I have always read as widely as I could about Cairo, because I felt I could never have enough information and understanding to get the whole picture of this fascinating, difficult and complex city. Whether it is reading about politics, culture, society, history, or anything else, I have never limited myself to a particular genre, subject or type of publication. In all this reading, I have seen everything from the sublime to the painfully misinformed. The truth is that any foreigner writing about Cairo is like the proverbial blind man and the elephant. In this Indian folktale, which is also found with some variation in Buddhist texts and in Rumi's poetry, a group of blind men attempt to describe an elephant by touching it. Since each one of them has their hands on a different part of the elephant (ear, trunk, tusk, etc) their descriptions are completely at odds, and of course every one of them insists that he is right, and none of them knows what the elephant really looks like. It is the same thing when it comes to writings about Cairo. If you are a stayat- home expatriate wife with two kids living in Maadi who writes a blog, you will be touching one part of the elephant. If you are a student at AUC, a social scientist conducting field research, or a foreign correspondent for a newspaper, you will be touching other parts of the elephant. In the end, your job, your place of residence, and the number and type of Egyptians you interact with on a daily basis will determine your experience of this city and consequently how you portray it in print. Writings by foreigners about Cairo can sometimes fall prey to a sort of essentialisation, in which the writer reduces Egyptian people to stock characters who can be depended on to provide local colour, authenticity, or a sort of street wisdom, and can also fall prey to overgeneralisation. One definition that I found for essentialism states that it is "a generalisation stating that certain properties possessed by a group (e.g. people, things, ideas) are universal, and not dependent on context. Essentialist positions on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or other group characteristics, consider these to be fixed traits, discounting variation among group members as secondary". On the dangers and pitfalls of foreigners writing about Egypt, I can never improve on the words of Sarah Carr, a local journalist and writer who published a scathing, sarcastic and devastatingly funny post on her blog entitled: "Guide to writing about Egypt" in February this year. It was inspired by an article by a foreign correspondent in Cairo that was published in one of the world's most well-known newspapers.
It is worth quoting her opening paragraph: "Your first paragraph, and you will use it to paint a stunningly authentic picture of Egypt for your inferior, undertravelled readers: a pastoral scene of the Nile Delta perhaps, or a portrait of poverty in Cairo's gritty, urban chaos as described to you by your stringer. There will probably be a headscarf in there somewhere, being gently caressed by the wind of Egypt's uncertain and precarious future. Whatever you choose, your first paragraph must mention at least one of four things: the Nile, the Pyramids, overcrowding or Egyptian fatalism." Whenever I sit down to write about any aspect of life in Cairo, I am faced with the problem of wanting to present a balanced picture, one that presents all sides and is not just a superficial reading. It is difficult to encompass all the complexities and contradictions that arise when in attempting to bring the “big picture” to bear on any piece of writing, while keeping the particulars in mind and at the same time trying to avoid falling into the trap of drawing superficial conclusions. In my case, this causes near-paralysis each time I attempt to frame my ideas and write. Those of us who are foreigners writing about Cairo have a responsibility to at least attempt to do justice to this contradictory, hard-toencompass, and difficult city which is both magical and heartbreaking at the same time.
