Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive 9780823252282

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Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism

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Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism a n a rchi v e

Hala Halim

fordh a m univ ersit y pr ess

New York

2 0 13

this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation.

Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or thirdparty Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Halim, Hala. Alexandrian cosmopolitanism : an archive / Hala Halim. — First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-5176-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Alexandria (Egypt)—In literature. 2. Cosmopolitanism in literature. 3. European literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. European literature—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PN56.3.A42H35 2013 809’.93358621—dc23 2013009212 Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13

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First edition

To Youssef Halim and to the memory of Amal Halim and Marie Yassa

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con ten ts

List of Figures Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. Of Greeks, Barbarians, Philhellenes, Hellenophones, and Egyptiotes: C. P. Cavafy

ix xi xvii 1 56

2. Of Hellenized Cosmopolitanism and Colonial Subalternity: E. M. Forster

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3. Uncanny Hybridity into Neocolonialism: Lawrence Durrell

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4. “Polypolis” and Levantine Camp: Bernard de Zogheb

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Epilogue/Prologue

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Notes Works Cited Index

313 405 447

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figur es

1. Etching by Ahmad Mursi inspired by C. P. Cavafy’s poetry, particularly “The City.”

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2. Al-Busiri Mosque, in the foreground, and Abu al-‘Abbas al-Mursi Mosque in the background, Alexandria.

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3. Interior of al-Busiri Mosque, with “al-Burda” inscribed on a frieze, and detail showing verses from “al-Burda.”

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4. Mohamed El-Adl, visiting card.

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5. Georges (“Ziquet”) de Zogheb in a revue titled “Bal Français” on 22 April 1950 at the San Stefano Hotel in Alexandria.

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6. Bernard de Zogheb in a dramatic performance in 1949.

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7. Watercolor of the Shallalat Garden, showing part of the premodern Arab wall, Alexandria, 1997, by Bernard de Zogheb.

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8. A drawing from Bernard de Zogheb’s 1957 diary.

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9. An illustration by Bernard de Zogheb for his libretto “Malmulla ou Il Canale,” showing Malmulla and de Lesseps.

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10. An illustration by Bernard de Zogheb for his libretto “Le Vacanze a Parigi,” showing the two American students, outside Prunier in Paris, being accosted by the prostitute.

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11. ‘Ali, left, reciting Cavafy’s “The City,” as Firas listens, in Yousry Nasrallah’s al-Madina.

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12. Recital of Cavafy’s “Ithaca” in Ibrahim El Batout’s Ithaki.

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ack now l edgm en ts

From Alexandria, where it all began, this project has taken me to several cities where I incurred many a pleasurable debt. First and foremost, I wish to express my gratitude to Vincent P. Pecora for his rigorous guidance and generous spirit as my graduate advisor. His faith in my work continues to inspirit me long after leaving the University of California, Los Angeles. Ali Behdad’s moral support and work on travel literature have meant a great deal to me. I shall always remember Aamir Mufti’s unstinting advice and encouragement at a crucial juncture. In their various ways, Katherine King, the late Michael Heim, and Michael Cooperson made my time at UCLA that much more enriching. Among much else, Lucia Re welcomed and offered insightful comments on Chapter 4 when it was first written as an article, in addition to checking my translations from Italian. At New York University, Kristin Ross, both as scholar and as colleague, set an excellent example. Kristin also read and commented critically on earlier versions of the Introduction, Chapter 3, and the final pages of this book. Jacques Lezra, my faculty mentor, exceeded expectations, invariably making the time to meet and giving wise counsel at every step. Everett Rowson’s responsiveness and unflagging encouragement were particularly helpful as this book reached completion. Participating in discussions with my colleagues in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies I have gained much insight into their range of specializations. For advice and approval of research leaves, I am indebted to the chairs, past and present, of my two departments: Marion Katz, Jacques Lezra, Zachary Lockman, Everett Rowson, and Nancy Ruttenburg. I thank Ella Shohat for her wit, and staunchness in our shared commitment to promote interdisciplinarity in Middle Eastern Studies. I am grateful to John Chioles, Cavafy scholar and translator, for

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his thoughtful and affirming comments on an earlier draft of Chapter 1. My engagement with Translation Studies has been reinforced in dialogue with my colleagues Emily Apter and Richard Sieburth. Cristina Vatulescu proved a wonderfully loyal colleague. Although I have not so far taught a course on Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, my students, particularly in the seminar on Mediterraneanism, have enlivened my work with the freshness of their response to literature. I thank Susan Protheroe and Angela Leroux-Lindsey, administrators in the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU, for all their assistance. Nelly Hanna will always have a place apart for the exemplary ethics and consistent support I have found in her over the years. Nelly also read and offered pertinent comments on a portion of the Introduction. Benedict Anderson—in an e-mail exchange about a shared interest in cosmopolites and pidgins—generously responded with his reflections on an earlier, published version of my work on Bernard de Zogheb. Peter Gran stands out for his uncompromising positions and the anti-Eurocentrism of his scholarship. Azza Kararah and Mostafa El-Abbadi, Alexandrian humanists of rare erudition, are an abiding inspiration. I cannot but remember here the late Amal Abou Aly, cherished friend whose highly promising career as classicist and historian of medicine was cut short so early. My years in Los Angeles would have been considerably less enjoyable had it not been for the friendship of Samira Qaddis and Sharon King. Now extending across three continents, my friendship with Hana Soliman and Ibrahim Fathi remains as bracing as ever. I have found invigoration in Joseph Massad’s sustained and trenchant critique of Orientalism. As editor of the Hawwa journal, Amira Sonbol went out of her way to include my work on E. M. Forster. Special thanks go to my interlocutors in different fields, including Beverley Butler, Michael HamesGarcia, Simona Livescu, Nadine Naber, Noha Radwan, Kamran Rastegar, Ken Seigneurie, Mirana May Szeto, and Shaden M. Tageldin. I thank the following individuals for their informative responses to my requests for references on specific points: Stanley Burstein, Vangelis Calotychos, Langdon Hammer, Tarif Khalidi, Maged Mikhail, the late Raja’ al-Naqqash, Dimitri Papadimitriou, Alekko Vlakhos, and Edward Wente. P. N. Furbank graciously supplied me in 2002 with a copy of the unpublished correspondence between Forster and the Alexandrian group who undertook revisions to the 1938 edition of Alexandria: A History and a Guide, as well as with information

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about the group. For access to unpublished material pertaining to de Zogheb, information about him, and contacts, I am grateful to Christine Ayoub, Gilles Beraud, Josiane Boulad-Ayoub, Jack Hagstrom, Jacky Lumbroso Nimr, Stéphane Olry, Monsignor Pierre Riches, Lucette de Saab, and the late Ion Zottos. At Misr International Films, the late director Youssef Chahine and Gaby Khoury were most helpful. I thank Yannis Zikoudis for instruction in modern Greek and for his painstaking translations from Stratis Tsirkas’s two books on Cavafy. Eleni Tsaggouri provided translations of prose texts by Cavafy; and Lori Lantz, a translation of an extract from Hermann Thiersch’s Pharos, Antike, Islam und Occident. Jennifer Newman undertook a translation of the libretto “Malmulla ou Il Canale” with zest and talent. I could not have been more fortunate than to work with Helen Tartar as editor: her enthusiasm for this first book made all the difference. At Fordham University Press I also want to thank Thomas Lay for his considerateness throughout. Tim Roberts of the Modern Language Initiative and copy editor Sheila Berg were most accommodating while this book was in its final stages. Of the two reports on this book, one was signed: I am grateful to Roger Allen and to the other reader, who remains anonymous, for their feedback and endorsement. I thank the two anonymous readers of the article, published in California Italian Studies, on which Chapter 4 is based for their comments. I owe a debt of gratitude to the late Hosny Guindy, founding editor in chief of Al-Ahram Weekly, for his impeccable values and for his wholehearted backing of my work on Alexandria that has come to inform my thinking in this project. Any errors in this book are my responsibility alone. Earlier versions of some of the chapters of this book were written on a UCLA Chancellor’s Fellowship Award. Research on unpublished E. M. Forster papers at the Modern Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge, was enabled by a Lenart Travel Fellowship, administered by the office of the Dean of Humanities, UCLA. Further research and writing were made possible by an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, directed by Vincent P. Pecora, with the Humanities Consortium, UCLA. The time to do some of the research for and the writing of Chapter 4 was made possible by a Faculty Fellowship with the Humanities Initiative, directed by Jane Tylus, NYU. Research for other parts of this book was supported by NYU funds and by a Goddard Junior Faculty Fellowship, with additional funding offered by

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the Department of Comparative Literature, NYU. This book received a subvention from NYU research funds. At the Institut Dominicain d’Études Orientales in Cairo, I am indebted to Frère Jean-Marie Mérigoux for several enriching discussions about Gaston Zananiri and for graciously facilitating my access to the library’s holdings. Jean-Yves Empereur, director of the Centre d’Études Alexandrines, courteously gave me permission to consult the Zogheb papers and scan images, and the scholar Dominique Gogny was always helpful. My research was aided by the librarians and archivists at the Alexandria Municipality Library; UCLA’s Young Research Library, especially Don Sloane; the Modern Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge; NYU’s Bobst Library, especially Peter Magierski; the New York Public Library; the Special Collections Department of the library of Washington University in Saint Louis; and Princeton University Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections. Quotations from C. P. Cavafy’s Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy, translated by Theoharis C. Theoharis, © 2001 by Theoharis C. Theoharis, are reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, all rights reserved. Quotations from the published Forster texts are printed by permission of the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and The Society of Authors as the E. M. Forster Estate. Quotations from the unpublished Forster texts are printed by permission of The Society of Authors as agent for the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge. Quotations from Justine by Lawrence Durrell— © 1957, renewed © 1985 by Lawrence George Durrell—are used by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.; from Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell— © 1958, renewed 1986 by Lawrence Durrell—are used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.; from Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell— © 1958 by Lawrence Durrell, renewed 1986 by Lawrence Durrell—are used by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc; from Clea by Lawrence Durrell and from “Alexandria” taken from Lawrence Durrell’s Collected Poems, © Estate of Lawrence Durrell, are used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Kind permission to quote from de Zogheb’s manuscripts and reproduce his drawings, as well as family photographs, was granted by his nieces, Margot de Zogheb-Bogert, Anne Anka, and Patricia de Zogheb.

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An earlier version of part of Chapter 2 was published under the title “Forster in Alexandria: Gender and Genre in Narrating Colonial Cosmopolitanism” in Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 4, nos. 2–3 (2006): 237–73, and is reprinted here by permission of Koninklijke Brill NV. Chapter 4 is a revised version of an article published under the title “Latter-day Levantinism, or ‘Polypolis’ in the Libretti of Bernard de Zogheb” in California Italian Studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–41. An abridged Arabic version of Chapter 1 appeared under the title “Mukhayyalat al-Sha‘ir: al-Akhar fi Nusus Kafafi” in Amkenah, no. 8 (June 2007): 212–24. Some points about Naguib Mahfouz in the “Epilogue/Prologue” are drawn from my article “Miramar: A Pension at the Intersection of Competing Discourses,” published in the volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz, edited by Waïl Hassan and Susan Muaddi Darraj (New York: Modern Language Association of North America, 2012): 184–201, and are reproduced by permission of the Modern Language Association. A few sentences in the introduction are drawn from my article “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 32, no. 3 (2012): 563–83, and are reproduced here by permission of the journal and Duke University Press. I have given talks based on parts of this book at: the Bibliotheca Alexandrina; Binghamton University; California State University, Long Beach; the Lebanese American University; the Middle East Studies Association’s annual convention; the Modern Language Association’s annual convention; NYU; Princeton University; UCLA; the University of Pennsylvania. I thank the organizers and audiences for their comments and questions. Last but not least, my families—the Halims, the Yassas, the Moftahs, the Bisharas, the Awadallahs, the Sidhoms, and the Rifaats, in particular Margo Yassa, Laurence Moftah, the late Mona and Magdy Rifaat, and my late uncles Helmy Yassa, Roushdy Yassa, and Azmy Awadallah—have bolstered me in more ways than I can enumerate. Without the multiple forms of support I received from my father and the formative influences of my mother and grandmother, this book could not have been written: to my three dedicatees, no words of gratitude can possibly suffice.

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a bbr ev i at ions

AH AHG AM AN AP APK APM AS B BTCT C CA CC CEAlex CP CPC CPCCP GB HH J JH JLN HTQK I “INE” KCC

Forster, Abinger Harvest Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide Nasrallah, al-Madina Forster, Aspects of the Novel Cavafy, Atele Poiemata Cavafy, Anekdota Peza Keimena Cavafy, Apokerygmena Poiemata kai Metafraseis Forster, Arctic Summer and Other Fiction Durrell, Balthazar Cavafy, Before Time Could Change Them Durrell, Clea Christine Ayoub collection Forster, The Creator as Critic Centre d’Études Alexandrines Cavafy, Collected Poems [trans. Mendelsohn] Cavafy, The Complete Poems of Cavafy [trans. Dalven] Cavafy, C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems [trans. Keeley and Sherrard] Gilles Beraud collection Hala Halim collection Durrell, Justine Jack Hagstrom collection Jacky Lumbroso Nimr collection Imam, al-Haya al-Thaniya li-Qustantin Kafafis El Batout, Ithaki Durrell, “Introduction to the New Edition” King’s College, Cambridge, Modern Archive Centre, E.M. Forster papers

xviii

KP KMP “LG” M “MMA” “NE” OJH OWU P PNF PP PU SB SO SPW TCD “TE” TP TP1 TP2 TUP UEE URP VAHH WU

Abbreviations

Cavafy, Krymmena Poiemata Durrell, Key to Modern Poetry Forster, “The Lost Guide” Durrell, Mountolive Forster, “Memoir: Mohammed El Adl” Forster, “Notes on Egypt” De Zogheb, “Opere,” Jack Hagstrom collection De Zogheb, “Opere,” Washington University collection Cavafy, Peza PN Furbank collection Forster, Pharos and Pharillon Princeton University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections De Zogheb, Le Sorelle Brontë [Fibor de Nagy Editions] Stéphane Olry collection Cavafy, Selected Prose Works Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy Forster, “The Trouble in Egypt. Treatment of the Fellahin” Cavafy, Ta Peza Cavafy, Ta Poiemata, vol. 1 Cavafy, Ta Poiemata, vol. 2 Cavafy, The Unfinished Poems Forster, The Uncollected Egyptian Essays of E. M. Forster Cavafy, The Unissued and “Repudiated” Poems De Zogheb, “La Vita Alessandrina,” Hala Halim collection Washington University Libraries, Special Collections, James Merrill papers

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism

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Introduction Alexandria in the twenties was a European city, where Italian, French, Greek or English were heard far more often than Arabic. The city was beautiful, and so clean that one could have eaten off the streets. Anything from Europe could be found in Alexandria for half the price: cinemas, restaurants, dance halls . . . But all that was for the foreigners. We could only observe from the outside. The real inhabitants of Alexandria—the itinerant vendors, the shoe-shine boys—lived in the popular quarters, in Ramleh. There used to be an open-air cinema on Saad Zaghloul Street which had a section reserved for Egyptians. A sign in French read: “for the natives”— meaning, for the real, national citizens. The cinema no longer exists. —n a g u i b m a h f o u z , “Alexandria for the Egyptians”

Alexandria—the last great cosmopolitan center of the Mediterranean—is special, unique, because people of different nationalities and faiths lived there, people going about their ordinary, everyday lives. They lived side by side—Muslims, Copts, Nubians, Greeks, Italians, Armenians, Maltese, Shamis, Lebanese, Jews, English, French, Spaniards, Germans, Austrians— they were all Alexandrians; together they made up the whole. They laid the foundations of the new Alexandria upon the remains of the ancient city. —h a r r y t z a l a s , “Prologue,” Farewell to Alexandria

Iskindiriyya mariyya; Alexandrea ad Aegyptum; cosmopolitan Alexandria. Far more than the Egyptian folkloric catchphrase and the Roman epithet, it is the link between this city and cosmopolitanism that has acquired the ineluctability of the perennially selfevident.1 This book asks the questions, Was Alexandria ever really cosmopolitan? And if it was, is it possible to speak of such a thing as an Alexandrian cosmopolitanism? In other words, is there something sui generis about Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism? When, by whom, and why was its cosmopolitanism construed as exemplary? Well into the nineteenth century this city and that concept had not been so firmly yoked. Certain leitmotifs reappear in the accounts of

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Introduction

travelers who disembarked in Alexandria in the first half of the nineteenth century and did not tarry long there.2 Gustave Flaubert, writing home in 1849, observes that “one curious thing here is the respect, or rather terror, that everyone displays in the presence of ‘Franks,’ as they call Europeans. . . . [T]here are so many Europeans here. . . . [T] he place is full of Englishmen, Italians, etc.”3 The resonance of ancient Alexandria in his fiction aside, Flaubert perceived the modern city as “bâtarde” (bastardized; mongrel), being “half-Arab, half-European.”4 Having “done” the sights in Alexandria and its environs in about a week, Flaubert and company were soon off to Cairo and thence to Upper Egypt. Some seven years earlier, Sophia Poole, the sister of the eminent Orientalist Edward Lane, observed the oppression of the working class and described the contrast between the Arab and “the Frank part of the town, which is in appearance almost European.” Watching the scene in the main square, she was disconcerted by the call of “watch out”: “The camel-drivers’ cries ‘O’a,’ ‘Guarda,’ and ‘Sákin,’ resound every where, and at every moment, therefore, you may imagine the noise and confusion in the streets.” Reporting on the city’s monuments and history, Poole noted, “Although the modern Alexandria is the successor of one of the most illustrious cities of ancient times, it disappoints me, and occasions only melancholy reflections”; thus “we find little to interest us in this place, excepting by association with bygone times; therefore our stay will not be long.”5 The city in the eyes of these travelers is gratingly lacking in the exotic as well as in archaeological vestiges, its most fabled monuments, such as the Lighthouse, having long since disappeared. But what is arresting is that these Western accounts contain signifiers of ethnic diversity (Egyptians, Englishmen, Italians, and Frenchmen in Flaubert) and polyglossia (Arabic, Italian, and Turkish in Poole)—signifiers, that is, of what would come to be designated Alexandrian cosmopolitanism but that in the 1840s were not pronounced as such. It is not the fact of the oppression and abjection of the local Egyptian population that prevents the dubbing of the city in a valorizing vein as cosmopolitan, for these conditions would continue. Granted, the proportion of non-Egyptians, specifically Europeans, residing in the city would rise in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the explanation is not demographic, given that this shift in demography is itself a symptom of a wider political-economic process of an accelerated colonial modernity.6 It is no coincidence that what is referred to as Alexandria’s cosmopolitan period—roughly from the

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1860s or 1880s to the 1950s or early 1960s—overlaps precisely with growing European intervention in the country, the British occupation and hence direct colonial control that ends in the 1950s. To argue that it is as underwritten by an accelerated colonial modernity that “Alexandrian cosmopolitanism” comes into being is by no means to suggest that cosmopolitan practices or different modes of cosmopolitanism had been hitherto absent from Alexandria or, for that matter, Egypt. It is, rather, to identify and critique the dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism as a discourse that, beholden to colonial conditions, drew on a site-specific archive to configure itself. However, in the larger portion of the literature and scholarship about cosmopolitan Alexandria, there is a failure to recognize the degree to which Alexandrian cosmopolitanism is complicit with colonialism. Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, I contend, was a Eurocentric colonial discourse that perched the city precariously between “quasi” and “pseudo,” multiply Europeanizing its diversity in a gesture of appropriation while ambivalently placing it under the sign of Levantine to impute a shifty derivativeness. While various disciplines, including archaeology and history writing, made their contribution to Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, this book is primarily a comparatist study of literary representations in different genres that also relates them to other disciplines. Probing the whys and wherefores of the nomination of Alexandria as exemplary of cosmopolitanism, I interrogate the canonization of a given set of writers, and moreover only selected texts by them, as canonical of that discourse. Reading against the grain of received critical wisdom, I reappraise texts enshrined as classics of the city and excavate overlooked and altogether unknown ones to elicit occluded resistances, foreground complicities passed over in silence, and dwell on unexpected solidarities. A word concerning the concept of cosmopolitanism is due first. Many have been the cultural and geopolitical realities that motivated the appeals to a rethought cosmopolitanism across the humanities and the social sciences in the Western academy since the early 1990s. These include exacerbated nationalism and ethnocentrism (witnessed in many contexts, not least in 9/11 and its fallout, and in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well the escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the worsening situation in Gaza and the West Bank); globalization, transnationalism and the question of multiple belonging;

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and the debate between canon conservatives and multiculturalists/ postcolonial scholars, among others.7 My navigation through the vast scholarship on cosmopolitanism will be strategic and geared in part toward prefacing issues to be brought out in the discussion of Alexandria to follow. A traditional account of cosmopolitanism would begin by paying the obligatory homage to Diogenes the Cynic’s self-designation as a “kosmopolitês” (citizen of the world/universe), as the presumed etymological origin of the word, then recapitulate at least two signal moments, Stoic thought and the Enlightenment with Immanuel Kant.8 Diogenes the Cynic’s neologism, when asked where he came from, indicates, in the immediate, that he rejected identification with any given city-state, preferring instead allegiance to the whole world, being “at home nowhere—except in the universe itself,” hence “un cosmopolitisme négatif.”9 But “there can be little doubt,” Malcolm Schofield argues, “that the Stoic doctrine of the cosmic city was developed in explication of this dictum.” The Stoics, as part of their doctrine of divine providence, held that only men and gods live by reason and hence by law, both groups therefore constituting “a community or a city,” the latter being the universe itself.10 The specific form of reason at stake, as Schofield expounds, is “prescriptive reason, [one] with which law is identified, [this being] focused on matters of social morality,” and it is this that “men and gods have in common.” The community of mortal and divine thus construed belongs to a city conceived of as the universal city, in view of the Stoic “idea of a city [as] nothing but an idea of a community founded on common acceptance of social norms.”11 The related notion of “cosmopolis” found its utmost expression in Rome as the imperial city par excellence. The manifold manifestations of “the city/world equation” included legal—“citizenship is the mechanism through which urbs and orbis are equated”—architectural, and cultural—the “city . . . could be figured as dominating the world but also as representing or summing up the world—in terms of synechdoche constituting its head (caput mundi), in terms of metonymy standing for its totality (every region represented within it), in terms of epitome gathering together its most precious contents.”12 The deployment of “cosmopolis” in relation to Alexandria in an overlapping but different vein is a point I shall take up later. In “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent” (1784), Kant argues that nature’s design to develop humans’ capacities to their utmost through “a universal civil society” is achieved

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through “men’s unsociable sociability,” which drives him both to desire human society and to desire to isolate himself. The conflict thus engendered on both the individual and collective scales “awakens all of man’s powers,” his rationality thereby making for “the first true steps from barbarism to culture,” but man “requires a master who will break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will, whereby everyone can be free.” This, he maintains, can be none other than a “civil constitution” that would also govern “external relations among nations,” a “federation of nations,” fulfilling “nature’s supreme objective—a universal cosmopolitan state, the womb in which all of the human species’ original capacities will be developed.”13 In the later “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795), Kant proposes a set of definitive articles for achieving this aim, namely, that all nations should have a republican civil constitution, that “a league of peace” among nations should be established, and that “cosmopolitan right,” in the form of hospitality in alien lands, be guaranteed.14 Here we may well ask, What connections exist between Stoic and Kantian articulations of cosmopolitanism? And what relevance could either or both hold today, whether historically (the age of modern imperialism, decolonization, globalization) or intellectually (in view of poststructuralism and postcolonial theory)? In the reinvigorated turn of the past two decades to cosmopolitanism, the move of recouping Stoic and/or Kantian cosmopolitanism has not been absent. Most prominently, it was Martha Nussbaum who made a strong bid for what she sees as the interconnected classical and Enlightenment legacies of cosmopolitan thought. She marshaled this argument in “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”—first published in the Boston Review in 1994, then reprinted with responses in the benchmark volume For Love of Country?—that was written, in part, against the philosopher Richard Rorty’s endorsement of patriotic values and national pride in the course of an attack he made on the left in the academy and its promotion of multiculturalism.15 Nussbaum was to follow this with several essays on the subject elaborating her position. In “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” she anchors her argument for a cosmopolitan education and a universal orientation in “Kantian morality” but primarily in the statements of Diogenes the Cynic, Marcus Aurelius, and generally the Stoics who “suggest that we think of ourselves not as devoid of local affiliations, but as surrounded by a series of concentric circles . . . [outside which] is the largest one, humanity as a whole.”16 Elsewhere, she draws out the “deep

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affinity” with the Stoics that Kant “found . . . with his own unfolding ideas about cosmopolitan humanity,” with the aim of pinpointing the common, specifically moral, grounds based on reason that can “give the world a paradigm . . . to inform its engagement with the political life, in a time of ethnic violence, genocidal war, and widespread disregard for human dignity.”17 Less germane to my concern here are the two key differences between Kant and the Stoics that Nussbaum so compellingly discusses, teleology and the passions.18 And I am in full agreement with her critique of—though certainly not proposed remedies for—American ethnocentrism, one that she was to restate in the wake of 9/11 when, condemning the backlash against Arabs and Muslims and the parochialism of U.S. media and education, she called for an empathic “expansion of [Americans’] ethical horizons” to embrace the “equal worth” of all humans.19 Most saliently, my disagreement with Nussbaum lies in the Eurocentric genealogy of cosmopolitanism she espouses. In pitting cosmopolitanism against chauvinism, American or otherwise, she laments that “we find that the very values of equality, personhood, and human rights that Kant defended, and indeed the Enlightenment itself, are derided in some quarters as mere ethnocentric vestiges of Western imperialism.”20 It is Nussbaum herself who, in fine-tuning the genealogical continuity between the Stoics and Kant, concedes a qualified difference between them on the question of empire that turns out not to be major. In contradistinction to Kant, who maintains “that colonial conquest is morally unacceptable,” Marcus Aurelius, she observes, “focuses on the task of managing the existing empire as justly and wisely as he can” rather than on whether it should be abolished; then again, she admits, “what Kant objects to in colonialism is the oppressive and brutal treatment of the inhabitants . . . more than the fact of rule itself.”21 Granted, in “To Perpetual Peace,” which Nussbaum adduces here, Kant inveighs against the “subjection of the natives” of East India in the name of trade, and the disregard by European imperialism in many other parts of the world of the will of the inhabitants.22 But it was also Kant who, in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,” argued that a philosophical world history teleologically guided by the goal of “a perfect civic union” for all humanity would necessarily begin with “Greek history—the one through which all other more ancient or contemporaneous histories have been preserved or at least authenticated.” Kant glosses the authority to authenticate as premised on an

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“educated public,” hence “the history of those peoples living outside it can begin only at the time at which they entered it,” the example he gives being the Septuagint, or translation of the Bible into Greek in Alexandria under the Ptolemies, “without which their isolated reports would receive little credence.”23 That Greece is appointed fountainhead of European rationality, which, by extension, becomes the one legitimate epistemological, civilizational mode, delegitimizes in the process other textualities and intellectual traditions in a move that buttresses European imperialism. That Kant elevates Greece as a point of entry into a universal history narrated with the telos of “a cosmopolitan intent” ipso facto renders other genealogies of cosmopolitanism null and void, indeed forecloses their very existence. Well may Scott Malcomson, in response to Nussbaum, contrast Diogenes the Cynic with Alexander the Great, 24 bring out the complicity of one form of Stoic cosmopolitanism with empire, and go over the well-rehearsed “imperial pedigree of universalism” as seen in Kant. He then suggests that the “cosmopolitan’s challenges are not in theory but in practice, and in practice Kant and the cosmopolitan Stoics of classical Greece and Rome are not of great use.” He commends instead the study of “actually existing cosmopolitanisms” with an attention to non-Western and hence more likely “nonimperial” instantiations. 25 True, his position resonates with a trend in recent scholarship on cosmopolitanism, which has privileged in-process, ad hoc definitions elicited from “situated particulars” and “‘thick slice[s]’ of cosmopolitan space-time.”26 But while I am all for this apparently more embracing sea change in scholarly discussions of cosmopolitanism, my sense is that some of the conceptualization of the notion has fallen short of the ecumenical and the non-/ anti-Eurocentric. A case in point is the introduction to an issue of Public Culture devoted to cosmopolitanism in which the editors, albeit conceding a very qualified “legitimacy to nationalism” and its mobilizing power in anticolonial movements, designate it as motivated by an increasingly “retrograde ideology” producing “evil” and “harm,” insisting that “the modernist (and nationalist) insistence on territorialized imaginations of identity has produced horrendous conflicts in recent history.” Granted, the converse for them is not globalization, presented here as “reviv[ing]” its earlier form, colonialism, and construed as promoting “neoliberal cosmopolitan thought . . . founded on a conformist sense of what it means to be a ‘person’ as an abstract unit of cultural

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exchange.” Avowedly committed to steering clear of Western universalism and inventorying “cosmopolitical genealogies” that “provincialize Europe,” the introduction identifies “refugees, peoples of the diaspora, and migrants and exiles [as] represent[ing] the spirit of the cosmopolitical community” with which “transdisciplinary knowledges” in the academy are in dialogue. 27 All manner of issues arise here. To start with, not all lives are transnational; many remain sedentary while experiencing the sorts of duress, economic and political, that have sent refugees, migrants, and exiles across borders. Indeed, no less a proponent of travel in its myriad forms as “crucial sites for an unfinished modernity” than James Clifford is the first to concede that he makes no claim that “everyone is—or should be—traveling, or cosmopolitan, or deterritorialized.” Rather, he conceives of the task of “a comparative cultural studies” as eliciting practices born of a dialectic of “traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling.”28 With Clifford, I would note parenthetically that sedentary lives are potentially no less cosmopolitan than those of the various groups identified in the Public Culture introduction as bearers of cosmopolitanism. I would add that the very list “refugees, peoples of the diaspora, and migrants and exiles” assembles a not altogether commensurate array of positionalities. 29 Granted, transnational lives are eminently worthy of study; but there is the question how the various displacements of the groups in that list relate to a globalization that has been construed critically, unless there is an implicit assumption that it is as victims of or acted upon by globalization. More pertinently, there is a danger of overlooking vast differences in enfranchisement and access to privilege between “peoples of the diaspora” and “migrants,” and indeed a risk of romanticizing the plight of the latter group by virtue of the ennobling aura of “cosmopolitanism.”30 As for “exile” and the stringency that needs to be exercised in invoking it, one need only cite Edward Said. Himself an exile for whom the notion has been a central critical tenet as overwhelmingly reflected in his choice of exemplary figures—for example, Erich Auerbach—he nevertheless scrupulously insists on maintaining the distinction between exile as a literary trope and as an experience lived on a large scale in the twentieth century, whereby “to think of the exile informing this literature [of exile] as beneficially humanistic is to banalize its mutilations, the losses it inflicts on those who suffer them, the muteness with which it responds to any attempt to understand it as ‘good for us.’”31

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The hasty dismissal of nationalism as inimical to cosmopolitanism scants a whole trajectory that comes out of anticolonial nationalism—from Bandung, the Afro-Asian movement, to the nonalignment movement—that in its avowed aims was internationalist and emancipatory, regardless of the tug of the Cold War that ultimately ran it aground. Nor is internationalism passé: it was palpably with us in 2011 in the spread of the Arab Spring’s radicalism from the periphery/ South to the center/North in a trajectory of activism that astonished commentators by its invigoration of dissent and protest not seen since the 2003 war on Iraq. This was invoked in the iconography (a placard in Wisconsin: “Impeach Scott Mubarak”), in the model of protest (Occupy Wall Street’s website states that the “movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia”), and in the statements of individual protesters (a protester in London: “‘It worked in Tahrir Square, it can work in Trafalgar Square’”; and another in Madrid: “‘You can’t really compare us to people who are risking their lives by protesting.’ . . . ‘But yes, you can say that we are inspired by the courage of the Arab spring’”).32 If one adopts the position on cosmopolitanism outlined in the Public Culture introduction, one would be hard put to explain this phenomenon of radicalism that is both national and supra- or inter-nationalist without the mediation of states or international organizations but as underwritten by radical solidarities. The introduction’s stance also scants the way in which the search for non-Eurocentric traditions of cosmopolitanism would need to attend to the manner in which some intellectual traditions are national ones. I do not propose or espouse a rigid definition of cosmopolitanism in this book: instead, I have chosen to elicit it from the archive I deal with, proceeding from the premise of a given tradition, national included, against but also through which cosmopolitanism is defined. If cosmopolitanism is to be “worthy of its name,” as Timothy Brennan puts it in his 1997 At Home in the World, it would need to embrace too “the rights of small nations—patriotism and all—including . . . socialist nationalism that is also an internationalism.”33 Revisiting the subject a decade later in Wars of Position, Brennan takes to task what he sees as U.S. scholarship’s conviction that “national sovereignty” and the “nation-state” are “obsolete” in favor of diasporas, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and Internet users who “are outwitting a new world order in the name of a bold new transnational sphere.” He argues that with “some exceptions, no fundamental distinction

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is entertained between [nations] created by imperial expansion and those created . . . by the peoples resisting that expansion.” As part of an argument about what he sees as U.S. humanities scholars’ lack of reflexivity about their positionality and interpellation in the economic, Brennan tackles “cosmo-theory,” his term for what he sees as the dominant trend in discussions of cosmopolitanism. Granted, his grievance about the upholding of new diasporas with insufficient attention to the “market” and the coercion involved is legitimate.34 And granted, there is a certain exaggerated and celebratory assumption that modernity has permeated the globe in its entirety without factoring in rural modes of life that “are hardly in modernity in any sense meaningful to cosmopolitanism.”35 But whereas some of these features are evident in one trend in the scholarship, as my discussion above has demonstrated, Brennan overstates the case when he ascribes them to an “unacknowledged consensus.”36 Indeed, a substantive portion of the scholarship on the subject has made a case for the continuity between cosmopolitanism and nationalism or patriotism, to the extent that one of the proponents of this position, Bruce Robbins, was later to take issue with the lack of political rigor in such appeals and revise his position. 37 A staunch advocate of the “pluralizing and particularizing” of cosmopolitanism, Robbins has proffered the term thus redefined as a card of self-legitimization in face of conservatives’ attacks on the academic left’s espousal of multiculturalism and the opening of the canon.38 In a 1990s essay he vacates the term of its earlier associations with privileged mobility. Distinguishing it from “an abstract, ahistorical universalism,” he vests it with the task of making explicit one’s positionality and acknowledging “a density of overlapping allegiances rather than the abstract emptiness of nonallegiance.”39 For him, the binary cosmopolitanism and nationalism is untenable and unproductive: “For better or for worse, there is a growing consensus that cosmopolitanism sometimes works together with nationalism rather than in opposition to it.”40 Designating the project of “comparative cosmopolitanisms” as occupying a space between the universal and the particular, he offers this by way of definition: “Instead of renouncing cosmopolitanism as a false universal, one can now embrace it as an impulse to knowledge that is shared with others, a striving to transcend particularity that is itself partial, but no more so than the similar cognitive strivings of many diverse peoples.” His wager is that this is a “project . . . that would help clinch the point

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that the concept is neither a Western invention nor a Western privilege,” and it is the case that a good amount of recent scholarship on cosmopolitanism has brought out other genealogies and articulations of cosmopolitanism.41 But in surveying the scholarship on the subject in 2007, Robbins observes that in “many, if not quite all, instances, the sharp knife of antinationalist critique has been sheathed” and insists, not unlike Brennan, on reintroducing “the issues of economic equality [and] geopolitical justice.” He questions the efficacy of the latest version of cosmopolitanism, with its newfound comfort with patriotism, in dealing with Zionism and Israeli military incursions as well as American nationalism. Taking issue with liberalism, he sets out the task of a “newer cosmopolitanism” of the left in an American context as “struggl[ing] schizophrenically on two levels at once: for less national solidarity, if national solidarity means . . . military aggression and the displacing of capitalism’s worst costs onto nonvoters, but also for more national solidarity, if solidarity means defense of the welfare state.”42 His prescription may be valid for the American context; but I would insist that in other contexts that are the subject of “military aggression” and of (American) globalization’s dictates of deregulation and free trade, the picture is different if not inverted. Hence, while acknowledging the juggling involved in maintaining local commitments and a politicized allegiance to broader justice, I would certainly edge closer to Brennan’s point by insisting on maintaining the distinction between (neo)colonial nations and Third World/underdeveloped nations as well as the contrasting orientations of a cosmopolitanism articulated in the metropole and one articulated as part of the decolonized nation’s resistance. In modern Arabic, the obvious word for “cosmopolitanism” is the recent loanword “kuzmubulitaniyya.”43 From at least the 1980s on, the word has been an entry in some English-Arabic dictionaries, such as al-Mukhtar, with glosses on “cosmopolitan” derived from the then-current Western definitions of the term, to the effect that it denotes “free from partiality to regionalism [or provincialism] and localism,” “inclusive of different races,” and “citizen of the world.”44 Indeed, the very transliteration of the term varies regionally, appearing in Lebanon as kusmubulitiyya or kuzmubulitiyya and in Egypt mostly as kuzmubulitaniyya.45 One might then conclude that the concept is derivative in the Arab context and that its transliterated foreignness makes it at best partially ineffectual, and that would be the

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end of the story. Or one might, as I would, suggest that this is only the beginning of the story. First, the Arabic transliteration of cosmopolitanism has been out and about since at least the mid-1960s, if among intellectuals, as in the writer Yusuf Idris’s statement that “the rules of science are constant, eternal and kuzmubulitaniyya, the rules of art are variables that change from one country to the other and one civilization to the other.”46 More recently, the term and a number of its cognates have proliferated in public discourse in a range of applications—including cities, with Alexandria retaining pride of place, but also Beirut and Cairo; individuals; world literature; interfaith dialogue; and music.47 Among other current usages that overlap with kuzmubulitaniyya, if addressing a specific aspect of the notion, are “hiwar al-thaqafat” (intercultural dialogue); “ta‘ayush” (coexistence); “tasamuh” (tolerance); and increasingly “al-ta‘addud althaqafi” (cultural pluralism) or its synonym “al-tanawwu‘ al-thaqafi” (cultural diversity), not to mention old Egyptian colloquial terms such as “bazramit” (meaning “métis” or “racially hybrid”). Although the discussions do not adopt commensurate positions or even address the same subjects, what often underlies the proliferation of the term and its cognates is an ongoing, acute concern for issues of civil society and the vexed questions of interfaith relations and secularism. In many of the discussions that deploy these terms, Egypt’s erstwhile ethnic and religious heterogeneity is invoked to translate into calls for pluralism and secularism in the present.48 And yet there has been little sustained attention in Western scholarship to cosmopolitanism in the Middle East. In one notable exception, the volume Cosmopolitanism, Identity, and Authenticity in the Middle East, there is only a single essay that gives an overarching reading of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism, by Sami Zubaida. After a prefatory analysis of the term’s interrelated and not always commensurate applications, Zubaida turns to several salient cosmopolitan moments and milieus in the history of the region: to wit, the hybridity of the cultural output of the Abbasid court in Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries; intellectual Sufism that “sought a universalism beyond the ritually bound community”; the matrix of Hellenism’s heritage that transcended the boundaries between the three monotheistic religions; and the changes the elite underwent in the Ottoman Empire and Muhammad ‘Ali’s Egypt effected by exposure to Europe. Discussing what he designates “the cosmopolitan era” in the context of Cairo and Alexandria in the nineteenth and

