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نمر في هذه الأيام بظروف هي حقيقة استثنائية، نرى من خلالها مدى هواننا وهوان دمائنا وحيواتنا في نظر الغرب ومثقال العالم، وحجم القتل المفجع والدمار الذي نصحو بشكل يومي عليه. نتوسل ونتضرع لأن ينقذنا أحد، لنكتشف مراراً أن من نتضرع اليهم هم القتلة. من الممكن أن نحزن و أن نيأس أو أن نستغرق في رومانسية غير مجدية ازاء ذلك الواقع القبيح. ويمكننا أيضاً أن نختار أن نغضب وأن نقاوم، وأن نتحمل المسؤولية دون أن نهرب، وأن نتلبسها بشكل يومي ونجعلها تلهمنا—لا لأن نغير العالم، ولكن لألا نترك في جسدنا طاقة دون أن نكون قد أفرغناها مقاومة، وألا نترك في جسد تلك الفكرة الاستعمارية الخبيثة مبرح إلا وقد أوسعناه ضرب، قدر وسعنا. كذلك تسود القضية في كل مناحي حياتنا، شيئاً بشيء، نرى من خلالها معنى لأنفسنا، لوجودنا وللأشياء.

hilalchouman

لقد فقدنا زمنًا كاملًا

لقد فقدنا زمنًا كاملًا حاولنا صناعته، وفقدانه بعنف. هناك من فارقنا ولم يعد هنا معنا، وهناك من فارقنا وبقي حولنا ولكنه لم يعد من كان لنا، وهناك ما ومن افترقنا عنه رغمًا عن إرادتنا. لقد أُخِذَت الأشياء منا عنوةً وتكرارًا. بقينا هناك، في الوراء ونحن هنا، نشهد نهاية لا تنتهي، ولم تنتهِ بعد. نتابع أحداثها ببطء قاتل، متنقلين من قاع فاجأنا، لقاع أسفل من سابقه ولا نملك إلا خيار التطبيع معه، لأنَّ مجابهته ستبطئ النهاية أكثر. اللغة تصير قاصرة والروح تبيت مكبوتة، ولذا نكتفي بالصمت لعلَّ فيه مرآة ذواتنا التي لم ندقق فيها في انشغالاتنا السابقة، ولم نعِ تشكلاتها.

To Be Clay

A friend of mine recently made this comment about needing more “clay people” in her life. It was in the context of a ‘building with earth’ course i’d been giving to school kids as part of a summer school. I was telling the kids, and my friend was there, a performing arts practitioner, that “the primary difference between silt and clay is particle size; but also that silt can be used in agriculture because it can both take absorb water and give it back, while clay is inorganic because it absorbs water and retains it within it, on account of its plasticity.”

They were intense days; working with kids is profound, and the desert sun didn’t make it any less humid. Hours later my friend was telling about needing more clay people in her life. I understood her statement as one that interpreted the qualities of silt and clay--in regards to absorbing, retaining and disposing of water--(astro)poetically, equating water with emotions, and thinking she would like to meet people (or men) who were more like clay, able to absorb the water and retain it within them. My friend was speaking from the viewpoint of a plant. Or rather, a human who wishes to find another to whom they could spill of themselves into, without being expected to retain any in themselves, as flowers usually do.

I found my friend’s casual interpretation quite fascinating. I, as silt, i think i let water out. Or according to my friend, i am like a soil saturated with groundwater ready to surface. It’s a soil healthy for agriculture, yes, I’d also like to develop the clay-like capacity that can support others like a foundation. Hence, in my silt-clay combination, i would very much hope to develop more clay, or rather the ability to receive from others, to retain, and become standalone plastic once mixed with water.

#clay #silt

شارع الجيش والحسينية

#Geish St #شارع الجيش

They Managed to Kill the Buzz

It’s so sad to see Cairo’s lights dimming over the past few years. So many brilliant people, many of my friends, have left because they couldn’t survive living in a place without sufficient public breathing space. There’s one word that used to describe a mystic quality about this city that no one could tangibly explain: buzz. Things are happening everywhere all the time. The streets were full and they used to attract the strangest of spectacles, like the guy who used to breathe fire for a few kind pounds. Downtown has now become empty, too civil for one to be themselves in the street. This buzz was always there. It was there before the revolution. It exponentially hyped after 2011. You could feel it, something that attracts you, that consumes you, even if you can’t exactly name it or understand what it is. A buzz that kept people awake till late hours of the night, one that even made you tired of its constant stress. The empty and intolerant policing of the public sphere since 2014 has choked us and killed this buzz. Downtown Cairo is now silent. The so called Art d’Egypte festival showcased many pieces of art, but no spectators, no audience. The art pieces sat there in loneliness with an uninterested visitor passing by every once in a while. There wasn’t any discussion or lively debate. No strange scenes taking place, no art. The coffee shop in a narrow street that was once full, too full, of downtown goers was empty sad and silent. The cold now is intolerable because there is no air of warmth in the streets. It’s too civil but fuck that civility.

