Chronicle of a Last Summer

by Yasmine El Rashidi

  —

  Dido believes there is no space for real romance when we are fighting, but he wants his genes passed on. He wants the next generation to be comrades. We are too passive, he says, and have the capacity neither for revolution or for love. He uses a word, poranheyar, to explain our emptiness. A kind of devastation. Something passed on, by the generation before. A word he invented, hybrid Arabic and Russian. There isn’t a language for what we are living. We need our own vocabulary, not just new forms in literature and art. He is teaching himself Russian because he thinks that in their literature he might find answers, a language that speaks to all he feels about the politics of our times. He says this even though he doesn’t write or make art, but he consumes everything, watches every film he can, reads and rereads novels, goes to every art opening, opera, play. He was the one who had put a VHS tape of Chris Marker in my hands and told me not to do anything else until I had watched it. Art is what sustains him, he says, gives him the energy to keep going. Dido takes down cases all day, oral histories of torture, abuse, arrests, at the hands of state agents. Even their emotions, these victims, what they are left with, the trauma, have no terms or designations. Nobody has a voice, he says, nor a real sense of who they are. He insists that the streets are simmering, filled with people’s outrage, but our emotions are misplaced, making us silent.

  I cross the square towards the university thinking about this, my next letter to A, how I will write to him about this feeling of being muted. Not having a language, gestural. How do you even initiate intimacy or the expression of desire? Mama never spoke about love. Nobody I knew who had ever really loved did. I imagined it was something Baba might have spoken of now. I turn the corner onto Mohamed Mahmoud Street. McDonald’s opened a few weeks ago, and the queue, now, is immense. I peer above it to find its end, tracing heads around a corner. It was on the exact same stretch of street that Baba heard the engines of jets, looked up, and saw the Star of David, on his way to volunteer to fight in that very war. It was one of those markers in memory that he said never went away. I felt deceived too, cheated out of a life, but I wasn’t sure why, or by what. I wondered. Was that also inherited, our listlessness, our sense of resignation? People, the older generation, Aunty and Uncle and all the others, would always somehow revert in conversation, even when talking about the price of food, to “ ’67.” Defeat, we are a defeated nation. But even though Nasser had lied, people still wanted him to stay. They pleaded, took to the streets in millions when he resigned. Baba had spoken about that so often that even as a six-year-old I could recite those stories by heart. They stayed with me. I had asked, Why did you want him to stay Baba? He had stared into the air, looked around, then peered down at me. Raised his shoulders, his eyebrows, pushed his glasses up from the tip of his nose. He muttered something about heroism, then said he wasn’t sure. He didn’t have an answer for me. I write this down in my journal now, under the heading “Notes on Defeat,” and beside an asterisk, a line about Uncle telling me years later that as a general rule in life, we act out of fear. We always choose what we know best, even if it means compromise.

  I think about Baba more and more. At a point the idea of someone long absent turns from emotion into something of a mental exercise in remembering and deduction. The last time we were downtown together, Baba had described, wistfully, the cityscape during his student years. There had been little except villas, a few low-rise modernist buildings, and a palace ground divided. Open space was the city’s marker. One of the three buildings that had always been there, once with its own garden, now encased on three sides with high-rises, was the one where Abu Seif’s studio had been. Baba had wanted to study film, but Grandpapa hadn’t let him. Young men were to study finance, the only way to a respectable life. Either that or they went into the faculty of law. Baba couldn’t argue with Grandpapa, so he skipped classes and spent days in the studio. He had been there when Abu Seif made what became his canonical film chronicling the aftermath of defeat. The only film from the time that Nasser hadn’t banned. I think about this, Baba’s activism, the person he might have been before he became a businessman. I have his university ID on my desk at home. I stare into it. I remember certain things. The sound of his breath as he wound up his wristwatch. How he gestured with his hands as he spoke. His footsteps up the stairs, the long pause and then rattle as he brought out his keys. The movement of his face just before he broke into laughter. I can’t imagine him interested in film. I hear things here and there, but no one says much. What I know about him I construct, piece together, through stories, notes, remembered dreams, interpreting recurring ones. A theater professor asks me one day why I have chosen the art form I have, why I have chosen art at all. And then he tells me his own story.

  —

  Dido urges me to involve myself in politics, to make documentary films about dissidents rather than the cinematic ambitions of fictional cinéma vérité I have. It’s about time, he says. It’s important to connect with my anger. He says I can make art through activism and documentary, a different art, more potent. But that’s reality, not art. He is adamant, and becomes more insistent. Surprises me on campus between classes, giving me books inscribed and signed, Please. Love. He also passes by the house on odd Saturdays, bringing with him ten piastres’ worth of dried sunflower seeds, sitting beside me on a step in the garden, blowing perfect smoke rings from rolled cigarettes. I listen as he goes on about reform, and I start methodically recording our time together, flipping my notebook back and around and making that side for him. I start each entry with his mood, writing down everything I remember of our afternoons. He’s the only person I know who speaks of changing the country. Love and revolution are one, he says, they come together. In the past two years there have been gatherings of people in the square with signs chanting for Palestine. Nobody ever mentions Egypt. People generally don’t talk about the status quo even though everyone yearns for change. I do. It seems that politics is at the foreground and background of everything yet not something that can be impacted in any way. Mama wishes things were different, though she never says so in direct ways. But I can tell. Even when she smiles or laughs, I can see her sadness is much greater, a melancholy so steeped in who she is. I’m not sure anyone I know is deeply angry, even as they are unfulfilled, restless, somewhat resigned. Uncle complains about things, laments, talks about the incompetency of government, but not with the vehemence of anger that Dido suggests. I don’t think I am angry at all, as much as Dido insists we all are. He says we just don’t know how to express it, that we weren’t taught to be in touch with ourselves. The way we live our lives is no better than death.

