Cairo sits now in my memory like an enigma rather than
a city. Some strange entity that took a part of me,
fucked it up a bit, and gave it back to me somewhat
changed.
So anyway the following long drawn out email dates
back to one day when I was wandering the teeming
medieval streets of Islamic Cairo…
A sound rose above the shouting and the haggling. A
shrieking. A wailing that seemed to slash at my heart
and steal my strength. Another wrenching, sobbing
banshee siren, and I almost fainted. I looked around
and immediately saw where the stream of human traffic
was being disrupted. There was a flock of
black-swathed women, heads back, keening at the
heavens, the sound seeming to echo from a void of
absolute loss and emptiness. Their black kohl
eyemakeup in rivulets down their cheeks. Two held each
other; one was on her knees in the mud; one was raking
her knuckles a bloody trail down a wall; while another
tore at her clothes her nails seeming to dig into her
flesh as she did so. I bowed my head in empathy with
their sorrow. I caught Amin’s eye, and he looked at
me, his shoulders slumped in aquiescence.
Within earshot of this baleful dirge there was only
sadness. All brightness and joy was leached out of the
air by that mournful cry. A tear seemed to glisten at
the corner of everyone’s eye; a prayer, more for
themselves than for the deceased seemed to play on
everyone’s lips; all heads looked down; two cats,
their hair up on end hissed at one another; and a
donkey fought against it’s owner. None spoke. All
thought about their own mortality.
Death is everywhere in Cairo. The ghosts of the
executed still linger around the great gate of Bab
Zuweila. You can imagine the unseen eyes of the women
in their harems, looking down at the victims from
behind their screens.
Beggars are dying, in front of your eyes, on the
street.
The City of the Dead; mile upon mile of ancient
encrusted tombs and mausoleums, but with clothes
strung on washing lines and children playing amongst
them. People, too poor to afford houses, have had to
move into the very tombs of their ancestors. What a
step that must be, to be forced to take your children,
and move into a cemetery. I wanted to explore this
place, but was too ashamed to be treating their
poverty as a tourists attraction. America has it’s
trailer trash, Cairo has tomb trash. (Now I know that
little joke ruined the flavour of this morbid email,
but I couldn’t resist…).
Out near Farafra, there’s a site of ancient Roman
tombs. The week previous to our visit, a group of
young kids had been playing soccer, with a human
skull!! A shard of bone or a tooth would chip off, and
the hilarity of it would be too much for the children
to cope with. Tears straming; having to even hold each
other up. Imagine seeing your child out trying to kick
a human skull into a goal. Not a sight you would ever
witness in the Western World.
Then there’s the butcher’s shops. The meat isn’t
nicely packaged as it is in, say, Australia. You can
easily forget that a rump steak comes from a cow’s
arse. Not in Cairo – Cairo doesn’t ever let you forget
your place, not for a second. The first thing you are
greeted by is the decapitated head of the camel that
you are about to eat, dangling from a rope, flies
crawling in and out of it’s gaping mouth, and it’s
uncaring jelly eyes. You order your meat, and the
butcher, his apron covered in brown stains, and fat
and gristle, brings out the carcass, and lays it on
the flyblown chopping table; blood soaked into it an
inch thick. Wit hhis massive cleaver he chops off the
desired amount, weighs it, wraps it up, and hands it
over.
Even the mosques remind me of death. The slender
minarets, topped by the crescent moon gaze gently at
the heavens. And the great interiors, cool and open
and quiet, an oasis from the raging multitudes
outside; just as death is the final soft silence from
the clamour of life.
Ferrets drag off bits of meat bigger than themselves
in the dead of night; the ubiquitous pigeon is rarely
seen, except on menus; and people drag chickens down
the street by their legs while they ruffle and thrash
around, trying to stay on their feet.
The vendors seem to be pennies away from starvation as
they argue over a pittance. The lawlessness on the
roads means that you are on the brink of oblivion
every second you are on them. People get on and off
moving buses, stepping right into traffic – old
ladies, pregant women and families.
And lets not forget about the Pyramids that loom over
the city – they themsevles are the biggest, oldest,
most epic tombstones known to mankind. They are
eternal reminders of man’s mortality. They make you
proud and humble, just by their proximity.
But, ironically, there is vitality and laughter in the
air, more than in any other city I’ve seen. Maybe this
comes from constantly staring at death, and accepting
it unfearingly. Maybe this is also why religion, why
Islam plays such a proiminent role, given that
religion and death seem intertwined – religion being
the answer to the question that death begs of us. We
in the West, hide death inside cling wrap, polystyrene
and black hearses; we shut it behind hospital doors
and censorship, and under 6 feet of soil; we
romanticise it and divorce oursleves from its reality
with euphemism and poetry. Maybe as we shut away Death
we shut away God as well.