Marginalia: Cairo to Edinburgh and back again Mona Anis spends an exhilarating week at this year's International Festival in Edinburgh, recently named first UNESCO City of Literature Someone might call it ether, but for you the light at the end of the tunnel is never quite air, and breath is a shape that sails out over the rooftops, into the lights off the quay and the tethered yawls. -- John Burnside There is something about Edinburgh that always makes me think of Cairo. I have felt this ever since I visited the city for the first time in 1974, though I have never been able to work out whether the affinity I feel exists between the two cities goes beyond the obvious: that the architectural layout of the Castle towering over the city of Edinburgh and the Royal Mile leading to it reminds one of the Saladin Citadel above the city of Cairo and Muhammad Ali Street leading from the Islamic city. However, when young one tends to take many things for granted, cities included, and back in the 1970s when I used to visit Edinburgh every year in August, Edinburgh primarily meant the Edinburgh International Festival of the Arts, and especially the Fringe Festival. For a week or ten days, depending on how much I had kept aside for Festival treats, I would immerse myself in watching all sorts of theatrical experiments, ranging from musical spectaculars to politically committed theatre to pure fantasy -- performed throughout the day with breakfast- to late-night-shows. With an average of six plays to watch every day, and many talks, recitals and other performances to catch between shows, I had little time for the Castle or for the history of Edinburgh itself. It was not until the late 1990s when I found myself back in Edinburgh with less stamina for experimental theatre and more time in hand that I thought it was time to join a guided tour of the Castle and its environs and to see whether there was more to my feeling about the affinities between Cairo and Edinburgh than memories of a young woman's homesickness for her native city. I was excited by the discovery that less than a century separated the laying of the foundation stone of the oldest building in Edinburgh (St. Margaret's Chapel on the Castle Rock) in 1090 AD, and that of the Saladin Citadel in Cairo in 1176 AD, though Cairo itself predates the foundation of Edinburgh as it was founded in 968 AD. This close historical proximity between what for centuries were the seats of power in the two respective countries gave rise to further analogies in my mind as I toured Edinburgh Castle. None of these were more powerful than the similarity between the vaulted chambers under the Great Hall at Edinburgh Castle, used as a prison ("the Casemates") and the frightening Citadel Prison in Cairo. While the former fell into disuse after the Napoleonic Wars, the later was used until the 1970s as a detention place for political prisoners. Egyptian novelist Gamal El-Ghitany's work Zayni Barakat was inspired by his spending six months incarcerated in this mediaeval prison in the1960s. Like the Casemate in Edinburgh, the prison cells at the Cairo Citadel are now part of the Military Museum that is open to the public, though perhaps the fact that the Scottish prison fell into disuse more than a century and half before its Egyptian counterpart says something about the date when the trajectories of the two cities, and the fate of their inhabitants, diverged. Edinburgh until the 18th century was, in the words of James Buchan in his book Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World, a city that was once "a byword for poverty, religious bigotry, violence and squalor." How this city rose from its slumbers to become the "Athens of the North," as it is now sometimes dubbed, is something that the cultural establishment in Egypt should study closely if Cairo is ever to occupy its deserved place on the map of contemporary world culture. If anybody in the establishment cares to learn something from Edinburgh, a good place to start would be the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF), which I attended last month as part of an international delegation sponsored by the British Council Bookcase programme. The EIBF itself, held in the attractive and comparatively small venue of Charlotte Square Gardens, was an extremely efficiently-managed 16- day event boasting some 750 meetings with writers from 45 countries, 200 of whom were Scottish. Cairo might be well advised to model its own international book fair after that of Edinburgh, instead of trying to imitate the Frankfurt or London book fairs and thereby ending up with the wild goose chase that the Cairo Fair has become over the years, especially since it has moved to the labyrinthine Nasr City Exhibition Grounds. Book fairs like those in Frankfurt or London are integral parts of what is now a globalised book industry after all, and they are places where business deals take place. They have little in common with the state-run Cairo International Book Fair, despite claims to the contrary. The Egyptian Ministry of Culture and the General Egyptian Book Organisation might think, therefore, of setting up an independent body to run the Cairo Fair, like that which runs the Edinburgh event. They might also aim to provide the Fair with the kind of institutional support that the Scottish Government and Scottish Arts Council give the EIBF, which is now directed by Catherine Lockerbie who has presided over an eight-year period of growth. One of the events I attended during the Festival was a showcase of contemporary Scottish writing commissioned especially by the Festival to mark both its 25th anniversary and the designation of Edinburgh as inaugural UNESCO City of Literature. Lockerbie had asked four of Scotland's most acclaimed writers -- A. L. Kennedy, Don Paterson, Janice Galloway and John Burnside -- to write poetry and prose to be published in a commemorative booklet for the occasion, and passages from this were read out during the showcase meeting. The booklet, entitled Lights off the Quay: New Writing from Scotland, is to be promoted at book fairs across the world, and it includes short stories by Kennedy and Galloway, a poem by Burnside entitled "In Memoriam," the opening lines of which are quoted at the beginning of this article, and two poems by Patterson. What impressed me most about this special session was the fact that it did not last a minute beyond the scheduled time of one hour. These sixty minutes, managed efficiently by the chairperson, Lockerbie herself, were enough for the four writers to read from their work and for the audience to ask them questions. This efficient format allowed one to sample some of the variety of the material on offer -- and what a wide variety it was. There was an average of 45 events daily, one third of which were for children, while the rest catered for every taste, ranging from literature, science, history, politics and travel to writing workshops, playwriting and storytelling sessions for children and adults. As for the authors discussing their works and signing copies of their books at the Festival's Signing Tent, these included well-known names such as those of George Steiner, Tony Benn, Margaret Atwood, David Owen, Kate Adie, Jonathan Dimbleby, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Anne Enright. The lack of hustle around these authors tempted me to ask for signed copies of Anne Enright's The Gathering and Hanif Kureishi's Something to Tell You. A last event that I would have liked to attend was a talk by one of Edinburgh's most famous sons, Sean Connery. He was scheduled to introduce his book Being a Scot, written with his friend the filmmaker Murray Grigor. The event was to take place on 25 August, Connery's 78th birthday. Unfortunately, by that time I was already back in Cairo and therefore missed the event. However, even if I did not manage to see Connery in the flesh in Edinburgh I did manage to see a "Bond girl" in the shape of Britt Ekland of swimming pool fame. No, she was not at the EIBF, but was instead at the fringe festival doing a one-woman show advertised as "a no-holds-barred exploration of the woman behind the headlines." But I shall keep my theatre experience in Edinburgh for another column. .
