The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution by Peter Hessler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Fascinating, Funny, and Moving Account of Egypt Based on his roughly five years living in Cairo with his wife and little twin girls from early in the Arab Spring revolution to well after Abdel Fattah el-Sisi imposed his martial police state dictatorial rule on the country, Peter Hessler’s book The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution (2019) fascinatingly depicts such changes in the context of the cultures of ancient and modern Egypt. We learn, for example, that the disproportionate number of young Egyptians (50% younger than 25) being dominated by male elders was not so different in the time of Pharaoh Akhenaten; that contemporary Egyptians as well as ancient ones favored strongman rulers; that ancient Egyptian rulers as well as contemporary ones embarked on “grandiose and misguided desert projects”; and so on. In his book Hessler makes many interesting insights into contemporary Egypt, about things like the following: --the complex nature of Egyptian culture (sarcastic, fatalistic, practical, local, paternal, superstitious); --the lack of governmentally organized systems for things like trash collection (the history of Cairo trash collection from the 20th century through Arab Spring is rich); the laws relating to divorce (if the wife initiates the proceedings she forfeits her right to alimony); --the inequality between genders (which Hessler sees as the biggest problem in Egyptian culture, as, for instance, married women rarely work outside the home); --the evil eye (never directly compliment someone on, say, their beautiful children, but instead use opposites like “your twins are beastly” or preface or conclude compliments with “This is what God has willed [masha’allah]” to avoid inadvertently cursing someone); --superstition (how Egyptians explain people with psychological problems as being possessed by afrits or djin); --the differences between and uses of classical “al fusha” (the eloquent) Arabic which is mostly written vs. demotic “ammiyya” (common) Egyptian Arabic which is mostly spoken; --education (why more than 25% of Egyptians are illiterate and how children’s textbooks are biased with, for instance Israel not appearing on maps and debacles like the last war against Israel described as victories); --drug abuse (opioid pain killer abuse is rampant in Cairo, not unlike in the USA); --the Cairene slum (such neighborhoods differ greatly from typical American slums, being vibrant, unplanned, improvised, centrally located, and strangely well-functioning places in which live 2/3 or 11 million of Greater Cairo’s denizens) --the niche filled by Chinese lingerie businesses (scattered up and down the Nile river towns and cities selling g strings and nightgowns to Egyptian women while speaking what Hessler calls the Lingerie Dialect of Egyptian Arabic, which uses exclusively female forms and calls every woman “bride” and cheaters “Ali Baba”). The two most interesting and sympathetic figures in the book are Hessler’s gay interpreter Manu and his garbage man Sayyid. Manu lives a dangerous life in a society that frowns on homosexuality (there is no neutral term for being gay in Arabic, the police are given to arresting gay men and subjecting them to anal exams, and Manu’s lovers often robbed or beat him after sex because of their guilt). Sayyid (the scene stealer of the book) is a down-to-earth, illiterate, street-smart, hard-working guy living in the Cairene equivalent of a slum with his formidable and beautiful wife Wahiba and their kids. Sayyid knows everything about everyone who lives in Hessler’s upper-middle class neighborhood on an island in the Nile in Cairo, learning about them through their trash and his own connections, and he gets to know Hessler and his family quite well, even taking the author along with him on his garbage rounds and eating meals with him and so on. Sayyid seems more concerned with his epic marital troubles than with what happens in the Arab Spring and subsequent coup. Hessler is a vivid, observant, and witty writer when describing people, places, moods, and events, as with empty shipping containers looking in the distance “like stacks of Legos melting in the sun.” His accounts of crawling through a long narrow debris-filled tunnel in a Middle Kingdom pharaoh’s tomb, of participating in a scary demonstration in Cairo, of accompanying Sayyid on a visit to a sexist and cynical divorce lawyer, of seeing Nefertiti’s uncanny bust in Berlin, of driving through a desert of mirages, and so on, are all prime. Perhaps he gets a bit too narratively clever at times when shifting between historical and modern times in mid-chapter, as when late in the book he moves back and forth between an account of his interpreter Manu trying to settle into life in Germany as an asylum seeking refugee and the story of the Jewish family who had his (Hessler’s) apartment building built in Cairo early in the 20th century, because I’d have liked to have had one or the other account completed without jumping back and forth so much. It seemed to be a kind of narrative trick unnecessary for an already absorbing non-fictional work. Hessler is a capable reader of the audiobook, pausing and emphasizing just right. Perhaps a more dramatic professional reader might have made his book even more compelling that it already is with his own reading, but I like to hear the author reading his/her own book whenever possible. Hessler also interweaves into his book his descriptions and perceptions of Ancient Egyptian archeological sites like the Buried of the title (an ancient necropolis in Abydos) and of modern and contemporary Egyptologists so as to illuminate them as well as to suggest parallels between ancient and modern Egypt and its people. Thus, his funny, thought-provoking, moving, and illuminating book should be rewarding for anyone interested in Egypt, whether ancient or modern. View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University