#Cairo #buzz #jan25

oc-chi-o-lism

"خصوصية المأساة عند جيل خاض تجربة التمرد، هى أنه مهما كان مصير كل واحد من أبنائه، سواء سار في سكة السلامة، طريق التوبة والإذعان لقوة الأمر الواقع، وحتى إعلان الكفر بكل قيم التمرد القديم، أو سار في طريق الندامة، الإنهيار، إعتزال الحياة، المرض النفسي، فإنه شاء أم أبى لا يعود أبدًا نفس الشخص الذي قبل أن تبتليه غواية التمرد، لقد مسه الحلم مرة، وستبقى تلاحقه دومًا ذكرى الخطيئة الجميلة، لحظة حرية، خفة، لا تكاد تُحتمل لفرط جمالها، تبقى مؤرقة كالضمير، وملهمة ككل لحظة مفعمة بالحياة"

أروى صالح_المبتسرون

The Descent of the Point

This post will be about the curious phenomenon called the Descent of the Point (نزول النقطة). The conception of this phenomenon can be traced back to ancient Egypt. Through a basic background research [1, 2, 3], it appears to point to the moment when the first drop of rain arrives (Point, in Arabic Noqta, refers to the droplet of rain), ushering in with it the beginning of the Nile flood, which follows afterwards. The descent of the point is also astronimically linked to the movement of the sun and the beginning of summer. The flood season in turn marks a turning point in the climate and agricultural calendar where abundance in wealth, associated with water (for drinking, for the growing of crops, etc), begins to steadily increase.

Only a few sources accessible to me (far from an expert on the subject) discuss this phenomenon and knowledge-practice, which appears to have declined in use especially since the building of Nile dams over the past century.

The descent of the point, then, is conceptually the beginning (of everything, of life, of abundance, of the season), though it is not merely a conceptual category. The descent of the point is a phenomenon the records of which are annually kept and updated by Egyptians as a matter of learning about and adapting to the flooding of the Nile, in agriculture as well as in other domains of life including the economic, the social and the overall environmental spheres. For peasants, it affects sun rays and water, which in turn affect agricultural crops, bread doughs, and soil.

It is quite well known that Egyptians across ages have highly regarded the Nile as the source of life and in a way the primary influence and metric through which seasons unfold, and cyclical time is documented and predicted. According to one source, this phenomenon occurs on the 11th day of the Coptic month Ba’ouna, 4 days before the movement of the sun marking of the beginning of Summer. The descent of the point, then, is an essential phenomenon that affects and can be observed by everyone. Those who are tasked with keeping time and analysing the behavior of the cosmos in order to enhance our ability to predict environmental and weather conditions have access to well-documented logs spanning hundreds of years to the annual arrival of this phenomenon on which the Coptic calendar depends: the descent of the point.

I would like to extend this concept into being a metaphor for the beginning of writing, which i usually write about in this blog, though now is not the time for it yet. ---

The first segment of this post was a general introduction to the phenomenon and its origins in ancient Egyptian practice and the Coptic calendar. This segment will be about this truly wonder-ful manuscript i came across at the Library of the Dominican Institute in Cairo, Malḥama ʿalā nuzūl al-nuqṭa yawm ṯānī ʿašar Baʾūna (ملحمة على نزول النقطة يوم ثاني عشر بئونة), which translates to The Prodigy of the Point’s Descent [...] in Ba’ouna.

Perhaps the best one can start with in introducing this manuscript, is to transcribe it, as follows.

