1.
During my stay in Luxor and my travels between the two shores of the Nile these past few weeks, I made sure to widen my senses as far as they go: my eyes, my ears.
Time has pushed me further out, and the homeland has become more distant.
I have been in Europe for two decades now. In sterile, cruel, silent Europe with its insular people and its silent dogs.
No friend, no interlocutor.
Even my countrymen have become like the living dead due to the extremes to which they go to imitate the people they now live among.
Now in Luxor I sit in the cheap three-pound cafés. I savor the eloquence of the people of Upper Egypt, how their dialect so closely resembles that of old Basra’s before it was undone by migration and wars.
2.
In the alleys of the western shore, which descend toward the great Nile, I meet children and women, and I am invited to tea at this or that modest house.
My strange-looking clothes pique the curiosity of the people, and they ask about my identity. They try to speak to me with the English they use to address strangers. It’s then that I remember the poet Al-Akhtal Al-Saghir, on his way to Baghdad:
A throng of grasshoppers peeps through their burrow’s eyes,
ask about the Arab boy dressed in foreign clothes.
They recall Qais al-Mulawwah seeing my pallid face
how the songs on my lips are tinged with dirge.
In the markets, I find myself among my kin. No incident shocks me, and no gesture fazes me.
Even their assumption that I am a foreigner does not surprise me. As soon as I speak Arabic, sweet laughter surrounds me.
3.
Years ago, I remembered an old Iraqi folk song. It began this way:
O sprig of basil, be kind
to the one who yearns
And in my London domicile attenuated by a damp night, I began to sing:
O sprig of basil
be kind.
I have spent the evening in the Sacred Valley,
but I long for the unholy now.
I look to the one who lives in my blood;
I look to you,
to you alone: no partner, no friend.
I yearn for you
with all humility
with all my Love
with everything in me that can be hurt.
O sprig of basil.
……………
……………
……………
O sprig of basil,
be kind.
I’m mad with longing.
Be kind.
Night is harder, and life more cruel,
if you don’t choose me.
O sprig of basil,
be kind.
4.
Four days are still at hand, but soon I’ll return to London, the imperial capital, my abode.
I am not eager to go back, but I am not sad to leave Luxor, for I’ll return to it, not long from now, for a longer stay.
Here, I don’t use the taxi. I prefer the microbus. The women talk about their joys and their troubles. Men, with their booming voices, speak of their days and their pains.
I enjoy the company of people. It’s “intellectuals” that I’m repelled by.
And when I look back at my life, I see that my most creative periods were those when I did not meet “intellectuals.”
In Algeria, between 1964 and 1971, I met none of them. It was a deeply meaningful time, rich with experiences that brought about my book Far from the First Sky.
And in London now, where I live like a hermit in the suburbs and where I visit no one and I’m not visited by anyone, I have been writing with a productivity that I’ve never experienced before.
The reason? In all this time I did not meet any “intellectuals”!
These days, “intellectuals” have proven to be the worst, in manner and in deed. They are the rulers’ and oppressors’ tongues that flicker like snakes’. They are the lickers of the rich sheikhs’ and sheikhas’ shoes. They are the fiercest censors of free thought. Double-crossers and snitches who inform on those who write with a clean pen.
It’s true that when I meet them I am not meeting real “intellectuals,” but politicians. I know then that I am in the company of liars. So I let them lie to me again and again, to analyze what they say, later. This is the best way to deal with politicians and intellectuals.
But now in Luxor I am with people. And I become one of the people!
5.
On the western shore of the Nile, Ikbal and I are looking for a reasonable apartment for a long stay.
On a dusty path, we laugh with children, sing with women, and enter an apartment for rent.
Meeting the owners of the apartment is more important to us than the apartment itself.
The lady of the house greets us.
Then the master of the house comes, and their children.
And the neighbors’ women.
And the Dutch lady, Sabina, who has lived next door to them for seven years.
Tea arrives, and the neighbors’ children come in as well.
We find ourselves in a festival of human joy that we have missed since we landed in Europe!
6.
I first encountered Hassan Fathi’s architecture, meaning its remains, fourteen years ago, when I crossed on the government ferry to the western shore of the Nile.
Hassan Fathi’s legacy is not on the tourists’ itinerary. His legacy is almost unknown. He is not Ramses II, but what he accomplished is greater. Ramses’s legacy does not need maintenance, as the hardness of the stone will assure its survival. But the tenderness of Hassan Fathi’s buildings and their delicate material need maintenance, a maintenance of tenderness.
Now it’s February 2017, and I’ve come here again on the government ferry, where Hassan Fathi’s village remains.
Fathi fulfilled his dream of a beautiful Egyptian village, when the cave dwellers in the mountains of the western shore began descending from their caves to live on flat earth.
His dream was made of mud and straw:
A small square.
A cultural center.
A semicircular theater.
Porticos between houses and shops.
A mosque.
The theater has been closed since 2009 as well as the mosque and the cultural center.
The minaret of Fathi’s mosque is a serious rebuttal of the phallic shape of the familiar minarets. Fathi’s minaret, square and squat, is more like a giralda. A giralda of the deep Egyptian countryside, a minaret that is a shelter for pigeons and birds.