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twentieth centuries, Zubaida goes over the well-trodden grounds of the spread of Western educational and cultural institutions through growing foreign intervention and the influx of Syro-Lebanese intellectuals into a more tolerant Egypt as a situation that favored the formation of these cosmopolitan urban spaces. To his credit, unlike others writing on the subject, Zubaida scrupulously puts the accent on the colonial conditions and “processes which established the legendary cosmopolitan enclaves in Cairo, but especially Alexandria.”49 I have no quarrel with the assertions that this “imperial-linked cosmopolitanism” belonged to an elite, whether of mixed origins or local; that this particular cosmopolitan formation was (largely but by no means altogether) undone by the rise of a secularist pan-Arabism, the anticolonial moment of Suez, and the sequestrations in Egypt; and that it was later shunned by Islamism. Indeed, the perception of Middle Eastern cosmopolites—albeit from a Western point of view—as elite and complicit is one that I discuss at some length in this book. What I have significant reservations about is Zubaida’s confining of cosmopolitanism, via an appropriation of Karl Mannheim’s account of the emergence of the modern intellectual, to “deracinated” figures and members of the elite, Western-educated classes. It comes as no surprise that the account should teleologically claim that cosmopolitanism now lives on nostalgically in pockets of postcolonial Middle Eastern countries among the “intelligentsia and the Europeanised bourgeoisie” but that “the main cultural flourishing of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism now occurs in London and Paris.”50 If one allocates Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism solely to those with access to privilege often conferred by colonial conditions, then it becomes inevitable to proclaim its falling off in the postcolonial period. One consequently remains locked within the binary of a colonial cosmopolitanism versus a postcolonial exclusionary conservatism. This, in turn, makes for a failure to salvage other, distinctly noncomplicit models for more receptive modes of affiliation—both in the colonial and postcolonial periods—that would point a way out of the impasse. By “noncomplicit models,” I mean non-Eurocentric traditions and practices of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism that, being indigenous and even vernacular, have a broader constituency and a more egalitarian potential. Elsewhere, I have argued that the Alexandrian writer Edwar al-Kharrat’s novels provide an alternative, postcolonial reconfiguration of cosmopolitanism by appealing to popular traditions of

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syncretism and interfaith reciprocities not indebted to Western influence, their idiom drawn from components both Coptic and Islamic. This move is reinforced by the texts’ nuancing, along ethnic lines, of the association between the key constituency of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, those of foreign descent, and colonial complicity by factoring in their access to privilege, this also in relation to gender.51 Adducing examples that demonstrate the rich intellectual environment open to the world that Cairo supported in the first half of the twentieth century, Zubaida asserts that “this cultural mix and excitement was cosmopolitan in a much more profound sense than the celebrated European-Levantine milieu of Alexandria,” “the paradigm case of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism.”52 To be sure, the Cairene memories of Edward Said and Magdi Wahba attest to various other aspects of the capital’s cultural diversity.53 Thus it behooves us to ask, if it is perfectly feasible to be Cairene and cosmopolitan, what is it that makes “Alexandrian cosmopolitanism” a genus onto itself in a way that a Cairene cosmopolitanism is not? Why should it have been Alexander’s city that was elected for this pronounced association with cosmopolitanism and not Cairo, the city founded by the Fatimids? While the focus of this study is the modern period, it should first be noted that classical cosmopolitanism’s trajectory overlaps with Alexander’s trajectory and thence the city he founded. The contemporaneity of Alexander with the self-proclaimed “kosmopolitês” Diogenes the Cynic is only a part of it. The philosopher’s biography is fairly interspersed with anecdotes of encounters between the pair that have themselves become the subject of representations. 54 The most oft-quoted of the encounters—“‘I am Alexander the great the king.’ ‘And I,’ said he, ‘am Diogenes the Cynic [the dog]’”; or: “‘Ask of me any boon you like.’ To which [Diogenes] replied, ‘Stand out of my light’”55 —have commanded different interpretations such as human dignity versus temporal power and the extremes of passive versus active cosmopolitanism.56 But it is primarily Plutarch’s On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander that is responsible for propagating the notion of Alexander as a philosopher in action put into practice what had only been a theory of cosmopolitanism as propounded by the Stoics. The key passage is worth quoting at length: The much-admired Republic of Zeno, the founder of the Stoic sect, may be summed up in this one main principle: that all the inhabitants

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of this world of ours should not live differentiated by their respective rules of justice into separate cities and communities, but that we should consider all men to be of one community and one polity, and that we should have a common life and an order common to us all. . . . This Zeno wrote, giving shape to a dream or, as it were, shadowy picture of a well-ordered and philosophic commonwealth; but it was Alexander who gave effect to the idea. For Alexander did not follow Aristotle’s advice to treat the Greeks as if he were their leader, and other peoples as if he were their master. . . . [H]e believed that he came as a heaven-sent governor to all, and as a mediator for the whole world, those whom he could not persuade to unite with him, he conquered by force of arms, and he brought together into one body all men everywhere, uniting and mixing in one great loving-cup, as it were, men’s lives, their characters, their marriages, their very habits of life. He bade them all consider as their fatherland the whole inhabited earth, as their stronghold and protection his camp, as akin to them all good men, and as foreigners only the wicked. 57

Although elements of this58 and other parts of Plutarch’s account of Alexander would continue to resonate into the twentieth century, scholars such as Schofield and A. B. Bosworth have viewed as untenable the motive Plutarch attributes to Alexander, namely, creating a “world-wide community,” and espousing a program “of cultural homogenization,” which Plutarch questionably suggests was an application of Zeno’s ideas.59 Bosworth, particularly, rebuts the motives attributed to Alexander of the “so-called policy of fusion,” commenting that there “is no denying the force of Plutarch’s rhetoric, but it is rhetoric none the less, remarkably unsupported by corroborative detail.”60 Despite this, he continues, later historians would cite evidence taken out of context in support of Plutarch’s view and minimize the well-attested violence of his reign, the “result [being] a sanitized Alexander detached from and unrelated to the carnage he created.”61 Of the historical Alexander, rather than the Alexander of myth, what can be said with some certainty is that his project of world conquest eventually resulted in large-scale ethnic intermingling, with multiple infusions of tongues, cults, and literatures in the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed, particularly Ptolemaic Egypt. The foundation myth of Alexandria in the anonymous Alexander Romance, which was to receive new accretions in later texts, emphasizes this intercultural melding, not least in the conception of the bicultural, part-human, part-divine Macedonian founder. Nectanebo, the last pharaoh, is said to have fled incognito to Pella in Macedonia where, Philip being away at war, he announces to

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Olympias that she will conceive a child by the Egyptian god Amun. With recourse to magic, Nectanebo then visits her in disguise and impregnates her himself. Years later, Alexander, whose mother had informed him of his divine paternity, visits the temple of Amun in Egypt’s western desert and receives an oracle in a dream confirming his mother’s story and his desire “to build a great city which shall be named after me, and from which my memory shall not pass away.” When his teacher Aristotle hears of Alexander’s intention to found the city, he sends him a message trying to dissuade him: “Nay my lord, do not begin to build so great and mighty a city, nor to make people of various countries and tongues to dwell therein; peradventure they may rebel against thy service, and take the city from thee.” The warning attributed to Aristotle reads like a warning specifically against cosmopolitanism or, more specifically yet, the order of a cosmopolis. But, as the Alexander Romance continues, Egyptian soothsayers assure the Macedonian that “the city . . . will be great, and renowned, and abounding in revenues, and all the ends of the earth will bring articles of trade to it . . . and everything manufactured in it will be esteemed by the rest of the world, and they will carry it to remote lands.”62 Of the undated Alexander Romance, which she maintains “provides us with the earliest surviving literary material about the foundation of Alexandria, material that must come from a generation after Alexander himself,” Susan Stephens has cogently argued in Seeing Double that it draws on the standard Egyptian mythology of the pharaoh’s divine paternity, albeit with a reversal in that “the human lover assumes the form of the god,” and on Greek elements. But Alexander’s dual royal-divine Egyptian paternity in this story—which, she maintains, operates not only on the level of the mythological but also on that of political realism (drawing on Nectanebo’s apparent flight from Egypt)—functioned differently for Greek and Egyptian audiences. Thus “the author of the Nectanebo story has devised a potent instrument that operates on multiple levels, human and divine, political and mythical, historical and romantic, comic and serious, and has produced a narrative that Egyptians and Greeks could recognize as possessing features not only of their own culture but of both cultures.” By this token, “the resulting act of foundation is presented as avoiding the hierarchies of dominance and submission, conqueror and conquered; the enterprise is cast as a cooperative cultural activity.” While the narrative is ideologically overdetermined by the dominance of the

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Greeks, it also contains a “tacit admission of the existence of a heterogeneous culture.”63 Hellenistic Alexandria—albeit differently from Rome and after its own fashion—was a cosmopolis, a status to which it rose at a time when “Athens had faded, Pergamum was still to come, Antioch and Seleucia lacked an equal political or cultural weight; no other capital could claim to rival the city of the Ptolemies.”64 Various factors contributed to the city’s bid to universality: its marked ethnic diversity and different cults and religions; its geographic position at the juncture of Africa, the Mediterranean, and hence Asia, rendering it “the greatest emporium in the inhabited world,”65 in Strabo’s words; its monuments—such as the Pharos Lighthouse and Alexander’s mausoleum, the Sema (or Soma), around which a cult developed66 —and above all its institutions, primarily the library and the Mouseion, the research center and academy so closely associated with it. For my purposes, the signal aspects of these two latter institutions are the aspiration to universal knowledge and the codification of the procedures of textual scholarship. For if the “Ptolemies wanted their library to be universal [and to] contain the bulk of Greek knowledge, but also writings from all nations to be ultimately translated into Greek,” as Mostafa El-Abbadi—Alexandria University classicist and key figure in the revival of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina—puts it, the Alexandrian scholars inaugurated and laid the rules for textual criticism.67 It was in Alexandria that the whole apparatus of textual scholarship—editing, annotating, commentary, philology—developed, a prime example being the editing of Homer’s two epics by Zenodotus of Ephesus, the first librarian, with subsequent Alexandrian scholars making their own contribution.68 It was here too that the notion of a list of “‘enkrinein,’ which means to admit or to approve of,” as in the Pinakes of Callimachus, comprising the most distinguished authors in a given field—“a sort of universal biography and bibliography,” as P. M. Fraser puts it—was established.69 Indeed, the ancient library of Alexandria is one of the key sites for the formation of processes of canon formation in that “Alexandrian scholars devised lists of the most distinguished writers in various genres ranging from poetry and philosophy to oratory and history, making qualitative distinctions and thereby either reconfirming or helping to shape, at least implicitly, the earliest literary canons of antiquity.”70 The ancient library of Alexandria, as a universal archive and an originary site for scholarship, philology, and interpretation has come to

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represent a dominant trope of the very notion of the archive.71 The library, as dovetailed with the Mouseion and the Septuagint—the legend that some seventy rabbis working in isolation from each other produced identical translations of the Torah, from Hebrew into Greek, for the use of the Hellenized Jewish community in Ptolemaic Alexandria72 —has, in contexts removed from the city itself, come to be coded as a prototype of ultra textual approaches in a trope that I would call, in shorthand, “Alexandrianism.” I deploy that term not in its strict definition as the “philosophical method or doctrine or the literary style of the Alexandrians,” or in its art historical register, but, in dialogue with Said, to designate a conservative critical discourse that upholds Alexandrianism as a rarefied literariness.73 Hence Harold Bloom’s “We are all Alexandrians still, and we may as well be proud of it, for it is central to our profession.”74 Said may appear casually dismissive when he invokes the city in his acerbic remark about “recent critical theory [which] has placed undue emphasis upon the limitlessness of interpretation[,] . . . [partly] due to a conception of the text as existing within a hermetic, Alexandrian textual universe, having no connection with actuality.”75 In context, his Alexandrian swipe seems quite arbitrary,76 but he may be alluding to such pronouncements as Bloom’s about interpretive practices that have been ciphered “Alexandrian.” Said’s investment here—an extension of his notion of “secular criticism,” as a skeptical practice, resistant to unquestioning “affiliation” to the pieties of academia such as the Western canon’s exclusions and aware of the impingements of the sociopolitical77—is to critique exclusively textual approaches by appealing to interpretive modes attuned to the worldliness of texts and of critics.78 Another example that comes to mind here, one undoubtedly taking off from the ancient library of Alexandria, although it does not name it, is Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel.” In this ironical allegory, briefly and for my purposes, the referent of the universe is displaced or occluded by the space of the library—“The universe (which others call the library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries”79 —which becomes an unfathomable labyrinth of texts, commentaries on texts, commentaries on commentaries on texts,80 where meaning perpetually recedes, leaving the librarian amid an incomprehensible Babylonian jumble of signifiers.81 Michel Foucault has argued that “Alexandria, which is our birthplace, had mapped out [prescrit] this circle for all Western language: to write was to return, to come back to the beginning

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[l’origine]. . . . Hence the mythical function of literature to this day,” and designated Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint Antoine as a self-reflexive “art within the archive,” as part of “our Alexandrian age.”82 The trope of Alexandrianism—including that of the Septuagint which functions as a tower of Babel in reverse—travels, is reformulated elsewhere for other purposes, and eventually returns to the context of scholarship on Alexandria, where it is invoked in a celebratory vein and with little attention to the materiality to the city. An essay by Eglal Errera titled “Le rêve d’Alexandre ou le mythe littéraire” illustrates the point.83 Errera evokes the grandeur of Ptolemaic Alexandria and the hold its cosmopolitan legends have on literary texts, mostly modern, given that “the city dreamt of and founded by Alexander” has “seen fourteen centuries of historic eclipse.” Mentioning the Septuagint, Errera suggests that “one could even consider that, at Alexandria, there are no foreign tongues and that every language that has been spoken or written there remains a language of the city.” She thus goes on to enumerate writers in Greek, French, English, and Italian who “have taken turns, from century to century, to erect the legend of this place and the spiral they describe turns round a common core.” However, listing a number of writers in Arabic, from the medieval and the modern periods, including al-Kharrat, Errera suggests that for them “and the Arabic language, there is another tale to be told and Alexandria is more a place of love than of passion.” Apropos of the “Great Library of Alexandria,” she cites the first Foucault quotation above and remarks that it “is plainly true that myth speaks of the origin of things and that the writing of Alexandria has made it one of the great wombs of western literature.”84 She then goes on to compile a series of quotations— from Plutarch, Shakespeare, Forster, Cavafy, Durrell, and Marguerite Yourcenar—about the moment when Antony, defeated by Octavian, hears the music of the god to whom he has devoted himself departing. The author makes no attempt to suggest the ideological and historical contexts of the Western texts she is dealing with, or consider Arab writers’ production and their relation to the city’s archive. In this, Errera is no rare exception. By “Alexandrianism,” I therefore mean the Western construct of the space of Alexandria as an ur-archive, an archive of archives, associated with abstrusely textual practices, a construct that would extend, for example, to rendering Cavafy emblematic of “the Alexandrian mind,” and to speaking of “Cavafy’s Alexandrianism.”85 I will take up the question of Alexandrian canon formation after a discussion of the city’s modern cosmopolitanism.

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My first overarching contention that identifies the discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism as colonial centers on the Eurocentric/ Hellenizing construction of modern Alexandria-as-cosmopolis. Whether in certain literary texts construed as canonical of it or in a substantial portion of the scholarship Alexandria-as-cosmopolis is invoked through a set of interrelated myths and tropes that project a historiographical narrative. The sine qua non of the dominant narrative of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism as a quasi-colonial, largely Hellenizing discourse is that it associates the multiethnic, multiconfessional, polyglot composition of the city’s population in the modern period with the Hellenistic one, whereby the modern city is often cast as recapitulating the ancient one.86 I use “Hellenistic” capaciously and not in the classicist’s strict sense of the term: the iconicity of the Ptolemaic period notwithstanding, the solicitation of the ancient variously extends to Roman times despite Alexandria’s demotion to a provincial capital. The time span harked back to might fluctuate, at its most inclusive tracing a millennium from the founding of the city to late antiquity, and the terms used—Ptolemaic, Hellenistic, Graeco-Roman—vary depending on the constituency giving voice to the narrative and the additional cultural inflections it introduces; but all accounts overlap in the inclusion of the Ptolemaic period. In its barest form, that account is instantly recognizable by the blanking out of the Arabo-Islamic period, coded as a moment of “decline,” a millennial rupture. The brevity of coverage that the period receives is matched by the lexicon deployed: the “decay of the once powerful seaport” and the “decadence of the city . . . determined by the rise of Constantinople . . . and the foundation of Cairo” are a representative sample.87 Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, then, resorts to a historiographical “invented tradition” that, in casting the modern city as reviving Hellenistic Alexandria, construes it as a “golden age” with recourse to a range of tropes.88 The appeal to a ready canon of myths and icons of the ancient city—the library, the Mouseion, the Septuagint—is only a part of it. A species of “imaginative geography” is at work in the reapplication of “Alexandrea ad Aegyptum”—the phrase from antiquity that depicts the city as adjacent to, not part of, Egypt—to the modern city.89 A number of street and place names, chosen by a largely European municipality, to which I shall return later, harked back to the Hellenistic period. Of foremost importance to the Hellenizing narrative is the gendering of the city. One abiding trope in much modern Western literature about the city is the feminization of Alexandria.

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Granted, Alexandria as “she” is situated at the cusp of different albeit not unrelated tropes of feminization, whether of the nation, with recourse to a historical or mythical figure—Mexico’s La Malinche, France’s Marianne, Egypt’s Bahiyya—or of the Orientalist’s “Orient” construed as a woman.90 But in the case of this Mediterranean city, the feminization also draws on site-specific Hellenistic associations. Its name already a feminization of Alexander’s, Alexandria was occasionally associated with a woman—whether royal or divine—in antique representations, quite apart from the later mythological resonances of such figures as Cleopatra and Hypatia.91 While never coalescing into a single emblematic figure, the feminization of Alexandria by modern Western writers often draws on the Graeco-Roman archive of the city by alluding to a Cleopatra whom Orientalism would later endow with an odalisque-like quality. “Alexandria, princess and whore. The royal city and the anus mundi. She would never change so long as the races continued to seethe here like must in a vat” (C 63): Lawrence Durrell here dovetails the cosmopolitanism with the feminization in its two registers, the Hellenistic/Graeco-Roman and the Orientalist. He was by no means the first to bring together the two registers of Alexandria’s feminization: one need only think of Anatole France’s Thaïs and Pierre Louÿs’s Aphrodite. If Alexandria in these two novels is “that cultural mirror unto which the [Parisian] fin-de-siècle projects its uncertainties” and decadence, it is via the “literary myth” of “a melting pot of ideas, religions, and nations, a prestigious but marginalized cultural center [foyer] and site of the encounter between Hellenism and the Orient.”92 That encounter between the Hellenistic and the Orientalized also informs the other, related aspect of the gendering of Alexandria, namely, the homoerotic. If the Arab Middle East has been equally the site of a “homoerotics of Orientalism,” in the case of Alexandria the Orientalist associations with homoeroticism are reinforced by the city’s much earlier association with Hellenism.93 I refer to the homoerotic poetry of the Greek Anthology and specifically the city’s Mouseion, which criticism has long maintained was reclaimed for the same urban space by Cavafy. Hence, for example, My Alexandria, the title that the American poet Mark Doty gives one of his collections, infused with loss and homoerotic themes, intertextually in dialogue with Cavafy.94 As the twentieth century wore on, Cavafy—the modern Alexandrian Greek whose poetry harked to the Graeco-Roman

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city—would be positioned as figurehead of the dominant narrative of the city’s cosmopolitanism. For this narrative pressed into service the Greeks of Alexandria, the largest of the colonies, as the cultural connective tissue between ancient and modern. In another projection of the discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, later critics and writers would parallel the bracketing of the Arabo-Islamic period by the elision of an Egyptian and/or a post-Suez, postindependence Alexandria. This, too, would be represented as a city in decline, in this case fallen victim to nationalism, the members of foreign colonies having departed, thus depleting that space of its cosmopolitanism. That these departures occurred under different conditions—the country’s decolonization, the Suez War and sequestrations of assets of British and French subjects, the Egyptianization of the economy, the early 1960s socialist-inspired policies of sequestrations and nationalizations—and unfolded differently for different colonies, being often elective rather than coerced, is rarely noted. Nor is it observed that not all members of European colonies or Alexandrians of mixed origin left; perhaps the trope of a mass exodus, over and above reinforcing the Eurocentrism of the dominant narrative, gained ground for its resonance with Zionism (a context I turn to in chapter 2).95 Silenced in and excluded from this prevailing narrative of cosmopolitanism are the Egyptians who constituted the majority of the city’s population and its labor force. An attendant lacuna, particularly in literary critical and broadly cultural studies, is the insufficient attention to the materiality of Alexandria, in the sense of the actual city and the class dynamics within it in relation to ethnicity. When an Alexandrian is designated a cosmopolite, it is virtually always the case that he or she is non-Egyptian or at least of mixed descent— which betrays the extent of the collusion of this cosmopolitanism with colonialism. To identify the recourse of this colonial narrative of cosmopolitanism to the iconicity of Hellenistic Alexandria is not to suggest that boundaries between different ethnicities were nonexistent, nor is it to impute a wholesale complicity to members of foreign colonies for, as the chapters in this book demonstrate, I attend carefully to instances of resistance, questions of class, and competing discourses, such as anticolonial nationalism, as being essential to this discussion of cosmopolitanism. Rather, I posit that the matrix that upheld the collective presence of these communities was that quasi-colonial Eurocentric, often Hellenizing cosmopolitanism. For if that discourse

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was intended to accrue for the colonies of modern Alexandria a European genealogy of cosmopolitanism, this in turn conferred further legitimacy on the quasi-colonial conditions and institutions that supported their presence. This goes some way also towards explaining the overlooking of certain communities, such as the (Arabophone, in particular) Syro-Lebanese, in accounts of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism specifically. In chapter 4, I cite their role in the theater; here I would adduce their prominence in journalism, examples of which are the publication of Al-Ahram in 1876 in Alexandria, before it moved to Cairo, by two Lebanese brothers, Silim and Bishara Takla, and of the Alexandrian daily al-Basir, established in 1897 by the Lebanese Rashid Shumayyil.96 That the Greeks of Alexandria promoted the dominant narrative is well attested. As the historian Alexander Kitroeff has posited, the Greek community, particularly its historians, claimed continuity with Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies, with the “obvious implications . . . that the Greek community could claim an earlier presence in the country than the local Arab population, which gave it an inalienable right to its privileged position,” and claimed to have a “civilising influence,” thus “adopting the same rationale as the one used by Britain’s colonial administrators.”97 If the architectural styles adopted for Greek public buildings and private residences at first largely favored neoclassicism—before shifting to Art Deco and an eclecticism bearing neo-Baroque influences with neo-Byzantine elements in the interwar period—according to Vassilis Colonas, this signified the community’s desire to single itself out from other communities and avow its connection to the “artistic and ideological” agendas set in Athens.98 Informing the identity of Alexandria’s Greeks and their appeal to the Ptolemaic city was the Megali Idea—the Greek postindependence ideology that sought to “redeem” the Greeks in Ottoman Turkey and reclaim “territories of the Hellenistic and Byzantine past,” which led to the tragedy of Asia Minor in 1922–23—an irredentism “particularly appropriate in justifying the Greek presence in Egypt,” so that “[i]nnumerable speeches by Greek diplomats, notables and teachers, and a multitude of articles and books all . . . celebrated Greco-Egyptian ties that went back to antiquity.”99 This, in addition to the mélange of European influences with which the space of the city put them in contact. That archaeology made a signal contribution to the discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism may seem surprising. Of nineteenthcentury colonial Southeast Asia, Benedict Anderson has argued that

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the rise of systematic archaeology, restoration work, and museology served to consolidate the conservatives’ position in the face of progressives’ push for reform. The ideological underpinnings of restoration work were to “place . . . the builders of the monuments and the colonial natives in a certain hierarchy” whereby the latter were implicitly told “they were no longer capable of their putative ancestors’ achievements” and that such museological gestures as explanatory tablets around the originally sacred monuments interpellated them into the secular colonial state, hence creating a local genealogy for it. At first sight, it would appear that in the Egyptian context the applicability of Anderson’s argument is to the Pharaonic monuments and temples rather than Alexandria, the capital of the Ptolemies. And indeed the relationship between Egyptology and the nationalist Pharaonic revivalism of the first half of the twentieth century is of more immediate relevance. Yet Anderson’s assertion that “museums, and the museumizing imagination, are both profoundly political”100 is apropos when brought to bear on Alexandria precisely where the Southeast Asian material parts company with the Alexandrian example. Compared to Rome, Athens, or Thebes, such was the perceived paucity of what remained of Alexandria’s edifices and monuments—given, too, that underwater archaeology was a field yet to be developed due to the lack of proper equipment—that most foreign archaeologists, such as Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated Troy, were wont to give up after a brief search for the most important monuments, like Alexander’s Soma.101 Yet the near-absence of material vestiges, rather than militate against, may indeed have enabled the colonial freighting of the “museumizing imagination” in the case of Alexandria, resonances of which in literary texts are explored in this book. In a city where few intact ancient monuments were extant by the late nineteenth century,102 excavated artifacts, from digs conducted by foreigners, of a Hellenistic culture deposited and narrativized in the museum told the natives not so much that “they were no longer capable of their putative ancestors’ achievements,” but that the city, and hence the country, had always held a foreign presence. Of the museum in question, the Graeco-Roman Museum, Donald Reid has observed that “the Doric neoclassical façade fit Western ideas of proper museum architecture, the Alexandrian milieu, and the contents of the collection inside”; this is apt, but one must take it further in the direction of the colonial Hellenizing discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. 103

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The point I am making here finds corroboration in a variety of other imperial contexts, such as Palestine/Israel and colonial Libya, where a sort of archaeological irredentism, albeit far more pronounced than in the case of Alexandria, exhibited itself.104 That archaeological irredentism is present in a 1914 guidebook to Alexandria’s Graeco-Roman Museum that both genealogically serves the discourse of cosmopolitanism I critique and provides a point of entry into the Italian contribution thereto. Alexandrea ad Aegyptum was written by Evaristo Breccia, one of the Graeco-Roman Museum’s three first directors, all Italian. In the introductory pages of the volume, the occluded Arabo-Islamic Alexandria is depicted as dead: “There, where the town of the Ptolemies had led its life of magnificence, splendour and glory, ruin and death for centuries reigned supreme. Where the brilliant rays of the sun shone on gold and bronze and marble, there remained alas! only an immense cemetery asleep in the sadness of an infinite silence.” It is this cosmopolis-turned-necropolis that Muhammad ‘Ali is credited with having “resuscitat[ed].”105 In the 1922 edition of the book, Breccia cites Alexandria’s population figures from the latest (1917) census and provides his reading of the multiethnic composition of the 435,000 inhabitants (the figure he cites): As for the elements and nationalities that compose it, it is true to say, mutatis mutandis, that the conditions of the Graeco-Roman epoch are closely paralleled; once more Alexandria can be defined as a cosmopolitan city. Nearly 70.000 foreigners can be counted amongst her inhabitants, of whom 30.000 are Greeks, more than 20.000 Italians, and several thousand French, English and other British subjects[,] . . . Austrians, Germans, Syrians, and Armenians. . . . Alexa ndria . . . is proof that much prejudice and racial hatred, much chauvinism, much religious fanaticism may grow milder, may even disappear, when a race or a nationality has occasion to live in daily contact with other races and other nationalities, and can learn that each one of them has qualities that cannot but be appreciated and faults that may be tolerated.

If there are “elements that leave much to be desired,” he adds, they are few “in proportion to the number of [Alexandria’s] inhabitants,” and by and large the different communities coexist harmoniously, constituting a model of tolerance.106 What should first be noted is the “semantic slippage,” as Philippe Jockey puts it, in the museum’s name whereby these early Italian directors of the museum yoked the Roman to the Greek/

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Ptolemaic—Graeco-Roman. He has persuasively read this as a competitive move that distinguishes the Alexandrian archaeological practice from the Cairene Egyptological one, promoted by the likes of Gaston Maspero, of an elevation of the Pharaonic crystallized in the establishment of the Egyptian Museum in the capital.107 But I would first observe that the museum could just as well have been called the “Alexandria National Museum,” the name given a museum inaugurated in 2003 that houses artifacts from the earliest periods of the city’s history, via the Islamic, into the twentieth century. I would add that it is not enough to elicit the various ways in which Breccia’s “museological discourse” categorically “condemns” the “fellahin,” the “natives” for undertaking “clandestine excavations” that have resulted in the dispersal of papyri “to the four corners of the world,”108 in contradistinction to the systematic archaeological practice of modern Europeans, who are “the new Graeco-Romans with whom he himself identifies.”109 A certain irredentism obtained within the Italian colony of Alexandria. This took the form of a “self-legitimising” discourse of a “civilising mission” that posited “the leading role of Italians in the establishment of modern Egypt,” pressed into service three iconic figures, Cleopatra, Saint Francis and Verdi, and appealed to “the GraecoLatin heritage.” The Italian colony’s adducing of “a Latin Egypt,” it should be noted, received the added infusion of a Fascism with which it entered a “marriage of convenience” in a “passive and indifferent” fashion; and there were contrasts and tensions between the Greeks and Italians of Alexandria.110 Despite these nuances, and the tensions between different colonies as well as between them and the British, how these Eurocentric revivalist tropes speak to Egypt’s quasi-colonial situation is the crux in my view. The section on Alexandria in Twentieth Century Impressions of Egypt (1909), a British guide to the country and its resources in a series on “the outlying parts of the British Empire,” includes three subsections on the modern city’s Greek colony; no other colony is accorded this treatment, although the coverage includes profiles of “prominent members of the European business community.”111 The historical overview with which the Alexandria section opens designates the modern city as “the mercantile entrepôt of an Egypt which has been made to shake off the stagnation and sloth of ages, to slough the dead skin of slavery and grow in prosperity under British guidance and the influence of British energy. . . . Little, indeed, has the Alexandria of to-day to show . . . of her pristine splendour in the Ptolemaic era, or of her later decline and decay.”112

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The Alexandria section makes scanty references to the Arabo-Islamic period but includes a subsection titled “Vestiges of Ancient Alexandria,” contributed by Breccia, as the director of the museum. Evelyn Baring, or Lord Cromer, the British agent and consul-general in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, who drew comparisons between Britain and Rome, posited that the “only real Egyptian autonomy” that he was “able to conceive as either practical or capable of realisation without serious injury to all the various interests involved, is one which will enable all the dwellers in cosmopolitan Egypt . . . to be fused into one self-governing body.”113 The entrenched notion of an Alexandria in perpetual decline from the seventh to the nineteenth century should, a priori, ring false if one considers the city’s illustrious heritage, its crucial strategic position, and the succession of dynasties that ruled Egypt in these centuries. Furthermore, the historical evidence, although not always of a piece, disallows that notion. That the Arabs decided to move the capital to Fustat, before the founding of Cairo, undoubtedly undermined Alexandria’s political role. Facing their foes, the Byzantines, across the Mediterranean was compounded for the Arabs by their lack of experience at naval warfare, although the notion of the Arabs, in their entirety, as a nonseafaring nation ought to be reconsidered, as George Hourani has long since urged.114 Natural and man-made catastrophes there was no dearth of; but they by no means warrant inferring a continuous condition of ruination—nor are the criteria for projecting that condition always made clear. Indeed, starting at least in the mid-twentieth century, Egyptian intellectuals and historians, in particular those at Alexandria University, devoted much effort to refute this narrative of Arabo-Islamic decline, delving into primary sources of the period, editing and publishing relevant Arabic manuscripts, and writing alternative histories.115 Alexandria’s heritage, albeit Hellenistic, had already been appealed to in an altogether different discourse, Mediterraneanism, its most significant formulation in Arabic being Mustaqbal al-Thaqafa fi Misr (The Future of Culture in Egypt), by one of the foremost intellectuals of twentiethcentury Egypt, Taha Husayn (1889–1973). As part of an agenda of educational reform, this polemical 1938 volume controversially articulated Egypt’s identity as Mediterranean European—sealed off from all things east of the eastern Mediterranean and inseparable from Europe—by outlining a symbiotic relationship between ancient Egypt

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and Greece that continued with the founding of Alexandria, which was “not an Oriental city . . . but a Greek one” and “the most important source of” Hellenism in its day.116 Later and not dissimilarly, the intellectual, writer, and literary critic Louis Awad (1915–90) was to postulate the hallmark of Mediterranean cultures and civilizations as “governed by a dialectical cycle” in which a “conflict of opposites” produces “a new more fertile compound,” adducing, among other examples, the syncretic intellectual output of ancient Alexandria (“a big laboratory”) as an “astonishing blend of the Greek mind and the Egyptian mind,” designating the Christian Neoplatonists as “Egyptians with Greek minds, or Greeks with Egyptian minds, for in that age there was no distinction between Egyptian and Greek.”117 Significantly, being closer to our times than Husayn, Awad’s articulation of Mediterraneanism—which also addressed its educational and cultural uses in such projects as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina—forcefully safeguards against strategic agendas to which it can be marshaled, such as polarization and rapprochement with Israel. To return, however, to the historical scholarship I referred to earlier: this was not confined to academic historians; writers and intellectuals also contributed a more nuanced picture of the bypassed medieval Alexandria. I find it instructive to bring to light the texts of these historians and writers—who on the few occasions when they are cited in Western studies of Alexandria are not analyzed discursively—and to dwell on both historical and historiographical aspects. That this was intended as revisionist work is not in doubt. Witness the prefatory remarks made by Jamal al-Din al-Shayyal and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Salim, Alexandria University historians and authorities on the period, to their respective 1960s books. Al-Shayyal observes that “much scholarly effort has been devoted to the history, archaeology, topography and civilization of Alexandria in the Graeco-Roman period, halting at the medieval Islamic period, indeed bypassing it to modern times,” at most referring to the medieval period “unfairly as one of diminishment, decline and backwardness.” Likewise, Salim takes issue with what he sees as cursory scholarly attention to medieval Alexandria in contrast to scholarship on Cairo in the same period, a state of affairs he speculates may be attributable to the Mediterranean city’s association with the Hellenistic period or to the loss of many of its Islamic landmarks on account of urban change—the latter point being less persuasive in that it applies equally if not more to Hellenistic Alexandria.118 Arabic-language revisionist historical studies of

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Alexandria were part of a postindependence trend that enjoyed institutional support but that had begun before independence. Certainly, the founding of Alexandria University in 1942 and the fact that it had a chair in Islamic history—long occupied by ‘Abd alHamid al-‘Abbadi, mentor of al-Shayyal—gave vital, perhaps even the foremost, impetus to this trend.119 Other forums included the local radio broadcasting service, established in the 195os, which hosted talks by historians (whether professional or amateur) about the city; the Alexandria Atelier, which held regular public lectures and issued occasional publications; and the Alexandria Governorate—quite apart from individual efforts, such as those of the patron of scholarship Radames Lackany. The governorate, for example, published a volume titled Tarikh al-Iskandariyya wa Hadaratuha mundhu Aqdam al-‘Usur (History of Alexandria and Its Civilization from the Earliest Ages) commissioned from Alexandria University professors. That the governor’s introduction reiterates the dominant narrative of Alexandria’s Arabo-Islamic decline is less significant than the events he chooses to foreground as milestone dates in the city’s modern history. Alexandria was “at the vanguard of” resistance to the French occupation in 1798 and to the British occupation in 1882, had witnessed King Farouk going into exile, and was where the nationalization of the Suez Canal was announced. This narrative that reinscribes the city within the anticolonial struggle and signal events of decolonization culminates in a statement of the aim of the book: “to mobilize public opinion, furnish it with awareness, and enhance the sense of responsibility and grasp of the relationship between the nation and its citizens in the new socialist society.”120 The immediate ideological context of the governor’s introduction to this 1963 book is the Nasser regime’s increasing socialist turn as articulated in laws promulgated in the early 1960s and codified in the 1962 socialist Charter (al-Mithaq). While the book would have been part of the regime’s attempt to enlist intellectuals, particularly historians, to promote the revolution’s ideological redaction of history, it would be reductive to suggest that all the essays collected in the volume, or indeed historians’ efforts more generally, were in keeping with that program.121 While the larger part of academic historical output on Alexandria took the standard form of the scholarly monograph or essay, it appears that the 1960s and 1970s output also included compendia of biographies, whether by academic or amateur historians, in some cases coupled with toponymy. Consider the 1973 Sakandariyyat

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(Alexandriana), a collection of thirteen biographies of figures whose names streets and districts of the city bear, by Yusuf Fahmi al-Jazayirli (1881–1973), an Alexandrian littérateur of Algerian origin and an anticolonial activist who wrote on topics that included comparative literature and Algeria. The genesis of Sakandariyyat, published by Lackany, himself the author of Quelques notes de toponymie Alexandrine (Some Notes on Alexandrian Toponymy), was a 196os guidebook to the city’s street names (Dalil Shawari‘ al-Iskandariyya), commissioned from al-Jazayirli by the governorate.122 In the Alexandrian context of the 1960s and 1970s, the genre of biographical dictionaries seems to have taken as its models sometimes premodern Arab, sometimes European prototypes. Al-Jazayirli suggests that the model he was following in compiling biographies of figures whose names are ciphered in street names is a certain encyclopedia, or dictionary, of Paris.123 By contrast, others, such as alShayyal, in his 1965 book, A‘lam al-Iskandariyya fi al-‘Asr al-Islami (Biographies of Eminent Alexandrians in the Islamic Period), refer to Arabo-Islamic models. Al-Shayyal (1911–1967) explains, in a historiographical vein, that premodern Arab historians devoted considerable attention to writing histories of cities in which they adopted the “sound methodology” of treating their subjects not merely as places but rather primarily in relation to the inhabitants who are responsible for their design, urbanization, and renown. Hence these historians allocated the larger portion of their books to the tarjama (writing of biographies; a term that al-Jazayirli, too, uses) of outstanding men who were either born or resided in the city. Thus suggesting that his own work, which is “but an initial attempt to repel the injustice to which Islamic Alexandria was subjected [by modern historians],” follows in the footsteps of these premodern Arab historians, al-Shayyal describes his own project by deploying the term sira (biography) as well as tarjama.124 In his 1969 volume, A‘lam min al-Iskandariyya (Biographies of Eminent Alexandrians), Niqula Yusuf appears to be commenting on both Western and Arab sources/models when he observes—with more than a hint of postindependence, 1960s populism—that previous biographers focus on intellectuals and elites, whereas history writing in his time has turned to peoples and their social development as well as to struggling individuals. Likewise, Yusuf asserts that the history of Arab peoples in general, and of Egyptians in particular, has been “falsified” by “some foreign historians,” especially in “colonizing countries,” hence the need for fair-minded and rigorous refutations.125

