Hala Halim keeps a diary of the opening of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, recording close encounters with flailing arms, convivial policemen and three blind mice Click to view caption The Corniche, as we drove to Montazah, where the press conference with Presidents Hosni Mubarak and Jacques Chirac was to take place, was as deserted as on a drizzly winter evening. I had only the briefest glimpse of the interior of the Montazah Palace as I was guided to the lawn where journalists, crowded behind a cordon, were waiting for the press conference to begin. As negotiations inside the palace continued the journalists whiled away the time in chatter. Standing beside me, two men from the French contingent were exchanging insights into "l'aristocracie ottomane"; on the Egyptian side, male and female journalists were having a heated debate about a statement by the Grand Mufti concerning women. A colleague from Al-Ahram Weekly was gazing up at the "F" of the royal family inscribed on the palace: wouldn't it be wonderful to have one's initial on one's house, she remarked wistfully. Monogrammed towels, I suggested; not even that, she sighed. Later, the press conference over, as we drove in great haste to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, there were a few patches of crowds of Alexandrians in the side- streets perpendicular to the Corniche watching the cars go by. In the plaza of the Bibliotheca, as the international guests were filing in, there was a remarkably festive atmosphere with the folkloric troupes (including a belly-dancer, very discreetly denim-skirted, who executed a little dance every few minutes behind a shawl she held in front of her). Queen Rania waved to the school children and Chirac clapped along to the tunes. The media was to watch the inauguration ceremony on screen, down at the press centre. The three rooms set aside for this purpose were amply equipped with computers and press kits, but in each of the rooms there was one small television screen, making it hard to follow. Some people asked for the volume to be turned up; others, comparing notes on this and that, asked for the volume to be turned down. Amid rumbles of discontent I had to more or less glue myself to the screen. When it was over, and as the official guests of the ceremony were leaving the Bibliotheca, the journalists who wanted to coordinate interviews, snap shots and so on, were momentarily held back behind the cordon. A Frenchman beside me, all flailing arms, was remonstrating with the security personnel: "Chirac -- he is leev-eeng, we must send a peecture, in France zey are wait-eeng for us; wizout a peecture it is no use; in all ze world I have never seen anything like zees." Then, spotting a passing French dignitary, he flagged him down: "Ils ne nous laissent pas diffuser... c'est scandaleux [they're not allowing us to broadcast... it's scandalous]." A man who identified himself as from the French police tried to argue with the security people; we are sorry, he was told; what do you mean, I am from the French police, he reiterated, then performed a little solo mime of fisticuffs, more pour la forme than anything else, I suspected. At this point a man standing to my right behind the cordon, who turned out to be a plainclothes policeman, murmured to a large and obviously highly-placed security man that the foreign photographer to his right had taken photos of the French journalists being held back behind the cordon. The senior security man stated calmly that: "no, I'm not going to confiscate anyone's film." The most enjoyable thing about the entire occasion were the impromptu outbreaks of festivity, and the activities that occurred on the margin of the main programme, where guests with Alexandrian backgrounds made their own expeditions. After the Walid Aouni show at the Ras Al- Tin Palace had received a standing ovation, with the audience gone, there was much cheering among the troupe, with the Nubian group carrying and parading a visibly moved Aouni and giving a performance of their own. But the business of getting home from Ras Al-Tin afterwards was not easy; I found myself held back behind a cordon with some inhabitants of the area (one of whom had stepped out to buy eggs and could not get home) -- and it was only by dint of slipping through narrow streets, with the aid of someone from the neighbourhood, that I managed to get to a main intersection and hail a cab. The following day I called the press attaché of a certain embassy concerning an interview I was hoping she would schedule for me. "I cannot tell you; we are outside the library now; they are not letting us in, not even the ambassador. I am very mad," she said on her mobile phone. The interview did not come through. But the same day I spent a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon at my old school, the English Girls' College (later renamed the El-Nasr Girls' College), where a reception was held in honour of an old girl, Queen Sofia of Spain, in Alexandria for the library opening. Daughter of the King of Greece, Queen Sofia had attended the school's kindergarten in the 1940s. The honorary president of the old girls' association, this was Queen Sofia's second visit to the school in recent years. While waiting for the queen to arrive, a bunch of us left the patio