How do we survive the beast that is Cairo? By being ourselves, it would seem. Fatemah Farag ponders the subversive relationship between Cairenes and their city as she leafs through Maria Golia's Cairo: City of Sand We take it all on with every passing day -- chaotic traffic, off-the-scale air pollution levels, extremely high population density and deafening noise, not to mention a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, lack of freedom and an uncertain future. Yet, we go about our business, love the city in our own ways and rarely, if at all, stop to wonder at the sheer immensity of the adversities we are obliged to cope with and manoeuvre through merely in order to go on with our day-to-day lives. According to the media, it's all become too much. These days, the papers are chock-full of the warnings of urban planners that the city's problems are spiralling out of control; calling for immediate and drastic action. Reports detailing an impossible traffic situation are front-page news, and the human and financial toll of a disastrous environmental situation is being recounted with increasing urgency. One recently announced government solution has broached the limits of the absurd: a project is under study to landfill sections of the River Nile as it passes through Cairo, with a view to widening the city's traffic arteries. Yet, with all the media huff, one would be hard pressed to find civic-spirited Cairenes conducting the kind of protest action that, say, Londoners have been engaged in recently as they seek to limit the use of big cars, especially 4x4s, on their city streets. One stark example of this apparent apathy has been this year's episode of "the black cloud" a couple of months ago. While the government repeatedly announced that everything was under control, stifling black smog settled on the city as its inhabitants choked, suffered respiratory illnesses and, ultimately, accepted official complacency. This is not for lack of awareness. "People prefer to avoid the attentions of a government they equate with setbacks rather than help. They find ways of working around the authorities, of making do and approximating the forms and functions of their households and their lives," observes Maria Golia in her new book Cairo: City of Sand published by Reaktin Books and recently re-released by AUC Press. What is truly astounding is the extent to which we take this capacity for coping for granted. Indeed, it was not until I was half way through Golia's book that the enormity of the challenges faced by the ordinary Cairene -- and the amazing qualities of humanity that make them able to go on with their lives -- struck me, a Cairene, full force. "Theirs [Cairenes] is a 1,400-year-old city of one-thousand-and-one contingencies, improvisations, renewals and debacles. Cairo is a millennial model of entropy and it looks it, a dilapidated brown conflation of cubes, domes and spires, glorious in the incongruity of its daily survival," writes Golia. The 213-page book details in remarkable density, the myriad of circumstances that make up daily life in the city. In extensively researched paragraph after paragraph, Golia draws a vibrant picture of life in a metropolis growing to the point that it is bulging at seams and spilling over into the desert on all sides. But throughout Golia -- who is a long-term resident of Cairo -- has the insight and sensitivity to press home the "high side of Cairene attitudes towards the city, themselves and others," noting "sanguinity and humour, sense of place, inter- connectedness and continuity," as these are attributes she acknowledges are all too often "discounted or trivialised or simply unseen". And hence, while Golia is aware that both the lack of democracy and economic hardship may, in some cases, drive people to violent behaviour, substance abuse and other forms of retaliation, Golia nevertheless observes, "[Cairo] remains one of the world's safest cities is due to the nature of its people, not its police." In another passage she writes, "the heat is on in Cairo, where economic and population pressures are so great that each day that passes without havoc and rebellion is a sign of either sublime fortitude or exhaustion, and probably both." So how do Cairenes cope? Golia cites jokes -- such as the one about the Upper Egyptian who went to the dentist suffering a severe tooth ache and asked him to remove all the other teeth leaving the offending molar to suffer alone. For her, this is an illustration of people's want of company; a means by which they deal with population density. Also, she cites behavioural traits such as the customary answer of ana (me), if you should ring someone's doorbell and they ask who's at the door, which for her illustrates the familiarity and receptivity of Cairene nature. With these and manifold other illustrations, -- such, for instance, as verses from popular poet Ahmed Fouad Negm's lyrics -- Golia weaves a complex tapestry of anecdotes, insights and observations to explain the spirit of the Cairene. Belief in magic, a well placed mistrust of foreign intervention, yet the curiosity and friendliness Cairenes manifest regarding "the other" -- all come together to explain the mood of the city and it's inhabitants; a city, she describes, as "radiant with life". In his documentary Cairo is enlightened by its people film director Youssef Chahine begins by asking a class of students how they would depict the city. The images are many: the Pyramids, the Nile, tourists and garbage dumps. The city Chahine goes on to describe -- his city -- is that of the people caught in the middle of it all. And when you think of it -- glorious past, problematic present and unknown future -- there is but one constant: the fact that this is a city that will always truly be enlightened by its people -- for better or for worse.