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم وبه ثقتي هذه ملحمة على نزول النقطة يوم ثاني عشر بونه اذا نزلت النقطة يوم الأحد يكون النيل في تلك السنة عشرين ذراعاً وبعض اصابع ويقيم على وجه الارض و يكون الزرع عزيز كثير البركه و يرخص القمح في اول السنه الى اول برموده ثم يرجع الى الغلا و يقع في الناس شتات الا ان الله روف بالعباد وهو قادر على كل شيء و يكون صيفها قليل المطر وخريفها اكثر برداً من شتائها و يقع الموت في الغنم و يقل العسل والقطن والكتان وساير الملبوس ويكون ذلك كله اخر السنه و اخرها اجود من اولها و من يولد في تلك السنة تفرح به اهله و يكون محبوباً عند الناس وكل يراه اخيه والله اعلم واذا نزلت النقطة يوم الاثنين يكون النيل من فضل الله تعالى اثنين وعشرين ذراعاً وبعض اصابع بالفرد و يكون نيل مبارك و يخصب الزرع و ترخص الحنطة في تلك السنة و يخصل الغلا في كيهك الى بركوده و تقل الكسوه خمسة اشهر و لا يكون في تلك السنة خوف ولا قتال ولا غيره و لا بد من فتن تقع في العرب و يقع الوبا في البقر ولا يدوم وتخرج السنة على خير وسلامة و تكون السنة كثيرة الربح قليلة المطر و يكون الربيع والصيف مبارك و يظهر في الناس مرض يقال له الطاعون واكثره يكون في الصغار والاطفال و يقع موت في بعض اشراف الناس والاكابر والروسا و يكثر السعال و يكثر العسل والزيت و تخصب السنة و يكون السعر متوسطا في اخر السنة و يقع في ارض المشرق والمغرب حروب وقتال وخراب و من ولد في هذه السنة يكون فيه خير الى اهله و يكون زاهدا ناسكا دينا صالحا والله اعلم

#environmental history #the point #le point #نزول النقطة

Does one “make an app” or “build an app”? Of course, there are other alternatives. One could also “develop” or “create” an app. Although an outsider to programming, i understand there is no one way to describe what one does when their work involves (web) applications. But, for example, one can’t say that they “do an app.” There are certain ways you can describe this activity that involves coding and programming and leads to the development of an app. But one among the persisting ways of verbalizing this activity, is “to build and app.” Apps and websites are simply and quite commonly refered to as “built” things. This is what interests me, this relation between coding (think language) and building. It interests me (as an architect who looks for inspiration in language, say, as built form) because it draws attention to this elusive relation between “writing” (think code) and “building.” Programmers write code. Through it, (i.e. their knowledge of this language) they build things (like websites and applications) Academics write too. They don’t exactly “build theses” (they build arguments, heck they do build theses!), but their writings “rely on” evidence as “support,” they are expected to be “structured,” and to lead to a product, say a book. Programmers, on the other hand, they also write, and their work too relies on structure, and it too leads to a product, say an app. Architects aren’t commonly refered to as ones who “write.” They are thought of as ones who “draw,” “design,” and “build.” Their work, almost too literally, also relies on foundational supports and structure, and it too leads to a product, namely, a building.

There is a tertiary relation here between coding, writing and building that needs to be unpacked.

(screenshots are results of googling “make an app” and “build an app”)

10 Years On

I’ve been meaning to write a lengthy text marking the passing of 10 years since the eruption of the Arab uprisings, particularly Egypt’s edition. I’ve been meaning to write on it, not just as a global historical event, but as one that has greatly affected me as a person over the past years; on my position from and in relation to it. On that front, writing about the revolution, the “best and worst of times” involving both boundless hope and intense violence, to me personally is an act of restitution. This is a front in which soul searching towards personal reckoning is in operation. Just as i was personally dismantled in the years after the coup (2013-2015), my writing about this event would necessarily tie both the global picture (of the historical event) to my own subjective experience of it.

Through writing, i also also wish to address the historical event, where we are at the moment, or rather, how we see it in retrospect; how it is talked and written about a decade after. So many ghosts and shadows are still perched over the memory of the revolution denying us from seeing it clearly. We are still within a fog that we need to pass and get out of in order to address this event with objective clarity. For too many among its participants, myself included, the revolution embodied a dream whose sky is the limit. We thought we were changing the world (and in a way we did), but among the effects of such an idea is that nothing among its resulting outcomes were enough to deem it successful. We wanted too much to the extent that whatever happened was never enough.

For example, too many among the discourse and talking points of (tone-setting) major news outlets on the anniversary reveled in judgements on whether the revolution failed or succeeded, and if it was worth it in the first place. This is wrong. The revolution was a massive social and political event that has literally affected and intersected with every aspect of our lives. What do we mean when we say that the revolution failed? Which aspect exactly do we address when we say “the revolution”? For example, the musical scene only flourished since. The several Me Too movements that took place over the years addressing harrasment and sexual violence were a positive outcome not unrelated to the revolution. Nothing before January 25th remained the same after, only very few things remained in place since.

This discourse, then, is not helpful. It obstructs us from being able to sort things out and understand where and how things have changed since, aside from the massive crackdown by the millitary on speech and bodies, public space, political organization and its de facto control of the state, media and economy. Yes, the revolution was defeated on the ground, but this defeat is not permanent and it certainly doesn’t represent the full import of how the revolution changed and continues to transform our reality.

