Two years ago, the man everyone calls khal, or uncle, sent me on a mission. Abdel-Rahman Al-Abnoudi, the famous Egyptian poet who passed away in April this year, wanted me to go to his hometown of Abnoud in Upper Egypt. There, I would photograph scenes from his childhood to go with a collection of poems he intended to publish. The project was never completed, but the trip is worth putting on record. At the time, the railway service was irregular due to the frequent blocking of the tracks, so I had to take the plane to Luxor, the nearest airport. From there I travelled by land to Abnoud with my friend Mugib Rushdi. Mohamed Khalil, a young poet whose father was a cousin of Al-Abnoudi, welcomed us. Khalil put us up in a guesthouse connected with the Museum of the Sirah Hilaliyah, the epic story of rivalry among North African tribes in the 12th century CE. Ten days ago, this museum changed its name and is now called the Abdel-Rahman Al-Abnoudi Museum, in honour of Egypt's beloved vernacular poet. The next morning, Khalil took me to visit the local Cultural Palace, where I talked to several women employees who owed their jobs to Al-Abnoudi as he had personally lobbied the government to build a library in his hometown. The director of the establishment, a woman from Abnoud, told me that she had studied philosophy in college. Following the khal's instructions, I went to the market in Abnoud that was held every Sunday. In large gatherings like this, anyone showing up with a camera and a bag of lenses is likely to attract attention. I could of course have taken pictures with my mobile phone, which has a 24-pixel lens, and no one would have looked at me twice. But for this type of assignment, I had to use very noticeable gear. People started noticing me. Most of them smiled and just walked past. The women were more curious; some were displeased at seeing the camera, some were shy, and some didn't know what to think. Then, a local vigilante emerged. Appearing from the middle of the crowd, the man walked up to me and asked me who I was. Returning the question, I asked him who he was. We started talking about the right of outsiders, such as me, to take pictures of public areas in his village. “I am here on the orders of the khal,” I told the man, imagining I would be pulling rank. “Which khal? There are 50 khals here in the market,” he shot back. “Al-Abnoudi,” I said, driving the point home. “Which Al-Abnoudi? We are all Al-Abnoudis here,” he said, a sarcastic smile forming on his face. The conversation was going nowhere, and fortunately Khalil, who was standing nearby, came to my rescue. He explained that everyone in the area, including himself and the local vigilante, were Al-Abnoudis, this being the hometown of Abnoud. Now I understood, and I must have looked quite sheepish about it because the vigilante, apparently taking pity on me, mellowed and even accompanied me on my rounds, making sure I didn't get molested any further. My next stop, according to the directions of the khal (the one who sent me, not the dozens who were now all around me) was to go to the district where he had been born, called Nag' Al-Trusah, and take photographs there. The house I had been sent to photograph was in an advanced state of decay. No one lived in it any more. Nearby, there was an oven, a sheep, an old man and two younger men. The old man introduced himself as Brahim (dropping the “a” from the name) Hussein Moussa Mohamed Mes'id Abu Ters, a cousin of Abdel-Rahman Al-Abnoudi. One of the other two men then introduced himself as Gaber Ali Zayed from Nag' Al-Trusah, a cousin of Abdel-Rahman Al-Abnoudi. When I asked him if everybody was a cousin, the man seemed baffled. “Of course, we are all cousins here,” he said. He then explained that the village was the true home of the famous poet, that he was the son not of Abnoud, a much bigger town, but of the much smaller community of Nag' Al-Trusah. My next assignment was to photograph the wabur. This word used to be applied to any machine that operated by steam or was thought to do so. Decades ago, a train was called wabur and so was a steamship. In this case, the wabur was the town's old mill, where the poet's grandfather used to work. I was led to an ancient structure housing a massive, cobweb-covered, rusty machine. One of the owners of the wabur, a young man who looked well educated and relatively affluent, opened the door for me and gave me permission to photograph it. Why was his family keeping this piece of rusting machinery that seemed idle and useless, I asked. “Just because,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. His little daughter had come with him, wearing her prettiest dress, and she posed for photographs near the wabur. Then it was time to visit the cattle market, where people not only sold cattle but also went to hang out, sell other things and just spend the day. The market was filled with farmers and cattle owners and people who sold the ropes and gadgets the cattle breeders use. Many of them were sitting in the tent-turned-coffeehouse where people chatted and made