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What some of these Alexandrian compendia of biographies, as well as the associated, sometimes overlapping project of the study of placenames, demonstrate is the inapplicability of the distinction between memory and history that Pierre Nora has proposed in the project of “lieux de mémoire.” He identifies a “fundamental opposition” between memory and history whereby there “are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.” Whereas this may be the case in France, it is inapplicable to a Third World context such as Egypt for several reasons: “peasant culture, that quintessential repository of collective memory,” has not disappeared as these are not late industrial societies; there are modes of oral transmission of memory; “memoryhistory” and “milieux de mémoire” persist by virtue of a continuity between the individual and the collective, the personal and the political. In this sense, Nora’s comment that “independence has swept into history societies newly awakened from their ethnological slumbers by colonial violation” is particularly inadequate.126 Granted, an anxiety about attrition of memory looms over some of these projects—these were decades when Alexandrians of foreign descent were leaving and some street names had been renamed—but this is more a function of conjoined and sometimes competing “milieux de mémoire,” those of European and Egyptian communities of remembrance. Indeed, some of the books draw on “living memory,” and al-Jazayirli’s comments in Sakandariyyat make clear that he sees no discontinuity between history and memory. While Nora identifies the historiographical turn, as well as self-reflexivity in different disciplines more generally, as a sign of the severing of memory from history, I would suggest that in the postindependence context at stake here historiographical commentary betrays a suspicion of colonial history’s disregard for local collective memory-history. Of particular relevance here is the fifth biography in al-Shayyal’s A‘lam al-Iskandariyya fi al-‘Asr al-Islami, devoted to Abu al-Tahir b. ‘Awf (a.h. 485–581; a.d. 1092–1185). The introductory pages of the biography are reproduced from the occasion for which it was first written: al-Shayyal’s 1957 professorship lecture at Alexandria University. The historian opens by paying homage to his late mentor, al-‘Abbadi, the first chair of Islamic history at the university to which post he is now succeeding. The core of al-Shayyal’s presentation, subtitled “The First Ustadh [Scholar of Religious Learning, among other usages, in the Arabo-Islamic context; Teacher/Professor in modern

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usage] at the First Madrasa in Islamic Alexandria,” is the hypothesis and supporting evidence that city’s first madrasa was established in the late Fatimid period, around a.d. 1137–38. This is followed by a biography of its first teacher, Abu al-Tahir b. ‘Awf, and an account of the school’s administration and speculated whereabouts. A scion of an Alexandrian family of scholars and a jurisprudent of the Maliki school whose writings are lost, Abu al-Tahir b. ‘Awf lived into the Ayyubid period, and it is known that al-Nasir Salah al-Din (Saladin), together with his sons and some statesmen, attended a number of his lessons during a visit in the city, after which the sultan would solicit his religious rulings. Al-Shayyal’s philological glosses on the word ustadh (which I adduce above) and the madrasa institution in relation to the Shi‘i-Sunni conflict aside, his prefatory remarks ponder the origin of the professorship lecture (then being instated at Alexandria University) and ascribe it to the medieval Islamic madrasas, adding that modern European universities have a similar tradition.127 In both content and reappropriated form, then, the text of this professorship lecture seeks to create an intellectual genealogy that traces back to medieval Alexandria. Through his choice of subject matter, and selfreflexive comparative commentary on educational systems and epistemologies, this scholar of intellectual history’s presentation creatively braids European and Islamic scholarly traditions, in the process of recouping a history of Arabo-Islamic Alexandria. Are these “nativist” accounts, or does Alexandria’s ethnic heterogeneity have a place in revisionist narratives produced by the local 1960s and 1970s intellectuals? My sense is that some of these studies—while they are by no means in dialogue with the discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism as I have critiqued it, indeed rebut aspects of it, albeit without identifying it the way I have—bespeak valences of cosmopolitanism. They do not have recourse to the loanword I adduce above, kuzmubulitaniyya—which, as we saw, had been used by Idris in the 1960s—because cosmopolitanism is not their primary concern. Yet again, if these texts proffer a cosmopolitanism of sorts, it is one that is refracted through other discourses of the time. I consider first Yusuf (1904–76), a writer and schoolteacher of half-Egyptian, half-Greek origin, born and bred in Dimyat (Damietta), like al-Shayyal, and likewise settled in Alexandria. His A‘lam min al-Iskandariyya is in some respects indebted to the work of the historian al-Shayyal, himself the subject of one of the biographies in the book. What impresses in the volume of biographies is not

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solely the broad historical sweep—starting from Alexander all the way to Yusuf’s own contemporaries—but also the ethnically and religiously embracing ambition of its coverage. The Arabo-Islamic period is represented by some thirty-two figures—jurisprudents, littérateurs, poets, Sufis, travelers, ascetics, and so on—from different parts of the Islamic world. In the introduction, Yusuf observes that his predecessors have construed as “Alexandrian” not only individuals born in the city but also those who moved to it and made a contribution (a definition that his selection of figures follows); hence a non-nativist definition.128 When Yusuf speaks of his book of biographies as “a bouquet of flowers of different kinds and colors that have sprouted and blossomed on Alexandria’s soil,” he is, in effect, providing a metaphor for a cosmopolitan space as much as for a cosmopolitan compendium.129 Indeed, in a period often construed as one of “ethnolinguistic nationalism,” Yusuf includes in the biographies of modern literary figures the Francophone female writers Nelly Zananiri and Jeanne Arcache. But there is some nuanced positioning attendant on these inclusions: he designates each as “Arab Alexandrian,” and cites a 1935 article by the “doyen of Arabic letters,” Taha Husayn, lauding Egyptian writers of foreign expression as reliable “emissaries” and successful “ambassadors” of Egypt.130 Such expressions of cosmopolitan inclusion present in Yusuf’s book are conjoined with a distinctly articulated anticolonial stance echoed in the choice of some of the figures whose biographies he writes. This 1969 book is dedicated to then-president Nasser, as a son of the city that witnessed “epoch-making events” after the 1952 Revolution, “foremost of which” was Nasser’s speech in 1956 in Manshiyah Square announcing the nationalization of the Suez Canal.131 As for al-Jazayirli’s 1965 memoir, al-Iskandariyya fi Fajr al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin (Alexandria at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century), its lyrical tableaux of lifestyles, pastimes, classes, professions and urban transformation include eloquent instantiations of interethnic conviviality, particularly in the poorer areas, an aspect that I have argued elsewhere is represented in the fiction of the much later writer al-Kharrat. After a description of the Egyptian spring festival, al-Jazayirli turns to the one held by Alexandrian Greeks, describes the participation of Egyptians in the dances, as well as the urchins’ satirical verses in Arabic hybridized with Greek, which the celebrants ignore as they recite their own Greek lyrics (two verses of which he transliterates

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into Arabic). In al-Labban, an underprivileged area with a high concentration of European, especially Italian, Alexandrians, the vendors sing the praises of their wares in a blend of “deformed Italian words and Italianized Arabic words.” Simultaneously, his repeated condemnation of social stratification carries a resonance of the contemporary discourse of egalitarianism, whatever other discourses may be informing it.132 The case of al-Shayyal furnishes additional nuances. The thirteen biographies in the book, al-Shayyal explains, “attest to the diversity of cultures and intellectual currents [tanawwu‘ al-thaqafat wal-tayyarat al-fikriyya] in Islamic Alexandria.” For the volume, as he elaborates, includes in its roster the grammarian, the transmitter of and specialist in hadith (the traditions associated with the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions), the jurisprudent, the Sufi, the orator, the political activist, and the journalist. They are, he is keen to point out, figures who hail from Isfahan, Andalusia, and Hijaz, in addition to Alexandrians, “but they all lived in Alexandria, filled it with scholarship, and were, in the last analysis, considered Alexandrians.” The terms al-Shayyal deploys in celebration of this heterogeneity offer a key to the discourse through which it is refracted: Underlying these studies is a significance I wish to foreground, namely, that the narrow concept of qawmiyya [nationalism] that we came to know at the beginning of the modern period was not recognized in the early Islamic period, in which the concept of the watan [homeland] was that of the broad Arabo-Islamic watan. Thus, any Muslim scholar who journeyed from his country to any other part of the Islamic watan was not made to feel like a stranger by its inhabitants, who considered him a citizen like any other [muwatinan ka sa’ir al-muwatinin] and welcomed him.133

The terminology of collective belonging that al-Shayyal uses is taken from different and at times apparently inconsistent registers. In contrasting the modern concept of qawmiyya, or nationalism, to concepts that obtained in the Arabo-Islamic period, al-Shayyal reserves for the latter the term watan, or homeland. But the more obvious word in context would be the umma, meaning “Islamic community,” or dar al-islam, territory predominantly inhabited and ruled by Muslims, this superseding their ethnic origin. Indeed, scholars have adduced the umma, as well as dar al-islam, as a matrix for ethnic diversity that made for hospitality to traveling members of the community of faith, forming, for example, part of “the intellectual

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basis of [the fourteenth-century globetrotter] Ibn Battuta’s cosmopolitanism.”134 Al-Shayyal’s elision of the word umma in the introduction finds some explanation in the remark with which he rounds off this point: “Arab unity [al-wihda al-‘arabiyya] which we call for today was not an innovation or an odd thing in the past, but rather an actual fact, its efficacious weapon being learning, culture, and the book.”135 Despite al-Shayyal’s not having employed the term qawmiyya ‘arabiyya (Arab nationalism), the framework informing his discussion is patently pan-Arabism. It is, moreover, a conception of Arab unity that does not place great emphasis on the religious component, hence his elision of the term umma and appeal to “culture.” The “diversity of cultures and intellectual currents” that al-Shayyal foregrounds, then, is a unity-in-diversity that speaks to pan-Arabism, which also explains his pairing of biographies of premodern figures with those of modern anticolonial activists. On Arabo-Islamic Alexandria, al-Shayyal and Salim concur that by the Arab conquest, the city had already sustained much damage,136 adducing mainly religious unrest, as well as land subsidence and the Persian siege, then taking of Alexandria. In what was to become a standard reference on Islamic Alexandria, Salim does not deny that the city declined in the aftermath of the Arab conquest, but he does not ascribe this condition to the fact of its no longer being the capital. Rather he attributes it to the depletion of the population with the departure of large numbers of Greeks (per stipulations in the Byzantines’ treaty with the Arabs), as well as many Jews, to the Arabs’ partial destruction of the city’s walls, after which they were rebuilt to enclose a much smaller circumference, and to the silting up of the Schedia Canal (also known as the Alexandria Canal) that connected Alexandria to one of the branches of the Nile and provided fresh water. But the image of persistent Arab neglect of the city is belied in his lengthy account of Islamic Alexandria. Among the relevant points to be culled is that starting from the first Islamic century—as seen particularly in the Battle of Dhat al-Sawari (Battle of the Masts) with the Byzantines in 655—the Arabs built a fleet in Alexandria. They continued in successive dynasties, albeit with some vicissitudes, to reinforce the city’s naval base in response to changing imperatives, whether fighting the Byzantines, combating secessionist movements, or countering Crusader attacks.137 As for other indices of the alleged neglect and decline of Arabo-Islamic Alexandria, the walls and fortifications were repeatedly restored, and the canal linking the city to the Nile,

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which often silted up, was dug up in several dynasties, even though the city’s connection with the river would eventually be cut off with the silting up of the Canopic Branch.138 For Salim, Alexandria in the Fatimid period witnessed a “great artistic, economic, and scholarly flourishing,” with many a new civil and religious establishment built, as well as a strong trade with Europe. Under the later Ayyubid dynasty, it was restored, furnished with new promenades and palaces over and above a thriving trade, particularly in spice, that connected the city with both the East and the West.139 He cites Benjamin of Tudela’s eyewitness account; and indeed the snapshot of Alexandria preserved in this twelfth-century rabbi’s narrative is astonishing in its sheer variety of ethnicities: Alexandria is a commercial market for all nations. Merchants come thither from all the Christian kingdoms: on the one side, from the land of Venetia and Lombardy, Tuscany, Apulia, Amalfi, Scicilia, Calabria, Romagna, Khazaria, Patzinakia, Hungaria, Bulgaria, Rakuvia (Ragusa?), Croatia, Slavonia, Russia, Alamannia (Germany), Saxony, Danemark, Kurland? Ireland? Norway (Norge?), Frisia, Scotia, Angleterre, Wales, Flanders, Hainault? Normandy, France, Poitiers, Anjou, Burgundy, Maurienne, Provence, Ganoa, Pisa, Gascony, Aragon, and Naverra, and towards the west under the sway of the Mohammedans, Andalusia, Algarve, Africa and the land of the Arabs: and on the other side India, Zawilah, Abyssinia, Lybia, El-Yemen, Shinar, Esh-Sham (Syria); also Javan, whose people are called the Greeks, and the Turks. And merchants of India bring thither all kinds of spices, and the merchants of Edom buy of them. And the city is a busy one and full of traffic. Each nation has an inn of its own.140

But “the most magnificent of [Alexandria’s] Islamic periods,” in Salim’s view, was under the reigns of the Mamluk sultans al-Zahir Baybars and al-Nasir Muhammad b. Qalawun. The former lavished so much attention on renovating the city, including the lighthouse, and its environs that the governor of Hama (in what is now Syria) asked to visit it, and the latter rebuilt Alexandria after a massive earthquake that overtook Egypt and the Arab eastern Mediterranean.141 It is not my intention here, however, to reverse the valences of the standard Western account of Alexandria’s history by projecting a continuously prosperous Alexandria in the Arabo-Islamic period, which historical evidence does not support either. Apart from the competition posed by Rashid (Rosetta) and Dimyat, the plague that swept Europe, Asia, and North Africa in the mid-fourteenth century

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decimated Alexandria’s population—one source cites as many as seven hundred funerals on a certain Friday—and also swept away much of the leadership in the city.142 Then there was the brutal sacking of Alexandria by Pierre I de Lusignan in 1365, a late crusade— motivated, among other things, by the desire to undermine Mamluk prestige and economic power, and enabled by the neglect of the Alexandrian navy—in which the Cypriots went on a spree of murder, pillage, and burning from which it would take the city a long time to recover.143 The Mamluks subsequently took several measures to safeguard Alexandria in the wake of the attack, including granting it a more autonomous administrative status to enable the local authority to fortify the city, restoring damaged public establishments, refurbishing the gates that had been burned, digging trenches, and decreeing that lanterns be lit all night in given locations. Adversely affecting Alexandria in the remaining Mamluk period, according to Salim, were, among other things, the commercial competition between the Venetians and the Genoese, with the latter attacking ships heading for the city; the outbreak of several plague epidemics at the end of the fifteenth century and the turn of the sixteenth; and the severe blow of the Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa.144 These are, inevitably, but fragments from the history of Arabo-Islamic Alexandria: my point in adducing them is primarily a historiographical brushing against the grain of the dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. One can well argue that the discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism unfolds along a spatial axis—“Alexandrea ad Aegyptum”— and a temporal one—the narrative of a Hellenized modern period tethered to a Hellenistic golden age. Here, I wish to dwell on an aspect of the temporal axis, namely, the relationship of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and the Nahda narrative. Put schematically, in the traditional version of the Nahda narrative (which has its parallels in accounts of decline-revival informed by colonial discourse in other countries), Egypt awakens after centuries of Ottoman “decline” at the hands of Napoleon, then Muhammad ‘Ali—the Albanian whose closeness in geographic background to the Macedonian Alexander is highlighted145 —who effects modernization through contact with Europe, hence translation and copying of Western models. Albeit emanating from the same colonial Eurocentrism the Nahda narrative in its traditional form and the discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism differ somewhat, not solely in that the former addresses the whole region while the latter focuses on a single city. Whereas

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the Nahda narrative asserts the presence of an Arabo-Islamic golden age, the so-called classical period of the early centuries succeeded by decline until the French occupation and its aftermath, the discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism goes as far as placing the entire AraboIslamic period under the sign of decline. In The Islamic Roots of Capitalism, one of the signal revisions of the Nahda, Peter Gran cogently argues that this long-entrenched paradigm does not stand up to either historical or historiographical scrutiny. Attending to cultural production in conjunction with socioeconomic change in Egypt from the 1760s to the 1840s, his account demotes the alleged “watershed” of the 1798 Napoleonic occupation as having hurtled the country out of decline, “barbarism and incessant military strife” in the late Ottoman period, into modernity.146 Arguing instead that “the industrial revolution was a global event” and that, in the late eighteenth century, “non-Western regions . . . had indigenous roots for their own modern capitalist cultures” that entailed struggles both local and vis-à-vis Europe, he bears out that the “common premise of no modern non-Western thought which does not ultimately derive from the West must be abandoned,” in this instance, that the Muhammad ‘Ali period is “basically a continuation of trends which began in the eighteenth century not a rupture with some millennial past.”147 In place of the traditional account of neoclassical revivalism coupled with borrowed Western models that identifies the nineteenth century as the turning point, his work recovers a neoclassical revival of the eighteenth century and goes on to chart subsequent phases in which the strategic reappropriation of Arabo-Islamic scholarship likewise mediated changing socioeconomic struggles. Most saliently, he shows that “the commercial revival of the eighteenth century triggered a renewal of vitality in the religious life of Egypt, which in turn gave birth to a nascent secular culture”—whereby the disciplines of literature and history saw their beginnings concomitant on religious revivalism—witnessed in a rise in “critical consciousness in scholarship,” in the revival of the premodern maqama genre now evincing rudiments of the novel form, a certain realism, as well as sincerity in poetry, as opposed to its earlier stylization and hyperbole.148 But what of Alexandria in the Ottoman period specifically? I turn to Salah Haridi’s study of Alexandria in the Ottoman period, which draws a portrait of foreign ethnic groups resident in the city. His study of the professional and social lives of Greeks, Europeans, Syro-Lebanese, North Africans, and residents hailing from the Hijaz

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is based on religious court archives between 1517, the beginning of Egypt’s assimilation into the Ottoman Empire, and 1798, the beginning of the French occupation of Egypt. Haridi, for one, asserts unequivocally that Alexandria did in fact decline in the Ottoman period. However, like Salim, he suggests that this condition goes back to late Mamluk times when the European discovery of the Cape of Good Hope route had a detrimental effect on the commercial life of the city.149 Treaties drawn during the first century of Ottoman rule granted concessions to the Venetians, Genoese, French, and British; Europeans resident in Alexandria therefore participated “in all manner of commercial activities.”150 The minutiae of Ottoman Alexandria that he has brought to light evidence both intercommunal accord and inter- and intracommunal tensions. When a European man accuses a Jew of leading his own wives into prostitution and beats him up, the Muslim witnesses confirm the Jew’s account and the French ones deny it; meanwhile at the wedding of two Christian Greeks in 1577, the bride’s wakil (guardian) is a Jew and the witnesses are Maghrebi and Syro-Lebanese.151 While Egypt had already been incorporated into the world market, it was not before the nineteenth century that Alexandria was fully involved in this shift by dint of Muhammad ‘Ali’s having renovated the harbor, dug the Mahmudiyya Canal, built the arsenal, and had a commission, the Ornato (on which I elaborate in chapter 2) undertake town planning along European lines, among other measures.152 The latter part of the nineteenth century would bring the rise in value of Egyptian cotton, despite vicissitudes, the digging of the Suez Canal, the bombardment of Alexandria and thence British occupation of the country in 1882. What, then, are the colonial conditions that went hand-in-hand with the discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism that I critique in this book? The English edition of Alexandrea ad Aegyptum, which I quoted earlier, was published in 1922; Alexandria, like the rest of Egypt, had long since become subject to the Capitulations, which granted the members of some fourteen countries extraterritoriality. An “imperium in imperio,”153 the Capitulations system guaranteed foreign merchants freedom of trade, exemption from taxation, and trials in consular courts. In later years, this was to be modified into the system of Mixed Courts, a “reforming” compromise allowing Egyptian judges to preside alongside European ones in commercial cases involving Egyptians and non-Egyptians while allowing criminal

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offenses by foreigners to continue to be tried in consular courts; the system was annulled by the Montreux Convention in 1937, which put paid to the Capitulations, but the courts continued until 1949. Egypt, hitherto nominally part of the Ottoman Empire but under the direct rule of the Muhammad ‘Ali dynasty, had been occupied by Britain in 1882 following its bombardment of Alexandria that year—taking as pretext the nationalist uprising by Colonel Ahmad ‘Urabi—and to be proclaimed a Protectorate in 1914. Alexandria had witnessed, in addition to local strikes by the workers and subalterns of the city, Egyptians as well as foreigners,154 waves of nationalist demonstrations as part of the 1919 Revolution against the British occupation. Although the Protectorate was annulled in 1922 and Egypt declared independent, the country continued to sustain British intervention in its affairs long past the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, which was supposed to grant Egypt more independence although it reserved clauses that privileged Britain’s interests. In addition to the Capitulations, Alexandria itself was a “a bridgehead of European colonialism,” as Michael Reimer puts it, with its harbor making it “the entrepôt linking the fields of Egypt with the factories of Europe.”155 The city being “dependent on the export of primary commodities, and increasingly of a single primary commodity [cotton],” he continues, “advanced European colonialism . . . by accelerating Egypt’s economic dependence on agricultural exports; by providing essential financial, legal, and other services to European businesses; and by hosting the country’s largest and most assertive colony of foreigners, which possessed unassailable extraterritorial rights.”156 Alexandria also acquired institutions that demonstrate the intimate connection between cosmopolitanism and colonialism, specifically, the city’s Municipal Council, established in 1890, which for long was almost unparalleled in Egypt by virtue of its structure and mandate.157 For Robert Ilbert, this institution epitomizes the city’s cosmopolitanism understood as “a community of interests”: Between 1890 and 1930 this institution [the Municipal Council] was solidly linked to the interests of the dominant section of society. The names of the council members were exactly those that presided over the communities and ran the cotton exchange and exporters’ association. . . . There was no American style ‘melting pot’ but rather a complex upper class of men and women connected by acquaintance and business. Any ‘cosmopolitanism’ was only a function of the ‘free city’ where the effective rulers knew each other personally, as much through business relations as through community

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or family solidarities. . . . Alexandria taught that a pluralist society could in fact function if based, not on the insistence of some abstract universality, but upon the recognition of the autonomy of different groups.158

One would have thought that the points Ilbert makes about the socioeconomic structure of the council—“dominant section of society” and “upper class of men and women” conjoined with “cotton exchange and exporters’ association”—would lead him to conclude that the Municipal Council is a function of the colonial situation and Alexandria’s particular role in it. Indeed, he is by no means oblivious to these points, but he, instead, upholds Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism as articulated in the council as a model that has something to teach. Yet again, how can one account for a pluralism and an “autonomy” that are, first, upper class and, second, ethnically nonegalitarian since secured by imperially sustained privileges to foreign communities as part and parcel of a colonial economy? Ilbert’s position in the essay I cite distills his stance in his two-volume Alexandrie 1830– 1930, a top-down study of the “notables” and elites of Alexandria, largely European and Levantine, with the Municipal Council as the central, albeit not sole, case study. It was, in fact, the Egyptian government that initially proposed the formation of such a council in the late 1860s “in its long-running battle with foreign governments over the capitulations.” Thus the Provisional and Preparatory Municipal Commission met with opposition from foreigners who were unwilling “to submit to any but voluntary taxes . . . [and] feared that a municipality would undercut consular jurisdiction,” regardless of the “unquestionably European . . . historic inspiration” of such an institution.159 When, some years after the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the Egyptian government pressed for establishing a Municipal Council in Alexandria, the foreign consuls acceded and accepted that foreign nationals pay taxes, in return for representational provisions and a civil character to the institution, as Hilmi Shalabi observes.160 Of the council’s 28 members, according to Ilbert’s own account, 6 were ex-officio members, 8 were appointed by the government albeit according to the council’s criteria of eligibility, “3 members were elected by the college of exporters, 3 by the college of importers, 2 by the committee of proprietors and, finally, 6 members were elected from the ‘general list.’ . . . The only limit fixed concerned nationality: the municipality was not to include more than three elected members from a given nationality.”161

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Although Shalabi concurs that the rules of composition of the council privileged the commercial elite, he, by contrast, emphasizes that the institution allowed for a disproportionate representation of members of the foreign colonies if one bears in mind their status as minorities in the city, as a function of the British occupation and the grip of the foreign consuls. Although he acknowledges the council’s success in controlling epidemics and in other domains, he argues that the structure and rules of the institution resulted in projects dictated by the interests of the largely foreign members, the institution’s neglect of working-class areas, and excessive levying of taxes drawing much criticism from Egyptian Alexandrians.162 Despite being in agreement with Ilbert’s refusal to reduce the modern Alexandrian experience to the binary colonizer-colonized, I must differ with his reading of the Municipal Council; indeed, the evidence he himself presents flies in the face of his often laudatory presentation of the “community of interests” represented by the Municipal Council. His account does note the following: that, according to facts and figures he cites, the electoral condition of paying a rent of LE 75 per annum was forbidding at the time and hence that “one must not confuse ‘municipality’ with ‘democracy.’ These figures suffice to reveal the absolute domination of a small group of merchants on the life of the city”; that indigenes were far less represented in the institution than the Europeans and the Levantines “who constituted only 14.4 % of the population in 1897” and that the British colonial system “reinforced the [ethnic] hierarchy already visible under [Khedive] Ismail”; that there was a hierarchy of quarters, with poorer, indigenous quarters, when not suffering neglect, receiving attention on account of sanitization and fears of epidemics, a belated sense of responsibility having set in, projects of low income housing nevertheless failing; that the (European and Levantine) members of the Municipal Council had strong social and business alliances with each other, that they doubled in roles and functions demonstrating a conflict of interests and the use of municipal privileges for private gain.163 Ilbert adduces the criticism by indigenous members of the Municipal Council’s failings and the later intervention of the Egyptian government, although when he suggests that the newspapers that played a role in the “prise de conscience” and resistance by citizens at large of the institution’s decisions, it should be added that Shalabi’s research demonstrates that it was Arabophone Egyptian newspapers that began to criticize the institution quite early in its history.164 It comes as no surprise that the

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1909 Twentieth Century Impressions of Egypt I cited earlier praises “the Municipality of Alexandria [as] exceptional, for it is one of the most cosmopolitan bodies in the world, and its powers exceed in certain directions even those of the Government.”165 My second overarching contention in this book is that literary criticism, in particular, reiterates and orchestrates with additional contributions of its own the quasi-colonial historiographical narrative of Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism that I critique above. If one were to speak of a modern Alexandrian canon, this would immediately signify the three authors who have been treated as such, if without the label, in critical works on Alexandria, namely, C. P. Cavafy (1863– 1933), E. M. Forster (1879–1970), and Lawrence Durrell (1912–90).166 But what does “canonicity” imply when preceded by “Alexandrian”? An Alexandrian canon means, in this case, works that are deemed exemplary and best, or exclusively, representative of the city, classics of “cosmopolitan Alexandria.” At first sight, the process of selection in this instance of canon formation might seem to place it within efforts to open the Western canon: it might, among other things, be thought to privilege a non-Western literary space; it might be thought to privilege genres usually excluded from the “great books” tradition, such as guidebook writing, in the case of Forster; it might be thought to provide an occasion for reflecting on academic “English lit. crit.” constructions of minor writers versus “general readership” reception, as in the case of Durrell. However, as this book demonstrates, even at its apparently most site-specific, most seemingly generically inclusive, the adduced canonicity is informed here by a number of the traditional processes of canon formation, such as influence and emulation, that predate the drive to open the canon. Bolstered unquestioningly by critical cross-referencing of later writers’ allusions to and citations from earlier ones, the canonizing readings draw from the literary triumvirate a Eurocentric cosmopolitanism complicit with the colonial conception of the city—which the critics by no means shun—by dint of overlooking certain texts, occluding resistances in others, and disregarding genre expectations in given instances. Simultaneously, there is a persistent disregard of the widely divergent representations of the city in Arabic, whether by Egyptians, North Africans, or SyroLebanese. While in earlier, 1970s literary criticism this disregard may have been reinforced by the vicissitudes of translation, which, in turn, are governed by larger processes of canon formation, it is the case that

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more Arabic literary representations of Alexandria have been available in English in recent years; that these texts continue to be overlooked in studies of literary Alexandria published in the new millennium is only further evidence of the durability of the paradigm I critique here.167 It should first be conceded that, as with the pattern of citation, allusion, and imitation underlying and bolstering processes of traditional canon formation, an evident web of connections between Cavafy, Forster, and Durrell does in fact exist. It is a web at times of biographical fact, at others of literary services to the older author, of allusions to antecedent texts—all of which are then solicited by critics to consolidate readings of a sort of chain of transmission of “influence” whereby Durrell is seen as having been influenced by both Forster and Cavafy but partly a Cavafy who has been handed down by Forster on whom Cavafy is said to have had a marked influence. But is this not a belated Alexandrianism—in the sense that I give that word in dialogue with Said’s critical invocation of Alexandria, above—by virtue of its exclusively textual approach that seals off the literary from the ideological impingements of the sociopolitical? Is it conceivable that writers from widely dissimilar backgrounds, exposed to different discourses, are all consonant in their construction of a Eurocentric cosmopolitanism? For instance, one issue that is overlooked in such canonizing readings is the distinction between the traveler, the sojourner (such as Forster and Durrell), the “habitant” (the resident of nonEgyptian origin, such as Cavafy), and the indigene (Egyptian writers such as al-Kharrat and Ibrahim Abdel Meguid), to redeploy terms proposed by Mahmoud Manzalaoui elsewhere.168 Although these categories cannot be absolutely hard and fast, as in the case of “habitant” and “indigene,” in Alexandria their value lies in providing an angle of approach that brings out divergences wrought by questions of ethnicity, the writers’ positionality, and the extent and conditions of their involvement. With a few exceptions,169 the dominant trend in literary criticism of Alexandrian texts was first established in a set of seminal studies in the 1970s such as Robert Liddell’s Cavafy: A Critical Biography (1974), Edmund Keeley’s Cavafy’s Alexandria: A Study of a Myth in Progress (1976), and Jane Lagoudis Pinchin’s Alexandria Still (1977). These volumes, moreover, betray something of a miniature, parallel, mutually citing canon of critical flourishes that take off from what I refer to as the “Alexandrian canon.” That trend continues apace in

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Michael Haag’s Alexandria: City of Memory (2004), which addresses primarily the canonical triumvirate through a biographical and social historical rather than strictly literary critical approach, and is consistent with the 1970s studies in its approach to Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism. Finally, Philip Mansel’s 2010 Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean—a historical study of Alexandria, Smyrna, and Beirut that draws on literary material, hence my including it in this portion of the discussion—while it seeks to be more heedful of Egyptian sources, ends up echoing several of the tropes in the preceding monographs. In appropriating and perpetuating the historiographical narrative that occludes the Arabo-Islamic period while describing a modern Alexandria whose cosmopolitanism replicates that of the city’s Hellenistic golden age, these critical studies, furthermore, have contributed to folding over that account on post-Suez Alexandria by depicting it as likewise a city fallen from cosmopolitan grace.170 Thus both Pinchin and Haag, in the historical context they provide in the introductions to their studies, uncritically reiterate that colonial narrative, often as extrapolated from one of their primary texts, Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide: “For more than a thousand years Alexandria languished, a colorless town” (Pinchin); “Wider and earlier forces than the Arab invasion of Egypt in 640–2 helped destroy the vitality of the city, but certainly over the following twelve hundred years the city declined” (Haag).171 In the introductory chapter to Alexandria Still, Pinchin remarks, “Few places have had as passionate a character. Few have shaped as many sensibilities; for, like a handful of other world-cities, Alexandria was the center of cultural, political, and religious life for many long centuries.”172 But it soon becomes apparent that the “sensibilities” that this “world city” formed do not include Arab ones; indeed, “Alexandria, with its rich past, is at present out of the world’s eye, noted, if at all, as a town where Egyptian presidents on occasion entertain heads of state. The contemporary city might have been easy to forget, except that the spirit of this particular place shaped the fiction of three major twentieth-century writers and through them the imaginations of all of us.”173 The question is not asked whether the contemporary city is forgotten unto itself, unto the region in which it is situated, unto a nonpresidential imaginaire shaping and shaped by other writers and scholars whose mere existence the critic does not choose to entertain. Haag, whose book is subtitled City of Memory, makes a similar point in describing his visit to the building, now converted into offices,

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that had been the Hotel Majestic where Forster stayed on arrival in Alexandria. He finds “idle characters in galabiyyas” and “shrouded young secretaries wearing the hejab” to whom “it is pointless explaining your curiosity,” since a “great sea change has washed over Alexandria and its populace inhabits a history disconnected from the city’s past.”174 Haag is writing more than quarter of a century after Pinchin, which is only to demonstrate the endurance of the patterns I critique here. Over and above the palpable prejudice (“idle” juxtaposed to “galabiyyas”; “shrouded” juxtaposed to “hejab”), his comments are all the more surprising in view of copious evidence that Alexandrian, and Egyptian more broadly, engagements with the city’s cosmopolitanism continue apace. I bring out several of these engagements in the chapters that follow and elaborate on more of them in the final pages of this book. Here, I would note the fact that Alexandrian texts written in Arabic registering “contrapuntal”175 cosmopolitanisms had long since been translated (see al-Kharrat’s two novels City of Saffron and Girls of Alexandria and Abdel Meguid’s No One Sleeps in Alexandria); the underwater archaeological excavations undertaken by Egyptian-European teams had trained attention on the city’s Hellenistic past; and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, itself a long-gestating project that had since the early 1990s refocused attention on Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism in a different key, was inaugurated in 2002— and this to cite only the most immediately obvious evidence that contravenes his assertions. In sharp contrast to Haag’s book is Beverly Butler’s 2007 monograph Return to Alexandria, a politically sound museological ethnography informed by poststructural and postcolonial theory that addresses “cultural heritage revivalism and museum memory.” Straining against “Western writers who have laid claim to city and archive as part of an epic vision of ancient origins and odyssey of homecoming,” Butler’s central case study is the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, as well as underwater archaeology and urban revivalism. Attending to the multiple and multivocal engagements of heritage by different “actors”—the intellectual elite, politicians, officialdom and also ordinary citizens—she produces a narrative of “radical transformation” of Alexandrian heritage “from an elite Western colonial paradigm into an operational model of heritage revivalism in a ‘postcolonial’ context thus confront[ing] [Western] museological/heritage theory with alternative sets of values, critical approaches, theorisations, lived experiences, and life-worlds that currently remain largely unrecognised.”176

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Haag’s assertions, on the other hand, are meant to stake a claim to Western Authority to rescue an erased heritage; what also gets occluded is that the “memory” (Western) that is being rescued has already displaced other (Egyptian and/or Arabo-Islamic) memories. Although Pinchin will elide defining what constitutes “major” as applied to the literary triumvirate, specifically in the case of a writer like Durrell, an implicit answer is to be found in her introduction of the major figures. Cavafy is “the Greek poet who made her [Alexandria] a mythical land, linking an outpost of contemporary European culture to its Hellenistic past.”177 Much later, Haag echoes this, albeit in a discussion of Forster: “Alexandria, an out-planting of European civilisation growing luxuriantly on the coast of Africa.”178 Setting aside the question, to be revisited in the first chapter of this book, whether Cavafy, for one, conceived of Alexandria as “an outpost of European culture,” Pinchin’s investment is obviously in a Hellenocentric or European/ized Philhellenism, one that overlooks the non-Greek, likely Egyptian, element in a “past” whose “Hellenistic” designation should also point to the presence of Egyptian cultural components. Cavafy’s exemplariness and what it consists in having been thus established by Pinchin, “the subject of this study, [is] the profound influence the spirit of Alexandria and of the city’s poet had on two English-speaking writers—E. M. Forster and Lawrence Durrell—whom world war brought to Alexandria, where they confronted the city’s history and ambience, the legendary Cavafy, and themselves. Both wrote about the poet and Alexandria and, in different ways, sought what Cavafy had sought: to capture the spirit of an extraordinary city.”179 Citation of and influence by Cavafy are intrinsic to the canonization of texts by the two other enshrined writers, whom she describes as “English Alexandrians.” The critical flourishes in these studies include invoking specific Cavafy poems in the context of postindependence Alexandria, a city that the poet did not know but that produces in the critic a sort of disorientation (a situation that applies to Forster’s Alexandrian texts, too, as I shall later demonstrate). The title of Pinchin’s book comes from a Cavafy poem, “Exiles,” or alternatively, “Refugees.” Although the time frame of the poem cannot be established, it is clearly set in Arab Alexandria, “after the Moslem conquest,” as she puts it.180 The speaker in the poem, an exile from Constantinople who may have lived under the reign of the Byzantine emperor Basil I, 867–86,181 lives in the hope of an imminent reversal of his fortunes. Whiling away his