One example of this is narrative. Major news and political outlets still talk about July 2013 unashamedly as a coup d’etat (unlike, for example, the July 1952 revolution/coup). It’s not a matter of debate. The world knows (although perhaps this is too simplistic to state) that what happened in 2011 was a progressive wave by the people of the region to overturn the grim conditions that were set by our past, from which we thought there was no escape. Another example of this is memory, a recurring talking point during this anniversary, triggered obviously by the regime’s early attempts to erase the memory of the revolution post-2013. But by now, we know with certainty that they haven’t been able to do so. Social media channels still retain a depository of archival material that demonstrate how impossible it is for the regime to rewrite the past. Despite the regime’s might and technological reach in terms of censuring voices and detaining dissidents, we continue to mourn every year, and remember. We continue to converge as masses, albeit in virtual squares. The material and archival history of the revolution was not and cannot be erased. It is not uncommon for revolutions to suffer such seeming defeat. A friend of mine recently pointed out how the Russian revolutionary forces in 1905 were entirely wiped out, on a scale not unlike 2013, before the Bolshevic revolution, 12 years later, toppled and eradicated the regime in 1917. One among the best commentaries i read on social media, shared by a friend, that “10 years is enough time for us to bury the dead.” It referred to Marx who quoted Jesus urging one of his followers who asked for time to mourn and bury his father, urging him to come instead and “let the dead bury their dead.” 10 years after, we are still mourning our dead, unable to see how the revolution lives on.

#jan25 #Egypt #revolution #arab spring

Michel Butor, The Text as Osiris

Seda A. Chavdarian (1985)

https://www-tandfonline-com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1080/03648664.1985.9926424?needAccess=true

Many things began in Egypt. I found out about Butor through Caroline’s writings. Otherwise, his name has been obscure to me. I made some initial general readings, and then decided to approach him from an angle that is specific to me. Through a brief Google search, i discovered he had spent time in Egypt that he considered formative. This then is the angle through which i will start building our relation. The above article from 1985 written by a now-emeritus senior lecturer at Berkeley, explored exactly that: Egypt’s influence on Butor’s textual oeuvre. Strangely, it does resonate, a review of Butor’s work through this specific lens. The experiments and ideas outlined by the author bare familiar to my readings and thoughts on the primal relations between writing, the paradoxical and regenerative nature of the text, the writer and being in space-time, and in the very relations, for example, in:

“The idea of repetition, i.e., prolongation, is an essential element of the Osirian myth; [...] This repetitious yet forward-moving and changing style is theoretically very similar to the constant creation and re-creation; [...] is seen as a passage where things are always in a state of becoming.”

I have not yet read Butor himself. I am not even sure which language he is available to read in. I read Caroline’s short text on him though, and it was a skillfully (de, re,)-constructed experimental writing of Butor rather than about him, unfolding yet another iteration of him altogether, perpetuating and transforming his being and memory, something that, while i am now reading about him, i am thinking he would’ve probably loved.

This idea of ‘becoming’ which can be found in ancient egyptian mythology has always fascinated me. As a structure, becoming is a loop, an arguably sustainable process of growth and unfolding, death and rebirth. I have been engaged with this notion since reading (about?) both Bergson and Deleuze -- my blog since 2011 is called becoming taliawi. They have both, to me, coincided with the geometric model of the Mobius loop (credit is due to readings with Tarek Naga), picto-illustrated by the ancient egyptians in the form of an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, and suggested in the form of the reproductive scarab beetle. Certainly in Egypt today you can feel this fluidity in things and relations right away. We know no separation between each other, individual and collective, limits and borders, no separation between state and religion, the old lady working in the bureaucratic authority will ask you about how your mother is, and will tell you about what she intends to cook for her children because she momentarily unites with you, the supposedly other ‘individual’ that only wants to stamp a document from a passing emloyee without thinking about their complex relationship with their mother, and how in fact they’re not sure what she ate today. This non-separation will rage you and it will waste your time. But still, at times you will understand that it is qualitatively different. That is, it has its own nature, its other qualities, and while it might be difficult to map in cartesian terms, it could much better be understood experientially, as a smooth desert space (as per Deleuze and Guattari) or a continuous loop that knows little distinction between abstract intervals, like beginning and end, one and other, author and text, as described by Chavdarian’s text above. It produces an oppressive military state when it coincides with the beginning of a Gregorian millennium, but it can also lead to mystic territories and a habit of grasping the phenomena that might be difficult to understand or explain.

