Out on the balcony
Amina Elbendary takes a breath of fresh air
"The mother and her two girls went at once to the balcony. They stood at the window overlooking al-Nahhasin Street to observe through the holes of its wooden grille the men of the family on the street. The father could be seen moving in a slow and dignified fashion. He projected an aura of grandeur and good looks, raising his hands in greeting from time to time.[...]
"The mother left the balcony followed by Khadija, but Aisha tarried there till she was alone. Then she went to the side of the balcony overlooking Palace Walk. She peered out through the holes of the grille with interest and longing. The gleam in her eyes and the way she bit her lip showed she was expecting something to happen. She did not have long to wait, for a young police officer appeared from the corner of al-Khurunfush Street. He came closer, slowly making his way toward the Gamaliya police station. At that, the girl quickly left the balcony for the sitting room and headed for the side window. She turned the knob and opened the two panels a crack. She stood there, her heart pounding with a violence provoked by both fear and affection. When the officer neared the house, he raised his eyes cautiously but not his head, for in Egypt in those days it was not considered proper to raise your head in such circumstances. His face shone with the light of a hidden smile that was reflected on the girl's face as a shy radiance."
-- Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk.
June is over, July is here and the Nile has started "to breath" as the 12th century administrator Ibn Mamati put it. Days are interminably long, the evenings stretch to dawn and what better way to spend them than out on the balcony.
It's hard to imagine life in Cairo without balconies -- before balconies, after balconies.
This is where many have their morning coffee and afternoon tea with mint reading the papers, where students claim to be sitting studying while in reality gossiping or watching out for the neighbours' daughter or son coming home (Aisha has many siblings). There is often a radio out on the balcony too. This is where families gather late at night to eat watermelon with white cheese and perhaps even bring out the TV and watch the evening dramas in the open air.
Balconies are where most laundry belongs. In many neighbourhoods of Cairo the hanging of the laundry is a social skill, one replete with overt and covert messages. In fact, there is logic to hanging laundry out on a balcony, as anyone who's observed long enough can testify. Ironically, it is the males' underwear and shirts that hang out first facing the street, shielding the home and testifying to the vitality of its men. It is a logic that initiated women know full well.
Balconies are also where garlic is stored in season and left to dry throughout the year and where all sorts of odds and ends are packed in cartons and stacked in the corner: old schools books and children's discarded toys.
So much activity takes place on the balcony that one can learn much about people just by watching their balconies.
For years one of my secret pastimes was monitoring neighbouring balconies. I remember when a particular couple moved in several years ago. There was a lot of commotion on their moving in. She had many plants in pots of various sizes and part of the morning routine was watering the plants. They were an impressive couple, I remember, because he always (at least whenever I was on duty) hung the laundry. That was quite unusual for what is usually perceived as a typically female chore. ("I will do anything to share household duties," one self-described progressive promised his future wife, "but not hang the laundry. Never.") Over the years, our neighbours' plants all withered and died. They were not replaced. Children appeared with little bicycles which they would ride out on the balcony. And then they enclosed the balcony and turned it into an extra room. I stopped watching.
Balconies are part of what the domestic architecture of Cairo assimilated in its process of Westernisation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For centuries before urban houses did not have windows that opened up on the street but rather mashrabiyas (carved wood screens) and inner courtyards.
Edward William Lane described these "traditional" Cairene houses in his famous An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians in the second half of the 19th century:
"The ground-floor apartments next to the street have small wooden grated windows, placed sufficiently high to render it impossible for a person passing by in the street, even on horseback, to see through them. The windows of the upper apartments generally project a foot and a half, or more, and are mostly made of turned wooden lattice-work, which is so close that it shuts out much of the light and sun, and screens the inmates of the house from the view of persons without, while at the same time it admits the air. They are generally of unpainted wood; but some few are partially painted red and green and some are entirely painted. A window of this kind is called a 'roshan' or, more commonly, a 'meshrebeeyeh.'
"Sometimes a window of the kind above described has a little meshrebeeyeh, which somewhat resembles a roshan in miniature, projecting from the front or from each side. In this, in order to be exposed to a current of air, are placed porous earthen bottles, which are used for cooling water by evaporation."
Mashrabiyas then were integral to particular socio-cultural contexts that rapidly disappeared. In fact, part of Mohamed Ali's attempts at modernising Cairo and cleaning its streets involved a ban on the use of mashrabiya in houses, as Nihal Tamraz writes in her study on domestic architecture in Cairo in the 19th century. The local population resorted to building in the Rumi style which was considered more economic than the typical European style. It took a while for such draconian measures to take effect but indeed a century later mashrabiyas had become historical artefacts.
It is amazing how quickly and thoroughly the balcony came to be ingrained in our local culture. Opening up the mashrabiya into a balcony also opened up a playful space between the sharply differentiated public sphere of the street and the private sphere of the home. It is a space where the crossing of some boundaries is tolerated, where some frustrations can be let out. This is most evident in the type of dress code allowed on the balcony. Men are more often than not spotted on balconies with pajama bottoms and sleeveless cotton vests. Women are seen with house dresses, and even women who cover their heads on the street can be spotted heads uncovered on the balcony. Female neighbours often chat with each other through balconies and in less uptight quarters than upper-middle class Zamalek or Garden City, for example, intimate details and precious advice are exchanged, in this tolerant open space. If only you would listen.
The balcony is, sadly, slowly disappearing from the urban scene. The mashrabiya is not making a comeback; in fact the whole idea of protrusions in domestic façades is disappearing. Increasingly, families are driven by the need for extra space to enclose balconies and turn them into extra bedrooms or living rooms. The increase in real estate prices also means that for many contractors balconies have become too expensive to build, that area could be enclosed within a room to add to the main square footage of a flat and hence raise its price. As the area of the typical domestic unit continues to shrink, one cannot afford to lose a room by opening up a balcony. A balcony then, has also become a sign of certain affluence.
Some historians, like Albert Hourani in his seminal A History of the Arab Peoples, had read a lot into the changes in domestic architecture that Westernisation brought. The opening up of windows and balconies on the street was interpreted as a sign of an outward looking mentality that embraced the other. Now that the balcony is disappearing, mainly for what seem to be economic and urban pressures, what social ramifications will this have? Now that sharper borders between private and public are up, now that this permissive space is disappearing, where does one turn for a breath of fresh air?