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time with the few Greeks who have remained in the city, and with strolls towards the Hippodrome and sightseeing of the palaces, he remarks, “It goes on being Alexandria still.”182 It is Keeley who most directly spells out the appropriation of “Exiles,” specifically, for the critical sense of disorientation. In a gesture similar to Pinchin’s, Keeley’s first chapter, “The Literal City,” begins with a short analysis of “Exiles” and brings out the hidden pathos and dramatic irony in the exile’s dreams of return to Constantinople from an “Arabic [sic] Alexandria” given that “the emperor who had to be overthrown before the exile could return to his own country [and] actually kept his throne for twenty years.” Hence “aware of the poet’s point of view,” Keeley says, “I find it hard to move through the streets of today’s Alexandria without feeling the presence of Cavafy’s ghost, especially the threat of its mockery.” It is significant that on the visit to the city that Keeley records, he was “arriving from Greece” and “tried to make myself believe that the ugly reality I was seeing masked the presence of another city, more real in its way, a city open to those who could bring to it . . . a mythical sensibility if you will, akin to Cavafy’s and exemplified in recent English letters by E. M. Forster and Lawrence Durrell. But the mask, the surface reality, was so unlike the literary images I brought with me, so immediate and harsh in its effect, that it frustrated any imaginative projection.”183 Calling the city “first of all squalid” (the squalid conditions in which some of the young men in Cavafy’s poems work having been forgotten), Keeley’s grievances are the Egyptianization and Arabization of Alexandria, and the city’s inscription within the politics of the region, this being now the Middle East and not a Hellenic/Hellenized Mediterranean. Hence “where the wondrous ancient Pharos used to stand” is “now Fort Kayet Bey, grotesquely restored as a museum celebrating the Egyptian navy,” though it is not clear why this should be grotesque. Likewise, he laments the fact that “the name of the poet’s street has been changed, from Rue Lepsius to Rue Sharm el Sheikh to commemorate the town on the Red Sea lost to Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967” (the street has been renamed again most recently, in response to a Greek initiative, “C. P. Cavafy”). From there, Keeley turns to a dwindling group of Greeks meeting at the “dying Association Hellenique Eschyle-Arian,” so reminiscent, he finds, of the speaker in “Exiles.” Stating that “the surface of Alexandria is now Arabic once again—Arabic and little else,” he, unlike Pinchin,

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momentarily concedes that “the mythical city beyond is visible only to the inner eye of an Egyptian poet, one who can see the vital imaginative resources that remain hidden from those confined to a European perspective.” This is a possibility, however, that Keeley does not pursue further. He goes on to restore, rather than read differently, the “Alexandrian canon”: “if the surface one sees today is unrecognizable to someone brought up on the images created by Cavafy, Forster, and the other literary ‘Alexandrians,’ this merely serves to reinforce the sense that literal Alexandria is not the one that has counted most for the world of letters.”184 Pinchin ends her first chapter where Keeley begins his, albeit in her case with recourse to another Cavafy poem, used as an antidote against, or a last sigh wrung by, disorientation experienced in postindependence Alexandria: By the time we got to see her . . . Greece in this city had all but faded away. The building in which Cavafy had lived was marked by two signs, one in Greek and Arabic commemorating the poet, the other advertising the Pension Amir. We came away from our visit to his rooms with a clear idea of the Arab children who had stared at their strange visitors. . . . The life of the back streets has paled too. But a few men still meet to play backgammon and smoke water pipes in the coffee houses. And in an almost empty taverna, Greek men even now dance to the bouzouki. We came upon a narrow, crowded shop poorly lit and in disarray but full of old books, where a nervous Greek sold me a first edition of Cavafy poems. His frail father sat on a chair in the rear and, when he had heard our purpose, began to recite ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ slowly, without missing a line, in the 1970s, among those yellowed books in Alexandria.185

Proceeding from a vision of the city and its erstwhile ethnic heterogeneity as dominated by the Hellenic element, Pinchin coerces all and any details encountered in a postindependence Alexandria into elegiac terms, ones borrowed from her reading of the “Alexandrian canon.” She does not spell out her feelings about the two signs in Greek and Arabic, but her next comments about the “Arab children” (not “children” simply), which render their gaze, rather than hers, intrusive, are revealing. The only conceivable reason the “life of the back streets” would have “paled”—in Pinchin’s eyes—is that Cavafy is known to have had a predilection for them, and hence now that he is dead they must have paled. Likewise, the curious claim about nearly empty coffeehouses must derive from Cavafy having frequented cafés, and hence the imperative to cast coffeehouses as now barely frequented. But the

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mourning of Hellenized Alexandria reaches its peak in the strategically placed final line about the elderly Greek quoting “Waiting for the Barbarians” in 1970s Alexandria. To a reader unfamiliar with the poem, the last line of Pinchin’s introductory chapter—crowning as it does this description of the city, and given the historical binary of Greek versus barbarian—would translate into a statement about the “Arabs” as being the barbarians, and the barbarian Arabs having arrived, which in turn means that they were never there in the first place. However, Cavafy’s poem in and of itself, set in what seems to be a Roman or possibly Byzantine late antiquity context, casts the awaited barbarians as possible redeemers of a decadent society. The poem ends with the lines, “So now what will become of us, without any barbarians. Those men were one kind of resolution” (BTCT 93). Unlike Pinchin, Liddell initially seems to have taken heed of what the poem actually says but only to then go on to preempt it in his derision of an Arab Alexandria: “It [‘Waiting for the Barbarians’] has passed from mouth to mouth of people ‘tired of living and scared of dying’, who have been cheered by its light-hearted spirit. There is even a note of hope.” What that hope consists in, according to Liddell, is this: “Suppose that at our frontiers there are, after all, no Barbarians? One may doubt if it is still much quoted in Alexandria, since the Barbarians have come.”186 Liddell ends his book where Pinchin and Keeley begin theirs, or rather, since their books were published after his, they start where his “Afterword” has left off. Liddell’s “Afterword” begins with an invocation of Forster’s account of the mortifying experience, on a visit to Alexandria years after his guidebook was first published, of losing his way in the city’s new railway station. The anecdote comes from a preface by Forster to Alexandria: A History and a Guide, where it is meant to justify the publication of the revised second edition on the grounds of the city’s growing urbanization. The reference to Forster foreshadows Liddell’s autobiographical account about his ambivalent, disoriented relationship with the city. For, before concluding the “Afterword” with an assertion of his own literary citizenship of Alexandria, Liddell recounts, “In 1948 I had the honour to be invited to give the English lectures to be given in the celebrations of Cavafy’s fifteenth anniversary. . . . Five years later I saw Alexandria for the last time, from the air. Since then it has been further ‘transwogrified’ (if one may coin a word); there is a bazaar in Cavafy’s Rue Cherif [where he was born], and his very bones are threatened.”187 There is no bazaar in Rue Cherif but

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the same European-style shops that Forster and Cavafy had known; Forster in 1923: “Rue Chérif Pacha . . . too shoppy to be genteel” (PP 87).188 Cavafy’s bones remain undisturbed in the Greek Orthodox cemetery in Chatby where they were interred in 1933.189 The citing of the threat to the poet’s bones by Liddell—who is reporting on a postindependence Alexandria that by his own admission he has not seen—is in consonance with the arrival of the barbarians and the “transwogrification.” Mansel ends the last of the chapters he devotes to Alexandria, titled “Egyptianization,” with the following envoi: Founded in 1992 by the Hellenic Foundation for Culture, the Cavafy museum in his eight-room flat on the Rue Lepsius (now Rue Sharm el-Sheikh, as decayed as other streets in the district) is visited by more Greeks than Egyptians. The loudspeakers of a nearby mosque project the call to prayer into Cavafy’s icon-hung bedroom. The museum’s curator, Mahmud Said, says, ‘Alexandria is not much interested in Cavafy any more. We’re not even interested in the Alexandria he lived in.’ For the novelist Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, ‘It is enough to put Cavafy out of favour that he was Greek and wrote in Greek. Cosmopolitan Alexandria is finished.’ An Alexandria deputy representing the Muslim Brothers, Sobhi Saleh, says, ‘Cavafy was a onetime event in Alexandria; his poems are sinful.’ Today he would be driven out of the city.190

What we have here, echoing Haag’s references to the exasperating ignorance of Forster by secretaries in hejab, is barbarism reinscribed as an encroaching Islam, as the menace of Islamism. Hence, in a predominantly Muslim country, there is something tainting, the passage implies, about the call to prayer filtering “into Cavafy’s icon-hung bedroom.” It only follows that there would be a quotation from a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and that it should be placed last, crescendo-like. But it is not the member of the Muslim Brotherhood who concludes; it is Mansel himself who clinches the arrival of the barbarian-as-Muslim with the words, “Today [Cavafy] would be driven out of the city.” Note that the position from which Abdel Meguid speaks is not glossed: to wit, it is a staunchly secular one, hence his statement articulates an autocritique that, in neo-Orientalist fashion, is cited as an indictment certified by a native informant. It is Mansel, after all, who opines that “[i]n 1952 Alexandria itself was deposed, as well as the King,” who speaks of the post-Suez “city’s fall,” leads up to the passage I cite with “Once Egyptianization was complete, Islamization gathered force, as some had foretold,” observes that nowadays “almost

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all Alexandrian women cover their hair with scarves,” and, adducing the nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul and his wife, laments, “Their secular attitudes, however, have been forgotten.”191 It therefore only follows that Mansel should have not posed the question whether there are translations of Cavafy in Arabic. If he had done so, he might have been surprised that one, by an Alexandrian New York-resident poet and artist, albeit printed in Egypt, was issued by a Saudi Arabian publisher, in 1992; that the Egyptian Ministry of Culture published an Arabic translation of Cavafy’s poetry in 2005; and that in 2011, a year after Mansel’s book came out, it put out another translation of the Alexandrian Greek’s poetry.192 I address this reception in chapter 1, and in the Epilogue/Prologue I address creative work that engages Cavafy as recent as 2012. A supplementary trope of mourning for the passing of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism is the Chatby Cemeteries—a complex that includes burial grounds for Jews and Christians of various denominations, as well a “Cimitero Civile” or Cemetery for Free Thinkers—as in Mansel’s assertion that “[t]he most compelling relics of Alexandria’s cosmopolitan century . . . are the tombs of notables . . . in the district of Chatby . . . [—] challenges in stone to today’s Muslim city.”193 The macabre, though, reaches its zenith, or rather nadir, in the conclusion to Haag’s book where—following the observation that nowadays “the city is no longer ad but in Aegyptum and uniform in culture”— he remarks that “almost all the citizens of cosmopolitan Alexandria have long since gone away, leaving a new people without memories to inhabit the carcass of others’ lives.” Egyptians, clearly, were never citizens of cosmopolitan Alexandria, which was never part of Egypt to start with, and they are, moreover, not only devoid of historical memory but also evidently parasitical. It only follows that after the author mentions the speculation that an ancient tomb in the Chatby Cemeteries, where Cavafy is interred, belongs to Alexander the Great, he closes on an elegiac note: “the first of the Alexandrians buried among the last.”194 A chthonic, ghostly quality has long since attached itself to Alexandrian mythology. An Alexandrian urban legend recorded by the tenth-century Arab historian al-Mas‘udi had it that at the founding of the city, demonic sea monsters would come out by night and destroy the buildings, Alexander averting further attacks by having semblances of the creatures placed on columns on the seashore to drive them away. Over many succeeding centuries, a pronounced

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sense of loss accrued, bolstered by the absence of Alexandria’s legendary monuments and the fact of its being archaeologically stratified, built on earlier Alexandrias. In a representation of the melancholic search for anteriority and disappeared landmarks, the Alexandrian director Youssef Chahine (1926–2008) includes Fellinesque sequences in his feature film Iskindiriyya Kaman wa Kaman (Alexandria Again and Forever, 1989), in which Alexander’s long-lost body is no sooner found underground during construction than lost to a screw drill. The uncanny possession by a ghostly Alexandria has been reinforced (in a manner that has its parallels in other cities such as Salonica) not only by the obliteration or paucity of material traces, but by the historical narrative that posits a (Hellenistic) golden age followed by a “decline and fall.” In a letter sent from Alexandria after he had embarked on writing his guidebook, Forster observes, “Ancient Alexandria . . . is proving a most amusing companion. I’m constructing by archaeological and other reading an immense ghost city.”195 The question, though, is, which ghosts are summoned? My third overarching contention is that the canonized texts are by no means congruent with each other on Alexandrian cosmopolitanism as the deconstructive readings in this book expound. The trope of the Egyptian in postindependence Alexandria as the arrival of the barbarian—adduced from a very specific reading of Cavafy—provides a lever with which to pry open the much-vaunted Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, so steeped in a Hellenic idiom, in relation to this most othering category of the barbarian, itself steeped in a Hellenic idiom. This book addresses Alexandrian cosmopolitanism in four writers: the first three chapters are devoted to the canonical triumvirate, the final one to Bernard de Zogheb (1924–99), a virtually unpublished Alexandrian author of Syro-Lebanese background. In contrast to criticism that constitutes Cavafy, Forster, and Durrell as consonant in their Eurocentric vision of Alexandria and its cosmopolitanism, I elicit the continuities and discontinuities with the dominant paradigm of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism in the texts of each and by contrast to the others’. In my discussions of the three canonical writers, I map in overlooked texts, including archival material to bring out a range of stances, anticolonial resistances in some instances and ambivalences and colonial discourse in others. In the final chapter, I elicit from de Zogheb’s operettas the spoofing of high canonical forms and the impetus to rehabilitate a denigrated Levantinism by a writer inscribed

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in Alexandrian cosmopolitanism who adapts elements from Cavafy and Forster, both biographical and literary. Chapter 1 begins by identifying the way in which Cavafy and his corpus have been pressed into the service of consolidating both a Hellenized Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and a binary of Greek (read: European) versus barbarian (read: Egyptian/Arab/Islamic). I then put this received critical wisdom to the test by posing the question what constitutes “Greek” and “barbarian” in his work and how entrenched that binary is. Given changing applications of the term barbarian both historically and within the Cavafy corpus, I do not confine the discussion to Alexandria but sound out the poet’s attitudes to a range of cultural contexts assumed to have been “othered” by him. In Chapter 2, I reinterpret Forster’s oft-quoted Egyptian texts—primarily Alexandria: A History and a Guide, as well as Pharos and Pharillon—by questioning genre expectations, by holding them up against the physical city to probe the underpinnings of its representation. I also tackle the ideological freighting of his historiography in the Alexandrian books and contrast it to a contemporary political tract on Egypt that he wrote to draw out the novelist’s Hellenizing articulation of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism vis-à-vis the colonial situation in Egypt and subalternity. In Chapter 3, I examine the apparent contrasts between things Greek and things Oriental in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet to arrive at the text’s celebrated hybridity and ask, in what precisely does it consist? Placing center stage the end of empire moment of the Quartet’s writing and resituating that hybridity vis-à-vis the Western notion of the Levantine, the chapter rereads the cosmopolitanism as articulated in function of neocolonialism and the use to which it puts minorities. In Chapter 4, I take up again the question of Levantinism, this time as articulated by de Zogheb. An artist and librettist whose ethnic background firmly affiliates him with the Levant and whose unpublished diaries and letters attest to the tensions of coming to grips with that specific cosmopolitan formation, de Zogheb wrote his libretti toward the end of the colonial period and afterward. Written in a pidgin Italian that enmeshes French, English, Greek, and Arabic loanwords, and set to pop tunes, his libretti project a parodic camp celebration of verbal mongrelization and gilded mores. De Zogheb’s libretti—in various ways from Le Sorelle Brontë, the first and only published one, to the last, “La Vita Alessandrina,” about Cavafy—undertake a dual labor of legitimization of homoeroticism and an elite Alexandrian Levantinism. The Epilogue/Prologue tackles much later texts—memoirs, films, and

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fiction—to demonstrate how different constituencies have extended or riposted to the literary legacies and cosmopolitan discourse discussed in the book. The texts thus covered in this study are from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first. Arabic literary criticism, by and large, does not get translated into English; meanwhile, Arabic literary texts rendered into English are not infrequently discussed in isolation from their local reception. In the case of Alexandria, there is an analogous situation stemming from the same root cause. Although the canonical authors have written in European languages about this Egyptian city, critics have by and large read them without paying heed to contemporary Arabic texts about the same issues and urban space, or to how their work has been received in Egypt. Throughout—whenever possible and wherever relevant—I have sought to situate the texts I discuss in relation to the country about which they were written. Hence my endeavor to bring into dialogue a given writer’s Egyptian interlocutor, draw on contemporary Egyptian texts or ones addressing the same period, elicit alternative appeals to cosmopolitanism, or broach the reception of and artistic engagements with the texts in Egypt. Elsewhere, I have written on Egyptian literary and cinematic texts about cosmopolitan Alexandria as well as other postindependence cultural engagements with the space of the city. Discussions of this material are present in the different chapters and the Epilogue/Prologue of this book, but it is my hope to revisit and elaborate it more fully in a later work. Finally, this book strategically treats Alexandria in conjunction with other spaces, such as Andalusia, the Maghreb, the Syro-Lebanese eastern Mediterranean and Baghdad: this is part of my effort to steer the city’s cosmopolitanism away from a Europe construed as its true North and indicate other(ed) intercultural coordinates.

a note on tr ansliter ation In transliterating from Arabic, I have adapted here the transliteration system of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, with minimal diacritical marks—denoting the ‘ayn by ‘ and the hamza by ’—except in instances where they are present in the original quotation in an English text. For names of authors whose works have been translated into English, such as Naguib Mahfouz, I have adopted the standardized spelling. I have followed a simplified transliteration system of Greek names and words and dispensed with diacritical marks.

ch apter one

Of Greeks, Barbarians, Philhellenes, Hellenophones, and Egyptiotes C. P. Cavafy

In the second volume of his study L’Hellénisme et l’Égypte moderne, subtitled Contribution de l’Hellénisme au développement de l’Égypte moderne (1930), Athanase G. Politis, the historian of the Greek community in Egypt, concludes with the chapter “La vie intellectuelle et artistique des Hellènes en Égypte,” a good portion of which is devoted to C. P. Cavafy. Underscoring the poet’s originality, Politis elaborates on the belatedness of recognition of Cavafy’s poetry, and the role therein of his idiosyncratic publishing patterns, before going on to expound a tripartite classification of his poems. The three categories, which Politis concedes are not impermeable, are (a) the meditative/philosophical, (b) the historical, and (c) the sensual or aesthetic.1 An anonymous 1930 French article extolling Cavafy’s poetry, and assumed to have been written by him, likewise refers to “his historical, psychological and philosophical value” (SPW 143; see also 163). Some, like W. H. Auden, George Savidis, and Edmund Keeley, have endorsed the tripartite division; others, including Pinchin and Arnold Toynbee, have come up with a bipartite categorization, sometimes construed as overlapping, such as the “historical” and the “erotic” or sensual; yet others, such as John Chioles, have pronounced Cavafy’s three categories “an ironic smokescreen . . . a harmless half-truth.”2 But, for my purposes of pursuing the valences of cosmopolitanism in Cavafy’s texts, what gives me pause is Politis’s commentary about the historical poems. Citing the Hellenization of the kingdoms that sprang up from Alexander’s conquests, Politis says that Cavafy often turns to the

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Seleucid dynasty, “under which Hellenic civilization made more rapid progress than in Egypt, perhaps because in Syria it did not have to struggle against a local civilization already very ancient as in the Nile valley.”3 As for the broader reasons for Cavafy’s choice of the Hellenistic period, Politis has this to say: For this historical period [the Hellenistic] is particularly fitting as a framework for the diverse historical characters whom he [Cavafy] wants to bring to life again. In the Alexandria and the Egypt of that time, as is also the case in those of today, there were, alongside the indigenes, foreigners. Among the latter, many, although not Hellenes, nevertheless spoke Greek; they were Hellenophones. They were numerous. Hellenic civilization had melted into one and the same mold men of different nationalities to whom Roman peace (pax romana) had contributed by giving them similar characteristics in such a way that the Graeco-Roman world of back then can be compared to our own nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In brief, what characterizes this epoch is above all the absence of a particular homeland and of a narrow nationalism, the absence of a constraining tradition, the facility of communications and, finally, a freedom of mores and a sexual morality similar to those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4

The cosmopolitanism that obtains in Politis’s reading of Cavafy would seem to be defined against allegiance to the nation in the sort of intermingling that speaks to what Zubaida construes as one of the hallmarks of cosmopolitan places as supportive of “culturally promiscuous life, drawing on diverse ideas, traditions and innovations.”5 Yet if cosmopolitanism takes the form of the melting pot, this is an emphatically Hellenizing melting pot. The dominant theme in the account, ultimately, is not so much the intermixing of cultures, because ethnic difference is superseded by and contained within the Hellenic cultural matrix of “Hellenophones.” Although Politis does not use the term in this context, what informs his commentary is the notion of the Koine, or the common Greek tongue. As for indigenous cultures (the Egyptian in both ancient and modern times and the ancient Syrian), these are acknowledged—in the context of Cavafy’s poetry— only as obstacles, of varying degrees of tenacity, to the desired teleological progression of a Hellenization that would effect an acculturation of non-Greeks rather than allow for any reciprocity of influence. Although Politis does not use the word barbarian, the palpable implication here is that because the Egyptians, the “indigenes,” are not

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Hellenophone, they will remain perpetually beyond Cavafy’s pale. Of note, also, is the fact that Politis projects the same Hellenizing state of affairs under Macedonian Ptolemaic rule, and under the imperial Roman subjection, onto modern Egypt, which was ruled by a TurcoCircassian dynasty of Albanian origin and was later also simultaneously a quasi-British colony (Pax Romana, of course, echoes, and inspired the phrasing of, Pax Britannica),6 and nominally part of the Ottoman Empire (although the latter was no longer the case when Politis published his book). In this sense, Politis would have us believe that Cavafy’s cosmopolitanism is not only predominantly Hellenic in timbre but also in collusion with imperial programs of which the historian, for one, is by no means critical. Cavafy did in fact write a review of the Greek edition of the first volume of Politis’s book, L’Hellénisme et l’Égypte moderne: Histoire de l’Hellénisme égyptien de 1798 à 1927 (1928). It is significant that in this laudatory review, Cavafy underscores the value of the book not only for the Greek resident of Egypt but also for Greeks of the mainland, and that the only section of this book dealing primarily with the Greeks in modern Egypt that he chooses to single out is Politis’s account of the Greeks in Hellenistic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian Egypt—the period that had inspired a large number of poems in his corpus.7 As for the second volume of Politis’s book, there is substantial evidence in the account of Cavafy’s work that the historian had interviewed the poet. Cavafy’s abandoning of his early Byzantine phase, for instance, is, “as he himself has admitted to us,” because it did not provide a suitable framework for his characters; and it was the Hellenistic period that “inspired” him, a word Politis uses despite the fact “that the poet detests it,”8 and so on. Such parenthetical statements would seem to imply that Politis’s ten-page section on Cavafy was indebted to comments, always alluded to but never quoted, made by the poet, whether or not the text actually underwent his authorization. Yet two questions remain to be posed: first, given Cavafy’s idiosyncratic publishing patterns,9 which the historian himself underscores, to what extent could anything purporting authoritativeness be said about Cavafy’s poetry while he was still alive? Second, to what extent were Cavafy’s comments, assuming he made them, brought in line with Politis’s narrative? After all, where the historian refers to comments made by the poet, it is in contexts other than the long quotation above. My sense is that a number of the poems and prose texts available to us today, many published posthumously, considerably

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modify Politis’s account, some of the main features of which, albeit mostly independently of his book, long continued to find expression among Cavafy scholars. A “Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe”: thus the felicitous oft-quoted Forsterian description of Cavafy (PP 91). Apart from his sexuality, that angle is in no small measure formed by Cavafy’s diasporic positionality: an Alexandrian Greek from a cotton-trading, part-aristocratic Constantinopolitan family that had fallen on hard times; who spent some of his formative years in Liverpool, London, and Istanbul; who was later to work under the British in the Irrigation Service in Alexandria, where his English bosses would occasionally correct his English but treat him with more deference than they did the Egyptians working under him; and who visited Greece for the first time at the age of thirty-eight, keeping a travel journal in English.10 As Cavafy himself famously declared, “I too am Hellenic [or ‘a Hellene’ . . . ]. Notice how I put it: not Greek . . . nor Hellenized [or ‘Hellenified’ . . . ], but Hellenic,’” which, as Keeley has suggested, denotes an allegiance to broader Hellenism.11 Given Cavafy’s self-designation as Hellenic, what significations of “Greek” and “barbarian” obtain in his texts? Cavafy’s poems are replete with instances of linguistic and ethnic diversity: witness, for example, the Alexandrian crowd in “Alexandrian Kings” (1912; disseminated) that, at a spectacle put up by Antony and Cleopatra, “worked themselves into raptures, and called out / cheers in Greek, in Egyptian, and some in Hebrew” (BTCT 23; see TP1 42), or the young men “In a Town of Osroini” (1916/1917), in Mesopotamia, who “are a mixture here: Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, Medes” (BTCT 61; see TP1 80).12 But neither such instances nor Cavafy’s self-designation as “Hellenic” settles my question as to the relationship between Greek and barbarian, which, to my mind, is a signal angle of approach to the Alexandrian cosmopolitanism of which he has come to be seen as figurehead in the modern period. It is true that neither category has been historically monolithic: for example, barbarian, if it signifies a Greek-coded “Otherness”—if, that is, it is the Greek name for the Other—has been applied to differently construed and Orientalized Others, such as the Egyptians and the Persians, whose “othering” has likewise shifted over time, as I will elaborate later.13 But my interest here is in the interplay between Greek and barbarian specifically in Cavafy, with the historical context brought in, at a later stage in the discussion,

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as it has a bearing on the texts. The presence of such a category as Philhellene,14 if we set it in relation to Politis’s Hellenophone, prompts us to ask if—in Cavafy’s texts—the binary of Greek and barbarian is as entrenched as it seems. Is a Hellenophone necessarily a Philhellene, and vice versa? And what of Greeks who are no longer Hellenophone? What is the place of colonialism, the conquest of barbarian by Greek, in the production of Philhellenes? And wherein specifically to factor the Egyptiotes, the Greeks of modern quasi-colonial Egypt, in relation to these questions? I therefore look at a number of poems, not all of them necessarily related to Egypt, where the meaning of these categories shifts, as a backdrop to another discussion later where I bring these questions to bear on Egyptian themes. The poems tackled are not confined to what is referred to as the Cavafy “canon,” meaning poems he considered final and published (after his own fashion), but include the unpublished or “hidden,” the “repudiated” and the “unfinished” ones. In drawing on the noncanonical poems, I consider the implications of the given text’s status. In light of the 1970s critical stances that Hellenize the city through a Cavafy oblivious to Egyptianness and hence go on to “barbarize” postcolonial Alexandria, I dwell on things Egyptian, whether Pharaonic, Coptic, or modern, and vestigial Arabo-Islamic elements in Cavafy’s texts, and, where relevant, read these in terms of the British occupation of Egypt. I also seek, to the extent that space allows and wherever relevant, to draw into the discussion Egyptian responses to Cavafy. Tracing these categories has dictated my choice of texts: several of his poems set in Alexandria are not relevant to these issues, while others set elsewhere, as well as little-discussed prose texts, speak far more directly to my concerns. My argument is that in almost all the categories, there is some evidence— to a greater or lesser degree—of a binarism at work; simultaneously, the corpus of prose and poetry is also polyvalent in that it yields an antiessentialist permeability, a continuum of shifting identities and an empathy that bespeak a diasporic Greek’s sensibility.

hellenism, philhellenism, and diaspor a The poem “In the Year 200 b.c.” (1916 [?]/1931) is a good starting point in that it refers explicitly to Alexander’s conquests and is spoken some 130 years after his decisive battles by a narrator who is a product of the new world that the Macedonian’s conquests brought about.

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The poem takes as its epigraph part of an inscription that, according to Plutarch, Alexander sent to Greece carved on spoils of war. Cavafy’s epigraph reads, “Alexander, son of Philip and all the Greeks except the Lacedaimonians—” (BTCT 181; see TP2 93). That the poet has omitted the rest of the line as cited in Plutarch, “who won this spoile from the Barbarous Asians,”15 begs the question how this blanking out of the barbarian plays into the poem. The speaker begins by conceding what he assumed would have been the indifference of the Lacedaimonians, or Spartans, who refused to participate in Alexander’s conquests, to the snub in the inscription. He then goes on to enumerate the victorious battles and sing the praises of the post-Alexander world thus: So, except the Lacedaimonians at Granikos; and after that at Issus; and in the decisive battle that demolished the terrifying army which the Persians mustered at Arbela: which set out for victory from Arbela, and was demolished. And from this marvelous pan-Hellenic expedition, the triumphant, the effulgent, the extolled, the glorified as no other had been glorified, the peerless: we emerged; a new Greek world, magnificent. We; the Alexandrians, the Antiochans, the Selefkians, and the numberless remaining Greeks of Egypt and of Syria, and those in Media, and those in Persia, and all the rest. With our widespread governance of many lands, with a versatile process of judicious adjustment. And the Common Greek Language which we’ve carried as far as Bactria, as far as the Indians. As if we’d mention Lacedaimonians now! (BTCT 181–82; see TP2 93–94)

The poem appears to be charting a celebratory progression, starting from the city-state to a Hellenistic cosmopolitanism in consonance with Politis’s claims. Although Cavafy has omitted the reference to barbarians from the inscription as cited in Plutarch, the barbarian in the first of the stanzas quoted above is implicitly the Persians. Yet it is worthwhile to pause at the speaker’s reference to the (historical) “pan-Hellenic” expedition and elicit from it the twofold identity in

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Greece of the city-states. Historically, there was, on the one hand, the distinction “between citizen and xenos [foreigner]” as one “always of the utmost importance though it was a distinction between Greeks”; and, on the other, there was simultaneously a “larger identity” defined by the distinction between Greek versus or “opposed to nonGreek or barbarian.”16 The “new Greek world,” so lavishly extolled by the speaker, is one in which the diverse populations he names are held together by “the Common Greek Language” (“tin koine Elliniki lalia” [TP2 94])—an indication of which is that the speaker, necessarily a member of one of the different kingdoms that spun out from Alexander’s conquests, speaks on behalf of these very heterogeneous peoples—as well as the “versatile process of judicious adjustment” (“Me tin pikili drasi ton stochastikon prosarmogon” [TP2 94]). The chauvinistic, triumphalist surface meaning of the text, however, is subverted by the date given in the title of the poem, over and above the reader’s knowledge of Cavafy’s irony in a poem such as “Kaisarion” (1914/1918) about the grandiloquent epithets of the Ptolemies: “All are brilliant, / glorious, mighty, doers of good deeds; / everything they undertake surpassing wise” (BTCT 55; see TP1 73). As critics have noted,17 200 b.c. is three years away from the battle of Cynoscephalae and ten from the battle of Magnesia, at which Rome would defeat the last Macedonian Philip and Antiochus III, respectively—events Cavafy was to write about in “The Battle of Magnesia” (1915; disseminated), “In a Large Greek Colony, 200 b.c.” (1928; disseminated), and in “Agelaus” (1932; unfinished), as well as allude to in “Nothing about the Lacedaemonians” (1930; unfinished).18 In a discussion of this poem, Keeley, detecting Cavafy’s irony and bringing out the significance of the titular date, astutely dissociates the poet from the speaker. Conceding the ambiguity of the poem, and suggesting that Cavafy had earlier shared the speaker’s “bias,” he claims that the “perspective is that of the poet-historian who sees a more universal, and necessarily tragic, pattern behind even those periods of historical greatness that best manifest the cultural and political values he believes in.” Keeley’s interpretation of this late poem belongs to the broader framework of his Cavafy’s Alexandria, where the argument is that the poet “evolved,” in ever-widening concentric circles, from “the metaphoric city” to the “sensual city” to “mythical Alexandria” and thence to “the world of Hellenism,” finally attaining to “the universal perspective.” Hence Keeley’s locating in an earlier Cavafy phase what he sees as a coherent, concerted vision of Hellenism, one

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that, at that stage, consistently endorsed its “cultural and political values.”19 While a good number of Cavafy texts do elevate Hellenism, others certainly pluralize and even undercut it along various ethnic and ideological axes. That the quality of Hellenism, in and of itself, and as distinct from the other cultures that went into the formation of the Hellenistic period, is exalted is palpable in “Epitaph of Antiochus, King of Kommagini” (1923; disseminated). Here, the second stanza of the poem is the quoted epitaph that a sophist writes: “People of Kommagini, let the fame of beneficent Antiochus the King be celebrated worthily. He was a provident ruler of the country. He lived a just man, wise, magnanimous. He was also that best of things, Hellenic— mankind has no quality more precious; everything beyond that belongs to the gods.” (BTCT 132; see TP2 42)

While the figure of the sophist is repaying royal hospitality in this instance, sophists are a largely valorized category in Cavafy, as has been argued. 20 What is of no mean significance is the process of production of the artifact, the epitaph, as narrated in the first stanza. The sophist is an Ephesian, with a Greek name, Kallistratos, who is no longer resident at the court; he has written, as advised by “Syrian courtiers,” the eulogy most likely to please the sister of the deceased monarch of the kingdom on the west bank of the Upper Euphrates that had previously been Assyrian. 21 Thus the different participants in the production of this epitaph—patroness, Greek sophist, and Syrian courtiers—are unanimous on the testament that is to be filtered down to the people of Kommagini, namely, that the most exalted quality attainable by mankind is being “Hellenic.” This would appear to corroborate Politis’s comments about the appeal of Hellenistic Syria to Cavafy on account of Hellenic civilization’s rapid “progress” there. Although Hellenism is undeniably next to godliness in “Epitaph of Antiochus, King of Kommagini,” what that quality consists in is left unstated; “Poseidonians” (1906; hidden), by contrast, offers one if by no means the only answer to that question in Cavafy’s corpus. In this poem, as the epigraph indicates, Cavafy draws on an account taken from Athenaios about the Poseidonians, a Greek people long settled in what is now Italy, who “forgot the Greek language, / mixed in for so many centuries / with Tyrrheneans, and with Italiotes, and other

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foreigners” (BTCT 256). 22 The sole connection they have retained with their origin is a Greek holiday with music and contests: And habitually, toward the holiday’s end, they would tell each other about their ancient customs, and would say the Greek names once more, which precious few barely understood. And their holiday always ended melancholy. Because they remembered they too were Greeks— they too had been Greeks in Italy; and how they’d fallen now, how they’d changed, living and speaking barbarically, withdrawn—oh the calamity!—from Hellenism. (BTCT 256; see KP 89)

While in the poem “Epitaph of Antiochus, King of Kommagini,” Syrians concur with a Greek Ephesian in upholding Hellenism in an area that had become Hellenized in the wake of Alexander’s conquests, the earlier, older ethnic Greek colonists of what was Magna Graecia in “Poseidonians” perceive their loss of the quality of Hellenism as a “fall from paradise.”23 Here the loss of Hellenism is effected through ethnic intermingling and, more specifically, the acquisition of a different language at the expense of Greek. The attendant hybridization is conceived of as assimilation into the category “barbarian”—“living and speaking barbarically” (“na zoun kai na omiloun Varvarika”); “other foreigners” (“Ki allous ksenous” [KP 89])—and barbarian in this instance is undoubtedly a debased, contaminating category.24 Concerning the quasi-sacredness of the Greek language, I want to next consider two poems that involve numismatic legends. In “Coins” (1920; hidden), the speaker is browsing through a book that shows coins minted by Graeco-Indian kings of Bactria in the second and first centuries before Christ. The speaker contemplates “the Indian writing on one side of the coins,” which the book “renders for us” as “Referring to monarchs of the greatest power, / to Eboukratinza, to Strataga, / to Menantraza, to Eramaiaza” (BTCT 272; see KP 107). It is not this that catches the speaker’s attention: “But the book shows us the other side as well, / which is, moreover, the good side / with the figure of the king. And how he instantly stops here, / how deeply moved he is, the Greek who reads in Greek / Hermaios, Ephkratides, Straton, Menander” (BTCT 272). The text is not merely about two scripts on two faces of the same coins, but about two readerships: an amorphous, non-identity-based “us,” and an inner group, that of

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the Greek reader who reads the Greek language, whose attention is “instantly” arrested by the script. The difference between the Greek legend on one face of a given coin and the legend on the reverse side, beyond the alphabets, is not even a translation, but a transliteration that only modifies the Greek names. However, what the speaker valorizes is the Greek side: the numismatic expression “the good side” (“i kali meria” [KP 107]) enhances the quasi-talismanic status of the Greek proper name, “properly” inscribed and properly read in Greek, the loss of which propelled the Poseidonians downward into a perceived barbarity. 25 Panagiotis Roilos, in the course of a discussion of the numismatic poems, observes, “‘Coins’ depicts the syncretism of indigenous and Greek elements from a . . . sympathetic perspective.” He reads a political subtext coded in the date of the poem’s composition: in “1920, a crucial year for the development of the Greek expedition in Asia Minor, ‘Coins’ celebrates the dissemination of Hellenic culture in post-classical antiquity.”26 “Philhellene” (1906/1912), by contrast, has for speaker a puppet monarch in an area in today’s Iran—“behind Zagros here, so far outside Phraata” (BTCT 24; see TP1 43)—concerned about the reports that the local Roman proconsul might file about him. In commissioning an inscription for a coin he is having minted, his instructions include a “diadem preferably narrow” because he dislikes “those wide things the Parthians have”; “Greek, as usual, for the inscription”; and on the other side “Something very choice . . . / some handsome discus-thrower in his teens”; but “Above all” the monarch “urge[s] . . . to take special care / (Sithaspis, for God’s sake, this mustn’t be forgotten) / that after the titles of King and Savior / there be engraved, in elegant letters, Philhellene” (BTCT 24). The prescription for Hellenism in this poem, albeit with the addition of a new element, a homoerotic aesthetic, would seem to be consonant with that found in “Poseidonians” in that it elevates the “Greek” language “as usual.” However, in contrast to the Poseidonians of ethnic Greek origin and their perception of the quasi-talismanic quality of the Greek language the loss of which propelled them downward into a perceived barbarity, the point of view in “Philhellene” is that of a non-Greek. The voice endorsing Hellenism here is of someone aware precisely of what would be seen as its “barbarity” by the Poseidonians and those of Greek descent. For while the overt anxiety about claims to Hellenism in the poem relates to the Roman proconsul (the inscription is to be “not hyperbolic, not pompous— / so that

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the proconsul can’t mistake it while he’s scavenging for faults to send back endlessly to Rome—”), the speaker has to defend these claims, which are only those of a Phil-hellene, against the unvoiced but palpable skepticism of his listener: “At this point don’t start playing the sophisticate, / indulging in arch rhetoric, ‘Where are the Greeks?’ and / ‘What can be Greek behind Zagros here, so far outside of Phraata?’” (BTCT 24). In response to these unvoiced doubts, his reassertion of a belonging to Hellenism begins to fray at the seams: “Since so many others more barbarous than us / inscribe it, we will inscribe it too. / And finally don’t forget that on occasion / Sophists come to us from Syria, / and versifiers, and other vainly learned sorts. / I wouldn’t say that we’re not Hellenized” (BTCT 24; see TP1 43). Being “barbarous” in this poem does not prevent the speaker from making a claim, not so much to Hellenism, but to Philhellenism. The speaker has traveled from the assurance of “Greek, as usual” to an admission of being “barbarous” to an assertion that the line between barbarian and Greek may not be so hard and fast. However, there is no question that the category of barbarian is what the speaker would like to leave behind in his desire to “pass” into the category of Hellenized (he detests the Parthians’ headgear)—a “wonderfully selfcondemning reference to the imitative philhellenism”27 of others like himself—and that by the end of the poem attaining not so much to Hellenism but to Philhellenism occurs through a simulacrum of what Homi Bhabha would call “mimicry.”28 It also occurs through an affiliation with a diffuse Hellenism betokened by the “Sophists . . . from Syria.” Intellectuals from that diffuse Hellenistic world are the subject of the dramatic monologue “Return from Greece” (1914; hidden), where an unnamed speaker is addressing a friend and travel companion on the ship taking them away from Greece. The poem is in some ways the converse of “Philhellene” in that it portrays characters, philosophers moreover, whose connection to mainland Greece would not seem tenuous at first sight: they have just been there, and the only figure named, the addressee, has the Greek name Hermippos. Yet it is specifically by questioning the denigration of otherness in the context of a Hellenistic world and hence brushing against the grain of an apparently more immediate bond with Hellenism that “Return from Greece” is the converse of “Philhellene.” Rather than feel despondent as the shores of Greece recede from sight, the speaker is relieved and anticipating return to his point of

