What Cairo means to me
Interview conducted in 1994 by Mona Anis in Cairo
"Having during the past year completed three books, and the year before Culture and Imperialism, which took me ten years to write, I want to write something that represents a change of focus and a change in form. What I have had in mind for several years now is to do a memoir of my youth, a lot of which was spent in Cairo. Although my parents are both Palestinian, my father came to Egypt from Palestine in the late '20s, perhaps in the mid '20s, and established a business that was connected to the family business in Palestine. After my birth in Jerusalem my parents came to Cairo and I first went to school here, and although I also went to school in Jerusalem I spent most of my school years until I was 16 in Cairo."
"I have come now, in a certain sense, to try and take in the setting, most of which has disappeared, particularly that that setting provided a background for the rather peculiar family that my parents had created for us. It was as time when the British were still here, Egypt was still a monarchy and a crossroads of dozens of different nationalities and political ideas. We, as Palestinians, Christians, my father was also an American, a citizenship he had gotten when he served in the First World War, so were Americans as well. We were completely out of place in this cauldron and I feel very stimulated to be here once again and to sort of relive some of the memories of these early experiences."
"My relationship to Egypt is really entirely Cairo, Cairo is for me one of the greatest cities of the imagination. I formed a peculiar, eccentric relationship to it, and I still feel reminiscences of this relationship when I return. I find it very provoking to hear the sounds of Cairo, the sights, the smell and so on. I am not really interested in local colour, or the history of the city, or the political economy of the revolution."
"My memoir is a kind of attempt to account for this quite intimate and privileged position that the city occupies in my own past, memory and imagination."
"I find Cairo fantastically rich and interesting. Cairo means the most to me for two reasons. One its spectacular setting and the majesty of some of its architecture and the bustle of energy of its local street life. And the other is its people. Arabic is my language and I am interested in the sound of its people. I am particularly fond of Egyptian spoken Arabic, and I like the play of language and the sound of the words against the traffic and the theatre of it. Cairo seems to me a bustling theatre of words and sounds that is for me like no other city. Most cities to me are quite mute, and it is certainly true of the great routine cities where although the language is known to me it is never experienced on such an intimate level."
"I left Cairo in 1951 to pursue my studies in the States, but my family remained here until the early '60s. After 1951 and until my family left Egypt, I would come annually during the summer vacation. After that, I didn't come back for about 15 years, and it was another 15 years before I came again. So there have been a lot of absences, and my recent return, last summer, then late last year and then now in spring have been very intimate."