"''The Spirit of Mediterranean Places'' is devoted to Mr. Butor's impressions of Egypt [...] long sentences, broken up into paragraphs that are generally separated only by a comma, [...] a kind of gratuitous and soon outdated modernism."

Le Nouveau Travelogue

Edouard Roditi (1986)

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/31/books/le-nouveau-travelogue.html

I can see common traces in different readings about Butor; his range of literary experiments, the breaking up of the way the text is built, a thread that seems to stitch his work. The repetition which highlights the difference, and thus conceives of text as also a possible sketch or drawing, or one where you would imagine an abstract drawing above which the text is being traced, one that might be better textually performed rather than written about.

“In Upper Egypt, a groove in the Saharan plateau, nine hundred fifty kilometers long, and on the average ten kilometers wide, as long as you go parallel to the course of the Nile, you can travel indefinitely toward Lower Egypt and the Mediterranean in one direction, and in the other toward Ethiopia or the Sudan, but if you set out at right angles to the course of the Nile, you are very soon stopped by the desert, which begins extremely abruptly . . . and you always know that you will be stopped, because the desert begins with a cliff you can see from wherever you are.”

A Long Scratch In The Desert From ''The Spirit of Mediterranean Places,'' ibid. (Emphasis my own)

#architecture of text #butor

Being Arab /2

Some site-specific contextualization, that I learnt here, site-writing (Rendell 2006), at UCL, and that might serve as an opening. I have been here in London for over the past year conducting postgraduate research. It was my first visit and stay in the UK. I passed through pre and post-Covid-19 lockdowns here in different spatial settings. Over these months, i both — healed from Cairo’s recent years’ violence and, in parallel, became all the more increasingly angrier over the course of my stay here in London. It usually conincided with reading of both history and current news. I became angrier, perhaps, because of the cold and lack of sun. These too are forces at play in my (site) writing, beside the social distacing. But the reasons for my anger that I want to explore here are historical and political forces that I was seldom able to voice in conversation during my stay in Bloomsbury and with the community of friends, colleagues, academics and activists I have been fortunate to meet, in class with my cohort and elsewhere. which found a perplexed and almost violent silence every time it slipped into a class debate. My coursework was full-time in-person over 6 months and online over a similar period.

Just recently, following the debate on decolonising academia and rights-based movements like black lives matter, BDS, the taking down of slave-owner statues, the climate breakdown frontlines, and other movements, some of these topics arose about the British colozation of Egypt and most of the Middle East, and (offshoot) Israel’s colonization of the Palestinians. Yet, for elaboration, I will remember vividly two incidents that occurred during class debates. In one comment I made on a prominent American speaker’s talk whose meticulous and revealing work on the violence that the border architecture between the US and Mexico is inflicting on the families of migrants who are themselves with no other frontier to head to for basic living conditions, i exclaimed mid-sentence in my question about the magnitude of pain and unjust violence in the form of architectural infrastructure and border secuity plicies, that this research lays bare. My comment, however, sparked a complete and horrible silence, a timid reply by the speaker, and an afterword by the organizing professor to tone down the conversation, make correctives to the audience about what the speaker’s work originally addresses, before peacefully handing over to the following question.

The other incident, was when a leading academic director of a really good unit within UCL came to talk to us about a fascinating archival and mapping methodology, yet was quite apprehended and dumb-founded when I asked if the archives and maps of ex-British colonies, like Egypt and Palestine, were accessible in the same manner, and where would they be. My question wasn’t cursory, it was technical, and in fact related to a then-ongoing archival mapping project I’ve been involved in, collecting and analysing maps pre- and during British colonial rule. I want to know where those collections are, assuming that they are somewhere centralized in which I can access, much like I could the archives of a neighborhood in London. But beside the very interesting presentation, the answer of the speaker was meandering and ultimately disappointing. He was unsettled, and replied with suggestions, but without detailed knowledge about archival collections for “places in which the British have been to.” The discussion was then again smoothly steered sideways by the professor. To me that was strange because I thought I was stating the obvious and that we’re passed this point of acknowledging and renouncing the colonial past, even if as a faraway past we feel unrelated to or associated with. It was the early month of my arrival and right into the first weeks of induction into the critical methodologies of architectural history, seminars that are really rich, diverse, current, critical, and often radical. It was also my first experiences with London as a city, and the British culture which I was curious, since I’m here, to explore.

I will fast forward my experience through other numerous accounts of conversations and experiences with specifically British friends, the last of which are my current flatmates here in London, all of which are well-educated in history and politics, professedly labour, way left. Yet, it crippled up onto me bit by bit until it struck me: the uneasy silence and perplexed looks, all along, something is shared between those incidents and the talk in the debate about British history curriculums and the fight back against “certain ideas and terms” which an HE official report came out denouncing. But it was mainly through my friends and colleagues’ facial reactions that it finally hit me: these guys don’t have a clue!