  Sociology. The professor is showing us slides of different types of drugs. The most common is a form of cannabis grown in the Nile Delta. We had been with him on a field trip to Qanater prison the week before. The prison is divided. There is the new prison, with tiled floors and a TV and shaded courtyard, where the men are kept, and the old one, where the women are. At the prison gates families are waiting to visit. They come each day with food, clothes, medicines, begging the guards to let them in. The guards make them wait. Take their names, IDs, the names of their loved ones. They also take tips. It’s no guarantee for entry. They still wait all day. Some spend the night. On the day of our visit, one woman is wailing. She’s been waiting for three days in the searing heat. She came all the way from Qena, seventeen hours by bus. She is large and has on layers. Sweat pours from under her scarf. She screams. This is unjust, have mercy on me. The guard opens the gate to let us in. She tries to push through. We are the first people they’ve let in for days. I feel bad, almost guilty. Two men grab her and push her back. They are the same men I saw in the Mugamma, the same men who came to the house, the same men I see downtown now, standing at street corners, watching. We were let in to the main courtyard. It looked like a construction site, strewn with sand and rubble, littered, lined on one side with three-story buildings. Cigarette butts were everywhere. As we walked toward the low-lyi
ng visiting area, the whistles and shrieks began. I turned my head. From the windows, behind bars, I could see the women. They stuck their arms out. Their legs. Tongues. There was a clamor, and it was hard to make out what they were saying, each one. At one building galabias were lifted to expose bare bodies. A pair of breasts dangled from a window, squeezed between the bars. The building is where the prostitutes are kept. They are the least harmful of all the inmates, none of them have killed, none have cut their husbands into cubes, none have drowned their children. None fed poison to families. None murdered for money. But they are the most disruptive, the prison warden explained. One woman screamed that she wanted to drink us all. Suck us. She was thirsty. Her thirst could never be quenched. We looked delicious. Everyone turned away. I tried to stare at her without making it known, out of the corner of my eyes.

  The clicking of the projector continues from the cannabis to the cocaine. The drug market is largely controlled by the state’s security apparatus, the professor explains. It’s convenient for the government that ful is the national food since beans make people sleepy. He laughs at his own joke. And that’s why the government floods the market with cannabis. The street name is hashish. He tilts his head. Between us, he whispers in his Lebanese accent. I close my notebook and slip out. Down the long open hallway, around, down three flights of marble steps, to the other side of the building. Room 202. I’m early, always, and everyone else late. I take my seat by the door and bring out my thesis project, a film proposal. The title pays homage to a film by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. The filmmakers ask people on the street a single question one summer. Are you happy? I don’t yet know quite what my question is, but know I want to set it in the summer. In my journal I write about wanting change. I have a cousin in America who left Cairo abruptly one summer. Something happened to him, but nobody speaks about what. I imagine myself in America. I think about the last summer before Baba left. The last summer we were all together. Mama saying that all she knew after the palace coup was that the summer ended quickly. Maybe I could ask people if they are angry. People seem disheartened. We all have frustrations, grievances, but anger? I watch them at sidewalk coffee shops, drinking tea, smoking, watching TV, for hours. They sit quietly, their faces blank. I imagine if they harbored anger, they wouldn’t be so quiet. They wouldn’t sit for so long. Their faces, expressions, would hang differently. I wonder, if I ask them, what they will say. I imagine they might fall silent. Feel uneasy. But if I keep rolling into the silence, will they fill it by talking about their lives? Or will they just get angry that I am asking? People get scared when you ask them things on the street. For a writing assignment we are asked to approach passersby with the question of what they would like to see improved in their city. People walked away. They looked at me skeptically. They asked who was asking. They asked who was really asking. They said they couldn’t answer such questions. They put their hands up and shook their heads. They took steps backwards, sideways. They said they couldn’t speak about the city. They couldn’t speak about the country. Sorry. You know how it is. I don’t want to get in trouble. I don’t want any problems. So why are you asking exactly?

