Issue No. 599
Living
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15 - 21 August 2002 Issue No. 599 Living |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Mood Swings: Illusions of Hell's heat
I am told the so called heat wave is already over. But is it?
All the symptoms of summer persist: infernal tempers, damp skin, the air-conditioned nightmare. Speaking of significant drops in temperature, people tend to forget that, the ebbing of the said wave notwithstanding, Egyptian summer is invariably a punishment in itself. But perhaps this obsessive attention to detail is the hallmark of weather-related small talk.
After all, there are few topics to which the contemporary Egyptian will so readily apply himself. Neither Middle-East turmoil nor crisis in the banking sector are as relevant as yesterday's forecast -- and its concurrence with sensations felt and perceived today.
Tones range from the historically insurgent (as if the purveyors of the government-controlled media, that produce the forecasts, are personally responsible for the level of humidity) to the cosmically dissident (why, even the most pious among us will not refrain from demanding, does God do this unto His creatures).
The diversity of its formulations aside, this is essentially a discourse of complaint. And one cannot help noticing that, as such, it reflects a much broader latitude of misfortune. Air-conditioning is not as widely available as it might be; and even the most weather-obsessed mentality cannot sensibly ignore the poverty of which this is a result. The government (or God!) are responsible for the heat only by extension: among their more obvious failures are unemployment, inflation, political dispossession and economic recession.
It seems that instead of addressing these issues people complain about the heat. Indeed, in a certain sense, discussing the heat seems to justify and make up for the absence of a sufficiently conscious discourse that makes room for issues or suggests, God forbid, the vaguest outline of an answer. Heat anesthetises.
Which is not to say that any discourse could adequately describe the experience, even for those who have the benefit of air-conditioning. For example, after walking out of an air-conditioned building, the affable warmth that engulfs the body soon develops into that insufferable sense of being enclosed in a tight-fitting, sandpaper-textured balloon. The glare of the sun makes the eyes water, the head weighs heavier by the minute and walking feels like wading through mud.
These are only the most physical symptoms. Summer manifests itself in the lousy tempers of taxi drivers; in the universal lethargy that besets people, out of which fits of hysteria are bound to explode; in peculiarly long-standing colds and skin rashes; in remarkably saddening sunsets; in the frustration of never, however often you shower, being free from perspiration; and for those who can afford it -- in the terrible choice between a fundamentally artificial, freon-mediated atmosphere and the fundamentally uncomfortable human condition.
Global warming may have a part to play in the heat wave discourse, but the vision of summer is, irrespective of fluctuating temperatures, a vision of apocalypse: extreme humours, torrid passions and exquisite if extremely brief dusks are in character. Also in character, is the Egyptian obsession with Juhannam -- what it might be like in the real Inferno, expressing how this is but a vague taste of the torments that await us sinners in the afterlife. One of many amusing episodes precisely illustrates this point.
A relation of the writer's, the twice married mother of three girls whose time is spent mostly by herself in a top-floor flat off the Pyramids Rd, has failed, for financial and logistical reasons, to install an air-conditioning system. She is known for having short delusive episodes that tend to occur upon her waking up in a state of semi-conscious confusion. For example, one time she was convinced of her blindness after waking up on several successive occasions, with her eyes failing her for a few minutes each time. More recently, her husband surfaced in the middle of the night to find her standing by the main door, sobbing, her eyes shut. "So this is what it's like," she was mumbling. So I'm dead and I'm here already. It is more terrible than I ever imagined it could be..." For a few minutes the husband was silent, as he listened, she continued to beg God for forgiveness. Why?
It wasn't until he woke her that the husband understood what was going on. "You mean I am still alive?" she muttered, tentatively opening her eyes and extending an arm towards his face. She had been dreaming, and the dream had lodged itself firmly into waking reality. "You mean I am not in Juhannam?"
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