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.
No comments:
Post a Comment