Abu Simbel, life in a modern village

I am back in Egypt. After two and a half months in England, I returned to Um al-Dunya, where hopefully I can tie up some loose ends and then go home to the US. Before I could sit down and write about Cairo again, though, I left again! I returned last Friday, and by Sunday night I was back at the airport, this time to fly further south, to Aswan. I had never been to Upper Egypt before, and when Marty (my Um fi Masr) generously offered to take me along, I couldn’t resist.

I am currently writing from Daraw, a town near Aswan, where we’ve spent the last 24 hours, staying with a German nurse. Before arriving here, we were in the Nubian village of Abu Simbel, where we spent the previous two days.

The time in Abu Simbel was not like anything I have experienced. The homes are a series of rooms surrounding an open-air courtyard in the center. There is no sense of ‘my room’ or ‘your room’ -- the spaces are shared, and people sleep where the temperature best suits them.

We stayed with Marty’s friend Azza, whom she has known since first coming to Egypt nearly 30 years ago. Azza recently moved with her children from Cairo to Abu Simbel so that her four kids would grow up in a healthier environment and attend better schools. It is so different from Cairo -- so quiet, the air clean, and the social relations closely knit, as most people in the village are related in one way or another. The main activity of the day is sending the kids off to school at 7 a.m., and then feeding them when they return in the early afternoon.

It would at first appear that the place is wholly removed from some of the more burdensome elements of modernity. It is tempting to idealize it as an escape. No one has to run off and check their email. The very notion of a schedule is silly, and we were regularly teased for having some sort of plan.

The tell-tale signs that we are all part of the same, shrinking world exist there, however, just a bit below the surface. Everyone has a mobile phone, and each house has a television, equipped with a satellite dish. We went to one woman’s house, where after sitting on the floor and sifting through corn kernels, we went into the front room where we drank Sprite and watched a soap opera. The villagers in Abu Simbel strike a balance between the traditional and the modern.

Yet cell phones and satellite dishes are just the beginning of the village’s modern existence. If you wander the streets of Abu Simbel, it is difficult to get lost, because off of the streets are arranged in a perfect grid. Every few streets a large manhole cover peaks out from the dust, and you can tell that the road was once evenly paved, and has eroded into mostly dust over the years. The manholes are accompanied by a modern sewage and water pumping system -- so that the homes have running water.

The village exists in this orderly fashion because it was built by the government. This is the second Abu Simbel. The original village is now under water. It was relocated in the 1960s, after Nasser heightened the Aswan Dam. The government rebuilt villages, and with the assistance of UNESCO, moved the people to new homes north of the city. Families were then assigned to homes that corresponded with their size -- a small family receiving a smaller house, and so on. The village continues to exist, with the state’s permission, more closely tied to state intervention than quarters of Cairo populated mostly by squatters.

The transplantation of Abu Simbel and other Nubian villages transformed village life. Where their former homes, near the Sudanese border, were in green, vegetated areas, this new village was in the desert. The village was no longer self-sustaining, but more of a government housing project. To support their families, men left the village and found work in Cairo, Alexandria, or near the Red Sea. This added another modern element to village life as the family became a mobile entity -- moving between the village and urban centers, depending on the season, and communicating largely by mobile phone.

Azza’s husband works in Cairo for a tile-making company, where he runs errands. He calls his wife on her mobile probably five times a day, but only sees her every six weeks to two months. Similarly, I was woken up one night at 2 a.m. when Azza’s niece Samar got a call from her fiancé, who is in Hergada. They hope to get married in two years, when they have saved up enough money to build a house in Abu Simbel. The village is a place of women, children and old men, and life there thrives on ties provided by modern communication.

Are these couples so different from my aunt and uncle, who spent the last few years doing a ‘hitch’ with an oil company -- where he worked for a month in Pakistan, and then would return to the US for a month off, only to return back to Pakistan and start the routine over again. The income levels are night and day, yet the strain on the relationship, and the type of commitment formed because of the distance might not be all that different. Perhaps my aunt and Azza would find a lot to talk about. We think of the oil company ‘hitch’ as especially modern, with all of the air travel, and networks of global commercial connections implied. Yet this village life might be all the more modern, when one considers that the village’s very existence is based on the state’s construction of it. What does this say about our notion of what constitutes modernity? and what is required to have it?

The villagers have struck a different kind of balance between the modern and the traditional. In some ways they are more embedded into systems of modern state-craft than most Westerners. At the same time, however, their dress, diet, and household structure have remained the same for centuries. If they are able to carry out this negotiation, then what does that say about modernity and modernization?

Perhaps the most modern element at work here is the ability to choose between elements of modernity, and how they will be adapted to a life. To raise a family in a village, while income comes from the city; to use the mobile phone to ease the tensions of that dual-existence -- these are the kinds of negotiations and choices that go on in the modern village. These choices show a kind of sophistication that do not seem as apparent to wealthier consumers. We cannot see the satellite dishes and mobile phones as a betrayal of village life, but as a sophisticated adaptation of the modern to meet traditional purposes.

Intersecting revolutions -- this isn't the first time

It does not sound exactly logical that events in Egypt would affect a revolution in Hungary. What stretches the imagination all the further is that the same historical moment transformed life in Ma’adi.