  Habiba walks in and sits next to me. She flicks her hair to the right and shows me a dyed purple strand by her ear. The highest spiritual color, she says. I laugh and call it cute. She frowns. It’s not cute. Don’t use that word cute so freely. Not very much in this world is cute. I flip my page. She tells me it’s for karma and good energy, then peers at my papers and puts her finger to a paragraph and laughs. She recognizes herself, in a character named Dido. She looks at me. Then says, You should write a novel, not a screenplay. How? Do everything you want with the screenplay but in the novel. It’s easier. Less costly. You don’t have to produce it. We spend the class playing word games on the margins of my pages, zoning out the professor’s reading of Albert Hourani. He reads aloud from chapter five. Z broplem wiz z Arap world. H rolls her eyes at me. We have twenty-one chapters yet to go. On the first day of the semester he had told us there were a few things we needed to know. I am, from, the middle class, he said. My family had nothing. In the 1960s I studied hard at the university, and I was granted one of Nasser’s bursaries to go to the United Kingdom to complete my PhD. Without Nasser I would have never had the chance to travel. He said this as if standing atop a podium giving a public speech. His English is weak despite having studied in England and obtaining a PhD from Leeds. H and I laughed about this later as she mimicked him, sitting on a step after class, initiating the rites of passage to become friends. She rattled off a monologue mixing p’s and b’s, z for th. I am z lucky ones to have gone to z English school, I said. Then laughed, trying to earn her laughter too. Her reaction was fierce. The occupation was the worst for us. They were the dark ages. They took us back decades. My education undermined my identity. It broke my character. I should be furious that the British school even exists. I shouldn’t even joke about it. She paused to catch a quick breath. I hesitated and didn’t say anything but realized how much I liked her. Wanted to be her? We sat under the shade of a flame tree. She asked about my film. She talked to me about her major, physics, and then of her interest in artificial borders. She didn’t buy anything made in Israel or America. Didn’t drink coffee because the money benefits Israel. Didn’t wear certain kinds of shoes because the soles are made in Israel. Even the plastic cups in the cafeteria, they benefit Israel. Did you know? She didn’t use the term Middle East because it is a creation of the British. To use it is to remain colonized. I used Middle East all the time. I nodded and made a mental note to be careful.

  —

  I cross the paved courtyard towards the library. It looks like a giant slab of concrete with slim glass shafts. None of them open. The only fresh air into the building comes from the door. When I started university, one of the librarians told me it is because of Baba and his friends the new library is built this way. They used to throw books out of windows as students. I looked at the lady as she told me the story, not sure if I should believe her. She was wearing a dress with a lace collar and had on black sandals. Her body was soft. Her thick glasses were attached to a chain that sat on her shoulders and draped around her neck. On her dress I spotted a stain.

  I sign out for my video equipment from the library’s AV room. People watch me. There are only three film majors, and we are all, always, watched. I exit the campus. Passersby stare. The only people who are allowed to film on the streets are the TV. They work at the Egyptian Radio and Television Union. If you work there, you are also the TV. You are also, maybe, someone with ties to the surveillance state. Someone it might be better to stay away from. I cross. On the old campus I go to the walkway between the basketball and tennis courts. The floor is paved with pink and yellow hexagonal tiles. I step only on the yellow ones. One step. Pause. One step. Pause. Sideways step. At the end of my path is the science building. I walk up the five steps at the entrance and set my tripod to the side. The university cameras are old, batteries last fewer than twenty minutes before going out. I look for a power supply. A guard approaches me. He shakes his head. You can’t set up here. But I’m on assignment. Sorry. But my professor asked me to. Sorry. But I’ll fail if you don’t let me. It’s against the rules. Please. We can’t allow it. But I have permission. Show me your permission. Here.

  You can’t be?

  I look at him. He peers as if into my face, through it, eyes wide. His silence like a gasp. He had known Baba. He sets up my power. Asks if I need anything. What a great pleasure to meet you. Your Baba was a great man. If ever you need anything. Anything at all. I adjust the camera. I hit record.

  —

  The first sit-in I witnessed was eight months ago, last winter. A silent sit-in, candlelit. It was the first political act on campus. University guards had hovered in the distance and then come closer, but they seemed unsure what to do. I also watched from afar. No one would talk about it at first except in whispers. H called it the thing. Then the government daily Al-Ahram ran a
piece. Accompanying pictures showed three young men in black T-shirts, leather straps on their wrists, one of them with dreadlocks. It went: The American University encourages disobedience. It’s the nesting ground for a new and dangerous movement. They take drugs and engage in sexual acts. They worship the devil. They practice homosexuality. They might have AIDS. The sit-ins are part of a larger movement of disobedience. They believe in anarchy. A Nirvana album cover runs alongside. Suddenly everyone is talking about it. The journalist is campaigning to get the university shut down. H calls on the home phone one day soon afterwards to say we are in for excitement. She has done some research. The same journalist wrote a piece a few years ago about young rockers. He described them as atheists. Then one night, without warning, the police had spread across the country banging down doors, dragging more than a hundred young men from their bedrooms in the middle of the night. Nobody knew where they were, if they would resurface. Parents searched and asked in vain. Lawyers were told to keep away. Ninety-seven days later they showed up, all of them, knocking on the doors of their homes. They wouldn’t speak about what happened. Nobody dared to ask. Scars peered from necklines and sleeves.