Tom & Jerry: man's struggle animated.

I woke up at about two in the afternoon today. It’s okay though, because I didn’t sleep until after six in the morning. Last night my new roommate Vincent and I passed a “nuit blanche.” That’s French for “all-nighter.” We began the evening at Mamo’s house, in a downtown neighborhood close to the Egyptian Museum. Mamo and I had been trying to plan something for awhile, and we finally settled in an iftar at his apartment. Marie, his wife, is in Paris at the moment, making final preparations for the birth of her and Mamo’s child. Mamo will go to Paris at the end of December, for three months, insh’allah.

Vincent and I brought some finger foods from the supermarket below our building. We brought a mixture of olives, pickled onions, and sautéed carrots, half a kilo of soft cheese with peppers, pita, and dried figs. Mamo was busy in the kitchen when we arrived, whipping up some beans and rice. As soon as we heard the muezzin, we reached for our glasses of water, soon to replaced by tamarind juice. We downed dates and lamb stew, scooping up olives and cheese with our pitas. It was great. And after it was all over, we drank tea and watched cheesy Ramadan soap operas. Vincent and I smoked a few cigarettes, Mamo smoked something else. Soon the discussion turned to the cartoons that flitted across the television, on mute, to the lilting melodies and tribal drumbeats of an Egyptian jazz group called West al-Balad. First Tom & Jerry, and then Tom & Jerry, Jr. We watched silently, soaking in the meager breeze from a small oscillating fan at one end of the room. Post-iftar is all about relaxation, feeling a full stomach and pondering the wonders of something so simple, so corporeal and eternal, as a dried date. Nourishment in the desert, alhamdullilah.

Tom & Jerry, like most classic cartoons, is all about the struggle of the little against the large. Tom, in the tableau, is the lumbering but likeable villain, powerful and resourceful, but also clumsy and shortsighted. Jerry, like Speedy Gonzalez, Road Runner, and Bugs Bunny, is the underdog—or the undermouse, as it were. Jerry is a tiny morsel of prey, but he is quickwitted, fast, and cunning. Tom & Jerry—in what is certainly the masterplot of Western history, if not human history—represent archetypes that are so well known to us that we often fail to recognize them. Jerry’s struggle—the one we are subconsciously compelled to identify with—is the classic battle of the weak against the strong.

How much further can we extend the metaphor? Tom is power incarnate—he is huge in comparison to Jerry, with sharp teeth and giant claws, and, like Wiley Coyote, he has access to an endless supply of weapons, traps, and other assorted mouse-catching/killing equipment. Jerry can never take a single step out of his mouse hole without looking both ways, over his shoulder, above and below. Jerry lives under constant threat in Tom’s house, the metaphoric representation of the societal infrastructure in which we all live, usually incorporated in the form of government, but something as simple as a tribal or community council will do. Tom is the power behind the system, and the system is out to get Jerry—and it’s out to get you too.

Luckily for Jerry, he’s a crafty little son-of-a-gun. With the ease of a jiu-jitsu master, Jerry deftly turns hapless Tom’s force against him. Jerry is always on the run, but he is also always thinking one step ahead, always anticipating Tom’s next move, always looking for a new place to hide, a new trick to stash up his sleeve. Jerry always has the last laugh.

But have you ever noticed that Jerry’s laugh is a bit cruel? If we take a few steps back from the television, breaking the spell that the powerful leitmotif has on us, and force ourselves to look at the tableau before us with diligent scholarly criticism, we soon realize that Tom, as much as Jerry if not more, deserves our sympathy. Whereas Jerry’s wishes are always fulfilled—he always gets away, he always gets the cheese—Tom’s wishes are always frustrated. He suffers from a punishment befitting Hades. Who was it that was stuck down there, dying from dehydration, standing before a wide, clear lake, and every time he began to approach the water it would recede just out of reach? Well, there you go—such is poor Tom’s lot, only he’s not guilty of anything other than being a cat. So not only are we taught intrinsically to hate Tom, since he is the obvious enemy in the equation, but our hatred is completely irrational. We, as humans, are no more mouse than cat, or vice versa. To hate Tom and view his eternal struggle to catch Jerry unsympathetically, let alone condemn him, would be as silly as hating a lion on Discovery Channel for chasing baby wildebeests. Is simply unjust.

After far too much analysis, I happened upon the real question posed to us by Tom & Jerry and all of their Hannah Barbara and Warner Bros. cousins: it’s not, “Are you more Tom, or more Jerry,” but rather, “Taking for granted that all of us contain Tom-like and Jerry-like forces competing within our psyches at all times, is it possible to determine, objectively, which Tom-like and Jerry-like forces to accentuate, and which to diminish?” Are you lumbering through your life, chasing after the object of your desire, never looking past the moment of fulfillment, never asking yourself, “What is it that I really want, and how best to get it?” Or better, “Do I really need it?” Tom, for example, receives daily feedings from his mistress; he certainly does not need Jerry’s protein-rich mouse flesh to survive. Yet, like an addict, he drives himself to the brink of insanity chasing that tender little morsel day and night—for nothing. Wouldn’t he be better of taking a catnap? And Jerry—why does he continue to live in a house with a giant cat? Ahhh—dare we suspect that his identity has been so consumed by the daily struggle that he would feel lost and empty without it? Is he an adrenaline junky, perhaps? Or is he addicted to the sense of purpose he gets from understanding his place in the world, that of an oppressed person fighting against an indefatigable enemy, one boobytrap at a time?

Either way, as Tom & Jerry, Jr. shows us, this is a fight that will continue throughout the generations, on the television screen, and in all of us. But it’s only a cartoon. You, the viewer, have the power to stop the fight from raging within yourself. Who is your Tom, and who is your Jerry? Are you someone’s Tom? Someone’s Jerry? Think hard, and maybe you can stop running around in circles for a while. Unless that’s what you like to do.

* * *

At about 9 p.m., we walked to the French Cultural Center in a region of downtown called Munir. We were going to West al-Balad’s concert, which the cultural center was putting on for free as part of their Ramadan celebration. The music was even better live than on CD, as is usually the case, and the environment was wonderful. The cultural center—one of many in the city, there’s a Dutch cultural center too, and several Egyptian ones—has an open-air stage and courtyard in the center of the building, and that’s where the concert was. It was packed, but thankfully a breeze picked up, washing away the afternoon heat and even some of the pollution. There were a quite a few foreigners, but the audience was mostly made up of young Egyptian men and women. Many of them knew all the words and sang along, though there wasn’t much dancing. The music was a wonderful fusion of Oriental melodies and vocals with Latin and African drumbeats, running the gambit from reggae to salsa to ancient Arabic ballads. I can’t wait to see them again, but more than the music I was pleased by the peace I found there.