Sound Tracking

An abrupt cut to the soundtrack and a jump on the visual screen; this is how I envision my move from Egypt to Canada. With the exception of short trips never exceeding three month, I had lived my entire 40 years in Cairo with all its tolerable clamor and unbearable cacophony, shifting between its disparate sonic domains throughout each day. Following an early upbringing in my grandfather’s home in Abdeen, at the city’s heart, I lived most of my life in Maadi, the healthiest sonic environment in this clamorous capital. And to each neighborhood was its own sound print.

Unlike the tumultuous din of daily life, the ear’s memory extracts specific sounds as aural representations of space. My daily walk to the Muhammad Farid Street bakery near Abdeen Palace to buy bread for my school lunch typically coincided with the final broadcast on the popular Radio Oum Kolthoum. It’s as though I always heard her sing the same song on that outing which was repeated innumerable times over three or four years, always the same section of “I’ve left you”, always heard as I glimpsed a poster of the new singer Muhammad Munir hung on the shop next to the bakery. The diva endlessly repeated, “I had hope that I’d forget you...I’d pour the love from my glass, I’d pour the love from my glass.”

Radio Oum Kalthoum is a station that starts its broadcast on medium wave at 5 p.m. with a lengthy song by Oum Kalthoum, followed by a Muhammad Abdel Wahab song and then an assortment of Golden Age classics until closing with another Oum Kalthoum song that begins at 9 p.m. and stretches until around 10 p.m. This announcer-free station has long been cloaked in mystery; legend has it that the Free Officers established it as a “broadcast reserve” so that if potential revolutionaries took over the transmission building -- as they themselves had in 1952 - they would have a ready station from which to fight back. It’s even said that the station is broadcast from Abdeen Palace.

In Maadi, silence has a sound of its own. I have a memory that goes back to the start of 1993, just after I’d returned from Alexandria with a severe flu. I spent the first days of that year in bed, shifting between fever-induced delirium and violent coughing, almost entirely cut off from the world -- although my family was at home and the doctor came to visit, my illness created a bubble around me. At dawn on the fourth day I awoke covered in sweat; the fever had broken and I was weakly regaining consciousness. There had been a downpour during the night but as I recuperated the rain stopped. I could hear the fall of heavy drops from the dense Ficus tree outside my window that had been washed clean by the rain. I heard the sound of a bicycle rustling dead leaves beneath its tires, the steady squeak of its cogwheels as its rider heavily pedaled, an old man riding at dawn. From where had he come and to where was he going? That sound was the first sign of humanity to have reached my senses in days, as though it were an aural signal that had picked up on the vibration of life flowing through my body following my near-coma of illness.

The metro train issues a short alarm announcing the automatic closure of its doors, and then a whistle upon leaving the station. An average of four minutes between stations, multiplied by eight stations between the suburb and city center, accompanied by the clatter of wheels on the train tracks and over the rail ties, as a daydreamer gazes out the window and crosses a sound bridge from one environment to another. It will remain to me a nearly daily journey from Maadi to downtown, a return to the haunts of my youth. In Maadi I existed in body and partly in soul, with the rest of my being downtown. Before I became a writer and a regular at the intellectuals’ cafés, a friend from the old neighborhood and I frequented a small café in Bab Al-Luq’s Anwar Wagdy building, a place known as Fathy’s Café. There I learned from the old men how to listen to Oum Kalthoum’s nightly song, and how to perfect the essential coupling of sipping coffee with smoking a cigarette. In short, I learned the art of what in Egypt we call a “frame of mind”, a satisfied way of being that traditionally and innocently involves coffee, cigarettes, and losing oneself in the voice of Oum Kalthoum to the point of musically-induced rapture.
 

Oum Kalthoum

My course of study at Fathy’s Café lasted four years, during which my friend became embroiled in card playing with the elderly patrons, betting on their café bills. As I cared neither for cards, backgammon, nor dominoes, I was left to the radio broadcast and contemplation. As boredom slowly crept in, my relationship to the café and my old neighborhood friend slowly fizzled out. Yet there’s no doubt that playing cards with the café patrons and my preoccupation with dedicated listening gave my friend and me an illusory sense of maturity; we were young teenagers at the time. When I visited Fathy’s Café years later as a twenty-something in the mid-90s, most of its elderly patrons had passed away.

At another layer of time and memory, the suburb of Maadi is for me connected to the discovery of rock and roll. We were teenagers angered by the strict rules at school, and expressed our furor by smoking at the edge of the soccer field and by the school gate at the end of the day. This developed into drug use as a radical reaction to the parental authority that we overestimated. The emotional isolation of our closed circle of friends deepened to mirror the self-sufficiency of our suburb geographically cut off from the heart of the city. It was perhaps at this stage of my life that I stopped going to Fathy’s Café and partly severed my relationship to downtown and the old friends I had there. As I count the subsequent years, their events manifest to me one after the other.