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“origin”: “At least we’re sailing on our own sea; / waters of Cyprus, of Syria, and of Egypt, / beloved waters of our native lands” (BTCT 263). In contradistinction to the monarch in “Philhellene” who anticipates his listener’s aspersions about his ascription to a desired (Phil-) Hellenism, the speaker here responds to what he reads in his companion’s demeanor as just possibly a tristesse du départ from what he might have construed as his land of origin: Why so silent? Ask your heart, Didn’t you also feel happier the farther we got from Greece? Can fooling ourselves pay?— that wouldn’t be exactly Greek. Now let’s admit the truth; we too are Greeks—what else are we?— but our inclinations and our feelings come from Asia inclinations and feelings startling at times to Hellenism. It does not befit us, Hermippos, philosophers that we are, to be like some of our lesser kings (remember how we laughed at them when they visited our classes) through whose exteriors, made ostentatiously Greek, and (what a word!) Macedonian, a bit of Arabia slips out at times, a bit of Media that cannot be snatched back, and the poor things, what laughable wiles their efforts to keep it all unobserved. Ah no, such things do not befit us. Such mincing will not do for Greeks like us. Let’s not be ashamed of the blood of Syria and of Egypt that flows through our veins, let us do it honor, let us exult in it. (BTCT 263; see KP 96–97)

Remarking that a closer translation of the title of this poem— “Epanodos apo tin Ellada” (KP 96), in older translations given as “Return from Greece”—is “Going Home from Greece,” Diskin Clay observes that this “is precisely the paradox of the poem: How can a Greek return home by leaving Greece?”29 Clay points out that Cavafy had originally intended to write the poem in the form of a dialogue, and suggests that in the final version of the poem “Hermippos’ silence,” which “is Cavafy’s silence,” “says all that needs saying”: “all of the nervousness and confident talk of his [Hermippos’s] friend is undercut and qualified by his silence.”30

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I would suggest, rather, that in the dramatic monologue format, Hermippos’s silence animates the speaker’s modulation on the paradoxes of his and his friend’s identity as he charts a course toward the coda in the last line, a course that in itself parallels the movement of the ship away from Greece, hence the emergence of the hybridized Hellene rather than a Macedonian “colon” who struggles to hold aloof from the barbarians whom he is soon to join.31 In the speaker’s discourse about the affiliations of which he and his companion are exemplars, Greekness becomes disconcerted through a series of paradoxes. The happiness that grows the farther the two travelers go from Greece is to be acknowledged precisely because they are Greek. Wherefore the relief at the departure, and in what consists this paradoxical Hellenism? The assertion that “we too are Greeks” is undercut by the note of doubt in “what else are we?” But the source of this doubt, the Asian “emotions and inclinations,” is described in function not of those who possess them but of the outlandish nature of these emotions and inclinations as seen from the perspective of Greece (“startling at times to Hellenism”). The speaker then considers two responses of Greeks of the diaspora to their relationship with mainland Greece, that of the “lesser kings” and that of the philosophers. The speaker’s rejection of the performance of the “lesser kings” is on account not so much of their racial hybridity, but their mimicry reminiscent of the puppet monarch of “Philhellene” whose aversion to the Parthians’ headgear and injunction “Greek, as usual” make him a look-alike of these kings with “exteriors, made ostentatiously/ Greek, and (what a word!) Macedonian.”32 As against that mimicry the speaker offers the formula of racial hybridity—“the blood of Syria and of Egypt/ that flows through our veins”—that is celebrated, as in the coda: “let us do it honor, let us exult in it.” But the coda also refers back to, and retroactively endorses, the more ethnic/cultural formulation of “inclinations and feelings / startling at times to Hellenism.” There is the question of the speaker’s thrice-repeated reference to himself and his companion as Greek. In all three of the speaker’s assertions of a belonging, no matter how undercut and pluralized, to Hellenism, the collocations are those of self-knowledge: “Can fooling ourselves pay?—/ that wouldn’t be exactly Greek”; “Now let’s admit the truth; / we too are Greeks”; and “Such mincing will not do for Greeks like us.” One can choose to ascribe such statements to the speaker’s vocation as philosopher, and hence possibly to an implicit reference to the Socratic dictum “Know thyself.” Or, one can interpret

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these statements as a species of sleight-of-hand for taming a sense of alienation (being Greek means acknowledging where and how one is not Greek). And it is possible that both interpretations stand, as a function of a diasporic ambivalence to “origins,” an in-between condition. However, there is no doubt that the speaker’s position, through its paradoxical reverence for Hellenism and its exaltation of the blood of Egypt and Syria, stands in sharp contrast to the binary seen at work in poems discussed above, such as “Poseidonians,” whereby intermingling with barbarians was equated with a fall from an exalted category of Hellenism. “Return from Greece” proposes a paradoxical alchemy of synthesis. This poem comes out of a very different position from that expressed in Politis’s overview of Cavafy’s work. Then again, the shifting positionality in poems discussed so far requires that we broach more explicitly the question of Orientalism in a Greek key.

orientalism and anti-orientalism vis-à-vis greek-versus-barbarian I now consider two diametrically opposed opinions about Cavafy’s relationship with Egypt, the Arab world, and the East more broadly, each of which has a certain amount of critical validity, pause at later critics’ comparable interventions, and move from there to a third position. The two critics in question are the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, whose comments come from the 1958 critical introduction she wrote for her co-translations into French of Cavafy’s poems, and the Egyptian poet and translator Bashir al-Siba‘i, who translated Cavafy into Arabic and whose comments come from a 1991 two-page article on the Alexandrian Greek. According to Yourcenar, “What strikes us first is the almost complete absence of any Oriental or even Levantine ‘picturesque.’ That this Alexandrian Greek should have given no room to the Arab or Moslem world can surprise no one even slightly familiar with the Near East, its juxtaposition of races and their separation rather than their mixture. Cavafy’s Orientalism, that Orientalism perpetually in suspension in all Greek thought, is located elsewhere.” As she elaborates, Yourcenar is thinking here of Orientalist backdrops and landscapes, which are absent from Cavafy, whose attunement to the human favors urban details and the décor of amorous assignations. Yourcenar, however, does not take up again her suggestion concerning

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the existence of another form of Orientalism in Cavafy, only observing in a note, “The abstract yet ardent tone of certain erotic poems irresistibly recalls some Arabic, or rather Persian, poetry, but Cavafy would surely have rejected any such comparison.”33 Her estimation is consonant with that of the large majority of Cavafy’s Western critics, not least Pinchin, who asserts that “Cavafy ignores the centuries between 1453 [the fall of Constantinople to the Turks] and his own, just as he all but ignores Egyptians in Egypt.”34 Al-Siba‘i begins his article by citing Pinchin’s opinion, and the single exception she mentions, 35 then counters it by drawing on Marina Risva’s La Pensée politique de Constantin Cavafy—which builds on Stratis Tsirkas’s book O Politikos Kavafis—and the argument she makes there affirming that Cavafy was opposed to the injustices of Britain in Egypt. “But what concerns us here is not bringing out this fact which cannot be denied,” al-Siba‘i continues, “but bringing out another fact which has long been overlooked: Cavafy’s acquaintance with Egyptian poetry written in French and his enthusiasm for it, and we refer here primarily to the creative writing of Ahmed Rassim (1895–1958).”36 Al-Siba‘i supports his claim by citing a letter sent by Cavafy to the editor of the Cairene Francophone weekly La Semaine égyptienne, who was soliciting articles for an issue devoted to his fellow Alexandrian poet Rassim.37 The letter, which was reproduced in the special issue of the magazine (May 1928), evinces Cavafy’s longstanding admiration for Rassim’s work. That Cavafy did in fact give room, albeit not ample, to the Arab and Muslim world, in contradistinction to Yourcenar’s estimation, that he would not have rejected comparisons of his poetry to Arabic or Persian poetry, as she suggests, that, as al-Siba‘i asserts, he was by no means oblivious to Egypt, the Egyptians, and Egyptian literature is attested in several Cavafy texts, including prose ones. Indeed, the earliest sustained discussions of the poet’s affinity with Egypt are Tsirkas’s O Kavafis kai e Epoche tou (Cavafy and His Era; 1958) and his later O Politikos Kavafis (The Political Cavafy; 1971)38 which, sadly, have not been translated into English. Tsirkas, an Egyptian Greek Marxist novelist and critic who had some knowledge of Arabic and remained living in Egypt until 1963,39 did much early, painstaking archival work, supported by philological analysis, direct observation, and the occasional interview, to bring out the resonance of things Egyptian in Cavafy’s texts. This was part of a larger argument that, briefly, attended to social class and ethnic/community issues in

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relation to the British occupation and read the poems allegorically with reference to the politics of Cavafy’s day and demonstrated that while he was an Anglophile he was determinedly opposed to British colonialism. That these aspects have been overlooked (at least by critics who had access to them), as al-Siba‘i rightly maintains was the case, is as much a function of the critical canonizing of a Hellenizing narrative of Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism as it is of the critical canonizing of “high” genres, such as poetry, and the demotion of others—as, at least, has been the case with Cavafy until recently40 —such as writers’ nonfiction prose texts published in magazines and journals. However, if Cavafy, like the speaker in “Return from Greece,” has “inclinations and feelings / startling at times to Hellenism,” if at times he does honor the blood of Syria and of Egypt that flows through his veins, as it were, there are also slippages in his texts whereby, as Yourcenar observes in passing, a certain Orientalism obtains. While it is imperative to tip the balance of readings that construe Cavafy as disinterested in all things Egyptian, Arab, and Middle Eastern, it would be a mistake to overlook not only the presence of a certain Orientalist strain in his texts but also the tension that this creates with his attunement and receptivity to Egyptian, Arab, and Middle Eastern elements. The challenge is not solely of shoring up and inventorying that other Cavafy more sympathetic to the Middle East. Rather, it is to demonstrate the resistance that this required of him to Orientalist paradigms—whether modern Eurocentric ones, ones of earlier Hellenic inflections, or those that relate to the complexities of modern Greece’s relationship to Western Europe—that echo even in his own work. Furthermore, papering over the Orientalism while highlighting the sympathy to the region risks leaving Cavafy open to a revisionism that would then reclaim him, and his Alexandria, for a new generation of Eurocentric readings, as in Pinchin et al. The Orientalist/anti-Orientalist dilemma vis-à-vis Cavafy’s texts has indeed yielded recent contrasting readings, this time informed to varying degrees by postcolonial theory, either by situating the poet within Orientalism—eliciting the porousness in his poetry between Hellenism and an East it Orientalizes—or by aligning his texts with postcolonial perspectives and in-betweenness.41 Approaching Cavafy through the set of concerns dictated by my inquiry in this study, and attending to ambiguities and slippages in his texts, I find that both positionalities are at work in his texts. Thus a consideration of the Greek/barbarian dichotomy vis-à-vis Orientalism is in order.

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What Said has called “imaginative geography” can be said to be a spatial parallel to the temporal dimension of Orientalism, whereby the East is relegated either to another, earlier time or an unchanging timelessness. But in what has been critiqued as one of the problematic aspects of Orientalism, Said genealogically traces these discursive habits of imaginative geography back to classical distinctions between Greek and Other (read: barbarian), this in itself premised on the second part of his threefold definition of Orientalism as a “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction” between Orient and Occident that capaciously “accommodate[s] Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx.”42 In outlining imaginative geography, he turns to the image of Asia, and by extension the East, projected in Aeschylus’s The Persians and Euripides’ The Bacchae, the former as an instance of the domesticating representation of the potentially dangerous Persians and the reenactment of their defeat, the latter as a dramatization of the warning to heed the perceived excesses of Eastern mysteries with their menace to Western rationality.43 Aijaz Ahmad, among others, has critiqued Said’s consequent construal of Orientalism as “transhistorical,” premised on a High Humanist formation that has traditionally reached back to ancient Greece for its canonical origins, which stands in contradiction to the book’s location of Orientalism’s starting point in the late eighteenth century with the advent of modern post-Enlightenment “colonial capitalism.”44 The point that Ahmad makes apropos of the place of the Classics in all this, namely, “that this sense of continuity was itself fabricated in post-Renaissance Europe” and that this could have served instead a reading of “the history of fabrication qua fabrication” is well taken.45 But in discussing the Greek/barbarian dichotomy in relation to Orientalism, I do so on two grounds: first, a prehistory (long predating modern Orientalism, that is) of tropes of othering that belong within the specific (Greek) cultural context at stake here, even though, as stated earlier, these are not historically monolithic; second, the resonance of these classical tropes and of modern European Orientalism per se, the latter via Neohellenism’s dialogue with Western Europe in the modern poet under study, Cavafy, in whose texts these constructions are likewise not reducible to a fixed binary. Among the array of disciplines on which Orientalism made its mark, the Classics’ response has included scholarship about notions of Greek and barbarian that demonstrates their variableness. Among

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the points that emerge from the historical overview provided in the introduction to the collection of essays Greeks and Barbarians is that Greek notions of barbarians, often discussed in the context of the variously stereotyped Persians and with reference to the Persian Wars, predate these events. These notions also extend in variegated and shifting ways to other peoples, including the Egyptians, the Scythians, and the Thracians, in a manner that also reflects the heterogeneity of the Greeks themselves.46 Different discussions of the Egyptians-as-barbarians in Greek thought, to which Herodotus is key, trace Greek conceptions of Egypt as a land of writing and of ancient marvels where the gods originated and were borrowed by the Greeks, without this implying, to the author of The Histories, any sense of dependency or inferiority.47 Indeed, as James Redfield and François Hartog have shown, despite the sense of Egypt’s anteriority, specifically in religion, the country, in Herodotus, for one, is depicted according to a logic of symmetry and inversions both as a natural landscape and in its religious practices that continue to denote alterity.48 Among the latter are the practice of embalming, the divergence between Greeks and Egyptians in sacrificial rituals, and the existence of sacred animals, toward which much later authors, unlike Herodotus, would be less respectful.49 Hence, the “Egyptians, very ancient, pious and learned ‘others’, are none the less inevitably included on the side of the Barbarians. . . . But ‘Barbarian’ did not carry with it the sense of barbarity. . . . Even more than a distinction of language—the fact, in other words, of their not speaking Greek—the term ‘barbarian’ designated someone who was ignorant of the polis and who lived in subjection to a king.” In later authors, and in response to changes in the values of the polis and in philosophy, there is a recouping of Egyptian notions of kingship, among other things, and later still, with the wonders of Egypt having been thoroughly textualized, “it dwindled until it was no more than a space that was both abstract—a sort of pure signifier, inhabited by philosophers—and at the same time one which teemed with that profuse anonymous literature ascribed . . . to the ‘thrice-great’ Hermes.”50 Vestiges of some of these elements resonate in Cavafy, but first one should pause at the Persians, those more famously/infamously “barbarized” others, who also figure in his poetry. In “History and Ideology: The Greeks and Persian ‘Decadence,’” Pierre Briant traces the shifts in the Greek stereotyping of the Persians with reference to the political motivations of these representations.

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The general pattern that comes out of his discussion of various ancient Greek authors, in which a succession of kings provides the staging posts, is that the Persians went from being a people that maintain “a balance between ‘servitude and freedom’”51 and a manly harshness of training (under Cyrus) to a decadence, briefly halted by Darius, brought on by the pursuit of war and military victories that resulted in younger Persians receiving a luxurious, corrupting upbringing, often administered by women. Among the examples given by Greek authors of the averred moral decline of the Persians was an excessive fondness for food, an abandonment of the soldier’s rugged life in favor of lounging around on thick carpets, a marked tendency toward inebriation, and a wont to violate their commitments. Briant observes that the decadence thesis is riddled with contradictions sometimes brought on by the stubbornness of historical facts that do not fit with the paradigm. For him, the “primary aim [of the Greek authors] was ideological. . . . The realities of the Persian empire in their time were not their intellectual property. The true subject of [their] speeches . . . was not so much Persia as Sparta and Athens. The Greek authors used the example of Persia only in as much as it allowed them to develop a discourse which was internal to the city.”52 Himself of a philological bent and by his own admission gifted with two “capacities: to write Poetry or to write History,” Cavafy was thoroughly attuned to the historically shifting Greek usage of the category “barbarian”; but as a diasporic Greek, he also occasionally expressed his own ambivalences to these binaries in their changing valences.53 For example, among his notes on Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Cavafy takes issue with a passage in which the historian, paraphrasing from citations of a speech given by Augustus, refers to Antony and Cleopatra as “a degenerate Roman, and a Barbarian queen”: “‘Barbarian queen,’” the poet comments, “I should much like to know in which Greek or Latin author this extraordinary expression occurs.”54 That Cavafy’s instinct is right and that none of the authors Gibbon draws on applied the term barbarian to Cleopatra, as has been demonstrated, 55 attests in part to his philological rigor, as well as awareness of the Orientalism at work in Gibbon’s deployment of the term. If, as I suggest, Gibbon’s usage merges an Orientalist image of Cleopatra with the category “barbarian,”56 thereby negating her Greekness, then, as Diana Haas has shown with reference to Cavafy’s poem “The End of Antony” (1907; hidden), the poet delinks the two categories of barbarian and

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Greek, while retaining for the latter an Eastern element, in depicting, from the point of view of the dying Roman, “the mistress with eastern gestures, / and the servants with their barbarically disfigured Greek” (BTCT 257; see KP 90). Haas comments that this underscores a distinction “between the ‘oriental’ queen and her ‘barbarian’ slaves[,] . . . [a] distinction which is Cavafy’s own,” and that for him, as seen in “Return from Greece,” “the oriental, ‘emotional’ element . . . is not incompatible with Greekness and is certainly not to be confused with barbarism, as Gibbon’s ‘extraordinary expression’ would imply.”57 In another Alexandrian context, namely, “The Glory of the Ptolemies” (1896/1911), Cavafy seems to using “barbarian” primarily in the sense of non-Macedonian, when he has an unidentified Ptolemy boast that “Not a Macedonian or barbarian can be found / who equals me or in any way comes close,” before going on to extol his highest mark of distinction: “The city instructing all others, the Panhellenic summit, / in every kind of learning, in every kind of art, more wise than any” (BTCT 16; see TP1 34). If in some poems, like “Poseidonians,” the category of barbarian was denigrated, in yet other contexts Cavafy critiqued or subverted that denigration, as I demonstrated in the foregoing. Before analyzing this double move in the context of Egypt, I turn briefly to his treatment of the Persians.

the persians: just how barbarian? The Persians figure in a number of Cavafy poems, including one, “The Naval Battle” (1899; hidden), that echoes the chorus from Aeschylus’s Persians commenting on the Persians’ defeat in the battle of Salamis that Said designates as paradigmatic in that to “Asia are given the feelings of emptiness, loss, and disaster that seem thereafter to reward Oriental challenges to the West.”58 Reiterating both the reservations made above about the strain in Said’s book of a historically monolithic Orientalism and my adducing his discussion in the spirit of eliciting a classical prehistory of tropes and motifs of that phenomenon, I argue here that there is nevertheless an altogether different representation of the Persians if we turn to Cavafy’s prose.59 In a three-page essay in English, titled “Persian Manners,” Cavafy takes on the representations in classical Greek thought of the Persians. “The Persians, though greatly stigmatised by ancient Greek historians, must be allowed to have had some redeeming qualities,” the essay begins. In place of these stereotypes, Cavafy argues, “They

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were brave, obedient, and,—I will add—generous, and, if not exactly sober, at least” people “who knew to prize soberness” (P 174). A slightly patronizing tone aside, Cavafy is clearly engaged here in a critique of representation that detects, quite early on, what scholars such as Briant would later identify as the hallmarks of constructions of the Persians-as-barbarians. Granted, Cavafy, unlike Briant, does not elaborate on the ideological underpinnings of this stigmatization of the Persians; possibly he feels they require no elaboration. Instead, he does something quite interesting that corresponds, avant la lettre, to Briant’s move of bringing out contradictions and excesses in the Greek discourse about the Persians. What Cavafy does is extricate from those ancient sources anecdotes about Persian kings’ remarkable gratitude and magnanimity toward those who had served them, often in accordance with promises they had previously made, and of their esteem for those who could drink alcohol without becoming inebriated. Although the essay’s main sources are ancient Greek ones such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plutarch, it also has recourse to modern secondary sources, including Comte de Ségur’s Histoire universelle, which draws on archaeological evidence like the inscription on the tomb of Darius I. In a sense, Cavafy is attempting to broach an alternative archive on the Persians, or at least some rough notes toward one. In quarrying archaeological evidence, he is implicitly considering the referent, the reality of the Persians; in culling the trace from within the dominant Greek classical discourse of that which it has othered and muted, Cavafy can be said to be indirectly underscoring its ideological overdetermination.

neohellenism and neo-phar aonism: a missed meeting? As for ancient Egypt in Cavafy, when not overlooked in secondary sources, it is often reduced to a reference or two that designate his attitude as dismissive. Witness the quotation from Cavafy that Liddell strategically places, under the heading “On Ancient Egypt,” at the end of the section “Fragments of Table Talk,” which rounds off his book: “‘I don’t understand those big immobile things.’”60 But allusions to ancient Egypt are interspersed in Cavafy’s poems and prose texts: from the reference to the Egyptian god Ptah in the poem “Sham El-Nessim” (the title is a reference to the spring festival that dates to ancient Egypt) to the function of masks in ancient Egypt, among other

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contexts, in the essay “Masks”61 to the potent reference to Athyr (the Greek rendition of the name of the Egyptian/Coptic month Hathor, the ancient Egyptian calendar being in use in Hellenistic Egypt) in the poem “In the Month of Athyr” (1917; dissemintated), among others. Yet Cavafy’s engagement with ancient Egypt is polyvalent, sometimes depreciating it but elsewhere displaying both a receptivity to certain aspects of ancient Egyptian civilization and a recognition of it as the indigenous element of Hellenistic Egypt. I begin with a poem that, although it does not mention ancient Egypt as such, describes a text that belongs to the Hellenistic period and indirectly clinches one aspect of Cavafy’s multifaceted attitude to Egypt per se. “The Mimiambi of Herodas” (1892; hidden) was written about a number of mimes by the Greek author from the Hellenistic period, Herodas, discovered in a papyrus in Egypt in the early 1890s that was acquired by the British Museum. Little is known about Herodas, beyond his Greek ethnicity as indicated by his name, the speculation that he is likely to have been a contemporary of Callimachus and Theocritus and to have had more than a passing association with Alexandria, given the praise of Egypt in mimes 1 and 2 and the setting of 2 in Kos, which was the birthplace of Ptolemy II Philadelphus.62 But his poetry has been compared to that of the Mouseion, for which Cavafy had much affinity.63 Cavafy’s poem consists of eight stanzas, four of which describe and provide a synopsis and paraphrase the contents of mimiambi 1, 2, 4, and 7.64 These four “core” stanzas about selected mimiambi are introduced by three that describe the conditions of the discovery of the text, and succeeded by a single stanza that again provides metacommentary. The first stanzas of “The Mimiambi of Herodas” provide metacommentary not solely on textuality and interpretation—as has been noted of other Cavafy poems that open with a persona contemplating a classical object, such as an inscription, or a legend on a coin65 —but more specifically on an archaeological drama of salvage that mediates cultural assumptions: For centuries abiding hidden within the darkness of Egyptian earth, amid a silence so despairing injury was done the gracious mimiambi; but those years have passed, from the North arrived wise men, and for the mimiambi entombment and oblivion ceased. Their humorous tones

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At face value, the opening stanzas may be thought as describing literally, albeit with a certain pathos, the circumstances of storage and later unearthing of the texts. On this level, these stanzas might be construed as a poetic parallel to a “preface” that precedes the text and commentary on it. But several markers invite us to read them almost as a (cross-)cultural allegory, most important the designation of the “men” whose arrival is credited with the rescue of the mimiambi as both “wise” and “from the North.” The juxtaposition of these two designations implicitly adds up to an image of these men as “enlightened.” Juxtaposed to these enlightened men from the North, “the darkness of Egyptian earth” can be read likewise figuratively, in which case it is not a metaphor of fertile land or a dryness that preserves but betokens oppressiveness, nay a species of obscurantism. This may appear to be a case of overreading that overlooks the way “a silence so despairing” is set up as a foil to the relief of reclaiming the “humorous tones” of the mimiambi. Yet the broader contrast betokened by the drama of salvage of the mimiambi is again emphasized by the cultural marker of “the merriment of Greek streets and marketplaces,” which, in aligning Herodas to the wise men from the North and making his text akin to European writing (philology), implicitly tallies with conceptions that the origins of European culture and canons are Greek, and may be said to encapsulate, in shorthand, the place of Greece in the European Renaissance. That the mimiambi are depicted as having been entombed in a dark Egyptian earth that has obscured and damaged the Greek texts, from which they should be rescued, metaphorically dissociates the Hellenistic textual legacy from all contact with Egypt. The poem also reveals a sentiment about Egypt different from that which obtained in classical times when, as we have seen, Egypt’s anteriority, in matters of religion, for example, was acknowledged; and indeed one of the mimes of Herodas, himself a Hellenistic author, touches on this.66 Moving to the uncovering of the mimiambi, it is surprising that Cavafy did not consider them a heritage that should remain in the country where they were found and just possibly also produced. It was Cavafy who had entered the fray of a debate concerning the Elgin

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marbles, and who published two articles demanding their return to Greece (“He [the writer to whom Cavafy is responding] thinks that if the marbles are restored, Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, India must be given away also—forgetting that if those possessions are necessary to the British trade and to the dignity and safety of the British empire, the Elgin Marbles serve no other purpose than to beautify the British Museum”).67 And it is to Cavafy that plausible evidence has attributed an article, in Greek, titled “Our Museum,” in praise of the newly founded but not yet open to the public Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria, written in the same year as this poem. The article expresses a palpable pride in artifacts that belong under the broad category of Hellenism—Ptolemaic plaquettes with Greek inscriptions, Fayyum portraits, Byzantine-period inscriptions and marbles—and adumbrates their value for studies relating to Hellenism. The Byzantine artifacts will enrich the Greeks’ recent resurgence of interest in their medieval history (likely an allusion to the scholarly interest concomitant on the ideology of the “Great Idea”), and “especially for us Greeks,” the museum “is like a treasury of familiar things. It speaks to our imagination regarding the glorious Hellenism of Alexandria. It presents to us an image of that noble civilization that developed so robustly in Egypt, as in another Greece, which injected into the Orient the Greek spirit and bequeathed Greek refinement and grace to the Oriental ideas with which it came into contact” (SPW 42; see P 161). While in “The Mimiambi of Herodas” the texts of the mimes were safely deposited in the hands of northern philologists and in “Our Museum” there is a palpable celebration of the resurgence of archaeological excavations and conservation in Alexandria, what the two texts have in common is the elision of an Egyptian context. When this is alluded to in the article, it is in its capacity as amenable to being embellished with the Greek spirit—which speaks to Politis’s account that construes Cavafy’s conception of cosmopolitanism as a Hellenizing melting pot. One possible context in which to set this is that of Neohellenism, which, for my purposes, can be accessed in a review article Cavafy wrote about a fellow Greek poet. My interest in the way Neohellenism manifests itself here is the interplay between narratives of national identity that configure themselves through archaeological artifacts, monuments, and heritage more generally. In his article, in Greek, “The Poetry of Mr. Stratigis” (1893), Cavafy offers a reading of, among others, a collection of nine poems, “The Aigyptiaka,” inspired by ancient

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Egypt. Cavafy comments that in ancient Egypt Stratigis “will find many lofty topics for poetry and plentiful virgin land.”68 In that sense, Cavafy continues, “the wise archaeologists of the museum of Giza, without knowing it, are benefactors of poetry” (P 73), at a time when it is said that there is nothing new under the sun. By uncovering the bodies and treasures of the Pharaohs, Cavafy continues, by translating papyri and inscriptions, “by possessing the language and the history of the dead proud people, they bring to light many poetical subjects” (P 73). Gregory Jusdanis mentions this passage as indicative of Cavafy’s conception that “tradition is benign; it enriches the poet, acting almost like an encyclopedia that the poet can consult.”69 He makes this point in the course of a larger argument concerning Cavafy’s attitude toward tradition, as part of a study of the Alexandrian Greek’s poetics. He goes on to contrast Cavafy’s attitude against his antithetical, anxietyof-influence attitude toward tradition when that is represented by the poetry of precursors. But I would stress that even here, in the context of this article by Cavafy about Stratigis, tradition, when it is ancient Egyptian, as distinct from Greek, is not entirely “benign.” While the reservation should be made that Cavafy is reviewing rather than critiquing, the article’s commendation of Stratigis is nevertheless palpable. After praising Stratigis for drawing inspiration from Egyptian themes, Cavafy goes on to commend the conditional quality of that engagement: “Our poet admires the Egyptian antiquity, but not beyond moderation. The gigantic, mute masses cannot dazzle the fine good taste of the Greeks” (P 73–74). If Cavafy’s use of “moderation” is an understatement for what comes across as Stratigis’s antagonism to ancient Egypt, he does not distance himself either from the distaste for an Egyptian monumentality that the author of “The Aigyptiaka” perceives as the converse of classical, anthropomorphic proportions. Cavafy’s “mute masses,” furthermore, seems almost too ready an index of an Orientalist conception of an eternal Egypt, a land of stasis and immutability read as a land of death, one that is the reverse of a Europe given to rationality and progress (see also the foregoing discussion, “The Mimiambi of Herodas”)—notions that are present in Stratigis as cited and paraphrased in the article. The ruins of Memphis, for example, prompt Stratigis to eulogize the mutability of beauty, pitting the images of the rose and the less ephemeral but ultimately perishable cypress against “the pyramids [that] live always”— and thence to the coda “These Parthenons pass / life, but those [pyramids] are graves” (P 74).

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But Stratigis, as commended by Cavafy, taps into one aspect of the classical representation of the Egyptian as barbarian, namely, governance. For Cavafy then quotes two stanzas from a poem by Stratigis about the pyramids that set up a contrast between the great pyramid, on the one hand, and the Parthenon and the temple of Theseus, on the other.70 These two sets of national symbols, in turn, stand as indices of an antithesis between what the poem describes as “the deeds of tyrants” who held “their people as slaves,” on the one hand, and “the glory and fortunes of Athens” (read: Athenian democracy), on the other (P 74). What we have here, to my mind, is contending foundational myths, whereby Egypt, far from being a benign reservoir of icons and themes, is perceived as a menace that has to be muted, written away in order to further elevate Neohellenic self-perception and national self-articulation—which, one recalls, were fraught issues in the recently established nation-state of Greece. It is almost ironically apt that, as Cavafy admiringly informs his readers, “the poem about the pyramids ends with a magnificent and melancholic description of the destruction of the monuments [tis katastrofes ton mnimeion]” (P 74). Yet again, if the classical Athenian imagery in Stratigis, as mediated by Cavafy, belongs to the hallowed status of the Parthenon, of the Acropolis, of Athens, in Neohellenic discourse, then, against the grain, I would draw out of the attendant disparaging references to ancient Egypt the irony of a shared Greek-Egyptian dilemma. I make the move of yoking Neohellenism with Neo-Pharaonism to elicit, against the grain of Stratigis-via-Cavafy, a commonality of Egyptian-Greek “belatedness” in the reappropriation from the West of archaeological symbols for nation building. Neo-Pharaonism, which has its rudiments in the nineteenth century, flourishes in the early twentieth century, partly as informed by the burst in Egyptology. But there is no doubt that intertwined though it may be with Western Egyptology, it stands in a tense relationship to the latter, Egyptians’ own appeals to the iconicity of ancient Egypt being marshaled to promote a nationalist, anticolonial agenda. Stratigis’s take on ancient Egypt is, at least in part, refracted through precisely Egyptology for he refers to his reading of the Egyptologist Richard Lepsius (see the editor’s note in P 73). But, in a fashion somewhat comparable to Egyptology/NeoPharaonism, his own frame of reference, Neohellenism, had a complex relationship with Western Hellenism, as Eleni Bastéa’s Creation of Modern Athens has demonstrated in discussing the impact of classical mythology, history, myth, archaeology, and architecture on the

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choice of Athens as the capital of modern Greece and on its planning.71 Artemis Leontis has underscored “Neohellenism’s contrapuntal relationship with Western Hellenism. Classical revivalism in the West preceded Neohellenism, though we should not perceive Western precedence as necessarily delimiting Neohellenic self-presentation.”72 The disparagement, however, underscores a Hellenic need, at least in the poet (Stratigis) as unskeptically conveyed by the poet-critic (Cavafy), to Orientalize Egypt against such commonalties, in the process of elevating Hellenism. The double move that this process involves endorses Greece’s then-tenuous ascription to Europe in its claim to being the cradle of that continent’s civilization by othering another ancient civilization and defining Neohellenism’s appropriation of the classical past against ancient Egypt. What is arresting in Cavafy’s commentary on Stratigis here is that the Alexandrian Greek poet has often been noted for his lack of interest in classical Greece,73 for his self-professed affiliation, in prose and in poetry, to a broader Hellenism. The Cavafy who, despite writing this article in Egypt, lauds Stratigis’s Orientalism is not an unfamiliar one: he has been encountered, if less prosaically and more poetically, in “The Mimiambi of Herodas,” to take but one example. However, even in the context of ancient Egypt, and as against what critics such as Pinchin and Liddell would have us believe, there is a far more receptive attitude, accessed perhaps through the sensibility of the diasporic subject of “Return from Greece.” The two poems I am going to turn to—“The Cat” (1897 [?]; hidden) and “For Ammonis, Who Died at 29, in 610” (1915/1917)—while apparently unrelated to each other, trace, when read together, an arc of a far more nuanced and heedful approach to ancient Egypt, in the latter poem also explicitly as it relates to Alexandria, cosmopolitanism, and Hellenism. “The Cat” has been described as having “a moralizing psychology” that has a “touching biographical dimension”74 in that it was occasioned by the death of the poet’s pet. The poem’s sentimentality aside, its Egyptian reference, which comes toward the end, stands at marked variance with Cavafy’s reading of Stratigis: The cat provokes antipathy in common men. Magnetic and secretive, she wearies their superficial minds; and on her charming ways they place no value. [ . . . ] But the cat’s soul is in her pride. Her blood and nerves are freedom.

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Never are her glances humble. In her passion for everything hidden, in her cleanliness, her calmness and beautiful stance, the restraint she shows, how fine a sense of purity is found. When cats dream or sleep a coldness, visionary, gathers all around them. Perhaps they’ve been encircled from afar By ghosts of ancient times. Perhaps the vision guides them back to Bubastis; where their sanctuaries were, where Ramses traveled once to worship them, where, to the priests, their motions all were omens. (BTCT 234; see KP 65)

The poem, it has been observed, has an affinity to “Le Chat” by Charles Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du mal is one of the intertexts of Cavafy’s work, directly invoked in early poems and constituting part of his dialogue with the European avant-garde and modernism.75 True, the poem is continuous with texts that bespeak Cavafy’s fascination with mysticism and the esoteric: the “ghosts of ancient times” here recalls other Cavafy poems with a mystical component of revenants from a polytheistic historical past, such as “Ionian” (1896 [?]/1911), a vision of the gods returning to the land of Ionia to which they are devoted despite the destruction of their statues in Christian times, and “One of Their Gods” (1899/1917), depicting the descent of a male god at dusk to the streets of Seleucia as he heads toward the red-light district.76 But not only does “The Cat” take as its source Egyptian religious beliefs, it also effortlessly traverses one demarcating line between the Greeks and the Egyptians. Unlike Herodotus, whose description of the treatment of sacred animals and their mummification in Bubastis and elsewhere appears judgment-free, some later authors apparently disparaged “the rapport the Egyptians had with certain animals as zoolatry,” although animal cults would be sustained and foregrounded by the Ptolemies.77 Nor does Cavafy misconceive of such cults as worship of animal gods as such: in his essay “Masks,” written in English, he remarks that “Diodorus tells [that] the kings of Egypt had images made of masked lions and wolves. The Egyptian priests whose duty it was to rear sacred animals presented themselves before the” people “wearing masks representing the beasts they tended” (P 168).

