First published, 30th December 2013
For over ten years Cairo has succeeded in drawing me back. These days I visit from Riyadh in the hope that I might reaffirm that I haven’t died and taken a squat in some weird supernatural pre-sin assessment waiting room. Not yet.
I’m going to start by asserting that Cairo is just like all great cities: it has always rebuilt itself into disorderly piles of corrupt rubble after every failed cartesian attempt to level it for something better. The word ‘chaos’ comes from the Arabic for Cairo—or was it the other way round? Anyway, it’s the city of all cities. City victorious. Al Qahira.
There is a decaying truth that whatever we do, however hard we pretend to rebuild ‘Jerusalem’, we are destined, hard-wired, to recreate the destruction. The crumbling urbanised world is where increasing numbers of us live. We prefer the habitat of a rubbish heap. The metropolis. The map of a city is the map of man. Our species loves to live in squalor. Beautiful treelined boulevards, grand piazzas, fine façades and noble buildings. No. No, no no. Give us a pile a rubble. That’s all we want. In fact, if you force us to live in clean avenues and orderly villas, we shall destroy them.
Well, of course, you’re going to want to correct me by saying this is simply not true. The ugliness of cities has all and everything to do with poverty. A map of a city is a map of class. People who live in favelas don’t deliberately make them ugly. If they could afford Italian marble for their porticos and staircases, shanty towns would be as magnificent as the grandest of wealthy districts. Really?
But the chaos of cities is not caused by a lack of wealth so much as a lack of common purpose. Great cities are incoherent, discordant, cacophonous. They capture the fact that to be human is to be dependent on others in a profoundly independent way. Cairo is a wonderfully human city and Cairenes are freer than they realise, if to be free is to be directionless and anarchic.
To capture my meaning, think about the antithesis of a city like Cairo. Paris – at least the central part within the Périférique – or perhaps Albert Speers’ Nazi Berlin, Germania. Brasília is probably the best example of realised ‘Utopian’ city. In the 1980s documentary series The Shock of the New written and presented by Robert Hughes, Hughes states:
“Nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future. This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent, and talented men start thinking in terms of space rather than place; and single rather than multiple meanings. It’s what you get when you design for political aspirations rather than real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens.”
— Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, Episode 4: Trouble in Utopia, (1980)
Could it be that Cairo is one of the least fascist cities in the world? Could it be that architects are, like Philip Johnson, closet fascists? Maybe I mean that architects, rather like Nazis, feel that the best way to resolve humanity’s eternal bane, dependent-independence, is to subject the will of the many to the will of the one – that being themselves, of course. Fascism is just politicised egomania, after all.
But it doesn’t necessarily take the ego of a singular supremo like Speer or Johnson to curb the rampant individualisation of place. Next time you walk around a wealthy middle class suburban district of a city, breathe in the oppression of souls and reflect, like Simone de Beauvoir – after a tour of Brasília’s superquadras – on “the … air of elegant monotony.” I did that a couple of years ago during a brief stay in Beverley Hills. Wandering up and down Rodeo and Cañon Drives, Sunset Boulevard, I’d have described the ‘monotony’ more as sterility, ‘elegant’ was more suffocating. But there you go. I still think we were on the same track or in the same cul-de-sac at least.
On the last day of my visit to Cairo, I bought Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis and read it on the flight back to Riyadh. It’s another novel that revels in the squalor and corruption of the urban nightmare – this time 1970s Bombay. It’s literary field journalism and, as with a lot of the contemporary literary love affair with all things inner-city-decay, it’s a little self-conscious, innit. Reminds me of the way Etonians used to fake a Norff Landon accent to make themselves less conspicuously rather monstrous, a little more real, perhaps. But it brings me back to my point. We are more Yahoo than Houyhnhnmn. Or rather, our inner point of reference is the buried wildness of a lost, pre-urban existence. Beneath the map of man lies a forgotten landscape. When I used to walk up the Champs Elysées towards its crowning triumphant arch, I would forget I was actually walking up a hill. Just a hill with a view over a valley and a river.
In my own self-conscious attempt to capture an aspect of a city, Cairo, I wrote:
“Dawn rose over the city like a heartache. The grey light had trawled the restless dust across the deserts and wadis from the east, and now rose a vast shadow over the Moqattam hills, spreading its mantle out beyond Heliopolis and the airport and far out to the south and the smoke stacks of Helwan. Cairo sprawled to the west beneath Salah al-Din’s citadel and the great mosque of Mohammad Ali like the smouldering ruin of a corrupt lung, a vast tumour choking an ancient river of forgotten gods. An imperial city of other empires. A city of the dead that had been dying since the Cleopatras, as if cursed for the hubris of incestuous pharaohs and condemned, like all fallen powers, to an ageless decay. All futures in the past.
The sun rose still and stubborn over this map of corruption, a cityscape portrait of the victims of greed and a legacy of the old men with their fine villas in Sharm El Sheikh and their yachts on the glistening clean waves of the Red Sea Riviera. Old men who commissioned the removal of this person or that in the far-off city and whose night works were even now being dumped in bin liners or hosed down before the new day had opened her eyes. The eyes of newborn widows.”
— from Where Are the Songs of Spring?
The fact is we do destroy in our ceaseless quest to create and to build, and the city will always be a monstrous place because it’s where there are more people collected together than there ever were meant to be. In Where Are the Songs of Spring? I wrote of Cairo as a city destroyed by corrupt politicians. I think, after my last recent visit, I had misread the map.