What draws you in rock and roll is the beat, the strong, confident, sometimes violent beat of drums that feels innate to an adolescent’s spirit. Yet rock and roll in Egypt was also situated in the appropriate context, a geographically isolated suburb with a culture of aspiring to be Western. When I revisit the years of 1985-87 I can still hear those songs echoing through Maadi’s quiet streets, spilling out the windows of teenagers’ bedrooms with walls covered by posters of Bob Marley rolling a massive joint, or from cars parked in Maadi’s empty squares, teenagers sitting inside smoking, fully engrossed in listening.

That bottled anger and random rebelliousness led to idiotic actions like raiding the school at night and setting fire to the chemistry lab or stealing the national flag and leaving its pole bare in the school courtyard. Such acts would be followed by a deep existential crisis, something like the barren alienation that follows the committing of a crime. Lonely and no longer capable of connecting with the world, especially in its banal everyday form, it was as though we were faced with an impossible ideal, one without an outlet and which could thus express itself only in negative form.

“Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown, waiting for someone or something to show you the way,” those lyrics from the Pink Floyd song “Time” accompanied my years of aimless wandering across the farthest reaches of Maadi. The song’s well-known musical introduction would resound through my ears via Walkman headphones as I walked and walked until exhaustion eventually took over. Crossing the pedestrian bridges over the railway I would read the graffiti spray-painted on their iron walls: “This is Semary’s bridge”, “All of Maadi is red-assed”, “Drugs, drugs, we’re all about drugs”, “The age of crosses” in a reference to the slang for Rohypnol pills, and a tongue-in-cheek scribble inspired by a flirty Sabah song that goes, “Your fault is that I love you.” Love had become a myth as we sought to create ourselves in the cultural haze of the late 80s. At the next threshold of my life, October 1987, I turned 18 and started college as the metro system replaced the old Helwan train.

A trip to the zoo in early childhood -- pools and lakes for hippos, seals, and crocodiles, their brown water seeming thick like oil, an intense smell overpowering the space, and from a distance your little ears pick up the consecutive beat of a drum resounding every few minutes. You circle the zoo seeking its source -- is it a vendor announcing his wares, or a group of boys expressing joy in their own way of making an outing fun?

To me, Oum Kalthoum is more than just a singer; she’s a musical “path” in the Sufi sense of the word. In the artistic sense she’s a school that opened me up to Egyptian musical heritage prior to, during, and following her period; at a later stage my interest expanded to include that marginalized by the institutions seeking to inform public taste. To my ear, the music of Oum Kalthoum is connected to rock and roll by the deep rhythm of its strings - contra bass in the case of Oum Kalthoum and bass guitar with regard to rock and roll. It’s a drone that mirrors the heartbeat. I compare and contrast it to the leading line of music; it’s as though it were a pared down version, the melody’s skeleton. And thus I would swing to and fro, between Maadi and downtown, until eventually leaving Cairo not knowing when I’d return.

The horizon is snow white; the houses are grey with slanted brown roofs tiled not with slate but rather a lighter, cheaper synthetic material. This view stretches on for miles in my suburb of the largest city in Canada’s midwest. I stand at the window watching the snowflakes break on the glass. No one passes by other than a huge white rabbit; here rabbits are our street cats. The absolute calm in this Siberian expanse is inhabited only by interior sounds -- the drone of the central heater that you forget, barely sensing it. You imagine that you’re facing a blanket of silence, but you only discern the clamor in your mind when the room reaches the required temperature and the heater falls silent, its drone resuming within minutes while you forget it again, not noticing it until its next break. In that charged silence I recall old conversations that never ended, and end them as they should have. Images and specters of past time I thought had dissipated for good suddenly penetrate my mind, taking it over, a fold or knot in my train of thought that soon fades away, returning to whence it came. My mind returns to its track, and daily life regains its sense of realism.

In the evening I make Egyptian-style beans with garlic and cumin, and select from my computer an appropriately nostalgic song -- “I left you, but can I forget your love? ”. When I emigrated, it seemed difficult to travel with my favorite tapes and records and so I filled my laptop with 16 gigabytes that represent the core of my musical upbringing. On a cross-continental phone call a friend would later tell me that his musician friends deem MP3 files a final death blow to music in its recorded form -- they are so compressed to save digital space that they forgo thousands of the sound waves that give music its depth.

“But I can’t hear any difference,” I told him.

“You’re listening to a specter of the song, not the song itself!”

“Do you mean that my archive is.…”

“Yes, your archive is dead,” he told me.

It was an exceedingly cruel description, but I’d grown used to not allowing metaphors to ruin my mood, even if grounded in scientific fact. The smell of fried garlic filled my Canadian home, while the diva sang “I’d pour the love from my glass... So far from you I found myself... in my forced forgetfulness, still thinking of you... ”. From an old corner of my memory I could smell the scent of hot bread from Abdeen.

Oum Kalthoum: The Last Words, 1946


text by Yasser Abdel Latif, Canada 2010
translated from the Arabic by Jennifer Peterson;
first published in The Middle Ear
edited by Maha Maamoun & Haitham El Wardany
published by the Sharjah Art Foundation - SB 10 - 2011
 

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