The events of October 1956 show the historical precedent for the kind of interconnected change we watched unfold in the last two months. A dictator is overthrown in Tunisia, thus sparking the revolutionary zeal in Egypt, then the Gulf, Libya, and so on. Networks of information and ideas exchanged over the internet have undergirded much of that activity. So it appears that while the authoritarian regimes controlled so much of society, they could not stop the airwaves themselves, nor the movement of information through them.

Throughout the 1950s the Soviet Union was similarly unable to control information sent through the air. Where we have the internet today, Western powers used the radio to send pro-democracy messages into the Eastern Bloc.

For years Hungarians heard messages from Radio Free Europe, offering the hope of Western military support if they opposed the Soviet regime. The critical moment came on October 23 when students took to the streets of Budapest. Word of their protest quickly spread throughout the city, and soon more than 200,000 people had joined in.

They stormed parliament, demanding the end of the Soviet occupation, fair elections, and a free press. Two days later, Soviet tanks were upon them, opening fire and killing hundreds of demonstrators. The oppressive strong arm was not enough, though, as the revolution spread into the countryside. By October 28 the revolutionaries were swearing in a new government. In the span of a week the Hungarians had done the unthinkable -- toppled Soviet power, and established an independent government.

Then they waited, hopefully anticipating the Western military support that would confirm their revolution, and prevent the Soviets from returning for an evening bloodier offensive. However well-intentioned Western promises, neither they nor the Hungarian people anticipated Egypt would have its own revolutionary moment in the same week.

While Hungarians stormed parliament, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, taking a definitive stance against Western imperialism. Where the British and French might have otherwise aided Hungary, they set their focus on Egypt instead. On October 29, the day after Hungary established its new government, the British, French, and Israeli militaries invaded Egypt. One Hungarian leader later told Nasser, “You stole our revolution.”

Rather than successfully thwarting Soviet oppression, Hungary became a bloody example of what happened to states that balked at their control. By November 11, the Soviet Union once again controlled Hungary.

For Egypt, the moment was more transformational. When the British and French took action, they anticipated the United States’ support. After all, Nasser had shown his own Soviet-leaning sympathies, so it appeared that the Cold War balance would swing in their favor.

U.S. leadership saw it differently. Wanting to avoid Soviet involvement in the Middle East, they sided with Nasser, and demanded that the foreign armies withdraw. To Britain’s chagrin, the loss of the Suez Canal marked the their empire’s setting sun. After Egypt, British power continued to fall throughout Africa and Asia.

This post-colonial turn not only altered Egypt’s position on an international scale, but also deeply affected the personal lives of those living within Egypt at the time. Throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, Egypt and especially the cities of Cairo and Alexandria had been cosmopolitan hubs. Foreigners from throughout the Mediterranean, Near East, and Europe made homes for themselves there.

Ma’adi was a product of Cairo’s cosmopolitan past. In addition to the Egyptians and Britons living there, its residents hailed from Italy, Greece, Germany, France, Austria, and throughout the Levant. While these various nationalities appear to have coexisted fairly harmoniously in peacetime, their neighborly ties were quickly threatened during periods of global conflict. During the first and second World Wars, for instance, Ma’adi residents saw the homes of Italian and German neighbors quickly become “enemy property.”

So when Britain, France and Israel threatened Egypt, Nasser turned his eye on the British, French and Jewish populations within his borders. He ordered the repatriation of all British and French nationals -- some of whom had lived in Egypt for centuries. The Jewish population was not ordered to leave, but was increasingly targeted by oppressive moves, so that the majority elected to leave.

For a place like Ma’adi, which was home to so many foreigners, its demography was transformed. Stores were shuttered, never to open again. Homes were abandoned, and then sequestered by the government. The synagogue went from being a center of Jewish social life, to a relic of a largely forgotten past.

While Ma’adi remains a haven for expatriates today, 1956 marked the end of an era where Europeans made long-term homes for themselves in Cairo. The gap left by European repatriation was largely filled by Americans. These new residents came with a more itinerant agenda--coming to Cairo for several years, but then leaving again for a new post or to return to their country of origin.

We still see remnants of pre-1956 Ma’adi when walking through the neighborhood. The abandoned villa on the corner of Roads 83 and 14, for instance, was once a lovely home with a large garden. Now it stands as a kind of decaying monument to Ma’adi’s former existence. It is physical proof of a historical change that was at once intensely local, and wholly global.

An inestimable number of lives were changed by the nationalization of the Suez Canal. It marked a new era in national politics -- claiming a renewed role for Egypt as a regional leader. It dispersed European and Jewish populations throughout the world, and it simultaneously dealt a crushing blow to Hungarians’ dreams for democracy.

We have all just lived through a similar turning point in Egypt’s history. I am writing this article, however, not from Ma’adi, but from Oxford, England, where I evacuated to in early February -- creating yet another link between Egypt and the world. Like those Ma’adi residents of 1956, our individual movements into and out of Egypt, the mobilization of local and foreign military power, and the movements of democratic messages through the airwaves are all part of the story. Once again, a revolution in Egypt is a deeply personal, national, and global event.