23 - 29 August 2001
Issue No.548
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 23 - 29 August 2001 Issue No.548 |
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Symbolic weight
There must be many candidates for the most expensive bar in town though the one in the EgyptAir cafeteria at Cairo Airport will take some beating. Not that you would really describe it as a bar: crushed into the corner of the cafeteria, it is little more than a counter in front of which several black stools have been placed, or rather riveted into the ground. Not all of these stools -- there are six of them in total -- can be sat on because the seats of some are missing, leaving just a metal pole protruding from the ground, an accusing finger with a particularly painful point to make. Hardly inviting, but then the comfort of customers is hardly an issue here. But you can stand, and for the equivalent of a little more than ten dollars sip a non too generous measure of gin and tonic. In doing so it is quite possible that you will be struck by the thought that somehow, and completely by accident, you have discovered the most desultory place on earth.
The man behind the counter can barely be said to smile, but then he has surprisingly little to smile about. Beneath the shelves at his back, on which are distributed an uninspiring range of miniatures, a cupboard hangs off its hinges. It is not alone: everything about this place, the cafeteria from hell, feels unhinged, though what lurks behind this feeling, like whatever objects lurking behind the half on/ half off cupboard door, is never wholly apparent.
It is in the nature of airports, of train stations and even of hotels to telescope impermanence, concentrating it into incredibly potent doses, so much so that if you are the kind of person who worries occasionally about never really feeling at home they become places with an enormous capacity to disorient. Combine this with the sheer tedium of modern travel -- the checking in and endless waiting around, the inertia imposed for reasons of security and the convenience of airline operators rather than their customers -- and you find yourself in a destabilising environment with far too much time to think about the unsettling nature of being in transit.
Which is why, I suppose, those who run airline terminals attempt to provide so much in the way of distractions. The times being what they are, these tend to take the form of food and shopping, a concentrated dose of consumerism. Yet even on this level, Cairo airport manages to get most things wrong. There can be no questioning the totemic nature of the exercise: airports are up there with national currencies as vehicles upon which the health of the nation, economically at least, is seen to ride. Just think of the furore that inevitably arises when the issue of selling off the national carrier is broached, and that much, at least, becomes clear. There is a very clear symbolic weight attached to the activities of EgyptAir: it flies, as it were, the flag, though in the most schizophrenic of ways. And in the face of calls to privatise, that symbolic weight will be bandied about with as much subtlety as a Soviet tank on the streets of Prague.
There will be endless hand wringing at the totemic nature of the enterprise. Yet for anyone who has ever passed through Cairo Airport and been forced to spend several hours there a simple truth hits them in the face: the coffee is cold, the bar stools are broken, there is no choice and it is all, even by airport standards, a terrible rip-off. This is a symbol the weight of which will be invoked only in the cause of self- preservation: in any other sphere it will be found to be completely hollow. The importance of the enterprise patently does not act as a spur towards the provision of even half decent services for its users. The kudos lies in the name not in its functioning.
Sadly, the manner in which this particular totem throws around its symbolic weight is far from unique: across the economic and cultural arenas innumerable other institutions operate in exactly the same way. It is almost enough (though increasingly not quite) to point to the Egypt in your title to neutralise any criticisms. Needless to say, this nationalist strategy has become so inverted that the guardians of these organisations, while using it to deflect criticism, do not at the same time feel bound to improve their performance and by doing so burnish their credentials.
So visceral has the defence mechanism become that one is loath to voice even the most reasonable of complaints. And things get worse. Yet nowhere is it written in tablets of stone that just because a café is run by EgyptAir the coffee must be cold, and the seats broken. It is wildly unfashionable in this late stage of capitalism to suggest that nationalised operations can provide adequate services. Yet fashions change -- who would have thought, five years ago, that the streets would be full of young and not so young people teetering about on platform heels half hidden beneath flapping trousers? And small things do count. For an organisation like EgyptAir to prevent its breakup the seemingly big issues, the symbolism of the organisation is not going to be enough. Rather than insist on its totemism, on the value enshrined in its very existence, it would be far more convincing, as a strategy geared towards ensuring survival, to screw the seats of stools back into place when they become loose, and to make sure that the water from which you make coffee is hot. Such a course may lack glamour, may be mundane, but so are all the necessary operations of life. It is on such small gestures, on simple acts of maintenance, that commercial survival depends.
In the end, I suspect, straight-laced practicalities will win out. Totems do, after all, have a habit of collapsing. No one in the duty-free shop in the departure terminal at Cairo Airport bats an eyelid when they tell you they do not accept Egyptian pounds. So much for that particular vehicle of national pride.
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