deals. Not far away, someone was selling foul (fava beans) and falafel as a quick lunch for visitors to the one-day event. Then another group of local vigilantes appeared, this time mostly government employees. They showed up the moment I was trying to locate a high point from which to take a general view of the market. Quite firmly, they asked me to leave. I had been drinking tea with the locals for almost three hours, had talked to half of the people in the market already, but the vigilantes were adamant. There was no point in arguing, so I gathered up my things. Then I saw a cattle truck driving by, hopped on its back and managed to take a wide shot of the market anyway to wrap up the day. When I visited the khal in Ismailia afterwards, he told me why the vigilantes had been so concerned at my presence. An armed robbery had taken place in that same market only a week earlier, he said. The day I met the khal in Ismailia was 23 July 2013, the anniversary of the 1952 Revolution. While I was sitting with him, he received a call from Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, the eminent journalist and once close associate of the late president Gamal Abdel-Nasser. “I couldn't find anyone to congratulate on Revolution Day but you,” Heikal said. To continue the story about my visit to Abnoud, one of my assignments was to photograph the weaving looms. The loom I was advised to photograph was in a house located about 100 metres north of the museum and 20 metres south of the wabur. A woman opened the door of the house and invited me to come in. The house was totally dark inside, although it was the middle of the day. I waited for a moment for my eyes to get used to the darkness and I was able to make out the shape of a man sitting at the edge of a hole in the ground, a massive loom towering over him. The man was old and mellow in manner. He had none of the vigilante suspicions that had plagued my trip so far and seemed a very nice fellow. He told me his name was Said Zikri and that he was making a table cloth. The hole was where the treadles for the loom were located. He used his feet to pump to treadles and make the loom work. He also told me that the man next to him was called Muharib. I hadn't even noticed that there was anyone else in the room, it being so dark. Muharib smiled at me and went to work, turning a spool on the loom. The whole scene reminded me of something out of a child's story or a scene from Cinderella. I asked Zikri if there were any looms more modern than his. No, not really, he said. There were only three looms. This one, and the one his cousin had, and another one somewhere he could not remember. Sadly, Zikri died a few weeks after this encounter. Khalil told me a few things about Al-Abnoudi, his cousin. He told me that the great poet was a simple man who liked simple people, and that he was a kind man who never acted like a big shot. When he came home to visit, he would hang out on his usual street corner and just chat with everyone who came by, trying to catch up on the village gossip. The khal had instructed me to go to visit a man called Ishaq in the town of Gagarus. I asked Ishaq, who was in his early 50s, the reason the khal had sent me to him. It turned out that Ishaq's father, the painter Youssef Fahmi, had been a close friend of his. When Fahmi died, the family found a closed box among his belongings with the name, telephone number and address of Abdel-Rahman Al-Abnoudi in Mohandiseen in Cairo. Ishaq took the box to Al-Abnoudi in Cairo himself and was very impressed when the poet served him tea himself and sat down to chat. “He hadn't known that my father had passed away,” he said. To this day, no one knows what was in the box . Maybe not much, maybe just some of Al-Abnoudi's belongings. But the incident started a friendship between Ishaq and Al-Abnoudi, and when Ishaq got into trouble with the law over trumped-up charges a few years later, Al-Abnoudi sent him a team of five attorneys who helped him bring the ordeal to a happy conclusion. All the charges were dropped, and Ishaq is still grateful for this extraordinary gesture. The last stop for me in Abnoud was the tomb of the poet Amal Donqol (1940-1983). For years, it has been the habit of the khal, whenever he came to his hometown, to visit the resting place of his best friend. He often told the story of how Donqol had passed away in his arms. Tears would well up in his eyes as he remembered his fellow poet, with whom he had travelled often in his youth. Donqol's headstone reads: “Death is our shared fate. This is the tomb of Amal Donqol. Died Saturday 21 May 1983.” Before his death, on 21 April 2015, the khal wrote this poem for his two daughters: To my two daughters, Aya and Nur, So that they may know they have a village Without match, In which people filled my heart with words That made me into something, When times have changed, When you grow up and go to Abnoud, You may not find a trace of what I told you. Those I knew will have departed, just like I have, The houses, the streets, and the values will have changed.