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ammonis: a poetics of tr anscultur ation The relationship between ancient Egypt in its continuities/discontinuities through the Copts in late antiquity, on the one hand, to Hellenism in its continuities/discontinuities in Byzantium, on the other, as set in the Alexandrian context, implicitly informs “For Ammonis, Who Died at 29, in 610.” I shall dwell at length on this poem because I read it as metapoetic; in the process of commenting on poetry writing, it also draws together and problematizes several, sometimes disparate, strands of Cavafy’s poetry, especially regarding what would appear to be cultural binaries and their potential permeability.78 The poem reads: Raphael, they’ve asked you to compose a few verses for the poet Ammonis’ epitaph. Something very decorous and refined. You will be able, you are the one best suited to write as is fitting of the poet Ammonis, one of us. Obviously you will speak of his poems— but speak as well of his beauty, of his delicate beauty which we loved. Your Greek is admirable and musical always. But we desire all your skill perfected now. Our sorrow and our love are passing into foreign speech. Pour out your Egyptian feeling in the foreign speech. Raphael, your verses must be so written as to bear some of our life, you know, within them, so that the rhythm and each phrase declare an Alexandrian is writing for an Alexandrian. (BTCT 64; see TP1 83)

The short reading of “For Ammonis, Who Died at 29, in 610” to follow raises issues that make for a template for a broader discussion of the poem later. The title of the poem, “For Ammonis, Who Died at 29, in 610,” furnishes an ethnicity through the proper name Ammonis (a Hellenized version of Amun), namely, the Copts, used here in an ethnolinguistic sense, and identifies the time frame as the very last years of Byzantine rule over Egypt, to be followed by Persian occupation and Byzantine retaking and the Arab conquest. However, other markers of identity of these fictional characters are ushered in through the first line. Raphael, when paired with Ammonis, and in view of the subsequent

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reference to his skill in Greek as a foreign language, is likely to be also a Copt, and specifically a Christian. Hence a historical link Cavafy is highlighting, via his coded choice of names, between ancient Egypt and the Copts. But Raphael’s identification as a poet is obviously the more underscored identity at this point, given that the speaker in this dramatic monologue refers to an unidentified “they” who have solicited the epitaph, as we find out in the second line. This line also reinforces the sense of poetry and the figure of the poet being the identity at stake, since Ammonis is also identified as a poet. The description of the epitaph, “Something very decorous and refined” and “fitting,” would seem to attest to a shared writing convention, possibly specifically of the epitaph genre. While “one of us” (“diko mas” [TP1 83]) may therefore seem at this point to indicate a community of poets, the following stanza implicitly subverts this assumption. The contrast between “Obviously” (“vevaia”)—concerning Raphael’s poem about Ammonis’s poetry—and the injunction “but speak as well of his beauty” indicates that the community in this poem is that of a group of homoerotic young men, if possibly also poets or literati as well. Although the genre of elegiac poetry, particularly the epitaph about a young man, is in existence, whether in the poetry of the Mouseion or in Cavafy’s own corpus, a tension is visible here between the expectations of the “they” surrounding the epitaph Raphael is to write and those of the “we.” At an overt, surface level, that tension may be between what is construed as decorous in an epitaph and the intimations of homoerotic mourning that the speaker is soliciting of Raphael in these Christian times—a tension explored in another Cavafy poem, “Myris: Alexandria, a.d. 340” (1929; disseminated).79 However, stanza 3, without abandoning the homoerotic mourning, amplifies and complicates it in an ethnic key. Just as the first stanza dwelt on the dichotomy “they”/“us,” the second on a eulogy of the death of a poet and of his physical beauty, the third offers up the dichotomy “Greek”/“Egyptian.” The stanza not only confirms that the entire inner group is composed of Copts, but that with the exception of Raphael, they are not “at home with” or skilled in the Greek language. Significantly, the phrase “foreign speech” (“kseni glossa” [TP1 83]) occurs twice in this stanza. Hence one must ask if the trauma of the loss of Ammonis is not underwritten by another trauma, one barely visible in “Our sorrow and our love are passing into foreign speech” and the repeated, desperatesounding appeals to Raphael to excel at his composition in Greek. In

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other words, one cannot help posing the question whether the loss of Ammonis is not intensified by (and symbolic of?) a linguistic, cultural trauma. While in the second stanza Raphael was exhorted to infuse a homoerotic aesthetic into the decorousness of the epitaph as solicited, here the tension he is asked to resolve is the gap between Egyptian emotions and foreign (Greek) speech—almost setting up a parallel between the loss of Ammonis and a sort of linguistic alienation, a parallelism whereby these two aspects complicate each other since in the latter case, Ammonis, if read as a god and not as individual poet, can be construed as metonymic of ancient Egyptian culture. What does the speaker and Raphael’s shared assumption that the epitaph has to be written in Greek signify? What does the foreignness of the Greek language to this group of Alexandrian Copts, so long past the Hellenistic period and now into the Byzantine, say about the cosmopolitanism of the city, about its designation as “Alexandrea ad Aegyptum,” as perceived by Cavafy in this poem? The last stanza, despite its apparent conclusiveness, seems not so much to offer a resolution as a drawing together of some of the poem’s strands while leaving some issues raised above unaccounted for. The second line of the stanza takes us back to the sense of this being an inner, “insider” group—as attested in “our life” and the complicity of “you know.” These phrases segue well into the last line, which offers itself up as a coda: “an Alexandrian is writing for an Alexandrian.” Yet does the completed prescription for the epitaph, codified in this formula, answer the question raised in the discussion of the third stanza, about the other dimension of the young men’s trauma, the ethnic/cultural one? If the coda of the last stanza is meant to represent an Alexandria that is a site of (a barely possible) synthesis, in what precisely consists this synthesis, and what are we to make of the name Ammonis, also in conjunction with the date in the title of the poem, a.d. 610? The few critics who have taken note of the name of the dead poet in Cavafy’s poem and the date in its title have for the most part confined the historical remarks they make to observing that the poem is about Copts in Alexandria in the last decades of Byzantine rule and on the eve of the Arab conquest. Margaret Alexiou discusses this poem in a much broader argument that approaches Cavafy’s poetry through the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination. Alexiou brings out what she reads as the Alexandrian Greek’s deconstruction of the whole Platonic edifice, through the same figures of speech,

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and in the same language, in order to deconstruct the traditional analytical frameworks through which Cavafy has been read. Taking note of the Egyptian/Coptic ethnicity of the figures and rightly summoning the presence of a third Alexandrian poet, Cavafy, in addition to the two poets, the living Raphael who is writing about the dead Ammonis, Alexiou posits the poem’s fusion of “poetic and erotic themes . . . with history”80 and suggests, “Rather than merely celebrating . . . the ‘quality of being Alexandrian’ . . . the poem is a positive assertion of the durability of the Greek logos and eros, even after the Christianization of Egypt in Theodosius’ time, and in spite of the Arab conquest that has dominated Egypt since the mid-seventh century.” The statement seems to elicit—against the grain—from Cavafy’s poem an Egypt that is an extension of Greece. Granted, Alexiou does entertain the possibility that “Ammonis” could be an alias for Amun and goes on to consider the age and anteriority attributed by the Greeks to the Egyptians on account of their writing, broaching the connection between the Egyptian god of writing, Thoth, and Amun “who metaphorically ‘died’ at the time of the Arab invasions but is resurrected by Cavafy.” Ultimately, however, Alexiou’s relative attentiveness to the Egyptian/Coptic aspect of the poem feeds into the conclusion that “for Cavafy the writing of Greek poetry can bring back and immortalize the ‘eternal youthfulness’ of Ammonis, who died in Alexandria some thirteen centuries earlier.”81 I would disagree that, at this remove of the metatextual poem, at the level of the “third poet” Cavafy, “For Ammonis” is about attesting to Greek poetry’s own durability. Rather, I find the poem even more transgressive in its deconstruction of the classical edifice than Alexiou would grant. Martin McKinsey’s short interpretation of this poem comes closer to the framework in which I read it: for him, the “challenge of the Alexandrian Raphael . . . to express his ‘Egyptian feelings’ in a learned language” is part of the linguistic dilemmas faced by “technicians of the word living and writing during periods of foreign domination, with its attendant pressures on linguistic practice.”82 My wager is that the poem is about the possibility of a transculturated, emphatically hyphenated Egyptian-Greek textuality—one that renders Hellenism, per se, foreign—while testifying to a multilayered cultural violence that is perpetrated by the hegemony of Hellenism—in Alexandria, where it was the literary language—followed by Christianity in the tension between its indigenous and imperial Byzantine forms, as much as it presages the gradual loss of the

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Coptic language and the death of ancient Egyptian religious beliefs in Arabo-Islamic times. In this respect, the date of the poem, 610 a.d. in its foreshadowing of the Arab conquest, is not arbitarily chosen: it was the year that the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, with his belated and doomed attempt at reconciling Byzantium with non-Chalcedonian Eastern Christians, ascended the throne; it was also roughly around that time that the Prophet Muhammad had his first revelation.83 The date, then, situates the poem at a cusp where it both analeptically looks back to the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine periods and proleptically looks toward the Arab conquest.84 That Cavafy had the Arab conquest in mind in the titular date is attested also in the external evidence of his placing this poem in the thematically arranged booklet where it was published before the poem “Aimilianos Monai, Alexandrian, 628–655 a.d.” (1918; disseminated).85 The three-stanza poem is about a vulnerable young man, susceptible to criticism, who dreams of making for himself “an excellent suit of armor” with words and demeanor but whose life is cut short when history catches up with him and he is exiled. The last stanza, in the voice of an unnamed commentator, observes sardonically of the “boasting Aimilianos Monai,” “Did he ever really make that suit of armor? / In any case, he didn’t wear it long. / At the age of twenty-seven, in Sicily, he died” (BTCT 65; see TP1 84). While the poem highlights hubris in the face of the forces of history, without ever mentioning the Arab conquest (640–642 a.d.) beyond the nudge in the titular date, we should take our cue from Cavafy’s thematic placement of “Aimilianos Monai” after “For Ammonis.” Bearing in mind, too, the poet’s tendency, noted by Alexiou, to interconnect through anagram and initials names of the young men in his poems,86 this sequence prompts us to read the two texts as set in contrast to each other. That the name of the fictional Aimilianos Monai hints that he is of Roman extraction,87 in contrast to the decidedly Egyptian ethnicity of his near-contemporary Ammonis, corroborates the differentiated emphasis Cavafy is placing in “For Ammonis” on the Egyptian/ Coptic experience, through its continuities and discontinuities. It should also be noted here that an Arabo-Islamic Alexandria for Cavafy—in contradistinction to Forster and Durrell—was not an inconceivable, “unrepresentable” place, as discussed later. The evidence is that Cavafy would not have agreed with Forster’s statement that “though they [the Arabs] had no intention of destroying her, they destroyed her, as a child might a watch” (AHG 62), or Durrell’s words

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regarding the Arab conquest that “the famous resplendent city nosedived into oblivion” (“INE” xvii). Certainly English-language criticism of Cavafy, for its part, has tried to convince us otherwise: “he all but ignores Egyptians in Egypt” (Pinchin), and although “he was not without sympathy for the modern country and its people,” he “never seemed to recognize the Arab conquest of Egypt” (Liddell).88 True, his “Of the Sixth or Seventh Century” (1927; unfinished) has a modern persona, speaking on behalf of a Greek “we,” wistfully and with marked Hellenic pride contemplating the period just before “the coming of the mighty Arab nation,” when Alexandria, we are told, still spoke the Greek language, “perhaps without much verve, yet, as is only fitting, / she speaks our language still,” so “[i]t’s not unnatural if we have feelingly / gazed upon this particular era of hers, / we who now have once more borne / the sound of Greek speech back to her soil” (TUP 30; see AP 255).89 But then Cavafy in the earlier poem “Exiles” (1914; hidden), thought to be set around a.d. 867–86,90 has a group of Byzantine intellectuals who have fallen afoul of the powers in Constantinople seeking refuge in Alexandria: in so doing he subverts the equation in others’ writings (vide Forster in the next chapter) of a post-Arab conquest Alexandria depleted of Greeks with a city that has undergone spiritual death and the destruction of its urban fabric. The poem does so by speaking of the Hippodrome and the monuments, of the city that no matter how “it’s been marred in wars, / . . . stays a wonderful city,” of the few remaining Greeks and their religious practices, and of a discussion of the Graeco-Egyptian poet Nonnos—all while awaiting their vindication and return to Constantinople (BTCT 264; see KP 98). One can only speculate about Cavafy’s source on the Alexandria of the ninth century—whether, for example, he could have known of the likelihood that Hunayn b. Ishaq, the formidable Nestorian translator of Greek texts under the Caliphate in Baghdad, had studied the Greek language in Alexandria in that same century.91 That the Alexandrian Greek poet set a poem in Arabo-Islamic Alexandria is especially noteworthy when one bears in mind that, according to Kitroeff, “the Islamic traditions of the Egyptians were of little interest to the Greeks and it is not surprising that a book on the achievements of Arab civilisations, by the historian Christophoros Nomikos [a friend of Cavafy’s], one of the community’s ablest scholars, was not at all well-received in some Greek circles. For most Alexandrian Greeks, history meant their classical past.”92 Ultimately,

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however, whether in “Aimilianos Monai” or in “Exiles,” post-Arab conquest Alexandria remains, for the Greeks, either a place of departures or of temporary refuge. “For Ammonis,” on the other hand, in training its attention on the indigenous culture that preceded Alexander’s conquest and that would remain and permutate after the Arab conquest, does not elide the cultural impact of Ptolemaic times and the religious impact of Roman and Byzantine Christianity either. Elsewhere, in the context of Hellenism and his own complex relationship with Byzantium, Cavafy was acutely attuned to historical transformations effected by religion. In a short essay in English, he pleads the case for abandoning the designation “Roman” as applied to the Byzantine Empire. “The Greeks, it is true, called themselves ‘Romaioi’ in order to avoid the name of ‘Hellene’ which denoted idolator,” he writes, but in later centuries when the connection wanes, “the old name reappears,” and in any case it is a misnomer both geographically and ethnically, and the Greeks of today, who use the term Byzantine “should be accounted fair authorities on their past” (APK 76, 80). Here, both the sense of ruptures and the pride in Hellenism and Byzantinism, which would heal rifts visible in nomenclature, are palpable. But I maintain that in “For Ammonis,” Cavafy makes the thoroughly empathic move of looking at the Greek language through the eyes of those to whom it remained foreign and, this more implicitly, at Byzantium through the perspective of those who, at the Council of Chalcedon, rejected its doctrinal positions.93 External evidence of his attention to both exists in his writing and his quoted statements made to friends. Cavafy’s poem “A Prince from Western Libya” (1928; disseminated) addresses the elitism of the Greek language in Ptolemaic Alexandria. It depicts a young man from Libya, on a brief sojourn in Alexandria, who, by dint of an assumed Greek name, acquired Greek manners, and reticence in conversation, earns approval. Meanwhile, however, “his soul trembled that by chance / he’d spoil the tenuously good façade / with some barbaric, mangled speech in Greek, / and that the Alexandrians would revile him, as is their habit, unforgiving” (BTCT 164; see TP2 74). There is no doubt that the poem casts the young man as a ridiculous figure: “An accidental, trifling man” whose few words mislead the Alexandrians into believing him possessed of deep thoughts. But it also hesitantly, albeit without the empathy of “For Ammonis,” takes in the fear of aphasia and malapropisms—“And that is why he

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circumscribed his speech, / afraid and careful in grammar and pronunciation”—that reduces him to muteness.94 And Cavafy is quoted as having said, in response to a friend who “maintained that all historical events were explicable in terms of economics,” that “there were other causes as well; for example religious sentiment,” adding, “‘How do you explain the fact that in a.d. 600 in Egypt half the population went into monasteries, a remarkable fact. . . . And it wasn’t only the poor who went, but people from all classes of society.’”95 The date in the title of “For Ammonis,” a.d. 610, furthermore, when conjoined with the name Ammonis/Amun, encodes the resistance of Egyptian culture to imperially contrived conciliatory doctrines like Monotheletism, a (failed, in the context of the Copts) proposal that was to be put forward by Emperor Heraclius, meant to gloss over the rift that had occurred at the Council of Chalcedon by proposing that Christ has a single will.96 To take up the question raised in my initial reading of “For Ammonis” concerning the formula in the last line—“an Alexandrian . . . writing for an Alexandrian”—I argue that the coda elevates writing and its capacity for witnessing and memorializing across the cultural vicissitudes that history and religious difference have effected in the space of Alexandria, particularly in view of its millennium-long status as capital. Yet it does so not in the name of Greek poetry but through a proposed transculturated writing practice—which is where the third poet, Cavafy, and the usage of “Alexandrian” come into play. Historically, in terms of the capital, the Greek language was dominant: A. Bouché-Leclerq’s Histoire des Lagides, a source that Cavafy is known to have used,97 mentions—in the course of an account of Ptolemaic culture and the output and features of the institutions of the Library and the Mouseion—only one Egyptian name among the roster that includes Callimachus, that of Manetho, who compiled the historical and religious archive of ancient Egypt and wrote it in Greek.98 “Transculturation,” first proposed by Fernando Ortiz, has been recouped by Mary Louise Pratt from “ethnographers [who] have used this term to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture.”99 But its applicability to “For Ammonis” lies in its capacity to elide “acculturation” and describe “patterns of influence that are . . . [not] unidirectional”100 and where a “‘reciprocal influence is the determining factor . . . no single element superimposes itself on another; on the contrary, each one changes into the

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other so that both can be transformed into a third,’” in Françoise Lionnet’s argument about the category.101 Raphael would seem to be a representative of an acculturated intellectual elite, for, unlike the speaker(s), he writes in Greek, and writes in the genre of the epitaph, yet it is an acquired, cultivated Greek—“Your Greek is admirable and musical always, / But we desire all your skill perfected now.” And it is into the cultivated Greek epitaph commissioned by others unnamed in the poem that Raphael is entreated to “Pour out your Egyptian feeling in the foreign speech” (“To aigiptiako sou aisthima chise stin kseni glossa” [TP1 83]). But it is not solely a translation into that “decorous” Greek epitaph of an Egyptian affect that the speaker is requesting. Rather, form itself, it seems, will be altered by the process: “the rhythm and each phrase declare / an Alexandrian is writing for an Alexandrian” (“o rithmos k’ i kathe frasis na diloun / pou gi’ Aleksandrino grafei Aleksandrinos” [TP1 83]).102 Hence, the final product is coded “Alexandrian” and not “Greek”—a language named only once in the poem but twice referred to as “foreign.” If, as has been observed, the sexual connotations of “pour out”103 speak to the homoerotic component of the poem, a shorthand of which is the dead individual “Ammonis,” the injunction also points to a metaphorical textual infiltration of Egypt into Greek letters. Hence the third, transculturated element, “Alexandrian.” In this, the poem bears comparison with “Timolaos the Syracusan” (1894; repudiated), which offers another instance of transculturation in a corner likewise far-flung from mainland Greece. Ostensibly about a moment of self-doubt and artistic crisis in the life of this master musician, a fictional figure with a Greek name, the poem begins by narrating Timolaos’s renown. Of “the glorious musician,” we are told that he is “Wisest with the lyre and the cithara, / he also knows the delicate pipe, / tenderest of all tender flutes. He draws forth / from the reed a weeping melody. / And when he takes his harp in hand, / its chords give out the poetry / of fervent Asia—initiation to voluptuousness and to sweet musings, / fragrances of Ectabana and Nineveh” (BTCT 293; see APM 30–31). This Greek from Sicily plays Asian melodies recalling the capital of Media (Ectabana) and the Assyrian capital (Nineveh)104 using musical instruments of different provenance, hence in a sense producing transculturated melodies. But there are two key differences between “Timolaos the Syracusan” and “For Ammonis”: whereas the former

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appears to be descriptive of transculturation, the latter is clearly prescriptive; more important, whereas in “Timolaos” the transculturated music is sustained by, and may have been imagined by Cavafy in praise of, the cultural potentialities of greater Hellenism,105 here set in the classical colonial context of Magna Graecia, in “For Ammonis” Hellenism recedes further, is made “foreign,” in favor of an “Alexandrian” textuality. In “For Ammonis” the “third poet,” the Alexandrian Greek poet Cavafy, imaginatively opens his text to those who stand outside the span of the Greek language (the speaker in the poem) and of the Byzantine Church (the Copts, Ammonis and Raphael). Hence he places himself in a continuum, via the figure of the Hellenophone (Raphael), with the figure of the barbarian (those whose “sorrow and . . . love are passing into foreign speech” [BTCT 64]). That the figures in the poem, including the speaker, are apparently a group of homosexual young men grafts the further level of homoerotic textuality as a space that favors such transcultural work. The “third poet” here, the Cavafy who is opening the space of his text to an Ammonis like “an Alexandrian writing for an Alexandrian,” has his semblable in the diasporic speaker of “Return from Greece.” Yet again, where ancient Egypt is concerned, it is important to recall the presence of that other Cavafy, the Cavafy of the wise men of the North who rescue the mimes from the darkness of the Egyptian earth in “The Mimiambi of Herodas” and of the praise accorded Stratigis. In terms of dates of composition, the two positions seem coextensive. Although “The Mimiambi” (1892) and the Stratigis article (1893) belong to the early years of the last decade of the nineteenth century and “For Ammonis” (1915/1917) comes much later,106 there is also the fact of the composition of “The Cat” (1897) soon after the first two texts. But, coextensive though the two tendencies appear, there is also a preponderance of openness to things Egyptian, and a larger degree of acknowledgment of Egyptian influence on modern Greeks from the region, as discussed below, in later years.107 However, I first turn to instances where Cavafy engages Islam and tropes associated with it—in the poems “Word and Silence” (1892; repudiated) and “Dünya Güzeli” (1884; hidden)108 —moving on from there to a consideration of how these tropes come to complicate and in turn become complicated by texts of his that evidence a greater receptivity to modern Egypt.

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islam and orientalism Cavafy’s polyvalent encounter with ancient Egypt, for all the richness of its ambiguities, need not bode a subtlety of response to binaries when Islam is at stake. The early poem “Word and Silence” cautions us against an unnuanced reclaiming of Cavafy in that context. The poem takes an Arabic proverb as its subject and its epigraph, as transliterated from an Egyptian colloquial version and translated into Greek. Both the transliteration and the translation are only slightly faulty: “Iza kan elkalam min fidda, assoukout min zachab,” rendered by Cavafy into Greek as “Silence is golden and the word silver” (BTCT 287; see APM 22).109 That Cavafy has taken such pains to transliterate, translate, transpose, and label as Arabic the proverb might be enlisted as an instance of transculturation, with some kinship to the metapoetic commentary in “For Ammonis.” However, “Word and Silence” is an invective that sets an Islam it elicits from the proverb in opposition to a Christianity that sanctions writing. Islam is not explicitly mentioned in “Word and Silence” but is clearly one pole of an antithetical relationship, the other being explicitly Christianity, it sets up. The first lines of the poem are “What profane character uttered such blasphemy? / What languishing Asian blind, mute, abandoned to blind, / mute fate? What madman, wretched, / stranger to mankind, reviling virtue, / said the soul is a chimera, and the word silver?” (BTCT 287). The religious register in words such as “profane” and “blasphemy” (“vevilos” and “vlasfimian” [APM 22]), when coupled with “Asian,” and the fact that the proverb has been identified as “Arabic,” yields an unmistakably intentional allusion to Islam and an inscription of the proverb in its worldview. The poem continues: Our only gift suiting us to God, containing all else—enthusiasm, sorrow, joy, love; the sole thing human in our bestial nature! You who call it silver, you do not believe in the future, dissolution of silence, mysterious word. You do not grow tender in wisdom, progress does not charm you; with ignorance—silver silence—you are gratified. You are ill. Unfeeling silence is a grave malady, while the Word, warm, empathic, is health. Silence is shadow and night; the Word is day. The Word is truth, life, immortality. We are to speak, we are to speak—silence does not suit us

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since we are fashioned in the image of the Word. We are to speak, we are to speak—since in us divine thought speaks, the soul’s unbodied speech. (BTCT 287; see APM 22)

The sets of antitheses in the poem—silver/gold, silence/Word, night/ day, illness/health, ignorance/progress—spring from the central binary of the speaker and the addressee. The invocations of the (capitalized) “Word”—a reference, specifically in “we are fashioned in the image of the Word,” to Christianity and to the concept of the incarnation—impute the binary to Islam/Christianity. Noting the antitheses, Haas attributes them to “fatalisme musulman” and “foi chretienne,” which become clearer, she elaborates, with the allusions to the Gospel of St. John. In her reading of the poem, Christian faith corresponds to faith in the “future,” the future merges with the “mysterious word,” and the Word, in turn, merges with “Immortality.” All this leads her to the conclusion that the mysterious quality accorded the “word” derives entirely from the mystical context of The Gospel According to St. John, which is central to Christian esotericism. She rightly notes that in the poem, “wisdom” (as the converse of ignorance), with which progress is identified, must be understood as spiritual wisdom. Making these comments in her study Le Problème religieux dans l’œuvre de Cavafy, she stays within the worldview of the poem, albeit expressing the reservation that her interpretation is “for our purposes.”110 In taking a closer look at the proverb that furnishes the pretext for “Word and Silence” and its relation to its context, my interpretation brings to light the relationship between the religious problem as manifested in this specific poem and the broader question—this for my own purposes—of probing cosmopolitanism vis-à-vis the binary of Greek versus barbarian in Cavafy. As seen in my earlier discussion, the Asian-as-barbarian (part of the classical binary Greek-vs.barbarian) was not consistently, in Cavafy, the denigrated Other; rather, in some notable instances, the Asian was exonerated, as in the essay “Persian Manners” and in the poem “Return from Greece” in which the diasporic Greek speaker declared to his silent companion that “our inclinations and our feelings come from Asia / inclinations and feelings / startling at times to Hellenism” (BTCT 263). Yet here is another Asia, an Asia that belongs to an Islam construed in the poem as an antithesis of Christianity, and, in its capacity as an Islamic Asia becomes the most abject Other.

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In commenting on the proverb as the pretext for the poem’s binary Islam/Christianity, I have used words like intended, impute, and construe because the proverb’s import and usage in its cultural context in fact have nothing to do with fatalism, whether Islamic or otherwise, an aspect of the poem that seems to have eluded all Cavafy critics. The proverb, which Cavafy would have heard in Egypt where it is in use,111 urges discretion and a reserved approach to verbally revealing thoughts and intentions in daily social situations. But what of the Arabo-Islamic “Asia” of the poem, the Arabian Peninsula? According to ‘Abd al-Karim al-Juhayman, in al-Amthal al-Sha‘biyya fi Qalb Jazirat al-‘Arab (Folk Proverbs in the Arabian Peninsula), the proverb counsels poise, deliberation, and not throwing in words without consideration of their consequences.112 Hence the register of this proverb is that of daily strategies of social intercourse, not of Islamic metaphysics. Moving from what I insist is the quotidian, social register of the proverb to that of Islam, I underscore the fundamental importance to this religion of the word—read, spoken, and recited—and its sanctity. One of the revelations took the form of the command to recite: “Recite, in the name of your Lord, who created; created man out of a blood-clot [ . . . ] who taught with the pen, taught man that which he did not know.”113 Construed as the word of God, and as “inimitable,” the Qur’an is the source of the sacredness of the Arabic language and of the accrued canonical status of Arabic poetry while presenting an unattainable standard of literary perfection, hence, also, the art of recitation of the holy book.114 The centrality of the word to Islam is attested in the whole apparatus of such branches of traditional learning as tafsir and hadith. This is not to mention the existence within Islamic societies of a range of popular traditions of exultation through words and formulas, as, for example, in the verbal forms of dhikr, the incantation-like repetition of the “Allah,” God’s ninety-nine names in the Islamic tradition, and certain phrases, and in tasabih, or glorifications of God.115 As will be seen in my discussion of Forster, the misconception of Islam encapsulated in Cavafy’s “Word and Silence” is hardly confined to the poet. To import the discussion of the proverb in the poem into the speaker/addressee binary, one would note the monolithic idea of Arab cultures whereby all aspects are ascribed to Islam, and an Islam, moreover, that is assigned the characteristics of “muteness” and “backwardness,” which throw into relief the (Christian) West’s

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articulateness and capacity for progress. One may then be tempted to assert that here is an unequivocal instance of a projection onto the “East” and “Islam” of an image that affirms the “West’s” superiority, in the discourse Said designates as Orientalism. In bringing out for the purposes of my guiding questions in this chapter the questionable reinscription of the proverb in an Islam construed as monolithic,116 I would also wish to emphasize that Cavafy wrote this poem at around the age of twenty-nine, when he may, quite simply, not have known better, having spent a good portion of his formative years in England, apart from a period in Istanbul. Furthermore, his choice to repudiate this early poem may well indicate that he recanted it not solely on aesthetic grounds but likely also on the grounds of a retroactive realization of the misguidedness of its assumptions and sentiments.117 The Istanbul association furnishes an index of the other side of the dichotomy of the Muslim-as-barbarian in this poem, this being not so much the category of broader Hellenism, but specifically that of Byzantine/Greek Orthodox. The poem “Dünya Güzeli” bears out my contention that the Byzantine/Greek Orthodox affiliation is the constitutive aspect of the Orientalist construction of Islam in “Word and Silence.” This near-contemporary three-stanza poem, the title of which “is Turkish for ‘the most beautiful of all the beautiful women’”118 (an interesting parallel to the transliterated Arabic proverb), is in the voice of a young woman, a Turkish Muslim denizen of a harem in Istanbul. The first stanza has the young woman contemplating her beauty in the mirror and mournfully reflecting that it is all to no avail. The second and third stanzas can be said to provide antithetical images of each other: Locked as I am inside this hateful harem, who anywhere on earth beholds my beauty? Only rival foes cast poisonous glances my way, the evil eunuchs, and the blood runs ice in my veins when my odious husband comes near me. Prophet, Lord over me, forgive me if my heart cries out in pain, Let me be a Christian! Had I been born a Christian I would be free to show myself to all, both in the night and day; and men with wonder, women with envy would confess, seeing my beauty, with one mind— That nature will not make another she like me.

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Of Greeks, Barbarians, Philhellenes, Hellenophones, and Egyptiotes Each time I would go forth in an open carriage the streets of Istanbul would be mobbed for everyone to see me. (BTCT 192; see KP 20)

The second stanza’s atmosphere of intrigue, the foes, the eunuchs, and the odious husband—the stock stage props of the harem—and the conjoined trope of Oriental despotism, all patently belong to what Yourcenar would have called Orientalist décor. The context that this poem explicitly belongs to is what Mohja Kahf has demonstrated is a Western trope (the harem and the odalisque) the emergence of which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in reversal of previous representations, specifically medieval, of the Muslim woman as a virago or termagant. “If European culture in the seventeenth century discovered the seraglio or harem and located the Muslim woman in it,” she writes, “the Enlightenment declared her unhappy there.”119 In contradistinction to the oppression and confinement of the harem as depicted here is the world the speaker would have inhabited “had [she] been born” “a Christian,” a world where she would have exercised choice in showing herself in public spaces—the carriage driving through “the streets” of Istanbul, and without curfews (“both in the night and day”). “Dünya Güzeli” reads as a specifically gendered analogy to “Word and Silence” in that it upholds a binary of a Christian “us” and a Muslim “them” paralleling the latter poem’s series of antitheses with the reversed mirror image in the second and third stanzas. Yet “Dünya Güzeli” does two things that “Word and Silence” does not do. It speaks its indictment of Islam through the voice of a Muslim and a woman; in Dünya Güzeli’s pleading with the prophet of Islam for forgiveness for her desire to be delivered by becoming a Christian, it also does so in the context of Istanbul, the Ottoman capital that had been Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium. This connection is unlikely to have escaped Cavafy whose maternal family was of quasi-aristocratic Phanariot descent.120 What I would wish to emphasize, though, is that the writing of this poem was contemporaneous with the gathering of force of Megali Idea. In pitting a denigrated (explicitly Muslim) Istanbul against a Christian (and likely implicitly Constantinopolitan, since in the same locale) space, the poem is therefore informed by a Byzantine nostalgia that is not inimical to the “Great Idea,” although at the same time not overdetermined in a propagandistic sense with that irredentist ideology.

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contempor ary egypt: witnessing colonial injustices and resonances of a popular imaginary But the binarism at work in “Dünya Güzeli” and “Word and Silence” is in turn considerably complicated, along both religious and colonial lines, in the poem “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” (1908; hidden). The poem takes as its subject one of the Egyptian men hanged by the authorities in the Dinshiwai incident. Cavafy had, in the manuscript of the poem, included the name of the young man, “Joseph Housein Selim”121 (or Yusuf Husayn Silim). The incident took place in the Delta village of Dinshiwai, where a group of British officers went shooting pigeons belonging to the villagers, resulting in a clash between the two parties that escalated into mutual violence, with a peasant woman being wounded and a peasant man killed, as well as the villagers being unfairly blamed for the death from sunstroke of a British officer. That the Special Tribunal set up by the British—which included only two Egyptians (one of them was Butrus Ghali, later to be assassinated), of whom only one was Muslim—“established premeditated and concerted action” and passed a death sentence on four men and a variety of other sentences on seventeen others, had widespread repercussions in Egypt and abroad.122 The incident—about which a number of poems by several well-known Egyptian poets were written, and folk ballads and popular songs composed and sung—brought to a head Egyptian resentment of the British occupation and became the subject of a media campaign against the British in Egypt and by the nationalist leader Mustafa Kamil in France. This eventually led to the resignation of Lord Cromer.123 Cavafy’s poem reads: When the Christians brought him out to hang him, the seventeen-year-old, the innocent boy, his mother, who was near the gallows crawled and beat herself on the scattered earth, under the fierce noonday sun, howled, and sometimes cried out like a wolf, like a wild beast; exhausted sometimes the mother-martyr keened, “Only seventeen, the years you’ve lived for me, my boy.” And when they took him up the gallows steps, and over him knotted the rope and strangled him, the seventeen-year-old, the innocent boy, and there hung in the void, pitiable, convulsed in black anguish, the beautifully made ephebic body, the mother-martyr rocked herself on the scattered earth

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and now no longer keened for years; “Only seventeen days” was her dirge, “only seventeen days, my joy, my pride with you, my boy.” (BTCT 258; see KP 91)

Tsirkas’s early and sustained engagement with this poem in Greek is, with few exceptions, not paralleled in English-language criticism. By and large, the latter has either merely touched on the poem as of tangential relevance to a given perspective or, as in the case of Liddell, cited it in the course of an argument denying an anticolonial stance on the part of Cavafy.124 Liddell takes on the interpretation of Cavafy’s work put forward by Tsirkas, contests certain biographical details that he offers, and ridicules his political-allegorical interpretations of a number of Cavafy’s poems, whereby historical figures are said to represent contemporaries such as Lord Cromer and Alexandrian Greek notables and their collaboration with the occupiers of Egypt— and yet, there is the stubborn fact of the poem “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” Liddell, who puts it on record that he condemns the Dinshiwai affair, implicitly admonishes Tsirkas when he opines unequivocally, “There is no need to draw a political conclusion from Cavafy’s humane reaction to one scene of horror—a reaction not unlike that of many British officials in Egypt at the time. He had, moreover, a particular abhorrence for capital punishment.”125 Citing a note by Cavafy condemning capital punishment, he then elaborates on the poet’s penchant for Greek lamentations for the dead and points out the presence of the mater dolorosa in other poems, as well as what he sees as an aspect of the poem that concerns the mourning of a handsome boy. Liddell then turns to the newspaper cuttings that Cavafy kept about another Egyptian case of capital punishment, that of Ibrahim al-Wardani who had assassinated the prime minister, Butrus Pasha Ghali, an Anglophile Copt. The critic argues that while “it is not recorded whether Ibrahim el Wardani was beautiful,” “it is not impossible that his fate appealed to the Cavafy of the letter ‘T’ [the homosexual Cavafy] quite as much as to the ‘other’ [the political] Cavafy,” and offers that “the connection between sex and hanging is only too well known.” He then produces a note by Cavafy that reads: “‘The Egyptian people showed sympathy for Wardani: out of pity for the individual, not—at least among the more evolved part of them—out of approval for the act. An organ of the Italian press in Egypt wrote recommending him to mercy.’” Liddell’s comment: “No doubt Cavafy felt some pity for the poor misguided individual,

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but we may safely suppose him to have been at least as ‘evolved’ as those Egyptians who had no sympathy for the act. The organ of the Italian press was no doubt trying to flatter Egyptian sentiment at the expense of the British, but Cavafy has never been found doing any such thing.”126 This is a somewhat disingenuous statement on several fronts. To start with, Liddell’s rendition of the Greek phrase “aneptigmenen merida” as the “more evolved part of them” is somewhat inaccurate: a more apt translation would be the “larger portion of them” or “greater part of them.”127 Thus Cavafy was referring to the majority of Egyptian responses rather than, as Liddell would have us believe, perceiving Egyptians in colonial/social Darwinist terms. And indeed Liddell amplifies the idiom he has injected here by placing Cavafy on a higher rung of the evolutionary scale—“at least as ‘evolved.’” Furthermore, elsewhere in the biography, Liddell himself mentions Cavafy’s acquaintance with the Italian poet resident in Alexandria Enrico Pea,128 whom we know was a member of an anarchist group and who had access to the press. The biographer’s main aim is to write off Cavafy’s keen awareness and meticulous description of Egyptian mourning over the execution of al-Wardani and his close attention to the controversy in the Italian press. Hence Liddell either ascribes the poem to Cavafy’s condemnation of capital punishment or his homosexuality. However, what of the voice in the poem? While not that of the mother, the question is open as to whether the voice suggests itself as being possibly a collective voice of Dinshiwai, given the deliberately loaded marker “Christians” in the first line, which establishes the Other against whom the collective (implicitly Muslim) village seems to be identified. This would be a reversal in point of view from “Word and Silence” and distinctly at variance with “Dünya Güzeli” where the “insider” Muslim voice is one that indicts Islam in favor of Christianity. This reversal of perspective on the binary of Christian/ Muslim in “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” would suggest an assertion of empathy on which conspicuous markers are placed, an empathy that is reminiscent of that at work in Ammonis’s friends referring to the Greek language as “foreign speech” (BTCT 64), being here an empathy with villagers in the Delta against Europeans/the British. Yet Dinshiwai threw the binary of colonizer/colonized into sharpest relief, and thus the poem’s use of “Christian” (as distinct from “British” or “English”) as the term for the oppressor and the Other can be read as depoliticizing. Pointing out that in the first draft of the

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poem the first verse originally referred to the “English” in place of “Christians,” Tsirkas likewise speculates which side Cavafy is on.129 One might be tempted to suggest that Cavafy’s use of “Christian” for oppressor is inscribed in that vision of Islam, seen in “Word and Silence,” as monolithic and unchanging. But while some of the mawawil (pl. of mawwal, meaning “popular poem”/“ballad”) in the village about this incident, although recorded after the event by Muhammad al-Masadi, consistently speak of “the English,” an anonymous mawwal in manuscript form obtained in 1943 by Pierre Cachia does refer to al-nasara (the Nazarenes) in the context of the British powers.130 Bearing this latter piece of evidence in mind, one would suggest that the speaker in the poem may well be adopting the accents and diction in popular Egyptian texts on Dinshiwai. Although how the Alexandrian Greek poet may have come in contact with such popular ballads is unclear, there seems to be a hint here that he was not insulated from nonelite Egyptian contexts. One paradox in the poem, then, is the Christian imagery in which the mother of the hanged young man is portrayed: the epithet “mother-martyr”—Liddell does not err here—casts her as a mater dolorosa. However, although the voice in the poem is “on the side” of the villagers, it makes no claim to speaking in the collective voice of Dinshiwai. Tsirkas, who likewise speculates that Cavafy’s usage of “Christian” is taken from a mawwal rather than classical Arabic poems on the incident—he disputes any Muslim fanaticism in the popular source—suggests that the butt of the irony about the “unChristian” behavior of the Christians in the poem is not solely the British but also some Greeks who were in favor of the executions.131 I would add that the same irony, albeit much more pronounced, is at work in Cavafy’s “To Jerusalem” (1893; hidden), which mocks the pious weeping, on “beholding the walls of Jerusalem,” by the “unvanquished Crusaders” of the First Crusade who have now expunged “[p]assion, avarice, and ambition” from their souls and “forgotten their quarrels with the Greeks, / . . . forgotten their hatred for the Turks”—only to then plunder the city and commit massacres (BTCT 217; see KP 46–47).132 Furthermore, the usage of “Christians” in “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” also taps into the “civilizing mission” rhetoric of colonialism more broadly by exposing the vacuity and complicity of a promise, made by Christians, that left a trail of “martyrs” and wreaked violence in order to secure economic gain—witness the detailed description in the poem of the hanging of the young man and

