Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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The European Service of the Egyptian State Broadcasting is celebrating its 50th anniversary. This brings back memories of my work in this service. I introduced a number of programmes which continued for many years: the "Diwan of the Poets", in which I presented translated works by modern Egyptian poets; "Arabic books", and "Under the Spell of Egypt", in which I talked about writers who lived in or visited Egypt and their impressions published in books.

This last programme must have run into over a hundred talks which reflects the great interest in Egypt and things Egyptian. One writer whom I presented was Robin Fedden, who was my professor at the English Department of the Faculty of Arts, Fuad El-Awal (now Cairo) University. With Lawrence Durrel and the poet Bernard Spencer, he published Personal Landscape, a magazine which, in the words of the introduction to the first issue "expressed our wish to emphasise the importance of personal life and values when the current of all thought and feeling around us set strongly in the channels of war, and when it was growing ever more difficult to exist outside the 'war effort.'"

The magazine was published for three years, becoming a vehicle in English for serious poets and critics in the Middle East. It was also appearing, again in the words of Fedden: "at a time when conflict coloured all perspectives, recalling those personal landscapes which obstinately continue to exist outside national and political frontiers."

Fedden's book Egypt: Land of the Valley is not only a reflection of the author's love for the country, but it is also a masterpiece of literary writing. Passage follows passage of beautifully composed prose; I use the word compose since every word is so well chosen that it reads like a composition of a poem or a musical piece.

In this book Fedden covers many aspects of the life of Egypt and Egyptians. The titles of his chapters reflect this wide variety of subject matter "The Country and the Traveller", "The Valley Landscape", "The Dwellers of the Land", "Life in the Village", "The City of Alexandria" and "Cairo: The Great Medieval City", to mention only a few of the eleven chapters of the book.

To Fedden Egypt is an eternal amalgam of two things: the Nile and the toilers on its banks. Only by the cooperation of the fellah, who is an element as essential as the river and who seems almost as permanent, are 5000 years of history explained, says Fedden. The conjunction of these two, and their troubled contacts with the outside world, have created Egypt from Aswan to the sea. They conditioned the landscape, and set the pyramids beyond the flood land; they slamp everything with its particular Egyptian quality, indefinable, but patent.

"They differentiate the mosques of Cairo from those of Isfahan, they make the warp of Egypt go up not down the woof, and turn the matter of Plato into the speculation of Plotinus" Fedden says.

He stresses this permanence all through the book. Aliens came, lived and left. "They came," he writes "for power and wealth, to found dynasties or run groceries, but in the end they pay a price for their invasion; they lose their identity, they are submerged by those whom they have conquered or exploited. Greeks, Libyans, Ptolemies and Arabs came and settled down, but all of them, like the rest, have long since been racially obliterated. Like pebbles thrown into a pond, they only wrinkled the surface."

Veneers of thought, says Fedden are imported on aircraft and steamers, but once entering the Nile, lose their lustre. Distorted or improved, they become unrecognisable and the native way of thought prevails. Dominant aliens pass, one after the other, their memory survives in stone monuments.

I would like to conclude here by quoting a very beautiful passage by Fedden: "Like the gigantic bird migrations that sweep up the Nile Valley, passing out of sight into the obscure tropical south, the storming foreigners leave in their wake a country essentially unchanged. Egypt is averse, as Herodotus once found out, to being anything but Egypt."