19 - 25 April 2001
Issue No.530
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 April 2001 Issue No.530 |
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The naming of things
Sitting on the ferry crossing the Nile from the West Bank to Luxor proper the talk to my left, and it was animated talk, concerned chemicals. Pesticides, fertilisers -- the inevitable accessories to intensive farming -- a seemingly endless list of complicated names, discussed with great familiarity, lamented as too costly, or else extolled. The powders ready for dilution, the concentrated liquids to be sprayed, are probably all unbelievably corrosive, vicious pollutants that do unspeakable things to insects and the creatures that feed on them, but this did not seem to concern the interlocutors on the boat. And if it seemed an odd juxtaposition -- the silent West Bank pastoral, with its fields, palm trees, hoopoes, and percussive crickets and frogs interrupted by this litany of polysyllabic chemical compounds -- the most impressive thing remained the familiarity with which the two farmers could name the ferociously sounding names of the tools of their trade.
One receives endless advice about the precautions necessary when dealing with fruit and vegetables. Soak them, douse them in permanganate, boil overnight, and if in the slightest doubt, repeat the process -- it is a neurosis that seems to particularly afflict foreigners living here. When they gather in any number there is the constant danger of being cornered by the fruit and vegetable bore who will spend hours swilling his drink around his glass, droning on and on as he elucidates various grape washing techniques, the only distraction being the clinking of ice cubes -- made from mineral water of course -- as the whisky sloshes slowly round and round.
Certainly the list of chemicals recited on the ferry sounded sufficiently alarming to instil due caution, perhaps more alarming to one who knows absolutely nothing about chemistry. But then the whole agri-business is pretty alarming, not least in Europe, home, perhaps, to fewer vegetable bores than North America, where impossible New World standards of hygiene prevail. The entire northern European livestock industry, one might do well to remind habitual denigrators of the Egyptian artichoke and orange, is dead on its blistered feet. No model of good agricultural practice there, though it is unlikely that they take the trouble to soak those tasteless, cling film-wrapped, supermarket-bought Dutch Moneyspinner tomatoes in permanganate overnight.
Back, though, to the West Bank of Luxor, and Shamm Al-Nessim, and spring, where everything cultivated looks impossibly verdant, an impression that probably owes rather more to the arid, rocky backdrop than to the intensity of the green or any individual propensity for cliché. Light and the contrasts of landscape -- impossible to separate -- play tricks here: foregrounded the swaying fields, occasional spiky clusters of palms themselves looking like gloriously outsized celery; behind the dun, crumbling hills in which the desiccated corpses of the powerful were laid to rest deep underground.
It is difficult to drag oneself away, and an exhausting journey back to the metropolis -- by open pick up truck, ferry, horse-drawn carriage and then by train the length of the Nile Valley, finishing with a taxi ride, that inevitable nod towards the internal combustion engine, through the streets of Cairo, hardly deserted at six in the morning. The area around Ramsis station threatens always to intimate the future of the city, apocalyptic, screaming -- the very edge of an urban nightmare. It engulfs, in a way no other section of the city engulfs, a warning, perhaps, rather than a prediction, but requiring a strong constitution nonetheless. And to think there are plans to turn even this into a shopping mall.
Yet the city, in the throes of its Shamm Al-Nessim celebrations, wears its greenest face, its brightest holiday garb. In Japan the arrival of spring is marked by excursions to view the cherry blossom. Here, of course, there is little in the way of blossoming cherries, but the jacaranda trees are suddenly a mass of flowers, that impossible to name colour, not quite blue, and neither mauve nor purple, so beautiful it takes the breath away, a heavenly colour, penetrating the grimmest of moods to wrest a smile.
It is almost impossible to discover the names of all the trees in flower: jacaranda, the shocking magenta of bougainvillea, and later acacia, these seem to be the most anyone knows. The trees with pink, orchidaceous flowers and drooping, bifurcated leaves hanging like limp camels' feet from silver grey branches remain nameless, though they are the most common of the large flowering trees, seemingly indestructible, occupying the oddest of corners. No one I ask knows what they are called.
Holiday time, and people cluster by the river, or stroll to and fro across the bridges, or sit in self-enclosed circles on patches of green. Post holiday, and it is back to city-life proper. A roof top party and, thankfully, not a vegetable-bore in sight. An Italian, dressed as Italians should be, in expensively labelled linen, has written a play. It is about Cleopatra, Horace and the venerable history of misinformation. I think aloud that Cicero deserves more honourable mention in any history of defamation, in any subversion of fact. No libel laws yet invented could save Cleopatra's reputation against his insinuations.
The god Thoth is to be present on stage (a link to that more peaceful West Bank, campaigns of misinformation a reminder of the shoddier aspects of journalism that prevail in reporting events in the other) as the actor who is to play Thoth -- the memory of history, he tells me rather grandly -- is also present at the party. The play will be staged, at either the National, or Al-Talia, some time in the summer.
It is cool on the roof, and people begin to dance. Behind is a treeless vista, the façade of the Abdin Palace stretched like an extravagant stage set, not a blossom in sight. And in the empty streets even this low slung, squashed, ridiculously proportioned building looks more beautiful than vainglorious.
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