Secret displays
Youssef Rakha marvels at the city centre's visual contradictions
Shop windows are the most diaphanous surface of material culture. Equally, in some sense, in downtown Cairo, they are the least revealing. In presenting objects for acquisition, they divulge more about predominant notions of allure than about modes of living. They are intended to be formal displays, but as arrangements of space they reflect the inner chaos with which their patrons are beset. The shop window was once part of an exclusive culture of soirees and receptions -- an externalisation of the deepest longing to mimic the West. For a brief moment it was the affordable expression of a newly democratised sense of hope. Today, as the facade of an increasingly inaccessible consumerism -- perhaps anachronistic in a remarkably provincial metropolis -- the vitrine remains the ideogram of a sensibility in exile. It is perhaps for this reason that it demonstrates an immense capacity for cultural confusion. Its original beneficiaries dead, expatriated or else safely sealed in a moral vacuum of expensive vehicles, isolated residences and frequent shopping trips to distant capitals, the shop window teeters at the edge of a muddled constituency divided between the temptation of consumerism and the conditions of a morally repressive, economically difficult existence.
"Every month, as soon as we got paid," a recently retired female journalist who took the veil some five years ago recalls the 1970s, "my friend and I would make our way straight to Groppi's -- for hot cocoa and gatueax. Maybe we'd have a meal first, kebab or fish. After Groppi's we would invariably wander around town, looking at the latest lines. We knew certain shops on Shawarbi Street that had new things every month; but those didn't always have shop windows as such. The best things were usually hidden inside. On Shawarbi Street lingerie was always displayed, yes, definitely. We'd always look but we seldom bought. One of us would buy a blouse, a dress, maybe, from one of those shops. Then we'd make our way back to Soliman Pasha Square. The concept of window shopping didn't exist as yet but I think that's what we were doing. For some reason, though, we only did it in the week or so after we got paid, when buying was still a realistic option."
So much for Sadat's open-door policy. The transition from class- to money- dominated society -- by way of a nationalist, then socialist revival -- also involved a gradual shift towards conservatism. So called peasant values kicked back in, in less polished form, and the horizons of (Westernised) liberation made available by Nasser -- which were only fully expressed, paradoxically, under the less centralised Sadat regime -- became increasingly obscured by a narrower and narrower religiosity. In its frenzy to fend off the socialist threat, the regime not only promoted (materialistic) piety but supported extremist religious groups -- the very people who were to end Sadat's life in the infamous Greek tragedy- like podium incident. While Groppi's shed its glamour and Shawarbi Street lost track of world fashion trends, economic dispossession and progressively lower standards of education were giving way to the amplified call to prayers and the veil as standard aspects of 1990s life. The streets were no longer an appropriate venue for liberated young women to amble about on the sidewalks, sampling clothes. Shop attendants became gruff and dismissive agents of the Islamic revolution. And the goods on offer were no longer enticing. Yet the vitrine persisted.
"Downtown used to be a vibrant shopping centre," a veiled English-speaking journalist in her late 20s testifies, "but that was before the introduction of the culture of malls. Specific instances of why an individual chooses to shop downtown or elsewhere may have to do with considerations of trendiness or affordability, but the general trend, I think, has to do with social attitudes. People don't necessarily go to malls to buy, it's just part of their culture. As for lingerie, which you insist on asking about, it's a perfectly ordinary aspect of life. Go to the Wikala and you'll see working-class women, in traditional black veils, sampling panties in public, off a wooden stall, and it's as likely that the vendor with whom they are haggling over a particular pair will be male. Why should it be so surprising that downtown shop windows display underwear in lurid colours? It shouldn't have anything to do with religion or even social trends. And no, it's never an embarrassing sight. I sometimes feel it's a bit vulgar, but it's not something that draws my attention, let alone stop me in my tracks. Then again, I tend to shop at the mall."
That said, it certainly remains somewhat disorienting, in an urban space thoroughly expunged of all evidence of erotic or romantic existence -- you see neither a homegrown bare arm nor a locally orchestrated kiss, the latter being, for the most part, a legal as well as moral liability -- to come upon elaborately structured displays of female underwear clearly engineered to provoke, and sometimes even sandwiched between displays of hijab- oriented clothing. To the hapless outsider, indeed, downtown shop windows might give the impression that life in this city is as liberated, as dissipated even, as it can be in the most open post-millennium societies. Yet the same onlookers will likely look on the veiled teenagers and all-male gatherings -- to whom the sight of a female tourist in shorts is sufficient reason for hours-long, persistently astonished gawking -- with a corresponding degree of incomprehension. Displays of mobile phones or shoes -- and of the latter, in downtown Cairo, there tends to be an inordinate number -- remain one thing, those of (Egyptian) humanity's most inavowable garments quite another. Yet, as the last-quoted journalist suggests, for the vast majority of city-dwellers, none of these contradictions is cause for commentary.
The thought of the downtown lascivious vitrine brings to mind another, equally disorienting if infinitely more saddening image. Lining the October Bridge in early evening, almost every day, are amorous couples whose subtle, barely passable embraces fail to draw attention away from the fact that the girls are veiled, the boys unemployed. It is the embodiment of physical dispossession -- homeless love. To the outsider, again, it may be a contradiction in terms: religious young woman and sexist young men engaging in public displays of affection. But the insider knows that, in their desperation, deprived of even the possibility of private space, young lovers are forced to take to the bridge, hiding in an environment designed primarily for vehicles in order to express, if only incompletely and momentarily, the deepest workings of their inner lives. The downtown vitrine is a little like those couples, isolated and homeless, recalling the glories of liberated consumerism even as they give in to the suffocation raging all around them.