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the peaking of the mother’s grief where she translates the seventeen years into seventeen days. Attributing the contraction of time to the mother’s grief and—adducing a similar play on time in a work song he himself had heard in Upper Egypt—Tsirkas speculates whether here too there is a resonance of Egyptian folklore.133 The date of writing of this poem is uncontested by Cavafy scholars: it was written in 1908, specifically, in January, according to Liddell himself.134 This means that the event and the subject of the poem preoccupied Cavafy for a year and a half, and that the poem was hardly the result of any topicality. Rather, the gap between the event and the poem—given, too, that epitaphs and poems about the writing of epitaphs make up a large part of the Cavafy corpus—would indicate an acute and rankling sense of the injustices of the British occupation as thrown into relief in this event, and an abiding desire to memorialize those put to death in the Dinshiwai incident.135 Cavafy is also likely to have known of the publication of Arabic poems on the incident and may have been writing this poem as a contribution, if an unpublished one, to the outpouring of poetic testimonies to the event in the country. Liddell’s quotation from Cavafy concerning Egyptian reactions to the execution of Ibrahim al-Wardani continues with a detailed account with signs of Egyptian grief over the event: “After the execution of the unfortunate young man, Egyptian demonstrations of sympathy were numerous. Poems in his praise were written, pupils of various schools of higher studies wore black ties for mourning; there were gatherings around his grave and there emotional speeches were made, and the hands of friends brought beautiful flowers.”136 Given that the two events, Dinshiwai and al-Wardani’s assassination of Butrus Ghali, are interconnected even in detail—“one of the reasons al-Wardani gave for assassinating Butros Ghali in 1911 was that he had passed a treacherous sentence over” Dinshiwai137—the poem and the press clippings evidence Cavafy’s sustained attention to the fallout from British injustices in Egypt. Liddell’s suggestion that Cavafy’s penchant for Greek lamentations for the dead is at work in “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.”138 can in fact be taken in another direction, one where a parallel can be drawn between this poem and “For Ammonis, Who Died at 29, in 610.” Despite the difference in historical moments that the two poems treat, in both instances the Greek language and, in the latter case, literary conventions are made into vehicles for specifically indigenous Egyptian (the fellahin, in this case predominantly Muslim, and the

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Copts, respectively) mourning. Another difference lies in the publication status of the two poems: “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” is “hidden” while “For Ammonis” is “disseminated.” One interpretation of Cavafy’s decision not to publish “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” is that he was still an employee, a muwazzaf (government functionary), in the Irrigation Service under the British administration when he wrote it. Cavafy may have deemed it incautious to disseminate the poem as he did “For Ammonis,” which held no apparent relevance to contemporary affairs. This speculation is not far-fetched if one considers the case of a contemporary Egyptian novel about the event, ‘Adhra’ Dinshiwai (The Virgin of Dinshiwai), by Mahmud Tahir Haqqi, who, like Cavafy, held a government post. Haqqi was repeatedly called in and intimidated by the British authorities while the novel was being serialized in a newspaper shortly after the incident (it was published in book form in 1909) and resigned from his post on account of the governmental displeasure he incurred.139 Nor did Cavafy destroy the poem on Dinshiwai or mark it “repudiated”; rather, he made sure to preserve it among his “hidden” poems. In contrast to the general obliviousness to this poem in Englishlanguage Cavafy criticism—apart from Liddell’s “misprision” of it—“27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” has garnered an affirming afterlife in the Egyptian reception of Cavafy. The poem, not being part of the “canon”—which for long was the main though not sole source of translations—has not often been translated into Arabic. While a fullfledged history of Arabic translations of Cavafy cannot be given here, I have elected to provide a note on the subject, and to bring it into my discussion of the poet rather than relegate it to an appendix. A number of the poems have been available in Arabic since at least the 1970s, including 120 poems rendered by the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef.140 Two if not more of the Arabic translations were undertaken directly from Greek: a selection of canonical and other poems was rendered by a Cairo University classicist, Hamdi Ibrahim, in 1992, and a translation of the canon in its entirety by Na‘im ‘Atiya—a half-Egyptian, halfGreek poet—was published in 1991.141 But ‘Atiya had clearly been working on the translation for many years, for Cavafy’s poems as rendered by him are cited in glowing terms in a 1967 article by Yahya Haqqi (1905–87), one of the foremost Egyptian writers and critics of the first half of the twentieth century. Haqqi saves Cavafy for the concluding paragraphs of this article titled “Unshuda li-l-Basata” (Hymn to Simplicity) where he writes:

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Recently, I spent a balmy evening on a terrace overlooking the Nile in the home of my friend the artist and writer Na‘im ‘Atiya, listening to him recite his translation of poems by Cavafy, the forlorn [miskin] poet of Alexandria. How accessible the words are, how simple, how delightful—their import free of convolution and cleverness. The significance of these poems lies not in what they say but in what they intimate. It is almost as though you are reading a story like many that happen every day—about a fleeting encounter, or a candle-lit night. But oh how you discover just then that what you have been reading all along is at once the essence of the tragedy of the human versus fate. . . . Nowhere else but in this small golden spoon full of nectar that Cavafy offers have I seen such a sea overflowing with emotions. In him, every spark is a sun, every drop the distillation of a thousand thousand clusters of grapes. This is poetry in all its simplicity and humaneness.142

A consummate short story and fiction writer, Haqqi’s brief within which he adduces Cavafy is to promote transluscent, even transparent, language and a realist aesthetic that eschews technical, modernist “convolution” at the expense of a construed content. In contrast to the “see[ing] a world in a grain of sand” quality (to loosely invoke William Blake) that Haqqi reads beneath the surface of Cavafy’s poems, a poet such as Ibrahim Dawud dialogues precisely with that seemingly unassuming, prosaic surface. As a member of the so-called 1990s generation of writers in Egypt, with its disenchantment with all grand narratives and discourses of nationalism of whatever hue, Dawud seeks an aesthetic steeped in the quotidian, in fragmentary details of everyday life, and in a bland, noncommittal tone. His 1993 collection of poems, Matar Khafif fi al-Kharij (A Light Drizzle Outside), has for its epigraph two verses from Cavafy’s “Walls” (1896/1897).143 Although some of the individual “hidden” poems, apart from the canonical ones, had long been available in several translations, it was not before 2011 that the vast majority of Cavafy’s poems, including the “hidden” and the “unfinished”—as well as a few of his prose texts—appeared in a translation by Rif‘at Sallam. His translation contains one of the few Arabic renditions of “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” Another Arabic translation of “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” appeared in Kavafi Sha‘ir al-Iskandariyya (Cavafy, Poet of Alexandria), a 1992 volume in which the Alexandrian poet and artist Ahmad Mursi rendered a selection of the poems into Arabic and visually translated them into a series of etchings (see fig. 1). In an introductory essay, Mursi pauses at Liddell’s assertion that Cavafy “never seemed to recognize the Arab conquest of Egypt” and adduces, against the grain

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Figure 1. Etching by Ahmad Mursi inspired by C. P. Cavafy’s poetry, particularly “The City.” Reproduced by permission of the artist.

of Liddell’s discussion, poems—he does not take stock of “Exiles”— in which the Alexandrian Greek “shared the emotions and passions [wijdan]” of Egyptians, including “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.,” of which he provides a translation.144 Parenthetically, I would note that this and another translation of the same poem, by Sallam, have opted

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for classical Arabic—although the more appropriate decision, in my view, would have been to render the mother’s keening into colloquial Egyptian Arabic, in keeping with the folk lexicon of lamentation, over and above the considerable possibility, as we have seen, that the poem’s intertext is a popular mawwal.145 Indeed, “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” is the subject of “Qasida Misriyya wa Sha‘ir Yunani” (An Egyptian Poem and a Greek Poet), one of two essays the Egyptian literary critic Raja’ al-Naqqash wrote about Egyptian poets’ intertextual dialogue with Cavafy’s poetry. Although seemingly not questioning Liddell’s biography, which he identifies as his reference on the poet, al-Naqqash does not unduly fall under the sway of its interpretations. He does suggest that one of three sources for Cavafy’s poetry (he names Graeco-Roman heritage and the poet’s personal experiences as the other two) is contemporary Egyptian events, although based on the evidence available to him, he considers it “limited” since the Alexandrian Greek poet did not take part “in Egyptian political life nor in Egyptian culture.” Al-Naqqash claims that in the earlier part of the twentieth century, Egyptian writers did not take an interest “in this poet who lived in their midst nor did they perceive” his eminent stature (a statement, of course, to be modified on account of Rassim, among others, and one that does not take the language barrier and belated availability of Cavafy translations sufficiently into account). He substantiates this claim by citing a single rather dismissive article about Cavafy that he has been able to locate from the period, by the poet, litterateur, and critic ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad (1889–1964) apparently written on the occasion of the publication of the first (1951) English translation of the canon. I agree with al-Naqqash that al-‘Aqqad misconstrues Cavafy whose poems he seems to have read hastily. This is not so much on account of al‘Aqqad’s value judgment that Cavafy’s poetic stature is “below the summit and above the descending slope” as his assumption that the poet—“a living example of the Alexandrian Age in which cultures and religions mingled”—is an “onlooker” who “does not have time for long reflection,” his philosophy in life being incapable of “firm belief or rigorous study.”146 Al-Naqqash then suggests that, thanks to an aesthetic sea change in Egypt, more experimental writers of the 1950s and 1960s generations have seen in Cavafy “an artist of great value and importance.” It is in this context that he turns to “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.,” which he designates as one of Cavafy’s “Egyptian poems” and lauds as “a

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beautiful, moving human tableau of great concision.” Al-Naqqash, who provides an Arabic translation of the poem, argues that the poem’s reference to “Christians” and the image of the “mothermartyr” are ironical commentary on the behavior of the British in this incident by contrasting it to Christianity’s ethos of forgiveness and mercy.147 He then turns to “Shanq Zahran” (The Hanging of Zahran), by Salah ‘Abd al-Sabur (1931–81), one of the foremost Egyptian poets of the twentieth century, suggesting that, though he has no concrete evidence for it, this elegy of another one of the men hanged in the Dinshiwai incident is inspired by Cavafy’s “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” Al-Naqqash emphasizes that this would be a case of intertextuality rather than slavish copying, given the strength of ‘Abd al-Sabur’s talent. The evidence, it seems to me, is quite circumstantial, and any resemblance would be the result of the tragedy that is the subject matter of the two poems. “The Hanging of Zahran” draws a much more distinct portrait of Zahran as an individual—as he grows into an image of peaceful, upright, life-loving manhood, marries, and becomes a father—than Cavafy’s poem does of the unnamed Yusuf Husayn Silim. While the focus of Cavafy’s poem is the trauma of the mother of the martyr, only implicitly drawing in the perspective of the village, the speaker in ‘Abd al-Sabur’s poem frames the tragedy in terms of its long-lasting impact on “my village which from that day fears life.”148 Aware that the publication history of the two poems makes his hypothesis tenuous, al-Naqqash adduces as external evidence ‘Abd al-Sabur’s expression of his admiration, in two prose books, for Cavafy’s poetry. For example, in the course of his reflections on poetics in the volume Hayati fi al-Shi‘r (My Life in Poetry), ‘Abd al-Sabur asserts that the criterion of aesthetic achievement is that a poem contain “a poetic climax” (which he distinguishes from the climax in drama) and that the different structures of the poem are a function of the different placements of the climax in the text. Asserting that the readiest poetic structure is one in which the climax is placed at the end of the poem, he cites—and provides a translation of—Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1898/1904) as the clearest example. ‘Abd al-Sabur compares the ending to that of the traditional short story, which necessitates a rereading of the whole text in light of the revelation at the end.149 As for the other prose text, ‘Ala Masharif al-Khamsin (On the Eve of Turning Fifty), including autobiographical meditations on formative influences, ‘Abd al-Sabur launches

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the ruminations on old age with which he opens in a chapter titled “The Old Man and the Newspaper” that plays off Cavafy’s “An Old Man,” and imaginatively re-creates the Alexandrian “scene” in which the poem is set.150 I would add that ‘Abd al-Sabur elsewhere translated three poems by Cavafy: “From the School of the Renowned Philosopher” (1921; disseminated), “An Old Man” (1894/1897), and “Ithaca” (1894–1910/1911). Still, I would suggest that al-Naqqash’s hypothesis about the intertextuality is somewhat untenable. In “My Life in Poetry,” the other prose book al-Naqqash mentions, ‘Abd al-Sabur cites “The Hanging of Zahran” in the context of discussing the influence on him of the language and imagery of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land—a wellattested intertext of his poetry—particularly the description of the typist’s room in the scene of her sexual encounter with the clerk in the third section of the poem. This and other modern poems the world over, he adds, clinched the sense that poetic diction has become a thing of the past, a realization he put into practice in writing “The Hanging of Zahran,” where he “tried to draw” a realistic portrait of the young peasant, in “clothing and human disposition.”151 Of course, the influence of The Waste Land on the language used in “The Hanging of Zahran” need not put paid to the possibility of “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” being an intertext; but what makes it all the more unlikely is that ‘Abd al-Sabur’s poem was first published in a 1957 collection, and, as al-Naqqash himself is aware, it is hard to imagine how the Egyptian poet could have accessed the Alexandrian Greek’s “hidden” poem at that early date. That said, al-Naqqash’s creative and thoughtful intervention is valuable for highlighting the affinity between the Alexandrian Greek poet and the Egyptian poet in choice of subject matter, an affinity that speaks to Cavafy’s empathy with Egypt and Egyptians. The Cavafy corpus also includes an early, repudiated poem, “Sham El-Nessim” (1892; see APM 23–25), about indigenous Egyptians in an Alexandrian setting. Taking as its subject the spring festival of the title, “Sham El-Nessim,” despite some cliché expressions, warrants comparison with “For Ammonis” and “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” It is true that in the lines (in Rae Dalven’s translation, where the title of the poem is given as “Sham-el-Nessim”) “the Egyptian preserves his solemnity / even at the festival; / he adorns his fez with flowers but his face / is immobile” (CPC 184), we encounter a stereotype that often accompanies Western depictions of “Oriental” natives, as in the

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“impassive Turk,” which may be why Cavafy repudiated the poem.152 However, not only does the poem thematically celebrate this most traditional of Egyptian festivals; it also places markers on its structural appeal to popular Egyptian songs. This poem—which appears to be the only one in the Cavafy corpus that names neighborhoods and districts of modern Alexandria153 —invokes the god Ptah, hence highlighting its awareness that the festival is of ancient Egyptian origin, and also transliterates into Greek the Arabic word for singer, “mughanni” (see APM 24). And in a move reminiscent of the transcultural bid in “For Ammonis,” Cavafy transliterates into Greek the Arabic name for the country, Misr (in the Greek original “Misiri” [APM 23–24])—rather than give it as Aigyptos—and also attempts in the poem’s folk ballad–like structure (with the first stanza constituting a refrain repeated at the end) an empathic mirroring of the Egyptian folk songs that “Sham El-Nessim” mentions. Noting the two transliterated Arabic words, Tsirkas comments that even if there were no other evidence, this poem suffices as testimony to Cavafy’s love of Egypt and the Egyptians.154 The opening stanza reads: “Our pallid Misr / with arrows full of bitterness, / and spite, the sun has scorched and flayed / exhausting her with thirst and with disease. / Our dear sweet Misr / now in a care-free festival / gets tipsy, then forgets, and then, decked out, all joy, / has only scorn for such a tyrannizing sun” (URP 96; see APM 23). The translation cited here, by Memas Kolaitis who had lived in Egypt for a spell, appears to be the only English one to have used Misr, instead of rendering it as Egypt; it also transliterates “moghanny.”155 Mendelsohn’s later translation follows suit in retaining Cavafy’s transliteration of the word for singer— “the sweet moganni / of widest fame is warmly lauded”—but it transliterates, as well as reproduces, the country’s name as given in the poem—“Our pale Misiri” (CP 207, 206).

a language of “the twilight zones” If Keeley and Savidis in introducing their rendition of a number of poems by the Alexandrian Greek admit that “obviously no translation can exploit, or even successfully imitate, the particular linguistic resources that Cavafy was able to tap in creating the tone of individual poems,”156 there is more at stake than the customary lost-intranslation disclaimer.

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Historically, Cavafy’s lifetime spanned the unfolding and peaking of the long-standing controversy surrounding the Greek language; autobiographically, the cities of his formation, Istanbul and Alexandria (apart from Liverpool, as well as London, in the 1870s),157 were at a distance from the Athenian center of the debate and offered possibilities of variant usage and idiom, in addition to other languages. Tracing back to the late eighteenth century, the debate about the choice of a standard written language became urgent in the early nineteenth century, with Greek independence, hence, as Roderick Beaton puts it, “the beginning of the notorious ‘Language Question,’ which reached a climax in the polarization and even violence of the first years of the twentieth century, and has still not entirely died down despite reforming legislation in the 1970s and 1980s.” Having inherited a variety of spoken dialects and it being felt that the written Greek of earlier centuries in either of its two models—the Attic dialect of classical Greece or the Koine, the Common Dialect “that had become a lingua franca for native speakers of many different languages around the eastern Mediterranean following” Alexander’s conquests, and which was to be the language of the New Testament158 —was inadequate, the Greek elite became polarized over the issue. Although Beaton nuances views that have cast the two sides of the controversy as antithetical, the issue at stake, briefly, was whether to use a purist, or purified, form of Greek, “katharevousa,” or to use the demotic,159 with the purist having been mostly upheld in official discourse in the nineteenth century, while “throughout the twentieth century the linguistic battle was fought out in the government, with liberal forces favoring the demotic and conservative forces favoring the purist form.”160 If Cavafy, like a younger contemporary, “strayed deliberately across the no man’s land which now marked off demotic from katharevousa,”161 then in his case this owed not a little to his diasporic formation, to “his cosmopolitan Alexandrian background.” “By 1900,” as Beaton adds, Cavafy “had dropped the elaborate archaisms of the Greek poetry he had grown up with, and had begun to develop the seemingly informal, conversational style for which he has been admired ever since.” Hence “by not renouncing its links with the morphology and syntax of older written usage, it is able to exploit for particular effects the full diachronic range of Greek as it had been written and spoken throughout the long history that is also the subjectmatter of many of Cavafy’s poems.”162

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In one poem, “To Jerusalem,” the first stanza is written in purist, the second, the same in content as the first, in demotic163 —the effect of which Theoharis Constantine Theoharis has tried to convey through choice of (high, literary, in the first case, and colloquial, idiomatic in the second) diction, syntax, and prepositions, among other strategies (see BTCT 217–18; see KP 46–47). If “To Jerusalem” renders, for its own purposes, synchronically the “diglossia”164 of Greek of the time, Cavafy’s appropriation of “the full diachronic range of Greek” and his “adept[ness] at annulling the boundaries between the conversational style of his own place and time and the Greek of (especially) the Hellenistic diaspora of two thousand years before” are for Beaton exemplified by the poem “Kaisarion.”165 In the poem, the speaker chances on a reference in a book to Cleopatra’s son murdered by Octavian, and describes, self-reflexively, how the dearth of historical commentary on the young man has aided him in his empathic re-creation of that shadowy figure. The poem “Kaisarion” ends with the word, meaning “‘too many Caesars’, that had been reported by Plutarch in the first century ad, and is itself a knowing pun on an obscure epithet in Homer. It is part of Cavafy’s achievement to provide a context in which this item of linguistic archaeology can be perfectly comprehensible to a modern reader.”166 But Cavafy’s layering of linguistic levels and registers has a great deal to do with and becomes in itself the stage across which are played out the ambivalences I have been tracing in this chapter. George Seferis’s comments about Cavafy’s language come to mind: “Cavafy’s world exists in the twilight zones[,] . . . [in] an area marked by blending, amalgamation, transition, alteration, exceptions; the cities that glow and flicker—Antioch, Alexandria, Sidon, Seleucia, Osroene, Commagene; a hermaphroditic world where even the language spoken is an alloy.”167 It should be emphasized again that Cavafy’s contemporary Alexandria, with its urban “heteroglossia,” as well as polyglossia, can be said to have been a particularly enabling context for his “alloys”; see de Zogheb’s pidgin Italian later in this book and my discussion elsewhere of the Alexandrian novelist al-Kharrat who both multiplies the registers of Arabic in his texts and meshes in his pastiche passages and dialogue many loanwords.168 Cavafy, who also worked as a broker at the Bourse, is said to have told an acquaintance “that he had picked up the phraseology of the people and the petite bourgeoisie as an eavesdropper in the cafés or on the Exchange.”169 In addition to Cavafy’s reproducing, without translation, lines from

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European literature in the titles of some poems,170 the Arabic language, though with various degrees of receptivity in contexts so far examined, had a resonance in his corpus.

the egyptiote-egyptian continuum Was Cavafy “interested in Arab men of letters”? The question was put to Ibrahim El-Kayar, an Egyptian former colleague of Cavafy’s at the Third Circle of Irrigation in an interview by an Alexandrian Greek in 1967, cited by Liddell. El-Kayar maintains that Cavafy could not read classical Arabic, that his knowledge of Egyptian colloquial Arabic was limited to what was necessary for daily transactions, that he generally wore a superior air with the Egyptians who worked under him while currying favor with his English bosses, and hence that it is most unlikely that he had an anti-imperial stance. Cavafy retired from the Irrigation Service in 1922, and El-Kayar saw him only once, briefly, afterward. I adduce these details not to cast aspersions on the testimony of the poet’s Egyptian colleague, for El-Kayar’s is a valuable reminder of Cavafy’s ambivalent social and ethnic positionality and also serves to adumbrate a fissure between the Alexandrian Greek’s lived reality and his affiliations as expressed in his writings. El-Kayar mentions that Cavafy once met with Ahmad Shawqi (c. 1869–1932)— one of the foremost Arab poets of the first half of the twentieth century, “the prince of poets” as his sobriquet goes—that the meeting was arranged by an Egyptian colleague, and that “they were half an hour together and talked French. Not about Arabic poetry or their own work, as one might expect, but about Molière, whom Shaouki much admired, as Cavafy himself told me.” El-Kayar recounts this anecdote to demonstrate that Cavafy “certainly wished them [Arab writers] to know him.”171 His comments on the meeting seem well informed; elsewhere we learn that Cavafy preferred the poetry of Hafiz Ibrahim to his contemporary Shawqi’s but ranked both beneath the Lebanese poet resident in Egypt Khalil Mutran, which indicates that he had some acquaintance with the Arabic poetry scene.172 It is fascinating, then, to consider the two poets’ shared interests that seem not to have been broached. In a recent feature film, The Night Fernando Pessoa Met Constantine Cavafy (2008), Stelios Charalampopoulos undertakes a Borgesian exercise of imagining an encounter that never took place between the Alexandrian Greek poet and the Portuguese poet. Here, by contrast, we have a meeting that

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actually did take place between two poets destined to leave their mark on modern European and Arabic canons, an encounter in which substantial areas of commonality appear to have been left unsaid. Not the least of those topics that Cavafy and Shawqi (who was of ArabTurco-Circassian-Greek origin) could have broached are parallels and contrasts between Neohellenism and Neo-Pharaonism. The Egyptian poet had written a number of Neo-Pharaonist poems, some of which also take in the Ptolemaic period, and was to write a play, Masra‘ Kilyubatra (Death of Cleopatra, 1929) depicting the Ptolemaic queen as a nationalist proponent of an independent Egypt in face of Rome and appealing to ancient Egyptian gods, with some of the action set in an Egyptian temple. Indeed, like Cavafy, Shawqi had written a poem about Dinshiwai, this quite apart from the two poets’ respective decisions to write in their native tongues while sustaining an intertextual dialogue with Western European literature.173 But then, I would wager that Cavafy’s approach to Egyptian literature, at least in later years when El-Kayar had lost sight of him, was a much more reciprocal affair; the Greeks of Egypt, it should be noted, were also reconsidering “alternative strategies” to their position in Egypt in response to Egyptian nationalism. Toward the end of his life (November 1930), Cavafy was interviewed for a Greek publication in Alexandria about “the philological production” of the “Aigyptioton Ellinon,” that is, Greeks of Egypt, or the “Egyptiotes” as they are referred to.174 The very term for the Egyptian Greeks, Egyptiotes, is quite significant and has been said, moreover, to have been coined by Cavafy along the lines of “Italiotes” in his poem “Poseidonians.”175 This short interview, in Greek, encapsulates a certain trajectory of Cavafy’s positionality discussed in the foregoing. Expressing his satisfaction with the “philological” and literary production of the Egyptiotes, particularly given the short history of that production and the relatively small number of the community, Cavafy asserts that for the intellectual life of the Egyptiotes to be strengthened, it is important to maintain a close intellectual relationship with “the big center Athens” (P 154). Thus far, it might seem that Cavafy ascribes Greek letters in Egypt to a subsidiary, satellite condition vis-à-vis Athens, whether in terms of intellectual concerns or reception, and isolates this output from its Egyptian situation. However, in the same article he is quoted as having urged, in an earlier interview where he referred to the Lanterne sourde of Cairo, that the literature produced by Greeks from Egypt be made known,

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through studies and articles, among Arabic-speaking Egyptian fellow writers. The trail from this reference has led me to a 1928 letter, published in 2008, that Cavafy sent to the founder of the Lanterne sourde, the Belgian poet and editor Paul Vanderborght. Originally a Brusselsbased literary collective that issued a short-lived journal as well as collaborated with other periodicals and publications, the Lanterne sourde (1921–31) developed into a series of international literary and artistic activities aiming at promoting a pacifist intercultural dialogue, according to Mélanie Alfano’s monograph on the subject. Capitalizing on his sojourn in Egypt in the 1920s, Vanderborght was first to found the Amitiés belgo-égyptiennes, then La Lanterne sourde d’Égypte, which hosted literary lectures accompanied by translation undertakings “aiming at a . . . rapprochement between artists of the Orient and the Occident.”176 The Amitiés, in fact, was to hold a banquet in honor of Ahmad Shawqi, as well as two other prominent poets, Hafiz Ibrahim and Khalil Mutran, in 1928. It was toward the end of that same year that Vanderborght launched the Lanterne sourde d’Égypte—to have a more international cultural scope than the bilateral Amitiés—serving as a forum for writers as diverse as the Egyptian ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad, the French Georges Duhamel, and the Indian Rabindranath Tagore.177 In this context, Vanderborght sent Cavafy his poetry collection, Messageries d’Orient (1927), and a circular letter addressed by Lanterne soliciting the opinion of its friends, as we glean from Cavafy’s reply, dated December 13, 1928.178 After paying courteous homage to the Belgian poet’s work, Cavafy refers to an enclosure, written in Greek, giving his opinion on the Lanterne sourde’s activities and requesting, with characteristic fastidiousness, that in the event it is published in French he see the translation first and that it should carry a note to the effect that it is a translation from Greek. In “On the Intellectual Affinity of Egypt and the West”—the draft of Cavafy’s comments about the Lanterne sourde, unpublished during his lifetime, the date of which I would wager as 1928—the poet lauds that literary forum’s mission of developing “relations between writers of Egypt and those of Europe and America,” the public lectures and visiting scholars’ programs, and its promotion, through critical appreciations published in European journals, of “literary works in Arabic, Modern Greek, Turkish and Modern Hebrew literature” (SPW 68; see TP 308).179 But Cavafy’s own intervention in terms of

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“the modern Arabic literature of Egypt” is to suggest that the project’s mission should also be to acquaint European countries (especially Western ones) with the contemporary Arab[ic] literature of Egypt and the outlook of contemporary Arab writers vis-à-vis the currents of European art; and also to convey to the European nations whatever specific contribution Arab writers in Egypt have to offer to these trends and, by means of translation (but translation done most carefully), perhaps an Arab contribution—a contemporary Arab artistic perspective—might be translated into foreign works and somehow naturally transformed in a way that the conditions of adaptation demand, thus becoming valuable outside the boundaries of Egypt and beyond the borders of the Arab world. (SPW 68; see TP 308–9)

Here, Cavafy evinces a strong awareness not only of Egyptian Arabophone literary production and its dialogue with European art but also of its transcultural agency that contributes, rather than becomes assimilated, to Western modernism, coupled with a prescient understanding of both the vicissitudes of translation and its rich potential for intercultural dialogue. The 1928 commentary, too, makes another unexpected move in that it promotes local Francophonie minus the word, as key to the Egyptian-European rapprochement but does so by ascribing it to Egypt rather than France: “there exists in Egypt a literary output in French; and among its practitioners are Egyptians. Those who are racially non-Egyptian among the writers—Greeks, Syrians, and other ethnicities—are nevertheless children of Egypt, because they grew up, lived, and many were born [here]” (SPW 69; see TP 309). This then serves Cavafy as the transition to the production of Greek intellectuals from Egypt: he underscores that they are “reared in the Egyptian environment” and “produce or will produce works that possess or will possess something of this environment,” a context in which the Greek language, long spoken in Alexandria, is not unfamiliar. Being themselves closer to “the Egyptian way of life, with the Egyptian way of thinking—coming, I say, into contact with their Arab-speaking [sic] colleagues,” their cultural production should be made accessible to “the Arabic-speaking public, particularly via condensed articles written in Arabic or French”—this also going beyond Francophonie’s elite purview—“preferably Arabic” (SPW 69; see TP 309). Nor were these random notes, for in the later, 1930 interview cited above, Cavafy further underscores that the work of the Egyptiotes, from the Egyptian point of view, is produced not by

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passersby but by Greeks raised, some also born, in Egypt, “and naturally at least part of their work will have something of the Egyptian environment in it” (P 154). Cavafy, then, is addressing the task of eliciting connections among Egyptiotes and Egyptians who are non-Hellenophone—in contrast to his alleged statements to Politis—and is also acknowledging, if not in these terms, a hybridized Greek textuality that makes the production of these members of the Greek diaspora in Egypt different from that of the metropolitan center, Athens. His combined statements in 1928 and 1930, while situating the production of Egyptian Greeks vis-à-vis reading audiences in Greece, internationally and in Egypt, suggest that a local audience would be adept at reading its intercultural elements. While the 1930 interview addressed specifically the issue of the Egyptiotes’ literary production, Cavafy goes on to say that it is his hope that those Greeks of Egypt who know Arabic will acquaint the Greek-speaking world with contemporary Egyptian Arabic literature, at least in its main lines (see P 154). Interestingly, the question of the existence of Greeks who are Arabophone cuts, in reverse direction, across the path of the category “Hellenophone” as a card for “passing,” if not into full-fledged Hellenism, then at least into a condition of semi-Hellenized barbarism or Philhellenism. Another task Cavafy outlines for Egyptiote writers is that, in addressing Alexandria’s Hellenism, where the Greek community is bigger in number, they should bring out its peculiarities and distinctive characteristics, for while it is “always Greek in depth,” it is, he says, molded by living circumstances that are not exclusively Greek (P 155). And indeed, to return to the question of Cavafy’s interest in contemporary Egyptian poetry, I would mention the tribute to the Alexandrian Greek by the Francophone poet Rassim from a 1933 commemorative issue of La Semaine égyptienne, published after Cavafy’s passing, an Arabic translation of which was published by al-Siba‘i in 2011.180 I would add that the same issue contained a tribute by a younger friend of Cavafy’s, Gaston Zananiri (1904–96), Alexandrian Francophone poet, scholar, later Dominican priest, and promoter of the notion of Mediterraneanism and of an “Alexandrian spirit” that harks back to Ptolemaic Alexandria, whose father is thought to have helped the poet obtain employment. Zananiri was to lecture and write about Cavafy in various forums later.181 The strand of Cavafy texts that his comments can be said to amplify and crystallize includes “For Ammonis” (in terms of the

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transculurated aesthetic it prescribes); “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” (in terms of opening its space to witnessing an indigenous mourning, as with “For Ammonis”); “Return from Greece” (which spells the emergence and “routes” of the diasporic subject); and the essay on the Persians, among others. This Cavafy barely has a nodding acquaintance with the Cavafy of Politis’s narrative in the rejection of a “narrow nationalism,” but he is otherwise incompatible with the poet whom Politis gives us. For, as we have seen, Politis would have us believe that the overarching hallmark of Cavafy’s cosmopolitanism, in its conjoined Alexandrian manifestations in the Hellenistic and modern Europeanized moments, is that it melts, in one predominantly Hellenic mold, people of different ethnic backgrounds, the point of entry for non-Greeks being the category of the Hellenophone, from which Egyptians are left out not solely for linguistic reasons but also for reasons of the impenetrability of an ancient culture. By contrast, the Cavafy of the 1930 interview—who would not necessarily appeal to Neohellenic sensibilities,182 who would not have rejected comparisons between his poems and Arabic poetry (see Yourcenar’s comments), who sees the Egyptiotes as hybrid figures and hence as apt cultural mediators—has an intellectual affinity if not identity with a host of postcolonial writers and their projects of translation, mediation, and transposition, in what has been variously, and not always commensurately, described as hyphenated identities, in-betweenness, “métissage,” or the “Third Space.”183 How, then, to account for the fact of Politis’s commentary on Cavafy’s poetry appearing in the same year as this interview (1930), and where to place the Orientalist Cavafy seen in the discussion above? Granted, Cavafy’s more overtly Orientalist poems and prose texts had occurred earlier—“Word and Silence” (1892), “Dünya Güzeli” (1884), “The Poetry of Mr. Stratigis” (1893). As previously noted, Politis’s drawing on the authority of Cavafy by repeatedly implying that he had interviewed him, albeit never actually quoting him, need not clinch Cavafy’s endorsement of the historian’s statements about his poetry. Indeed, there is room for speculation that Cavafy, in the interview about the literary output of the Egyptiotes where his words are cited and where he is clearly named as the source of the statements, may just possibly have been putting it on record that his positions are at variance with the historian’s reading of his oeuvre. Yet while the fact of Politis’s account being published in the same year as the interview cautions one against a wholesale dismissal of

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Orientalist elements in Cavafy, there does seem to be a preponderance of anticolonial perspectives and instantiations of affinity with Egypt in his later texts. That affinity is in part explainable by his greater acquaintance with the country later in life. It also provides a clue to his repudiation of Orientalist poems such as “Word and Silence” and his preservation, in the category of “hidden” poems, rather than repudiation, of an empathic anticolonial text such as “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” while disseminating “For Ammonis.” Finally, that some of his statements in prose that I discuss under the rubric of the EgyptioteEgyptian continuum were published in the press—hence a far more accessible medium than his privately distributed poems—attests to his desire to publicize this affinity. Beyond authorial intentionality, Cavafy was heir to a catholicity of intellectual traditions, sometimes mutually reinforcing, at other times antagonistic. His intercultural positionality opened his texts to competing discourses from multiple cultures—Western European, Greek, and Egyptian. A European Orientalism could be reinforced—or subverted—by the Greek-vs.barbarian dichotomy, but both could be qualified and undercut by a diasporic affiliation that goes beyond binaries in favor of a more cosmopolitan attunement to otherness and other textualities.

ch a p t e r t wo

Of Hellenized Cosmopolitanism and Colonial Subalternity E. M. Forster

When E. M. Forster arrived in Alexandria toward the end of 1915 to work for the Red Cross as a “searcher” of news of soldiers wounded or missing in action, he was suffering from writer’s block. An established novelist, he was grappling with an unfinished novel about India, a country he would be using as a “standard” against which his Egyptian experience was to be measured, and pronounced “a parody” thereof.1 Egypt, he wrote to his Indian friend Syed Ross Masood soon after his arrival, seemed “vastly inferior to India,” its “inhabitants . . . of mud moving”2 —a sentiment that six months later had coalesced, in a letter to the same correspondent, into the statement, “Here there is only the pseudo-East—the pretentious, squalid, guttural Levant—and I shut my eyes to it on purpose, lest it spoil my pleasure in the true East.”3 But Forster was to be a sojourner, not a traveler: despite the early protestations of the eyes shut against it all, he was to mix not a little with this mixed society; and he was to come away from his Egyptian sojourn with an array of texts. These range from the guidebook genre (Alexandria: A History and A Guide, published in Alexandria, 1922);4 the essay or newspaper article (texts initially printed, starting 1916, in Egypt and England,5 some later collected in Pharos and Pharillon, which was published by the Hogarth Press in 1923); and the political report (“Notes on Egypt,” as part of a Labour pamphlet titled The Government of Egypt, early 1920s).6 This is apart from a number of Egypt-related texts that remain unpublished.7 What is most intriguing about these texts is that they grapple to different, sometimes widely divergent, effect with Egypt’s status as 120

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more or less a British colony, and specifically with Alexandria’s heritage in relation to colonialism and cosmopolitanism. That these texts are incommensurate in their construction of the way these issues relate is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that they are, in several cases, near-contemporaries. As the dates above show, most of Forster’s Egyptian texts were written between 1916 and 1923; while one might be tempted to ascribe the divergent positions to a development over a seven-year span, this is belied by the texts: “Notes on Egypt,” the more explicitly anticolonial text, although published after many of the Egyptian essays and articles had been individually printed, was written some two years before the publication of Alexandria: A History and A Guide and three before the collection Pharos and Pharillon, which two latter texts exhibit, in my view, marked paradigms of colonial historiography. What animates my discussion of Forster’s Alexandria: A History and A Guide and Pharos and Pharillon—canonized texts both of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism—is that by and large the colonial historiography they display has escaped critical attention. Hitherto, if an instance of colonial complicity on Forster’s part was noted by critics, the tendency has been to elide by connecting it to the anticolonial stance in A Passage to India—on which criticism of Forster inflected by postcolonial theory has focused to the near-exclusion of his Egyptian texts—or in “Notes on Egypt.”8 But it is not merely a question of reading Forster’s Egyptian texts through and against each other; rather, in keeping with one of the broader concerns of this book, I aim to bring out the selective and ideologically freighted enshrinement of Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism in some of the writer’s texts and the complicities at work in their reception. In so doing, I bring to the fore the question of genre in relation to Eurocentric canon formation. Critical readings of Alexandria have all too often focused on the first, “History” section, to the exclusion of the “Guide,” partly on account of the author’s canonicity as a novelist—guidebook writing being considered a lesser genre than history writing—with readings of this text being mostly concerned with construing how Alexandria was the author’s passage to India. Another reason is an entrenched sense that the reality and materiality of the place can in no wise contest Forster’s writerly authority. In focusing on the first section, furthermore, these readings, with the added enlisting of a perceived influence of Cavafy’s poetry, have for the most part tended to accept the “History” at its word. In my view, that the same writer had

