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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 April 1999 Issue No. 426 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 April 1999 Issue No. 426
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Special Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Roads to paradise, dubious passports
When the minister of culture, Farouk Hosni, arrived in Aswan for the closing ceremony of the fourth International Sculpture Symposium some sculptures were still unfinished; none had yet been transported to the open-air museum, that part of the landscape where they were destined to reside. A general sense of restlessness nonetheless prevailed at the Basma Hotel, presaging the excitement of an extraordinary evening.
The tiny village of Baharif, normally a sleeping beauty unknown to tourists, was to be loudly wakened. This, at least, was Salah Mar'i's promise to the symposium, never stated but clearly implied. And true to his word Mar'i, whose job was to choreograph the closing ceremony, held an audience of villagers spellbound for an hour of indigenous entertainment, making it possible for Henein, Hosni and Misbah to deliver their speeches and honour the 15 participating sculptors in an astonishingly informal, astonishingly beautiful setting. With whitewashed walls decorated in a delicate sky-blue, evocative lighting illuminating the performers authentic costumes, hordes of palm trees towering above a semi-circle of small houses, and enthralling voices singing the praise of the Prophet -- two months of hard work under the sun's glare could not have been better rewarded. Though he had to limit himself to an hour, Mar'i presented some of the most striking examples of folk performance in the north and south of the governorate, including the Leithi zikr and Kaff traditions.
Sugisaki, for one, may have been the first Japanese ever to set foot in Baharif, but by the end he was dancing along with everyone to a catchy Nubian beat.
Besides being the crowning glory of a successful event, the closing ceremony thus offered one road to paradise -- a chance to reconnect with the magic power of the indigenous, to forget city life and its endless frustrations and draw on the purity and warmth of Egypt's essential springs. Graced by fully-fledged governmental support it was also a chance for Misbah to reaffirm his people's fundamental goodness, and proclaim their resistance to such evils as terrorist attacks and fundamentalist attitudes.
Clockwise from top left: the musicians entering Baharif; "a sleeping beauty unknown to tourists"; Salah Mar'i, his pre-performance anxiety evident on his face, adding the finishing touches to the village square; the Kaff troupe performing before Minister Farouk Hosni; Sheikh Amin El-Dishnawi working his spells on French tourists; Abdellah's mizmar troupe shedding the silence in the Land of the Dead.
photos: Randa Shaath
A similar, if far lass persuasive effort, was to be undertaken in Luxor, on the western bank of the Nile, where the ancient Land of the Dead had witnessed the 1997 Hatshepsut Temple massacre. Gourna on Line, a folk music festival, was to offer another road to paradise -- this time with European, non-institutional passports and untrammelled by governmental formalities.
Chantal Crousel, a Paris gallery owner who had witnessed the massacre in Gourna and deeply sympathised with its people, decided to hold an annual event there to celebrate traditional Upper Egyptian music and reaffirm the values of indigenous culture in the face of growing unrest. She persuaded Mohamed Abdellah, the owner of a small restaurant near Madinat Habu, to do the curating and provide catering services for the visitors, and mobilised the support of such intellectual figures as writers Edwar El-Kharrat and Sonallah Ibrahim. The Culture Ministry's lack of interest, however, shifted the venue from the Habu temple to a conventional café near the Ramesseum, and turned the festival, in official terms, into a "private party".
On the first night the presence of Moroccan critic Mohamed Barrada (vice-president of Gourna on Line) and his wife Leila Shahid, Palestinian ambassador to France, ameliorated the otherwise stiflingly Western ambience which made the festival seem like an out-of-the-way diversion designed to entertain a group of French tourists who, rather than sampling the lush hotels on the eastern bank, were opting instead for "the authentic".
Though Abdellah declared that people were allowed in free of charge, the LE30 entrance fee for Egyptians (LE60 for foreigners), necessary because Crousel's non-profit organisation has not yet procured funds for its activities, seems to have prevented the people of Gourna from making their way to the performances. And to the end it remained unclear who the performances were actually aimed at: French invitees/tourists, Cairene intellectuals or people from Gourna and the surrounding villages?
On the other hand Abdellah's curating policy ("to commission those troupes whose success is guaranteed, and those who are popular in Gourna, but also those who don't charge too much"), though thought out over a two-month stay in France, seemed as arbitrary as any other. Yassin El-Tohami was the only instantly recognisable name on the programme and, though the mizmar troupe was excellent, the accompanying tahteeb (stick fighting) was amateurish and badly thought out. Even Amin El-Dishnawi's popular zikr, the only aspect of the evening that seriously involved Upper Egyptians, drawing more and more ordinary people from outside the festival to "the rising star of religious singing", seemed shoddy and contrived compared to the austere sincerity of Mar'i's Leithis. The French, who had no experience of indigenous performance, were understandably fascinated, nonetheless. In black jeans and crew cuts some of them joined in the zikr as if it were a techno rave.
By the end of the first night one was already wondering whether Crousel's efforts would ever achieve any "intercultural awakening", though. Rather than improving people's standard of life after the massacre which had, according to Crousel herself, "drastically transformed the face of life in the village", or even involving them in some kind of constructive dialogue, all that "the real encounter between the population of Gourna and the visitors" seemed to be doing was offering the visitors a taste of the unusual and the strange, exoticising an otherwise wholly banal touristic experience and contributing, even with the best of intentions, to the endless process of uncovering, and eventually violating, Egypt's well-kept secrets. Crousel's only tenable objective, on the other hand, is her long-term project of recording, archiving and commercially disseminating Upper Egyptian music in the West.
"They love it there," a senior folk musician told me. "It quenches their thirst for spiritual fulfilment. Let's hope more people take notice of us because there will be no more of it in the future. The children no longer want to learn this trade, and if one of us dies he will never live again." Happy with the attention bestowed on them by the festival, the musicians remain unaware of its dynamics. To figure alongside pop stars in the CD stores of Paris can only excite and stimulate them. But there is more to living again than this. Crousel hopes to achieve better co-operation with the Culture Ministry in future years. Whether the festival will really help these artists live again, though, only the Theban mountains can tell. And the Theban mountains are silent.
Hard rock
