“In the old days, passing on an inheritance was rarely an issue. Oh, there were always old men to complain about the folly of the new generations and cheeky brats ready to mock their elders, but, on the whole, the world of sons resembled that of fathers, and the lessons of the latter were passed on without much difficulty. Today, each era seems to create its own world, bringing its own new life into it. The challenge is not to lose sight of the aspects of continuity that reign from one era to the next.”
Mohamed Abdallah
Egypt, its neighbors. Cairo, a city that has created an arena for itself between the jaws of the desert. Its river emerges from elsewhere, the Nile, always there, meandering amiably between Cairo's buildings, sometimes disappearing behind a mosque or cinema, before reappearing for good, an ancient comrade in a procession backwards through the decades. Its nourishing trickles are laden with secrets, the destinies of men and women and the mysteries of millennia.
One era? No, several. At the beginning, or rather at the end, two novelists, two cousins who don't know each other but remember the same universe. In their books, they recount its beauty, greatness and pettiness, successes and failings.
The root of this painful poetics? A revived horizon, refracted from one era to the next. Revolutions wished for, sung about, mourned. A world, several continents believing themselves to be in the hollow of a valley where faces emerge, voices rise, psalms are declaimed, music dances, scents run through the streets... Oumm Koulthoum, Youcef Cha-hine, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ahmad Shawqi, Cheikh Imam, Fouad Nagm, Soad Hosny and... take their place at Café Isfet in the El Gamaliyya district. Broken, twisted, surviving, magnificent friendships. Unspoken loves, over-thought, under-experienced.
Good-natured, jovial, albeit frazzled, witnesses. And, in the midst of this field of superb ruins, life, its aspirations, the arts and their.