From it wings fly to the clear sky forever.
And from it rose the call to prayer, the praise chants, and the glorification of the Creator.
The mosque is closed.
Why is it closed?
The house has a God who protects it.
But why is every sign of Egypt’s genius of poor people’s architecture closed?
Rusty locks on the cultural center, the theater, and the houses.
Our civilization of mud and straw, where do we go without it?
7.
We go to New Thebes.
A high-born Iraqi woman, one of Ikbal’s relatives, has lived here for years, married to a gentleman from Luxor.
The lady’s house is in the middle of a wide field:
Sugarcane, alfalfa, and barley.
Goats and cows.
A yawning water buffalo.
The village women are sitting at their doors.
I see a woman cleaning what looked like green molokhia leaves to me.
I asked the lady, “Is this molokhia?”
She replies, “No. It’s clover for the cow!”
At the home of the Iraqi lady (her husband works in Saudi Arabia), they introduce me to Fatima, the painter of New Thebes. She came wearing a niqāb, but the veil could not hide her beautiful eyes.
What do you paint, Fatima?
Everything!
8.
An Irish Pub in Luxor.
It’s at the vertex of the triangle
between the Papyrus Museum
and the Luxor Library,
an impossible thing.
On a street that was paved fifty years ago but that has survived
as the impossible bar has survived, and as the library and museum have endured.
The sign “Irish Pub” seems to have been here since the beginning of creation:
“Shall we go in?” Ikbal whispers:
We go in!
Like the evening breeze that falters, we saunter in.
No guard in the corridor.
Not a soul about.
We go in.
The evening air was heavy
and the bar breathless like its former customers.
There is nothing in it but a fading flag from the army of United Ireland.
Dublin banners.
Her revolutionary banners when she was “green, green,”
and Lorca’s “I love you green”
growls in Luxor.
The corroded wall bears a poster of a discontinued whiskey
and a movie schedule for a cinema that is no longer with us.
We walk as if we are exploring a labyrinth in a cave.
A detour in the maze leads to a staircase.
We climb it.
Suddenly a surprise like an explosion:
We find the bar!
Nubi Hassan.
I’m Nubi Hassan.
I am the caretaker of this place.
I don’t see anyone.
No one sees me.
Ten years now,
I don’t see anyone
and no one sees me.
How long will I remain
steadfast and absolute?
9.
On Al-Tayyeb Street, branching off from Al-Madinah Al-Munawwarah Street, there is a dental clinic. I go there to repair what time has wrought on my old teeth. The clinic is a lesson in the Arabic language, in its origins, history, and development. Open-mouthed, I listen to people talk, and enjoy.
And in the bustling Lotus Hotel, I ask the gardener about the shape of the lawn he is maintaining. He said, The grass here greens up when the weather turns cold!
And on the microbus, listening to people talk, I keep recalling my former teacher, Dr. Mustafa Jawad, who loved the purity of the Luxorites’ Arabic. It was Dr. Jawad who taught our late king, Faisal II, an eloquent form of Arabic worthy of a Hashemite monarch.
10.
On the western shore, just before our return to London, while looking for a place to stay in our next visit to Luxor, our wayward feet lead us to the “Sheherazade Hotel.” Not far from the ferry,
the hotel is beautiful, its design inspired by local architecture, with several gardens and a nice swimming pool.
And it is nearly empty of guests, like other hotels on the western shore during this bad spell for Egyptian tourism.
We meet two Canadians from Vancouver: a man and a woman. The lady is tinkering with her laptop and the gentleman is trying to read when we meet them.
They sit in a small courtyard, at the door of their room, which is almost part of the beautiful garden.
They praise the hotel, accommodation, and management. They came by chance, found it on the internet.
They are very happy to meet Ikbal, a fellow Canadian.
The day is fine, as the days are always fine here on the western shore.
I begin to explore the garden and its trees, shrubs, and plants. I rub the leaves of a plant, thinking it is a weed. I smell the leaves and catch the fragrance of basil.
O sprig of basil.
In Iraq we eat basil fresh with kebabs. Like green onions!
But basil on the western shore has other benefits. It freshens the air, decorates the garden, giving off a great aroma. People here in Luxor revere basil; they don’t eat it as we Iraqis do!
I say to Nubi Ahmed, the gardener at Sheherazade Hotel, as I rub a dried-up basil bud between my thumb and forefinger, that I want to plant basil in London!
“I will bring you the yield” (meaning the dry seeds), he said.
And quickly he brings me a handful.
Back at the Lotus Hotel, I meet the gardener there. He and I have made a nameless, silent friendship. I greet him every morning and ask him about the plants and how he took care of them.
Today I tell him, “I have basil seeds that I will take to London. Do you think your basil grows there?”
“They’ll sprout,” he assures me confidently, as he tends to his plants.
And the man spoke the truth.
In a pot by my London window, the seeds sprout, the basil seeds I brought from the western shore of the Nile!
Just so, like a miracle.
Seven days later!
Translated from the Arabic by
Khaled Mattawa
For more from the Spring 2022 special issue of MQR, “Decades of Fire: New Writing from the Middle East and North Africa,” you can purchase the issue here.
