8 - 14 March 2001
Issue No.524
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 8 - 14 March 2001 Issue No.524 |
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Plain Talk
I have just come back from Alexandria after spending a few days in the ancient capital of Egypt. Alexandria, somehow, is redolent always of old glories. Whenever I visit I am reminded of those ancient times when Alexandria was the lighthouse of culture, the very hub of the world, and one of its major conduits of knowledge. I am reminded of those times whenever I read E M Forster's Alexandria: A History and Guide, or Marlow's The Golden Days of Alexandria.
While the two writers each dealt with the city, its history and its past achievements, each of them had his own approach. Forster is mainly interested in the earliest days of the city, founded by Alexander the Great, and more or less claims that Alexandria, his Alexandria, came to an end with the arrival of the Arabs. While it is a fact that the Arabs created a new capital, Cairo, Amr Ibn Al-As, the Arab commander, praised the city in his letter to Caliph Omar Ibn Al-Khattab.
The reason for the change of capital was due to the fact that the Arabs were not a maritime power. They were desert dwellers, uninterested in seafaring. All their conquests were by land.
The two books give us a wonderful picture of Alexandria, and by extension Egypt, under the Graeco-Roman rule. This is a phase in our history that remains a mystery to the majority of Egyptians, apart from university students specialising in the period.
Alexandria was the first truly cosmopolitan city and was home to dozens of different peoples living peacefully together. And until fairly recent times the city retained a cosmopolitan nature, something clearly reflected in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. And during World War II, Alexandria became once again a major hub.
Durrell looked upon the city as an extension of Greece, where he had lived for many years teaching and working. After the fall of Greece to the Germans Durrell, along with many others, fled to the city. In his novels and poems he is at pains to create his own Alexandria, foregrounding mainly Greek and Levantine characters with only the odd Egyptian thrown in here and there.
Such thoughts crowded my mind, as they invariably do when I visit the city. One sometimes has the feeling of being in a different country altogether. The city still bears the features of the past, both the ancient and the new. At one time the city was full of Greek taverns where one could enjoy retina, Greek food and Greek music. The number of such places has dwindled, but there are still one or two of them. It was after the 1952 Revolution that most of the Greeks left the city, but they still remember the old days there. Some of them have written poems and others novels and short stories. Cavafy is an example of what one may call a Graeco-Egyptian or, more correctly, Egypto-Greek.
Cavafy's poems reflect his love for the city. By evoking the past, the Greek past, he outlines a poetic history of the city. This evocation of the spirit of the place is also the modus operandi of Farewell to Alexandria, Harry E Tzalas' collection of short stories, and D J Enright's novel Academic Year, among many others.
What is interesting is that most of these fictional works -- Cavafy excluded, of course -- were written many years after the authors had left the city.
Alexandria is currently undergoing a revival, the most obvious symptom of which is the new Alexandria Library, due to open next July. Alexandria will no longer be just a summer resort, a fact that was deplored by E M Forster when I met him at the University of Leiden in 1954. Then he was critical of the manner in which the past of the city was ignored. Had he been alive today he would have felt happy that the city's past is being celebrated.
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