where a man in baggy trousers was pouring hibiscus in traditional fashion, and went exploring old haunts -- classrooms, the swimming pool, the changing rooms with the lockers, the gymnasium. Reassured that little had changed, exchanges of anecdotes followed, about swimming competitions, about the two-piastre penalty extracted by prefects if you spoke Arabic. When the queen arrived she was taken to her old classroom, after which we all sat around in the theatre. Here the headgirl and two other students proceeded to interview the queen for the school magazine. Which part of the school did the queen remember most vividly? The classroom she had just visited, the swimming pool, the dining hall, the theatre -- the latter, in particular, she remembered from a performance of Three Blind Mice. And her favourite subject? "Playing," replied the queen without a moment's hesitation. When the laughter had died down, some of Queen Sofia's classmates exchanged reminiscences with her. Then soprano Nevine Allouba sang three songs to the accompaniment of the piano, including "Those were the days..." and the Egyptian song "Zourouni kul-sana marra..." (Come visit me at least once a year), with everyone clapping and singing along with the refrains. I slipped out before the end of tea and the cutting of the cake with the school logo on it, which was followed by the group singing "Pioneers", the school song. Before leaving, I was told, the queen had asked to be taken to the playroom which she had not seen at the beginning of her visit. From school I walked to Abdel-Moneim Riyad Square to watch the festivities for the inauguration of the statue of Alexander the Great. The event was central to the programme of the over 500 Greeks originally from Egypt but now living in Greece, who, with no access to the Bibliotheca celebrations, had come to Alexandria simply to be there at the time of the inauguration. Arriving by steamer, on which they also stayed while in Alexandria, they had their own simultaneous fringe activities during the gala: on the night of the 16th they had huge screens set up in Antoniadis Gardens to watch the official ceremony live, while a Greek folkloric troupe performed dances. It was these dancers that I saw in action in front of the statue; they were, in fact, Macedonian, in tribute to the Macedonian. The women wore unusual headgear, bowler hat- like and studded with flowers. It was interesting that in a conversation with two of the male dancers, Athanasias Zlatoudis and Thomas Milonas, later, it was particularly the women's headgear and its significance that they wanted to comment on. The headgear was a modified version of the helmet, and there were three alternative traditions about the helmet. One legend has it that in a certain battle, "the men did not show their valour, so the ladies fought in their place and thus were accorded helmets," Zlatoudis explained. Another story has it that the women of that specific region (central Macedonia) had to take care of all matters while the men were in battle, and on return their menfolk gave them the helmets in appreciation. The third version was an Alexander the Great one: when men were insufficiently numerous for a certain battle, the women came to their aid, and so Alexander offered the ladies the headgear that only men were allowed to wear. There was so much more to be said, the two dancers continued -- about the women's belts, about the men's costumes, about the swords -- but oh, it would take hours to explain it all. And of the occasion itself? "The only way to understand how we were feeling when we were dancing in front of the statue was to be dancing with us." As I stood watching the sword dance, a tall, green-eyed man beside me, who, judging by his heavily-accented Arabic was Greek of Alexandrian background but long since living abroad, turned amiably to a policeman beside him. It's just like an Alexandrian wedding, he offered, to which the plump policeman convivially assented, "exactly". So there it was; after all the official rhetoric about dialogue of civilisations and intercultural exchange, there was a cosmopolitan moment, spontaneous, and involving a Greek émigré and an Egyptian policeman, of all things, merrily finding affinities at a most visceral, folkloric level. And, given the emergency laws under which we've been living for years, it was a joy to see people dancing in public spaces. Granted, I got past the cordon thanks to my press pass, and the celebration was causing a detour in traffic. But given that much of our driving is a matter of detouring -- around accidents, holes, road works -- it was not such a bad thing to be detouring, for once, around people dancing in the street. Although the official Bibliotheca Alexandrina inauguration ceremony was not Hellenised -- which, come to think of it, it could easily have been -- the one main, decidedly Greek component it comprised, perfectly aptly, was a concert of some 13 poems by Alexandrian-Greek Constantine P Cavafy (1863-1933). These were alternatively read out in English and sung in Greek to music composed by Dimitri Papadimitriou, the English readings being by Alexis Costalas, a famous Greek media personality. The repertoire of poems was a roller-coaster of surprises. We began with "Sham El-Nessim", an early, rarely quoted poem that happens