They really don’t know about our or their past. Much as we don’t know about our past, though perhaps they are not the same positions. Some historical facts are completely omitted from the picture. Some topics are self-censored, a violence is enacted both by its voicing and by its silencing.

In the following post, i hope to address some of those critical and general historical facts over the longue duree from the late 19th century to the very present weeks, jumping around focused on a trail of key events that are among a picture that i think my friends, some of whom i hope this would reach, really need to know about and grasp really well, especially if they will work in left politics and more so if they will ever engage the Arab world through their writings or acquaintenances. These facts that strictly around history and geography, from a professedly amateur reader, on the relation between Britian and Egypt over decades, and the child-conflict that became, as Edward Said put it, the Question of Palestine.

Being Arab / 1

I had a friend of a friend visit, here in London. Both my friends are Italian, among a community of other friends who are mostly Italian. But this visiting friend in particular had an interesting story. It started to unfold when I understood that her grandparents were born and lived in Beirut, to a family of Jews who are originally from Aleppo. It struck me! “So, your grandparents, do they speak Italian or Arabic?” I asked her. “Both,” she replied, “but mainly French by virtue of education, and Arabic. Their Italian is not the best.” Wow, I thought to myself. Here I am again in front of an Italian of Arab origin, in fact syrio-lebanese, or you could say shami, for levantine, since we’re talking about exactly the time that this political distinction came to effect, resulting in the carving of a Lebanon, by the French mainly whose colonial mandate it was under, from Syria then, early 20th century.

In any case, we didn’t draw on any of this history, it was merely in the back of my head as I listened to our friend telling us about this captivating journey that her grandparents went through, having grown up in Beirut and educated in French schools, and how by the late 40s early 50s they had to leave. In my mind, that’s a sorry but familiar story that I’ve heard over and again about Arab Jews finding themselves at the temultuous front of nationalist quasi-post-colonial states and the forming of the formative Arab-Israeli conflict, and having to leave. I grew up on my own father’s stories about his jewish neighbors, and the jewish tradesmen with which his father traded, along of course with copts, as well as other diasporic (European origin) communities that lived in Cairo at the time like the Armenians, the Greeks and the Italians.

Our friend told us about how they first left to Tokyo, where they lived for a while and how the grandfather wrote from there for a Lebanese newspaper. Eventually, seeking to settle after the birth of our friend’s mother, taking advantage of a post-war European scheme to provide residency and citizenship for Jews, they ended up in Italy, which they knew nothing about. My friend, of course, feels assuredly Italian by virtue of this decision, whose timeliness would inform hers and her mother’s upbringing in Milan, this city her grandfather picked on the map and actually made the trip to.

The fact that her grandparents in Milan spoke Arabic and maintained a memory of their past-life in Beirut intrigued me. I asked my friend if she identifies with being Arab at all, she replied “no” straight away. She considered that she had middle eastern origins, because for example the typical food that her grandmother would make for her was kibba and hummus and those dishes, no pasta included. I told her yes those are typical Arabic dishes. She was puzzled and the discussion carried along with our friends. I didn’t manage to ask her how she thinks her grandparents identified themselves. Our discussion bordered into mentioning the Arab Israeli conflict, though without getting into it. I am not sure how my friend, who studied history and journalism in New York and here we are meeting in London, would have weighed on it. I had the sense that she identified with being Jewish, at least as it pertains to her search for stories of her family’s origins.

It was interesting and strange for me. Particularly as it comes in a time where I am personally reckoning with and rediscovering being an Arab, here in London, along with a growing Arab diaspora of friends and colleagues who are spread around cities in europe. In a time as well when an Arab-Muslim migrant crisis is overshadowing Europe, it’s relation both to itself and to the world, and when a cartoon and series of statements by Macron lead to widespread mutual-hate speech and daily lone-wolf terror-crimes are erupting across different cities in Europe. I as an Arab at this present moment bear this weight in my presence here, in people’s perplexed looks, insinuations and misunderstandings. The popular theory goes that as there is no fire without smoke, and as we might not believe in stereotypes, we nevertheless think that there are reasons behind them, and it is to those roots of the stereotype of the Arab male backward and violent jihadi that the perplexed eyes keep looking.

