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Oh, Come to Alexandria!

Posted on Nov 27, 2007 in preambulatory | Permalink

Some friends who have been to Egypt (studied abroad in Cairo and visited Alexandria) lent me this curious Egyptian pop cassette tape. They actually received it while living in Boston via a mysterious transaction that landed the tape in the record shop of another friend. The cover art (and sound) seems to date the recording from the early 70s perhaps. The tunes are peppy love songs sung in mostly English and occasionally Arabic. Musically, they have lounge-pop feel but are distinctly near-eastern in the instrumentation, melody, and rhythm. The song included here is about Alexandria and might well be titled “Come to Alexandria” after the chorus lyric.

alexandria42’s photos / Tags / alexandria

Posted on Nov 26, 2007 in preambulatory | Permalink

This image of wrapping paper is titled “Hannaux, Alexandria wrapping paper - memories of shopping with my mother,” and is one of many photos tagged “Alexandria” by woman with the username alexandria42. The stream of photos portrays a fascinating visual history of a family named Cohen, the father of which was an English banker living in Alexandria from the 1930s through the 50s. Alexandria42 apparently attended the prestigious English Girls’ College (EGC) in Alexandria as a young person, and many of her family photos portray this institution.

What is curious about the dozens of photos I’ve viewed is what is absent from the pictures (as is often the case). Seen here is England on the Egyptian Med and rarely does one see anyone who appears to be of Arab descent. (To be fair, the majority of these are obviously family pictures and by no means a representative cross-section of mid-20th century Alexandria.) Undeniably, though, I think the photos as a whole intimate the history of British imperial hegemony as it extended around the globe in general and in Alexandria in particular. The Brits occupied Egypt from 1882 until 1956, and their worldmaking was a formula of cultural interjection and domination that spanned the globe. And other defining historical moments are revealed as well, as in this photo below from 1935.

Such a personal archive of old analogue photographs is quite rare to find online. Thanks to alexandria42 for making them available to the rest of us.

Alexandria, City of (My) Memory

Posted on Nov 24, 2007 in preambulatory | Permalink

Alexandria, Egypt has loomed large in my memory over the last dozen or so years. Its presence has ebbed and flowed in my imagination. In fact, I have never been to Alexandria—physically, anyway. For me, it exists as a remembered placed constructed from the tales of two poets: Lawrence Durrell and Constantine Cavafy.

Primarily a novelist, Durrell was a British expat who at times worked for the British Foreign Office and lived for a few years in Alexandria and Cairo around the time of World War II. He would draw upon this experience when he wrote The Alexandria Quartet (c. 1957-60), a series of four books—Justine, Balthazar, Mount Olive, Clea—which follows a somewhat eccentric cast of characters and their various liaisons and intrigues in the years leading up to World War II. Told from different perspectives throughout the quartet, the books chart the provisional, fluid, and nonlinear character of memory and invoke the city of Alexandria as a kind of datum which organizes memory and connects the experiences of his characters who commiserate in each others’ joys, angsts, sorrows, neuroses, and on and on. Of course, the filter of my own memory now obscures and colors my interpretation of the Quartet, but it’s still quite obvious why these books had such a profound affect on me; particularly with respect to my later research/obsession with memory and architecture. At the time of my first reading, I was 21 or 22 and had yet to shed some of the more romantic notions I had about being an artist-poet. Several factors collided to guarantee my fascination with Durrell’s books (and identification with the narrator of Justine): I was young, poor, brooding and philosophical, a painter trained by the sons of the Abstract Expressionists, tortured in love, and, most significantly, still pining away over a prior year of studying abroad in Rome. And I was utterly dismayed by the rawness of it all. No wonder. I wonder what criticality my distance from these first readings might invite… I imagine Durrell to be incredibly chauvinist and certainly misogynist, a white male literary voice of the highest order. But am I inventing this?

I feel confronted by the dilemma of whether or not to reread The Alexandria Quartet either in advance of or during my visit to Alexandria.

Cavafy is a figure I’m less familiar with, and I came to his poetry via Durrell’s mention and quotation of him in the Quartet. He was born in Alexandria to Greek parents and seems to embody the kind of abundant cosmopolitanism and mingling of Mediterranean cultures that marked the city in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century. I remember Cavafy’s poems (read in translation) as sharp, crisp, and deftly composed in their sparseness. Like the light of the Mediterranean, that piercing clarity. And I can’t help but revisit and interject the poem of Alexandria now:

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.
—“The City”

My sense is, though, that these poets project a dangerous image of the city of Alexandria. Dangerous to me, that is, because the perspective is so partial, so aestheticized, exoticized. It reaches from out of the past and entangles history. And which past is represented here? That of the iconoclastic Brit? The Greek aesthete? Are these accounts of the city acknowledged by contemporary Alexandrians? If so, how do they interpret them? To what degree to Durrell and Cavafy matter to the everyday life of the city now?

Much of my distrust of these authors comes from my utter ignorance of so much what constitutes the place of Alexandria, Egypt. However, in my search for points of entry into that world, for hermeneutic anchors that might inform my understanding, I am drawn to The Alexandria Quartet and Cavafy’s poems because they are something concrete that connects me to the city. It may be problematic but they offer a place to start.