As a month-long French cultural season in Alexandria comes to end, Youssef Rakha asks what it has all been about Click to view caption Since the beginning of May "Le Voyageur, entre Alexandrie-Marseilles: Destins croisés, regards présentes, lieux de mémoire," a French- instigated event, has combined a rich exposition of poetry and photography with a programme of film screenings and seminars revolving around the two Mediterranean cities, the relation between their respective histories and inhabitants and the cultural forces that have contributed to their character. Organised by the independent, Marseilles-based Système Friche Théâtre -- La Friche la Belle de Mai, in collaboration with PACA, Tarek Abul-Fetouh's "Garage", the French Cultural Centre and the Jesuits Cultural Centre -- the latter two organisations provided the venues -- the event embodied, according to the organisers, the desire to explore the contemporary artistic, literary and intellectual registers in which nostalgia for the two cities is communicated, to bring together and establish a dialogue both between the two cities' destinies and among the artists and writers who have an interest in them. +In+an+introductory+note+addressed+to+"fellow+voyagers+in+Marseilles+and+Alexandria",+writer+Alaa+Khalid+(whose+place-oriented+alternative+cultural+magazine,+Amkena,+has+over+the+last+few+years+solicited+positive+commentary+from+both+independent+and+establishment+circles)+writes:+"Before+travelling+to+Marseilles+I+was+filled+with+the+feeling+that+I+knew+this+place+which+lies+on+the+opposite+side+of+the+Alexandria+sea.+Coastal+cities+tend+to+induce+in+their+inhabitants+a+kind+of+human+emptiness+which+only+nostalgia+for+something+far+and+unknown+can+fill...+There+is+a+remarkable+resemblance+between+the+sea+and+the+desert,+in+that+the+aspect+of+each+insinuates+an+infinite+void,+a+vast+space+that+forms+before+you+that+you+alone+inhabit.+At+this+point,"+Khalid+finally+drives+home+his+point,+"you+must+fill+this+void+with+life,+with+hopes+and+fears,+with+desire:+the+main+thing+is+that+you+have+to+undertake+a+form+of+creation,+and+you+have+to+do+so+alone.+If+the+emptiness+of+the+desert+results+in+a+contemplative+human+being,+a+Sufi+who+marvels+at+the+incorporeal,+the+sea+does+the+same+thing....+Inside+water+there+is+a+yearning+for+sympathetic+contact,+driven+by+a+kind+of+human+Sufism+that+perceives+corporeal+existence+too....+a+Sufi+nostalgia+for+others." It may sound cryptic, but the introductory note pinpoints the concepts that inspired the event: individual creativity as a response to the sea, or rather to living in a place by the sea; and the desire to make contact with what lies on the other side of that void, made up, as it were, of a "tender, ever-shuffling and moving element". What it does not reflect is the intimate, flowing simplicity of the rest of "Le Voyageur", the bilingual journal accompanying "Alexandrie-Marseilles", put together by Khalid, designed by Ihab El-Azzazi and featuring photographs by Salwa Rashad. The combination of long, colloquial Arabic interviews with everyday people in a specific geographic-cultural setting, poetically contemplative passages and dry, almost academic theses on location and perspective makes "La Voyageur" read like an abridged issue of Amkena. Yet passages on Alexandria and Marseilles hanker back to the content of "Alexandrie-Marseilles", probing it further. "In Marseilles," writes Khalid, "conditions differ due to differences in place and political history. Perhaps Alexandria and Marseilles have a common root, that Greek civilistion crossed the sea to arrive at both cities, turning into an intellectual or mental common denominator. The importance of this obvious point is that it stresses the presence of a rational, open- minded strain in the unconscious of both cities. "Plurality created the spirit of both cities," Khalid writes on a separate occasion, "the plurality of ethnicities, religions and historical classes. Once again the sea enters into the life of both cities.... " And again: "Two different kinds of memory in Alexandria and Marseilles. In the former, memory still dreams up a narrative, a holistic story. In the latter, memory has shed the warmth of the story [in favour of] a disjointed, migratory sense of being." Other highlights include Khalid's futile search for traditional fishermen in Marseilles: "When I looked for the fishermen in Marseilles I found a few derelict boats, discarded nets that no longer smell of sea, abandoned fishermen's houses; you do not catch a whiff of the smell of that trade anywhere in Marseilles the way you do in Alexandria, in Anfoushi, Al-Me'adeya and Rashid. In Marseilles fishing is no longer undertaken in the spontaneous, transparent way in which it is all across Alexandria's beaches. The poor fisherman Edmond Dantés, the hero of Alexandre Dumas's Le Comte de Monte Cristo, has disappeared... " And there is a stimulating conversation with Basile Behna -- a second-generation Syriac-Iraqi immigrant whose father was an early pioneer of the film industry, working contemporaneously with Egyptian filmmaker Mohamed Bayoumi -- the flavour reflects the spirit of "Alexandrie- Marsailles" as a whole. A multidisciplinary, relatively slow-paced event, "Alexandrie-Marseilles" transcended the cross-cultural encounter scenario, emphasising individual creativity in a pluralistic context. The exposition, for example, offered not photographs, poetic texts and translations as such, but "visual and aural stimuli". And regardless of their professional designation, participants were described as "five artists with different sensibilities, languages and expressions: Nabil Boutros, Salwa Rashad, Alaa Khalid, Jean-Françios Rivière and Claudine Dussollier." Informal encounters among artists and audience members, and with the material in Le Voyageur, the reading of which was said to transform visitors into voyagers, played a significant part in the process of engagement proposed by the event. In combination with such alternative, low- budget initiatives as the multimedia, often weeks-long cultural events organised by Tarek Abul-Fetouh in the garage of the Jesuit Cultural Centre and the publication of Amkena, as well as major national events like the upcoming inauguration of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, "Alexandrie-Marseilles" has contributed to Alexandria's rising status as an Egyptian cultural-literary centre and, in this context, a reborn cosmopolitan metropolis. The programme accompanying the exposition, conceived of as a series of Recontres et Projections du Voyageur, gave voice to better established figures like poet Abdel-Moeti Hegazi and, to a lesser extent, novelist Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid. The former contributed to an evening of poetry readings accompanied by oud performances by the Iraqi musician Nasir Shamma, Le Printemps des Poètes 2002; participants included Gil Jouanard, Ludovic Janvier and Cyrille Martinez. Together with sociologist Claire Duport, director Mehdi Lallaoui and historian Ghislaine Alleaume, Abdel-Meguid, author of Nobody Sleeps in Alexandria, was part of a seminar on the history, memory and imagery of cities. Two ethnomusicologists from the south of France, Gilles Suzanne and Nicolas Puig, presided over a seminar on urban music, followed by a Sayed Darwish recital by two young oud-players from Alexandria, Tarek Abdallah and Hazem Shahine. Another seminar probed the question of how the artist, the citizen and the sociologist-historian each fits into the present and future metropolitan framework? What is the role they play and what are the factors that influence their performance? The screening programme featured two films by Robert Guedigian, Marius et Jeannette and La Ville est Tranquille, Thierry Ragobert's Les Mystères d'Alexandrie (Mysteries of Alexandria), performed solely by real-life archealogoists, photographers and artists and produced by the Centre d'Etudes Alexandrines as well as Alexandrie, Pourquoi? and Alexandrie, Encore et Toujours by Youssef Chahine. Mehdi Lallaoui and Emile Témine's documentary on Marseilles aside, the exposition offered a bilingual video on Alexandria.