I never really identified as an Arab before. I identified more as an Egyptian who is reconciled with his Arab ethnicity, along with the African and Mediterranean affinities, although I am culturally oriented towards the west, for many reasons. Part of my childhood and all of my travels were in and to the west. Only last February I visited beirut for the first time, and, realizing that it was my first visit to an Arab state other than Egypt, I felt warmly home in it, digested its crises and social malaise. I understood in a novel way what and how it means to be Arab the minute I arrived to the airport and was confronted with the lax but authoritative security officer, I automatically understood how things here are done, even if they speak with a shami accent and seem to be lighter-skinned.

As recently, and I could almost argue that it was by way of peer-pressure, I am feeling in need to reckon as well with how the word Arab echoes, and what it resonates or connotes. And as I spent the past year here in london, half of which under lockdown, and as i suffered from social isolation, estrangement, and an almost medical need for sun, spontaneity, kindness and warmth, I slowly discovered how in fact Arabs are lovely people. They are generally kind and natural, saturated with a high level of corruption and cynicism and usually crushed under the heavy weight of decades-long national and collective crises, very attached to where they come from but also actively dreaming to leave it ‘behind’ to a better place since there’s almost no hope for things to change. Arabs also have a colorful shared cuisine, full of breads, cheeses, olives, vine leaves, hummus, felafel and beans much of which is shared with the southern Mediterranean and other regions. A significant stretch of the Arab geography, is the Fertile Crescent from Palestine-Israel as they border Egypt, tying Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. My visit to Beirut, and more precisely outside of Beirut in Lebanon, I admit, opened my eyes to this tasteful landscape of green hills that Gibran described, bordering arid desert from the back and overseeing a generous stretch of the Mediterranean Sea on the front, with a temperate weather saturated with sun, warmth, and a fertile soil rich with produce, and archaeological remains necessary for understanding how civilization transformed at a certain moment in time around the agricultural revolution, bringing forth writing and scripture, cities, prophets, and god.

This is what my imagination projects if I say that I’m an Arab. I’m not sure if that what my friend understood when I asked her if she identified with her Arab origins.

Grids and Paragraphs argues that the introduction of paragraphs in dividing the space of the text echoed the transformation of the city as it came to be organized by grids. In as much as it is composed of and about texts as they relate to architecture, it looks at how texts conceive of and depict the city, as well as how texts are material products, built and populated with words and spaces, which are in turn shaped by the city. Paragraphs divide the text in a similar way to the division of space to grid-planned land plots. As much as the page has a body and margin, land plots have built forms and retention spaces separating them. Paragraphs and Grids can be both seen as parts of an otherwise extended whole-continuum; the text in the case of the first and urban space in the case of the second. Punctuation, on the other hand, regulates the flow of the text, as analogous to traffic in the city space. In other words, it brings together, separates and distinguishes texts in order to better perform the meaning.

GRIDS AND PARAGRAPHS: Parallel Transformations in the Architecture of Texts and the City in Late 19th Century Cairo

Paragraphs divide the text in a similar way to the division of space to grid-planned land plots. As much as the page has a body and margin, land plots have built forms and retention spaces separating them. Paragraphs and Grids can be both seen as parts of an otherwise extended whole-continuum; the text in the case of the first and urban space in the case of the second. Punctuation, on the other hand, regulates the flow of the text, as analogous to traffic in the city space. In other words, it brings together, separates and distinguishes texts in order to better perform the meaning.

#cairo #architecture #city as text

My friend Parfait and Comunque the cat

When i lived in Italy, i had a gang of italian friends. Among those was an African guy originally from Burundi, who was living and perhaps was born in Italy. We spoke a mixture of English and Italian. Burundi, however, is an ex-Belgian colony, so you can say that the mother-tongue of this guy, the language his family used at home, was french, beside other local languages. My friend’s name was Parfait, which of course in French means Perfect. His name hit me and made me wonder a lot. I’ve never known any french whose name is Parfait, nor did the name ever appear in the french textbooks i learnt from when i was a kid. We have names in Arabic that are of the same meaning, Kamil (Perfect), though it might be a bit antiquated today. But this way of making a name after a concept like ‘perfection’ is not common with either Perfect in English or Parfait in French. It appeared to me that this guy’s name sopke of his mother and father’s appropriation of the french language, that of the colonizer, and used it in the way that works for them best, one that realizes their own local imagination. It was perfect. They used the french in a way that the french don’t, and the french are famous for being particular about their language, a once lingua-franca of the world.

In the midst of this, a cat came to our house. We lived in a ground floor apartment that overlooked the lush internal courtyard of the building. The cat chose when to come and when to go, often sitting on the window sill, between inside and outside. We were happy when she came and gave her yogurt. An Egyptian and an Iranian learning Italian and a Sardinian who denied being Italian, we called her Comunque, Italian for ‘however’.

