“You don’t have to see the city the way Lawrence Durrell did” (or anyone else, for that matter)
Posted on Dec 16, 2007 in preambulatory | Permalink
The literary Alexandria is an entry point into the project, as those texts are ultimately representations of the city. The idea of discovering/reading/writing pedestrian histories of the city through conversations and walks, etc. could be a way to counterpoise these literary representations with other perspectives (”counterpoise” may not be exactly right). Originally, I was concerned with accuracy—ie. Durrell’s Alexandria was somehow wrong—but I’m not sure that this should be my worry, whether one depiction of the city is “right” or “wrong.” They all co-exist as projections onto the city; they have meaning and they matter. (And they don’t somehow.) They enter into a cultural feedback loop, commingling with each other to form versions of the city. My concern is to find multiple versions because the ones I have access to at the moment conceal the minor histories that are so important to understanding a place. Besides, dealing with accuracy opens up sketchy terrain with respect to Truth!
A powerful nostalgia seems to envelope the city. My brief correspondence with alexandria42 indicates the power that the past city holds. There is apparently a large diaspora of former Alexandrians that shares strong bonds with not only the city and its cosmopolitanism but also with each other. (I wonder if it was because of the abruptness with which nationalism emerged in Egypt, thus provoking, or forcing, many of the “non-Egyptian” communities to leave Egypt.) In much of the writing I’ve read—the literary Alexandria—there is a strong sense of nostalgia for the city’s past that spans generations. Forster, writing in the early 20th century, mentions this; as does Durrell in the 70s along with others. I wonder if the spectre of the city’s ancient past—buried and apparently vanished with very little empirical traces left—has embedded this sense of nostalgia into the psyche of the place. I’m cobbling all of this together ad hoc… What is also curious about Forster’s guide (well, Alexandria, really) is that all of the great monuments are gone without a trace it seems. This is very different from Rome, where I studied for a year as an undergraduate. The physical space of Rome is incredibly theatrical, the layers of its architectural past all out in the open and compacted together (vertically and horizontally). At night, drunk and young, my classmates and I performed the city among its series of flood-lit historical sets. I felt the sum weight of all this evidence to be as incredibly oppressive and stifling as it was spectacular and romantically inspiring. I am anticipating something much different in Alexandria.
My objective with this preparatory work is decidedly not to get ensnared in the past, but is rather an attempt to work through some of this material in order to arrive at the present Alexandria. I will deal with this present city and its life as I encounter it in just a couple of weeks. Yesterday, NYTimes.com ran an article in the Travel section about Alexandria and ended with a conversation with Mahmoud Khaled at ACAF, an artist who I’ve corresponded with occasionally:
A young generation of Alexandrians, weary of the nostalgia for the city’s European past, is also renewing the city in smaller ways. On a September evening, Mahmoud Khaled, an artist who helps run the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, an exhibition space, talked about the city’s fledgling artists. “It’s still a small scene,” Mr. Khaled said, adding that the library had become a cultural magnet. “We get lots of students.”
As he prepared for a new exhibit of Arab artists, he talked about the popular perception of Alexandria among visitors, which, for many, continues to be shaped by a set of postwar British novels called “The Alexandria Quartet.”
“You don’t have to see the city the way Lawrence Durrell did,” Mr. Khaled said, referring to the books’ author. “We’re really interested in getting them to look at the city in different ways.”
That’s it exactly.