Amina Elbendary forwards a stimulating reading of Sherif Sonbol's poignant photo story on Shubra Al-Khayma, the north Cairo suburb whence the perpetrators of Cairo's most recent string of bombings hail To live in Cairo is to buoy between contradictions daily. You do it for so long that you forget you're doing it; the daily summersault becomes second nature, your default walk becomes an undulation. There are pits to skip over and protrusions to avoid all the time: careful, don't plant your feet in the mud or bang your head on a protruding balcony. The world you step into can easily be miles apart from the one step out on to. You take it in stride. You keep going. And then something happens and you stop and look, the look becomes a gaze, the gaze a stare. Photos do that to us. They capture common afternoon moments on an early summer day. They freeze the normal and when you stare at it long enough it ceases to be normal. The photos Al-Ahram Weekly's photographer took of Shubra Al-Khayma might seem quite common at first glance. One pores over them trying to detect something different, a clue, perhaps, to why this particular street in Shubra Al- Khayma was home to the Yassins. You look for a reason, an explanation. Something must be different here. You try to locate the genesis of their anger and despair. If there is a breeding ground for Terrorism its address must be 15 Road One (otherwise known as Shari' Al-Magari, Sewage Street), Ezzbet Al-Gabalwi, Ard Al-Doktor. Nothing is different here than elsewhere, and yet it is not normal. Children play football on the streets, and people hang their laundry out of the windows to drip on passersby. Even on Sewage Street, children play football and laundry is hung, vegetables are peeled, poultry is sold live with feathers and all, and newspapers are read. But you look more and you realize this can't be anywhere, this must be Cairo. You see the character traits of the old city here in the spontaneous suburb to the north. There is that old respect for the street alignment even here where streets have common-sensical names, conceived not to glorify any notion or individual, but basically to let one know one's way around. Even when people built their shanty houses spontaneously they respected some sort of street pattern; you can see to the end of the street. But these streets are too narrow, they remind you of the historical city. A microbus can barely pass through, the street can only take two cars side by side. It is reminiscent of travelers' complaints of some streets in Cairo which could barely accommodate one camel laden with goods; it would take ages for a caravan to ride through. Few houses here are painted, the majority have bare brick walls facing the streets. But they are homes to families sheltering them from the outside world -- sometimes. From the top of the street the buildings look almost identical. The transportation system is for the most part informal. That's how the microbus became the symbol of an era. The microbus is to the Egyptian suburb what the SUV is to its American counterpart. The microbus has bred a whole network of routes and tariffs, as well as its own etiquette and rules of conduct; it's taken a life of its own. All amenities it would seem were spontaneously made available by the ingenuity of the inhabitants. Make-shift metal awnings protrude from some buildings, sheltering the ground floor shops beneath from the sun, echoes of the fabrics covering the bazaars of medieval towns. Look at all those wires running up and down the walls, entwined like over-cooked spaghetti on an unappetizing plate. These are the electricity and telecommunication networks gone haywire. Yet there is method in the madness, order in the chaos. Shubra Al-Khayma often invokes images of sprawling shanty houses, pseudo-village dwellings set on muddy streets. Yet Shubra Al- Khayma has known proper urbanization too and building projects. They often loom large, in stark contrast to what lies beneath. The exaggerated size of a newly constructed mosque right above a dumping ground periodically screened by residents, only serves to accentuate the paradoxes and contradictions of Shubra Al-Khayma and by extension Cairo and the nation. Seen from below with its omnipotent dome it is reminiscent of the great Citadel up on the mountain, yet somehow deprived of glory. Shubra and its environs, are famous for their mutli-sectarianism. This basically means that the population of the neighborhood includes a large number of Copts living aside Muslims. The fact that this is reiterated ad nauseum whenever anyone says "Shubra" hints at the tension beneath. It's not as if people cease to remember that they are Muslim or Copt, they never do, they are consciously aware of that. You see it in signs here and there. A photo might celebrate the co- existence of Markaz Israa Al-Tibi across the street from Maktabat Al-'Ahd Al-Gadid. But the fact that they had to name them Israa and Ahd Gadid, to invoke Muhammad's nocturnal journey to Jerusalem and Christ's New Testament, in itself suggests the discomfort lurking beneath the co-existence and the need to emphasize and uphold a religious identity. When all else fails, is this what one holds on to? The parochial identities of kin, sect, and neighborhood? And then you look again at the photos, perhaps over a cup of tea, and you see the homely signs. Despite the poverty there are three pots standing by the entrance of a building. If you are thirsty, stop for a drink of water, the age-old sabil. There is room on the corner of another house for a pot of plants to hang protruding from the façade. In fact those plants seem to pop out of the most unexpected corners, dotting the photos here and there. There are the little pleasures too: the cotton candy for the children, the colored Ramadan lantern hanging between two buildings. Before a shop open to the street, two people sit poring over a newspaper. Life goes on, even in Shubra Al-Khayma.