Dear Professors,

With all due respect, thank you for all the encouragement and pushing to invest in my back ground and language. That's great, truly inspiring, and also something completely legitimate, for each to bring home what is most accessible by them from their own knowledge environment. That's all very good. I've thought about it, and it was convincing. Instead of thinking about avant-garde french literary movements of the 70s, which were only translated in english in the 1990s, and how they could be translated in architecture because admittedly, by one of london's leading architecture schools, they have not had the echo that they deserve. I decided to look at local examples instead. The notion of language hit home. I decided i will look at arabic language texts from Egypt. I'm learning. I make a presentation, and still my professors tell me that it's not decolonial enough, and perhaps my decolonial act should also include the english language itself... but, what should i do more? We're in England. Should i write in Arabic? That's the only remaining thing. Is that how my practice becomes decolonizing? I'm surprised. My professor tells me that what is post-colonial cannot be written in english. Edward Said wrote his work and lived most of his life in New York. In fact, a great number of decolonial literature is written in english, by sons and daughters of diasporas or immigrant communities, for reasons this might not be the place to discuss. What is wrong if one writes in English, or in fact study English or French studies, should they choose to? The same practice that is decolonial can in fact turn to obstruct one from entering into certain domains. It is not enabling, it is the opposite. But there's also another part of this story. I myself have started writing in English since i was 5 years old, in an english speaking country, in fact before i learnt to write in arabic. I write to my mother and sisters in English. I write my diaries in English. And i'm mostly reading english, even when i need to read avant-garde french literary novels of the 70s, which i am very interested in. I'm not sure whether i dream in arabic or english, probably Arabic and i certainly would be glad for that. Poetry i read in Arabic. But french avant-garde and the newpapers, i read in english, since i was a kid, and i grew up to see my father do the same as well. Perhaps my english (and inclination to study european studies) has a foreign accent. My father's mistake, he taught me to speak english in the way it could be communicated the clearest, regardless of accent; that in fact he retained the accent. It was his sense of identity, that although he's in the west, in none other than New York in the 70s, but he's not from the west. And we could reflect on why is it that he is in the west, but perhaps this is not the best place to discuss this. You may consider that it is precisely the accent which is what i bring new to the subject. But forget my accent, i'm not interested anymore in studying a european subject, although i remain convinced it can in fact be decolonial, though perhaps this is not the best place to discuss this. (parfait) I also love arabic. I am glad that i'm going to study arabic texts from Egypt, and still you tell me that it is not decolonial and that perhaps i should challenge the notion of the language? How? You are my professors. You know best, and i've told you in numerous occassions my specific interests since i came to the course. They were not egyptian. They were the things for which UCL is known in the world best. I told you from the beginning i'm coming here to study relations between architecture and text, in the program that Adrian Forty established. 8 months in the process, i have been told over and over to rethink my projects and reorient myself towards east. My final second term project was exactly about not being heard. I understand teaching is a challenging position. You try to direct students to what you think is best for them, and in the process you might be disagreeing both with the student and with yourself, trying to direct them without pushing them against their will to what you in fact want. It's a fine line, i imagine, that needs one to revisit one's positions every now and then to make sure they are helping the student, or at least not standing in their way. It's difficult, i can imagine, especially when there are many students to all of whom you need to give answers repeatedly in continuous 20 minute cycles and i imagine sometimes you can struggle to find what to say, after all it's humanities. Perhaps silence is what some students might need at times. Remove the stigma from it. It's ok to be silent in response to a student's puzzling question, it's ok not to have a specific position at the very moment. Take some time in developing it. It's OK not to know. But honestly, it's not OK if my language is used against my will and free choice. It's not OK if it's forced. It's not OK if it will be used as a wall. It's not an excuse for not noticing, or not listening. It's not OK if it's used to fill a form and hold up a sign that we're decolonial and encouraging the students to be decolonial when in fact it belongs to a system of words used to fill time that we call critique or feedback, and it's not OK when it is used to hinder the student from mining his own sources of power and studying from whichever spring of knowledge there is, and it's not OK when it is against their will, and it's not OK to prolong as such for many months over many occassions in different projects in a process that is akin to disempowerment rather than the opposite.

The eye, the name and the voice.

Being, On The Line from Taliawi on Vimeo.

In the troubled Spring of 2020, the world was overtook by a pandemic. Everyone, everywhere, is staying put, wherever they are. Our understandings of time, space and society are being redefined.

This 3-Act audio text performance draws on diaries, correspondence, and voice notes that have become essential during this time to record the echo of non-presence.

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