A Cairo Song
by
Madeleine Marie Slavick
The
first sound in the Middle East is the robes of two men at the transit airport:
very starched, very white, and rustling, like oversized wings, or crisp sails
being shaken.
I
learn how to say Bahrain: Bach, and rain, where it’s all balm and smells of
green sea and women dance their bellies to a crowd of three at the Supernightclub. A sheesha rests against stucco. No ripples in the pool.
Flying on to Egypt, sky merges with haze, haze with horizon, then the sand
monologue: banks, drifts, dunes, and for a while, a weird geometry appears:
full- and semi-circles of rice farms.
Cairo, ‘mother of the world’, confluence of Asia and Africa, Africa and Europe,
of life and afterlife.
Zachariah meets us at the airport, says, ‘Muslims and Christians live peacefully
here; my name is used by them both.’ The scenery from his late afternoon taxi:
details of the colonial, billboards of Nestle, many military clubs, a mosque at
every block. Then small white neon crosses atop a Coptic church — almost a
floating graveyard.
We
too quickly cross the Nile. Like a birthday.
We
wander as the early evening muezzin half speaks, half sings. Pass fruit stalls
lit up and happy, large straw trays full of flat round bread. See shops vacated
of keepers, full of incense and Allah. The door of the mosque is peopled with
empty shoes, all men’s.
A Nile fish smiles as we dine, daubed with lemon
and oil and a dash of unidentified spice. By trees trimmed like fez, a
Turkish coffee sweetness.
The
night River gets historical, with or without felucca dressed in neon and
song.
In
the morning, dust storm. The River reflects grey, is being dredged, yet people
fish from the promenade and couples embrace. One escorted woman has a dirty
handprint at the small of her back.
There’s a ferry to Mar Gergis. Men hum in robes, a veiled woman sleeps near the
altar, everyone seems in a trance, a Coptic cross in hand. I press, rest the
cheek on pillars of marble, ivory, wood. We all breathe the same
fourth-century-air. A dark quiet. Unreal peace. The gift shop is closed.
From
the Citadel, a grey skyline of scrapers and minarets, the pyramids always in the
distance. Hot noon, cool echoes; modest dress, lacy marble.
At a
poet’s house, a grandmother in a black robe and headscarf, the robed daughter in
another color, a granddaughter in cowboy boots dancing in the family living
room. Hips in Arabic beat.
A
week later, we meet Somaya Saad, the Consul General of Egypt of Hong Kong and
Macau, who speaks of the Koran merging with literature, lending to poetry, and
her voice carries me back to the gorgeous Arabic of poetry, vowels and
consonants, crisp and separated, following the other in a dream that runs and
runs, and finds. Hear breathy sounds that come from depths, yet are a feather.
Words sent forth in an ecstasy of truth.
Without the poem, chaos is Cairo, Cairo could be a city in India, but no walking
cow. Could be a city rushed to in desperation, or maybe elation. Could be
somewhere I have been before: seventeen million people weaving, children
begging, robes swishing, in a maze full of mother of pearl, alabaster and
tobacco, always spice and strawberries and hibiscus, always coffee and shay
and sheesha, and men. Friday lanes turn into a long overlapping prayer
mat, layered with men and younger men.
‘Welcome! Welcome!’ as you wander streets and
lanes, and more if men find you pretty: they must tell you so. The hotel clerk
kisses the hand; one stranger says we should marry if I return to Cairo; and a
fellow poet says he loves me as he asks about the melancholy in my eyes.
And
when a poem is sung to the oud, I am happy I am not alone.
On
Easter Sunday, the literary Gamal Al Ghitany greets us. We want to know about
censorship and he answers with a defense of freedom. He knows that writers will
always find a way to create. He asks about my poem against war, against sadness,
and I want to say, so much, but the words stay in the poem. A thin minaret
inches higher.
See
the pyramids, and you lose innocence, you lose a fairy spirit, said Mark Twain.
It smells like the Great Wall: power and pride and protection, and labor, labor,
labor, says the poet Zheng Danyi.
Saqqara, the oldest pyramid: single, simple, elegant, seen. A security guard
sits in a hut. Papyrus in shops. A carpet school by the gates. I walk barefoot
on the limestone, a pilgrim of the intimate, all of this death starting four
thousand five hundred years ago.
In
Giza, be a tiny tourist on horse, camel, bus. Desert on one side, a city colored
by sandstone on the other three, and closer, grow dizzy with proportion, a
million bricks, a thousand steps, and sun reflecting off every grain of sand.
Now
I want these graves in front of me, I want to walk a circle around each pyramid,
and sit beside the smallest, the farthest one.
I
want to touch the tail of the Sphinx.
In
Spring 2005, Madeleine Marie Slavick, author-photographer of ‘delicate access’,
participated in a cultural exchange programme in Cairo where her photographs
were exhibited at Cairo Atelier, and Arabic translations of her poems by Sayed
Gouda were published in Akhbar Aladab. A Chinese version of A Cairo Song, by Su
Yin Mak, was published in the Mingpao, in Hong Kong.
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