to be one of the few in the Cavafy corpus with an Egyptian subject matter and set in the modern period -- complete with references to Mex and Mahmoudieh. A facile solicitation of an Egyptian audience's sympathy, I thought at first, uncharitably, while admitting that the oriental melody to which it was set worked rather well. Another startling aspect -- not startling in terms of the Cavafy corpus, but in terms of the occasion -- was the large proportion of erotic poems; after all the talk of cultural dialogue here was alterity startlingly pared down to the erotic, to the lover and the beloved. And more: the erotic poems were not confined to the homoerotic, but comprised one of the few, early heterosexual ones, this dramatised in the Greek rendition. By the time a recently discovered, humorous poem by Cavafy was read, I had started to cotton onto the panache and originality of the decisions made. Only three of the poems were ones I would have expected -- "The City", "The God Abandons Antony" and "For Ammonis, who died at 29 in 610". (The latter, about young men commissioning an epitaph for a poet who was a friend of theirs, more or less on the eve of the Arab conquest, may well have been selected for the ultimate line: "Our sorrow and love pass into a foreign tongue./ Pour your Egyptian feeling into a foreign tongue./ Raphael, your verses should be written so [...] that the rhythm and each phrase will show/ that an Alexandrian is writing of an Alexandrian.") The fascinating concert, with candles at the back of the stage, ended with "The God Abandons Antony" -- a poem where the god in question is personified Alexandria, and where there is defeat, and a stoical pride in the face thereof. It was an astonishing finale for a concert taking place on such a celebratory, revivalist occasion; but I did have a hunch that what all this was about was a laudatory maintaining of the fin-de-siècle spirit of Cavafy against the grain of the event. In conversation with the composer, who had also selected the poems, I found out that Papadimitriou is an Alexandrian Greek (who was a pupil at College Saint Marc, and left Egypt at the age of seven), and hence was commissioned by the Greek Ministry of Culture to compose something relevant to the Bibliotheca opening. This was not the first time that Papadimitriou had given a Cavafy concert: "this performance came out of a larger work -- I have composed 18 poems that I use as a pool that I take from every time, and according to the singers I have I create a different performance." One difference between his Cavafy concerts in Athens and the one in Alexandria is that in Greece the poems read need not be the same ones sung, "but this time I had them read for the poet's sake, because he may not be that well-known here." To my concealed embarrassment he affirmed that he always starts with "Sham El-Nessim", even in Athens: "Because it shows the Athenians the Greeks of Egypt... [Greek poet George] Seferis, when he came to Egypt and saw a land with no mountains, said 'I begin to understand the poetry of Cavafy,' which has no obstacles, has a sky that is transparent; his ideas are very clear." Papadimitriou elaborated by citing a poem he himself wrote in early youth, about how eyes that have seen the desert see differently from those that haven't. And on the choice of "The God Abandons Antony" for the finale: "this is Cavafy's flag for the Greek-Alexandrians," a poem he does not usually include in Athens concerts. And of the resignation to loss in the poem? This is autobiographical, he explained. "I knew that I would be returning [to Alexandria] after leaving at the age of seven, and that it influenced me in a very hidden and timid way, and I know that one should go ahead, and be proud of the past." The day after I went to my downtown dry- cleaner's, and found 'Amm Said Abu Taleb, who generally does not lift his tired eyes from the intricate work of mending moth holes in garments, wreathed in timid smiles. A week before the opening of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina he and his younger colleagues had been called on to restore and clean a very valuable covering of the Kaaba, embroidered with golden threads, that had been given by King Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud to the Egyptian financier Talaat Harb. Part of the Manuscripts Museum of the Bibliotheca, the covering, I was told, is in two parts, each seven metres long, and was in bad condition owing to the fact that it had been in the tomb of Talaat Harb for several decades. Very proud of his work, and of having made some contribution to the Bibliotheca, 'Amm Said remarked: "it took us four days of intensive work, but the media, as you know, exaggerate: they turned it into a much bigger thing with 'phase 1 and phase 2'!" On Sunday, the first day that the library, as distinct from related facilities, was officially opened to the public there was an amazing influx of university students from the Chatby campus of Alexandria University, just across the street. And I stood in an interminable queue to leave my bag, I thought that now is the time for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to begin its real work, to facilitate the business of reading and research. Related stories: The responsibility of creativity Long road to success
