Eid el-Fitr

Today is the first of October, and Ramadan is officially over. Actually, everyone pretty much pretended it was over as soon as the sun went down last night, and by midnight Muslims were cutting loose again, to the extent that they like to cut loose, which maybe isn’t very much. I was on a houseboat with several dozen Muslims who were gettin’ down on the dance floor and throwing back shots of Jack Daniel’s and Smirnoff. They were making up for lost time. Lest you let your imagination run away, and conjure visions of bacchanalia on the Nile, I should remind you that there’s not much alcohol in Cairo, and the small quantities that do exist are rationed out so frugally that no one save the lowliest lightweight can get much of a buzz. “Malesh,” as they say in Arabic, or, “Oh well, too bad.” That said, I am impressed by the toll that one beer takes on some of my Egyptian friends. You might even say I’m jealous.

I had my two friends Imah and Ahmed over for dinner last night, and I invited my Danish friend Sarah as well, and Vincent invited his friend Tristan. It’s a small neighborhood—Sarah, who’s in an advanced program at the ALI, lives two blocks away, and Tristan lives right across the street. It’s pretty weird to meet a foreigner, start talking, and then inevitably learn that he or she lives in the same building, or a block away. I really like my building—I’ve got an excellent 24 hr. grocery in the basement and I’m within a two minute walk from several very cool cafés—but I think next year I’ll try to live in Wust al-Balad (Downtown) or Garden City. Yes, I am already planning that far in advance. I’m already on the apartment hunt. Garden City doesn’t have much in the way of street life or cafés, actually it’s almost entirely residential, but the neighborhood is beautiful, and after five o’clock, when all the embassy folks go home, there’s no one there. The buildings are all old French and British colonial style, mostly former mansions that have been broken up into flats, and they have very cool balconies, high ceilings, and parquet floors. Wust al-Balad is a five minute walk, and the Nile is just across the street. Speaking of the Nile, I can see it quite well from my room, which is on the 11th floor of a high-rise.

Imah and Ahmed are two young Egyptian kids that Vincent and I met at a concert in the French Cultural Center. They were standing behind us during the concert, and when the intermission came, Imah leaned in and asked if I was from Quebec. He said, “Tu as vraiment l’accent quebecois.” Hahaha. I thought that was funny. Somehow both Imah and Ahmed, neither of whom have left the country (and both of whom are actually named Ahmed), both speak a foreign language fluently. Imah speaks nearly flawless French, and Ahmed’s English is excellent. They studied hard in school and they’ve tried to learn from watching television and hanging out with foreigners. I took them to Duweiqa to help me with the Suzanne Mubarak Housing Project piece, and they were an excellent resource. Vincent was able to publish a short article using Imah to translate from Arabic into French, and Ahmed helped me conduct interviews between English and Arabic. I promised them I’d cook for them if they translated for us, so that was the reason for last night’s fête. Ahmed is very interested in photography, so he’s always asking me about my pictures and talking about composition and lighting and things like that. I’m going to buy him a reporter’s notebook so he can jot down notes while he’s translating.

Ahmed works at the Tommy Hilfiger store in Mohandiseen, not far from where I live. Everything in there costs at least LE 300, and most things cost more like LE 500 or LE 1000. I went in there to meet him the other day because we were going to go to 6 October City to interview some Iraqis together, and I was a little weirded out by the pricetags. I suppose the prices are comparable to U.S. or European prices—about $60-$95 for a nice shirt—but so far out of line with Egyptian cost of living. The average Egyptian makes a little more than a dollar a day, and there’s no middle class as such. The city has at least 10,000,000 residents who are outside of the mainstream economy, living hand-to-mouth. I’ve been thinking a lot recently (obviously, how could I not) about how incredibly wealthy my country is. People don’t even flinch when they spend $20 on DVDs or $8 on a McDonald’s value meal. In Egypt, that DVD would be half of a young doctor’s monthly salary (LE 200). All of this makes me constantly conscious of my wealth, my privilege, and my status.

I’ve never lived in a society with such rigidly drawn class lines. Maybe I have, but I just didn’t notice, because the dispossessed are kept out of view in the U.S. But here they are everywhere, and it’s impossible not to take notice, though I get the sense that many people try to avert their gazes. Example: Last night, while my guests were here, I heard the trashman collecting our garbage in the corridor. The trashman who comes to our building, like most trash collectors in the city, works in the illegal, underground garbage and recycling business. The industry relies heavily on child labor, produces noxious fumes and toxic runoff that poisons the neighborhoods where the recycling takes place, and leads to uncounted scores of chronic disease and physical injury in the slums. However, it’s also one of the only industries where Cairo’s poor can find work, and it’s a totally grassroots operation, started and maintained without any help from the government (because the government wasn’t going to help, ever). I have been planning on writing a long story about the “zebaleen,” or garbage people, since I got to Cairo, and I’m hoping to do some of my fieldwork this week. So, since I had my translator with me, I rushed to the door of my apartment to ask this particular garbage collector where I should go to find the recycling plants, and who I should talk to.

When I came back inside, Imah shot me a perplexed—perhaps scornful—look. “Pourquoi tu veux faire un article sur les zebaleens?” he asked. He elaborated his question: the zebaleen are poor, dirty, stupid. What’s interesting about them? Why in the world would you want to talk to them? I wasn’t at all surprised by the question, but I took my time in answering it. I told him that I am interested in the zebaleen because they are making something out of nothing, because they are forcing generations of children into a brutal industry, because they—as a population—are wrestling with a panoply of medical issues largely without aid from the government, and because, with regard to the latter two reasons, they are complicit in their own endangerment. The most interesting stories are those that revolve around a central paradox, preferably one with a high or low exit point—by which I mean, success or failure of the individual or group in question will resolve the paradox. What if the zebaleen could gain official recognition by the government, both for their service to the city and for their healthcare needs? What if they don’t want to become official, because the money’s better off the grid, and it’s easier to use child labor when you’re not answering to government officials?
Anyway, the only argument that held much water with Imah was the idea that Cairo’s poor comprise the majority of the population, therefore to capture the essence of Cairo one must focus mostly on the poor. Still, Imah would undoubtedly prefer that I stick to interviewing musicians and artists, which I hope to do in the near future.

I cooked beef with spices that I bought in Islamic Cairo, from a spice vendor named Saleh, the guy who invited me to join his family for iftar right there in the street. I also cooked curried vegetables—Cairo’s vegetable stalls are always packed with great zucchini, tomatoes, and baby eggplants, all of which soak up curry and spices very well. As usually, I had rice on the table, burned before hand in olive oil to give it that browned, slightly smoky flavor that’s so commonly found in Oriental restaurants. Speaking of the word Oriental, it’s not necessarily a bad word here, as it is in the U.S. It’s actually a cooler way of saying “Eastern,” and it’s often contrasted with “Occidental,” a word that has nearly fallen out of the English language, but which one still hears frequently in French. Growing up in Maryland, I always thought of Oriental food as Chinese food, until I was told by some cultural authority figure that it was impolite to say Oriental. After that, I just called it Chinese food.

After dinner, we went to the houseboat, and after the houseboat we went to McDonald’s. I know, I know. Don’t judge. We searched the entire island for a place to eat a tamiyyah or foul (pronounced fool) sandwich, but everything was closed. I resisted, but, alas, I gave in. After McDonald’s we hopped in a taxi and headed downtown for the Eid el-Fitr prayer service in Khan el-Khalili, the famous area of Islamic Cairo that’s home to the Al-Azhar Mosque and the Al-Hussein Mosque. The two mosques face each other, sort of, and in between them there’s a large square with a slew of cafés and places to sit. The square was packed when we arrived at 5:45 AM, and the lighting was incredible. The streets were slick with water—I’m not sure why, it certainly did not rain—the sky was blue, relatively unobscured by pollution, and the neon greens and pinks of the cafés and minarets were reflecting off of the puddles and casting weird hues over the marble facades and flagstones of the square. I was in heaven, which was appropriate for a morning as holy as this one.

The first day of Eid el-Fitr—the three day feast holiday that marks the end of Ramadan—brings people out into the streets in droves, especially in places like Khan el-Khalili. Muslims comes from all over the world to make the feast prayer at one of the historical Cairo mosques on the first morning of Eid. This morning, I saw Malaysians, Indonesians, and all varieties of African Muslim—each with their own variation of the traditional jalabiyah (pronounced galabiyah in Egyptian colloquial) and prayer cap—strolling around the square, going to prayer together, arm in arm. Eid is also a major travel time for Egyptians, and, I suspect, Muslims from all over the world. Cairo is pretty quiet during Eid, because everyone who can afford to leaves the city for Dahab, Port Said, Alexandria, or Sharm el-Sheik. I’m staying here. I want to take the days off I have this week to go to Manshiyet Nasr to interview the zebaleen, and to catch up on sleep and reading.

I also hope to see my Iraqi friend again, Abu Bashar, whose family will head back to Iraq at the end of the month. There’s an incredibly compelling story to be told about Iraqi refugees in Egypt, about their longing for home, and their fear of return. As one of them told me, loosely quoted, “Right now, the Iraqi people are like a body without a soul.”

I took some great photos at Khan el-Khalili this morning, both of the prayer itself and of the post-prayer joy I saw in the streets, especially among the kids. Like Christmas, kids get new clothes and a little bit of pocket money on the first day of Eid. Parents even give their grown children a wad of cash on Eid. Maybe that’s why there were so many beggars in the square this morning. For once, most people had something in their pockets.