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written historical commentary in “Notes on Egypt”—not long before the publication of Alexandria—almost diametrically opposed to that in the guidebook should open up both the overdetermination of genre and the vexed relationship between colonialism and cosmopolitanism in Forster’s Egyptian writings. In what follows, I draw on perspectives from narratology and the genealogy of the guidebook genre for my discussion of Alexandria as a self-designated History and Guide. For what could be more called for than eliciting “emplotment” when addressing a “history,” particularly one written by a novelist? And what could be more called for than the imperial framework of the guidebook genre when addressing a “guide” of Alexandria written during World War I conceived with British soldiers as its primary readership? Consider this, from Forster’s preface to the first edition of Alexandria: “The ‘sights’ of Alexandria are in themselves not interesting, but they fascinate when we approach them through the past, and this is what I have tried to do by the double arrangement of History and Guide” (AHG xxvi).9 In contrast to the short historical account of Alexandria in contemporary guidebooks, whether covering Egypt or dedicated to the city, Forster would devote almost equal space to the “History” and the “Guide.”10 Introducing the reader to the structure of the book, whereby the “Guide” section devoted to the contemporary city is cross-referenced to the preceding “History” section, and vice versa, Forster’s comment suggests that the edifices that had come to be so iconic of Alexandria having long since disappeared, it is only when the history is refurbished into the “site” of the no longer extant monument or into the “sight” of a contemporary monument that has replaced a more glorious one that the city can best be appreciated. Questions arise here: to what extent will Forster’s approach allow for a full engagement with the present of the city he lived in, whether in terms of the impact on it of Egypt’s then recently proclaimed status as a British Protectorate or whether in the relationship between extant sight, on the one hand, and site of absent monument, on the other, in the historical narrative he is to provide? In the spatial “Guide” section, will Forster proceed from the material referent, or will his narrative be beholden to a preconception that will select and edit it? If so, what are the discursive underpinnings of that narrative? Addressing these questions, I educe counternarratives and undertake detours—conjoined temporal and spatial readings against the grain of Alexandria that throw into relief the book’s narrative underpinnings

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and elicit alternative intercultural spaces. The crux of my argument concerns the historical portion of Alexandria in that I identify the sheer aesthetic and thematic novelty of Forster’s contribution therein to an entrenched Eurocentric paradigm by expounding the narratological undergrid of his account and its sources both spiritual and cultural. I go on to argue that the conception of cosmopolitanism in the historical account has its spatial correlatives in the conjuring up of Hellenistic edifices long gone, which displaces in situ signifiers of another/an othered constellation of interethnic affiliation. Of the “History” section, Forster declares that it “attempts (after the fashion of a pageant) to marshal the activities of Alexandria during the two thousand two hundred and fifty years of her existence” (AHG xxv). But this does not quite cover it since the historical coverage in the book is attenuated when Forster describes Alexandria from late antiquity to the modern period. And therein lies the fascination of his account; that is, in the imaginative, albeit ideologically suspect infusion of a spiritual valence into the standard paradigm of arching over from a Hellenistic golden age of Alexandria to a modern city constructed in Hellenized terms while bracketing out the Arabo-Islamic period. Of foremost importance to my argument is the way in which Forster halts the chronological narrative in the “History” section to provide an account of Alexandria’s theological-philosophical debates under the subtitle “The Spiritual City.” Locating this as the core of Forster’s vision of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism thematized in terms of debates on the link between the human and the divine, the discussion that follows brings out an underlying tragic emplotment, a sloping down from a metamorphical, syncretic high point thence to a slow decline unto a final fall after the Arab conquest. Musing on the mirroring in that account of Forster’s own spiritual skepticism, I set it in the context of Western historiographical narrative modes and dwell on the Orientalist implications of its transmission to the space of this city. I then go on to draw out counternarratives occluded in his “Spiritual City” that entail a counter-flânerie. In part a corrective to that “history” as well as to the “guide,” this is not presented in the spirit of submitting a more definitive conception of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism but rather of suggesting the significance of an attunement to multiple intercultural connections that the space of Alexandria yields. A word about the coordinates of the detours I present here. The “Guide” section of Alexandria is divided into eight sections, of

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which six consist in a series of walks or excursions by tram in different directions of the town that take as their starting point the Square, or the Place Muhammad ‘Ali (today referred to as Manshiyah Square).11 Thus, even if readers have overlooked the narrative in the “History” section and gone straight to the “Guide,” they would find that the actual space of the city is not provided in the form of a list of “sights” but has already been described in a manner whereby the Place Muhammad ‘Ali becomes the center and focal point from which organized tours of the town can sally forth. The point of departure is not the Western Harbor—as in the cases of The Lands of Sunshine: A Practical Guide to Egypt and the Sudan, brought out in 1908 by Whitehead-Morris (also the publisher later of Forster’s Alexandria), and the 1914 edition of Baedeker’s Egypt and the Sudan: Handbook for Travellers, one of the guidebooks the English novelist used during his years in the country12 —which would have betokened a tourist passing through. The square that Forster makes the focal point of the “Guide” instead, a product of the era of Muhammad ‘Ali after whom it came to be named (previously Place d’Armes, then Place des Consuls), was a more concerted articulation of the “Occidentalization” of Alexandria, the rudiments of which trace back to earlier decades.13 The development of the Place Muhammad ‘Ali stands as an index of the country’s “economy [being] gradually . . . absorbed in the world-economic system as a major producer and exporter of cotton,” which required the development of the port and the facilitation of commercial activities. Under Muhammad ‘Ali, the design of the square and concomitant planning of the parts of the city were undertaken by a special commission, the Ornato, part of the health department, modeled on similar commissions in Italian cities.14 The resultant vocabulary of the square and overlooking buildings was an eclectic European one, “adapt[ing] the typology of the okelle characteristic of the Turkish town. These new okelles housed the consuls . . . [and] borrow[ed] a neo-classical language to represent the okelle in its new occidentalised setting,” which allowed for representing different ethnicities.15 It thus constituted a spatial symptom of the colonial incursions attendant on the growing European intervention in the country, bolstered in this case by the Capitulations system, in a process that has its parallels in Cairo, as well as in North Africa, most visibly in Algiers.16 But the salient point to be made here is that the imperative of making the square the focal point and the point of departure of the walks and excursions, a European imperative of approaching a city, is

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premised on an already extant representation of Alexandria—in the sense of urban planning—in European terms. As in the case of Algiers again, the premodern urban order was not eradicated from the city. Prior to the Muhammad ‘Ali era, the extant urban fabric was shaped by Turkish influence, built “through the traditional guild system by master masons and craftsmen.”17 What is referred to as the Turkish Town is in the western part of the city, close to what became the Place Muhammad ‘Ali, popularly referred to as Bahari—including Anfushi, with its dockyards and fishermen’s settlements, and Ras al-Tin (Cape of Figs), with its palace built in the time of Muhammad ‘Ali. The inhabited part of the city in Ottoman times, Bahari, was typified by two-story houses with the upper floor jutting out, as well as okelles (wikalas)—commercial structures of varying sizes, with shops and workshops, as well as apartments. The Turkish Town comprised several ethnicities and classes, including quarters inhabited by Maghrebis and Jews (as well as Greeks), whose presence remains ciphered in the nomenclature of alleys and souqs, in addition to houses belonging to indigenous and Turco-Circassian notables. The area also contains the most important mosques of the city dedicated to Sufi figures. To the south was the “Arab town,” inhabited by rural migrant workers whether from the Delta or Upper Egypt, served with little or no infrastructure,18 areas of Alexandria that housed the lower middle class and working class. Himself born and bred in Bahari, alJazayirli’s memoir al-Iskandariyya fi Fajr al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin attends to the minute social nuances distinguishing these western and southern quarters; one district, Karmuz, was looked down upon by old Alexandrian families as “outside the walls” and occupied by rural migrants with different customs, a few affluent Alexandrian families having settled there after the loss of their homes on account of the British bombardment of Alexandria in 1882. But it is Bahari, in the Turkish Town, the oldest part of the city, that occupies a privileged position in the Egyptian imaginaire as the “authentic” Alexandria and is the subject of nostalgic depictions by Egyptian and North African Alexandrians, in popular lyrics and paintings,19 over and above its associations with the anticolonial movement, to be taken up below. Thus it is in the walks that comprise the western and, much more so, the southern parts of the city in the “Guide” section of Forster’s Alexandria that one might locate, or not, the presence of the subaltern, an issue that is also central to my discussion of “Notes on Egypt.” But before turning to his two Alexandrian books and his

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“Notes on Egypt,” I would like to take stock of two sets of statements Forster made about Alexandria more than three decades apart, hence preceding and succeeding his long-canonized texts about the city.

of bastardies and ta xonomies In June 1956, about thirty-seven years after his departure from Egypt, Forster was to give a talk, titled “The Lost Guide,” about his Alexandrian years at the Aldeburgh Festival. This sounds an altogether different note about the city from his early Alexandrian letters. Here, his account of the society in which he moved, defined against the comportment that was expected of him, is celebratory of a cosmopolitanism that he now codes, in a valorizing vein, a “bastardy.” Forster describes a stiff interview for the Red Cross job in England with Gertrude Bell. Having asked Bell “what the inhabitants of Alexandria would be like,” he was told that “I should have no opportunity to find out. I should only see them in the streets as I went to and fro on my work” (“LG” 354). He was, we are given to understand, expected to be the aloof English colonial type, but—and Forster does not mention his initial aversion to the place—as he went about his business, he “began to look at people, and they sometimes looked back with extensive results” (“LG” 355). Of the acquaintances he made, he has this to say: The start of it was an American lady, the widow of a Norwegian Judge in the Mixed Courts who . . . had furthermore a retired Greek maid who spoke Italian. I left my hotel, I took a room in the house of the Italian-speaking Greek maid of the Norwegian Judge’s American widow, and with the move I moved into Alexandria. . . . Under her relaxing sway I gave up wearing my uniform except for my duties, and slid into a life that suited me and into a variety of acquaintances who never coalesced into a set. For instance I got to know the Swiss Director of the tramways and the French Director of Ports who thought he had discovered a prehistoric harbour and an Englishman who had built an exquisite fortress for the Bedouin in the Western Desert and an Egyptian tram conductor and a Syrian Police Officer who was enthusiastic for George Moore, and an Italian composer who sang Tristan to me under the sea. . . . And most important of all—I got to know the Greek poet Cavafy. (“LG” 355)

The passage rejoices in the felicitousness of Alexandria’s apparently incongruous admixtures. Many of the figures who make cameo appearances are identifiable: the American widow of the Norwegian

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judge is Aida Borchgrevink, who had trained as an opera singer and changed her name from Ada to Aida, and who was to take Forster under her wing; the French director of ports is Gaston Jondet, who figures, together with his discovery of a “prehistoric harbour,” in Forster’s Alexandria (see AHG xxxii, 141); the Italian composer is Enrico Terni; and so on. 20 But what is noteworthy is that the only figure named is Cavafy and that the only Egyptian mentioned in this mélange is the “tram conductor.” The passing reference to the Egyptian tram conductor is, to my knowledge, the closest that Forster ever got to speaking publicly of Mohamed El-Adl with whom he had a passionate relationship that lasted until El-Adl’s death in 1922, at the age of about twenty-three, a relationship that profoundly affected both. 21 That Cavafy is the only Alexandrian named is in keeping with Forster’s point in the lecture that “his qualities or rather the mixture of qualities in him seemed to me typically Alexandrian” (“LG” 355). As for these typically Alexandrian qualities of which Cavafy is an exemplar, Forster discloses: “that city symbolises for me a mixture, a bastardy, an idea which I find congenial and opposed to that sterile idea of 100% in something or other which has impressed the modern world and forms the backbone of its blustering nationalisms[,] . . . usually an excuse for arrogance and cruelty, as with Hitler” (“LG” 355–56). By contrast, “No one could possibly speak of a 100% Alexandrian and that is partly why I was happy in the place, and feel Cavafy its representative” (“LG” 356). Indeed the novelist endows this Alexandrian quality with a longue durée: “It has been a mixture, a bastardy for nearly 2000 years—ever since it was founded by a Macedonian who believed in miscegenation and thought his father was an Egyptian god” (“LG” 356). Clearly, Forster’s “bastardy” is of an altogether different order from Flaubert’s exasperated description of the same city as “bâtarde.”22 If Forster’s words have a contemporary ring that resonates with recent scholarship about cosmopolitanism, this is because in his construction of Alexandria’s heritage the city epitomizes a valorized hybridity, specifically here racial (“bastardy” and “miscegenation”), as an antidote to nationalisms based on the ethnocentrism that have spawned ethnic cleansing. Speaking in 1956, what would have been uppermost in Forster’s mind in this homage to Alexandria are the Holocaust and the trauma of World War II, not Egyptian nationalism—despite the lecture’s date being four years after the Free Officers’ Revolution

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(the Suez War had not yet taken place). But references here and there in the talk invite us, perhaps against the grain of Forster’s lyricism, to ask whether he is at all factoring the sociopolitical into the hybrid landscape of Alexandria as he experienced it, Egypt’s status as a quasi-British colony, under the euphemism “Protectorate” during his years there, and, before that the Capitulations system—as well as the place, if any, of Egyptian and Arab strands in this “bastardy.” The one Egyptian in the account, the unnamed tram conductor, worked for an institution the director of which was Swiss, as the director of ports was French, per Forster’s narrative. As for the Mixed Courts where the late Norwegian judge presided, these were a spin-off of the Capitulations system. Forster’s “Macedonian who . . . thought his father was an Egyptian god” is of course a genealogical gesture that traces back modern Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism to the rhetoric surrounding its founder. But while it invokes an Egyptian component, the qualifier “nearly” in his designation of the city as having “been a mixture, a bastardy for nearly 2000 years,” mitigates that gesture. Why “nearly” if the city, founded in 331 b.c., has existed for over two thousand years? For the time being, I would like to take my cue from Forster’s playful reference to the legend of Alexander’s descent from an Egyptian god, as well as his private allusion to El-Adl, to bring my question about Egyptian and Arab elements in Forster’s construction of Alexandria’s hybrid landscape to bear on an article that forms part of his Egyptian wartime journalism. “A Musician in Egypt,” first published in The Egyptian Mail on October 21, 1917, under the pen name “Pharos,” derives some significance from the fact that it directly precedes the writing of Alexandria and also stands in some contrast to Forster’s retroactive reflections of 1956. “A Musician in Egypt” is about the Alexandrian Italian composer Enrico Terni, to whom Forster alludes in his 1956 talk and who was to marry the Italian novelist Fausta Cialente. 23 The article is a laudatory review of a concert of Terni’s compositions given at the San Stefano Casino and Hotel, which Forster takes as a pretext to reflect on art in relation to the cultures of Egypt: The civilisations of Egypt are, roughly speaking, three in number. There is Egypt of the Pharaohs which still moves tourists and popular novelists, but which means nothing to the resident, nothing at all. Then there is Arab Egypt in which we more or less live and less or more have our being—a real civilisation this, but static and

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incomprehensible. And thirdly, there is Egypt of the Levant—the coastal strip on which since the days of Herodotus European influences have rained. A European personally, I feel kindly toward this coastal strip . . . a civilisation of eclecticism and exiles. (UEE 37)

In what poses as a taxonomic survey of a landscape composed of heterogeneous cultures, those cultures that would ideally go into the “mixture,” the “bastardy” that he was later to laud in Alexandria, Forster nevertheless casts as ineffectual all but the European element, the “coastal strip.” Although he rightly taps into Egyptomania when he speaks of “tourists and popular novelists,” it is surprising that he should suggest that ancient Egypt means nothing at all to the resident, unless, in keeping with his Eurocentric argument here, he is unwittingly overlooking that beside the residents, by which he presumably means foreign ones, there were indigenes, including Copts—and particularly Egyptian nationalists from all denominations who would soon be launching a Neo-Pharaonist revival—to whom ancient Egypt meant something more than “nothing at all.”24 Arab Egypt, the more present culture than ancient Egypt, which he grants is a “real civilisation,” ends up not faring better at all. Forster does not say that he has not attempted to comprehend this civilization and its dynamism but that it is, in and of itself, “incomprehensible” and “static”—undeniably Orientalist designations both. Not the least of the paradoxes of the article is that it evinces an awareness that by its very construction of these cultural layers and assumption that they are discrete, it designates an economically and politically parasitical society but then goes on to endorse its Europeanized cultural practices. Although he points out that Terni is “born and bred here,” Forster adds that “he is emphatically a musician in Egypt, not an Egyptian musician” (UEE 38). I shall return to Terni in a later chapter, but here I would like to note that this article, while it speaks of cosmopolitanism like the 1956 lecture, unlike it concedes the importance of national tradition— except that Forster goes on to construe as the true or truly nurturing national traditions those of Europe. “We are exiled here in Egypt for the purpose of doing various little jobs—eggs, cotton, onions, administration and so on—and out of a population of exiled little jobbers it is impossible that a heroic art should be raised,” he writes. “Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Tolstoy—they must in the nature of things spring from a less cosmopolitan society. But what coastal Egypt can do and what from time to time it has done is to

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produce eclectic artists, who look for their inspiration to Europe” (UEE 39). It is tempting to read Forster’s list of Alexandrian occupations— “eggs, cotton, onions, administration and so on”—as metonymic of a critique of the way in which the city lives on the surplus of the countryside, a critique all the more apt when the city in question is a “colonial bridgehead,” to use Reimer’s designation. However, instead of elaborating on the relationship between this coastal culture and imperialism, instead of entertaining the possibility of resistances, whether political or cultural, or even critiquing what he might have assumed was their absence, Forster is all for “this straining of the eyes beyond the sea[,] . . . this turning away from Africa, the vast, the formless, the helpless and unhelpful, the patchyderm [sic]” (UEE 39). Forster compares Africa and coastal Egypt, respectively, to the rhinoceros and the little bird that performs “for him duties he is too unwieldy to perform for himself” (UEE 37), hence, on a figurative level, not a parasitical but a symbiotic relationship in a possible justification of colonial economic exploitation. When Forster wrote this article, it was early on in his acquaintance with Cavafy whom, even before he spells it out unequivocally in his 1956 lecture, he was to cast as representative of Alexandria. Forster did not reprint the article “A Musician in Egypt” in the collection of his Alexandria-related Egyptian journalism Pharos and Pharillon where Cavafy is the privileged figure of the city, his poem “The God Abandons Antony” (1910/1911)—as was the case in Alexandria: A History and a Guide—providing the link between past and present, with the final essay of the volume being about him. Indeed, Forster begins the essay in Pharos and Pharillon, “The Poetry of C. P. Cavafy,” by borrowing an image from his own article on Terni: “Modern Alexandria is scarcely a city of the soul. Founded upon cotton with the concurrence of onions and eggs, ill built, ill drained— many hard things can be said against it, and most are said by its inhabitants” (PP 91), before going on to claim the figure of Cavafy. Did this shift from Terni to Cavafy as representative signify a revision in Forster’s vision of Alexandria and, by extension, the relationship between colonialism and cosmopolitanism in the city’s archive? In turning now to Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide, I shall take the two figures of Cavafy and El-Adl as gauges of my question about the extent of the catholicity of the “bastardy,” its openness to and awareness of non-European elements, or, alternatively, of its

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colonial situation. These two figures have been identified as pivotal to Forster’s time in Egypt. It has been suggested that, apart from incorporating the Cavafy poem and including an essay about the poet, Forster wrote the two books in what is often a Cavafian mode. 25 We may well ask, which Cavafy? For, as my analysis in the previous chapter has sought to demonstrate, Cavafy’s relationship to Hellenism and Egypt is itself not monolithic but oscillates between a quasi-colonial Greek-vs.-barbarian dichotomy and a more ecumenical conception, with a preponderance of the latter position in later life. El-Adl, on the other hand, is a figure who should prompt us to probe the question of Egyptian subalternity in Alexandria. As such, for all the provisional nature of the exercise, he allows me to look for something nearer to hand, namely, the representation of those areas inhabited by subaltern classes in the “Guide” section, and, in the “History,” what it is that the text indirectly renders, or alternatively comments on, as subaltern. Beyond that, this figure beckons to the question of colonialism in the book, a question to be pursued at greater length in the latter part of this chapter in the discussion of “Notes on Egypt.”

the ambivalence of a post-enlightenment legacy Summing up the survey of the coast with which he begins the “History,” Forster says, “Such are the main features of the situation; a limestone ridge, with harbours on one side of it, and alluvial country on the other. It is a situation unique in Egypt, and the Alexandrians have never been truly Egyptian” (AHG 6; emphasis added). Here is a geologic reinterpretation of the culture of the “coastal strip” of which Forster had spoken in his article “A Musician in Egypt”—an “Alexandrea ad Aegyptum,” geographically all but located off the coast of Egypt and culturally distinct from the mainland. Except that here, unlike in the article, he is tackling ancient Alexandria, too. The tone-setting phrase is indicative: in the survey of the site before the founding of Alexandria, the guidebook mentions two instances of Egyptian anteriority but betrays in the process an ambivalence that has its parallels elsewhere in the book. Forster begins with the Homeric tradition (in the Odyssey) of Menelaus and Helen having been detained on the island, which was to be the future site of the lighthouse, and concludes with the comment that it “is significant that our first glimpse of the coast should be through the eyes of a Greek sailor” (AHG 7). And yet the town of Rhakotis, which he

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places second after the testimony from the Odyssey, should have preceded the Homeric tradition. It is a reordering to privilege the Greek that he himself concedes: “But our historical survey must begin with Rhakotis.” His comments on Rhakotis, which he suggests goes back to 1300 b.c., are telling in other ways: “Rhakotis was never important in itself. But it is important as an element in the great Greek city that was built up round it. It was a little lump of Egypt. Compare it to the Arab villages and slums that have been embedded in the scheme of the modern town—to Mazarita or Kom-el-Dik. Rhakotis was like one of these. The native and conservative element naturally rallied to it” (AHG 7). Although Forster does not explain what he means by “conservative” (does this imply a religious obscurantism or nativism?), its negative connotations are explicit and thus, through collocation, it elicits a colonial usage of “native,” a point to which I shall return. Having considered anterior settlements in the region, the “History” proceeds from the founding of the city by Alexander in an apparently linear fashion through the era of the Ptolemies, their institutions and culture. After an account of the Christian period up to and including a brief account of the Arab conquest, there is an “interlude,” as Forster calls it (AHG xxv), an interruption in the linear narrative that introduces a more thematic discussion of the “Spiritual City” and its doctrinal debates that concludes with a brief note on Islam. All the above occupies some eighty-four pages; but when the historical account continues, it accords a mere five pages to the “Arab Period” and the “Turkish Town” of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries combined, before moving to a more full-fledged account of the modern period (this demarcated by the advent of Napoleon). The “interlude,” which in my view is pivotal to an understanding of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism according to Forster, in a sense recapitulates in miniature the perfunctory treatment of the Arab period in the historical narrative. The dismissive treatment of Islam and the Arabo-Islamic city, I suggest, is partly underwritten by an ambivalence to a liberal-humanist legacy and partly by a Eurocentricity inflected with Hellenism. Hence the narrative Forster produces precludes from the start intrareligious affinities (the “Other” religion here being Islam, although Coptic Christianity is more than a little problematic in his treatment)—as witnessed in the “interlude” on the “Spiritual City.” However, as I argue in the next sections of the discussion of Alexandria, the dismissive approach is also a function

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of a historiographical paradigm and mode of emplotment evident in Forster’s obliviousness to extant Muslim sites and his elision of other (read: Arabo-Islamic) historical accounts. That the paradigm with which Forster is working is complicit with colonialism is further attested in the consonance of the “Guide” section’s overlooking of subaltern Alexandria with the “History” section’s elision of both Egypt’s status as a British colony and resistances to it. In his treatment of Alexandrian culture from the city’s founding until the Arab conquest, the two strands that appear to constitute what Forster sees as the contribution of the period can be identified as science under the Ptolemies, and philosophy, in its interaction with theology, mostly after the Ptolemies, although he does not overlook literature and scholarship. 26 But the more immediate point concerns Forster’s treatment of Alexandrian science, which he regards as having made greater achievements than literature and scholarship. In his laudatory narrative of Alexandrian science—taking in the fields of mathematics, geography, medicine, and astronomy (AHG 40–47)—he observes that “the third century b.c. is (from this point of view [scientific achievement]) the greatest period that civilisation has ever known—greater even than the nineteenth century a.d.” (AHG 41). The account is, not unexpectedly perhaps, refracted through a post-Enlightenment rationalism. For example, in speaking of the decline of the scientific spirit in Alexandria (betokened in his account by the acceptance for centuries of Eratosthenes’ successor Claudius Ptolemy’s map with its fanciful linking of Africa and China), Forster comments: “The age of enquiry was over, and the age of authority had begun, and it is worth noting that the decline of science at Alexandria exactly coincides with the rise of Christianity” (AHG 45). At first sight, a contradiction might seem to obtain between the post-Enlightenment rationalism and secularism that inform Forster’s description of ancient Alexandria’s scientific achievements, on the one hand, and the special place he accords the city’s theological contributions, on the other, whereby he halts the chronological narrative to trace, through the same centuries previously covered, “The Spiritual City.” Yet, in identifying a single issue, namely, that concerning the link between the human and the divine, as the problem that, in their specifically Alexandrian manifestations, Judaism, Neoplatonism, and Christianity, variously sought to solve, Forster, Malak Hashem has suggested, may have been responding out of a

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legacy of liberal-humanism. 27 But rather than construe this liberalhumanist outlook in Forster as an unquestioned, sovereign one, I would agree more with David Medalie who points out that while the rational self of the Enlightenment had been destabilized by psychoanalysis, one should not “overlook the many-pronged attempts in that same period to re-establish the centrality of reason and to recover the very useful humanistic language of control, volition and self-advancement.”28 He elaborates on the sense in which “the Edwardian age was an age of secular faith, [which] attempt[ed] to invest with a quasireligious significance the elements of secular life as a response to the ever-declining power of religion.”29 In arguing for “the reluctant modernism of E. M. Forster,” against the grain of readings that have persistently identified the English novelist as a liberal and a humanist, Medalie traces a growing ambivalence to and grappling with the loss of that legacy in the novelist’s two last works of fiction, Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924)—significantly, the two novels bracketing his Egyptian texts. Medalie locates “as a crucial ingredient” within the “great drama of loss and recovery”—of the Edwardian period in Howards End, of the British Raj in A Passage to India—“the predicament of liberalism and humanism.”30 As against the perceived threat of modern social phenomena—with Forster’s perception of “urban life [as] a modern malady and cosmopolitanism [as] a curse” being expressive of anxieties shared by others at the time—these two novels’ “concern with lost or recovered habitations, be they private, rural, symbolic or colonial, includes an investigation of whether there can be a home for liberalism and humanism . . . in such dispossessing environments.”31 I argue that Alexandria mediates precisely this crisis in relation to the urban experience in that it locates within the “Spiritual City” a potentially redemptive, humanist model of refuge set in a cosmopolitan urban landscape. By virtue of charting a given spiritual trajectory thematized in terms of the question of the relationship between the human and the divine and by identifying a specific moment in that trajectory, that of early Christianity, as the high point, Forster’s “Spiritual City” becomes the “City of Forster’s Spirit.” The “Spiritual City,” in particular its finest moment—an uncertain, metamorphic one, according to Forster—becomes an “objective correlative” of the ambivalence and malaise of his unfinished secularism.32 Forster’s perception of modern Alexandria did not exempt but rather made it continuous with anxieties about the modern “City.” This is nowhere more forcefully expressed

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than in an unfinished, posthumously published short story inspired by his first air flight, which took place in Alexandria and was to furnish material for two texts.33 One is tempted to read the aerial view of Alexandria, as seen through the eyes of the protagonist, despite the site-specific details of the cityscape, as a blueprint of the anxieties surrounding the modern metropolis in Forster’s generation in Europe: Yes—by the way, this was Alexandria. Here was the lake and the twin harbours, and between them, not expecting to be examined from above, many houses. At this altitude they resembled decayed teeth. That they could shelter human beings in their roots, and contain cavities that were entered through doors and equipped with furniture did not occur to Gregory, though he had spent all his life in or between them. They were so small in the midst of so much earth and air that they made him smile and the city herself—a sagging mouth in which they were set—caught their unreality. He had nothing to do with such fragments; he belonged to the ever advancing funnel of the blue sky. (AS 223)

Written around the same time as The Waste Land, it is no coincidence that the language Forster deploys here—“unreality”; “He had nothing to do with such fragments”—should be so reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s own about London and other big metropolitan centers.34 Bracketing for the moment the marked, and markedly misogynist, feminization of the city, the passage speaks directly to the trope of the metropolitan crowd in relation to the “mental life” of the urban dweller that can engender an “aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion, which will break into hatred and flight at the moment of closer contact,” in Georg Simmel’s words.35 In the guidebook, although Forster does not exempt modern Alexandria from the grim prognostications associated with nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban life, he nevertheless locates potential redeeming graces: Politically she is now more closely connected with the rest of Egypt than ever in the past, but the old foreign elements remain, and it is to the oldest of them, the Greek, that she owes such modern culture as is to be found in her. Her future like that of other great commercial cities is dubious. . . . Material prosperity . . . seems assured, but little progress can be discerned in other directions, and neither the Pharos of Sostratus nor the Idylls of Theocritus nor the Enneads of Plotinus are likely to be rivalled in the future. (AHG 103)

What should be noted here is that it is the Greeks of the city who contribute “such modern culture as is to be found in” Alexandria: this,

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apart from speaking to the privileged position in which Forster holds Cavafy, also suggests a reflection, if pale, of the Hellenistic or GraecoRoman culture of the city, as the high point of cosmopolitan urban culture as construed in Alexandria. Yet what of Forster’s contribution to that abiding paradigm that predated his account, namely, his distillation of the essence of that high point of the Hellenistic city in a philosophical-theological key?

whose spiritual city? The reverence with which Forster introduces the “Spiritual City” is undeniable, tempered though the account may be with a note of skepticism. Speaking of Egypt’s annexation to the Roman Empire and of Alexandria’s reduction to the status of a provincial capital, he asserts that “there is a splendour that kings do not give and cannot take away, and just when she lost her outward independence she was recompensed by discovering the kingdom that lies within” (AHG 64). Granted, the fissure between rationality and mysticism can be glimpsed in the remark regarding the intermediate being between God and the human, that the Alexandrian philosophers and theologians “became as certain of his existence as of God’s, for in philosophy their temperament was mystic rather than scientific, and as soon as they hit on an explanation of the universe that was comforting, they did not stop to consider whether it might be true” (AHG 65). Yet Forster reserves his finest prose, his highest superlatives, for these Alexandrian philosophers: “sublimity” (of Philo’s philosophy); “words of immortal eloquence” (of a passage by Plotinus); “Only in Alexandria could such a theologian have arisen” (of Clement of Alexandria), among others (AHG 67, 71, and 78, respectively). Forster himself was to describe the section on the “Spiritual City,” in a reading he gave of an extract from it, as “the most serious and ambitious part of the book and the part that most interested me to attempt” (“LG” 359). The syncretism and cross-fertilization of creeds and currents of thought that the confluence of Alexandria, with its tradition of scholarship, enabled are brought out both implicitly and explicitly in the rest of Forster’s account of the various contributions of the Jews, Neoplatonists, and Christians to the central problem. What is even more remarkable is the openness that this portion of the account evinces to nonclassical, Eastern influences. In tackling Neoplatonism, for example, Forster suggests a syncretism that combines classical

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Greece and possible Eastern influences. He speculates about the sources of the Neoplatonist’s notion that “not only do all things flow from God; they also strive to return to him,” through rebirth after death as well as through the Mystic Vision. Dwelling on Plotinus’s Enneads, which points toward “the vision of oneself and the vision of God [being] really the same, because each individual is God” (AHG 71, 72), the account underscores both the distance between this Neoplatonist notion and Christianity and the former’s affinity with the theological systems of India (see AHG 72). Forster’s own Indian experience and hence his openness to such work of “connecting” aside, his suggesting routes of intellectual exchange that situate Alexandria along a continuum not only with Greece but perhaps also with India is valuable in loosening the grip of the Hellenocentric paradigm. And in a fictional parallel to the hypothesized exchange between Plotinus and Indian theology, echoes of Neoplatonism, it has been suggested, resonate in A Passage to India.36 Nor does the account of the “Spiritual City” elide the influence of ancient Egypt as an “Alexandrea ad Aegyptum” perception might have dictated. Speaking of the unknown Jewish author of “The Wisdom of Solomon,” who in “solving his problem in the Alexandrian way . . . conceived an intermediate between Jehovah and man whom he calls Sophia or Wisdom,” Forster comments that he “not only wrote in Greek but had studied Stoic and Epicurean Philosophy and Egyptian rites. He had the cosmopolitan culture of Alexandria” (AHG 66). Here is an instance of Forster’s usage of “cosmopolitanism” where the coastal strip of the Terni article is not attributed to exclusively European, in this case classical, influences. Nor is the coastal culture as represented in Alexandria construed as cut off from the city’s territorial and national self. Cosmopolitan, in this context at least, begins to denote a dynamic and syncretic exchange of ideas and traditions. In introducing Christianity, Forster likewise throws into relief its tremendous indebtedness, both doctrinal and iconographic, to ancient Egypt and Alexandria. He cites the new religion’s doctrines of the resurrection and personal immortality, as well the Eucharist, as possible borrowings from the cult of Osiris, and the clearer iconographic adaptation of Isis and Horus in their new guise as Virgin and Child, Horus and Set’s transmutation into St. George and the dragon, the ankh reappearing on Christian tombs as a looped cross, the iconographic discussion being cross-referenced to artifacts in the Graeco-Roman Museum collection (see AHG 73–74).

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In Christianity’s crossing to Egypt, the other key force it encountered was the “Alexandrians, [who] were highly cultivated [and] . . . had libraries where all the wisdom of the Mediterranean was accessible, and [whose] faith inevitably took a philosophic form” (AHG 74). What would ensue from the encounter where the Alexandrians would bring to bear the question of the link between the human and the divine onto Christianity would be the debates surrounding the nature of Christ. Although Forster’s account of specific Alexandrian contributions to Christianity maintains some of the features of his treatment of previous philosophical and theological schools, a less commendatory tone begins to show, regarding the Copts, even before we reach what he casts as the momentous rupture of Islam. Granted, the description, under the heading “Orthodoxy (Early),” of Clement of Alexandria’s thought will continue, in the vein of Forster’s previous narrative, to draw out what he sees as cross-fertilizations37 and will indeed appear to be the culmination of the “City of Forster’s Spirit,” to be followed by a sloping down. For Forster, Clement of Alexandria “raised [Christianity] from intellectual obscurity, he lent her for a little Hellenic persuasion, and the graciousness of Greece seems in his pages not incompatible with the Grace of God” (AHG 78), adding elsewhere about him that “in that curious city, which had never been young and hoped never to grow old, conciliation must have seemed more possible than elsewhere” (PP 42). It is a vision that constitutes the flipside of the novelist’s own agnosticism, his “secular faith,”38 in a yearned for compatibility and “conciliation” between faith and secularism: no wonder he describes the Alexandrian theologian as “enlightened” (AHG 78). While Forster acknowledges, if tacitly, that the label “heresies” under which he groups Arianism, Monophysism, and Monothelism, is a function of his and his readers’ perspective of Western Christendom (see AHG 80), he leaves the reader in no doubt as to the drift of his account of these. Tracing the transition from the earlier Christian theologians and these “heresies,” he writes, “Thus the characteristic of early orthodoxy was a belief in Christ as the link between God and man. A humanising belief; the work of Greek scholars who had subtilised and universalised the simpler faith of Palestine, and had imparted into it doctrines taught by Paganism. We must now watch it harden and transform. Several causes transformed it—e.g. the growth of an ignorant monasticism in Egypt” (AHG 79; emphasis added).

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the copts and the beginning of the decline Despite the “humanising” and “universalis[ing]” attributes being of a piece with the main drift of Forster’s account, these attributes—previously ascribed in large measure to the syncretic, spiritually intertextual space of Alexandria as a gateway to Egypt and possibly also to the Orient of India—are now subsumed under the ethnic designation “the work of Greek scholars” rather than, for example, possibly Hellenistic, hence ethnically hybrid; see, in this respect, Awad’s contratingly syncretic designation of these scholars, as cited in the introduction. (The passage, it should be noted, concludes a discussion of both Clement of Alexandria, thought to have been an Athenian, and Origen, whom Forster says was Egyptian, his name being connected to Horus [AHG 78–79].) Simultaneously, Forster, for all the nuancing of his usage of “heresy,” evinces an aversion to the Copts, and one of their, together with Greeks and others hailing from the eastern Mediterranean, key contributions to Christianity—the monastic tradition, which he dismisses as “ignorant.” In its ambivalence, the passage is a useful point of departure for investigating the multilayered sources of the paradigm at work jointly in Forster’s historiography and his depiction of space. As previously noted, Forster is twice over—in the chronological narrative and as replicated in the account given in “The Spiritual City”—dismissive of Egypt from the Arab conquest all the way to modern times. But the dismissive attitude begins, as seen in the foregoing, from the growing establishment of Christianity and its triumph over paganism, even while it wrestled with its own controversies, and with regard to the Copts. Past the time of Clement of Alexandria is the beginning of the decline as Forster sees it. Forster’s two-pronged hostility, targeting what he identifies as the dissolution of the classical heritage and giving vent to unmitigated racism against the Christians of Egypt, is palpable in the essay on St. Athanasius in Pharos and Pharillon. Elaborating on the account of the mock-baptism performed by St. Athansius in his boyhood, which resulted in his entry into priesthood, Forster produces a satirical sketch of “the sportive youth . . . in the act of pouring some of the harbour water over two other Gippoes” and the Bishop’s alarm: “‘Stop! stop!’ the genuine article cried” (PP 45–46).39 Of the several occasions on which St. Athanasius was banished and of the diffusion of his thought, Forster has this to say: “Roused by his passage from older visions, the soul of the world began to stir, and to what activity! Heavy Romans,

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dreamy Orientals and quick Greeks all turned to theology, and scrambled for the machinery of the Pagan State, wrenching this way and that until their common heritage was smashed” (PP 49). While this is an image of a barbarian horde, Forster’s most mordent satire is reserved for the church fathers in the post-Chalcedonian phase, as seen in his essay “Timothy the Cat and Timothy Whitebonnet” in Pharos and Pharillon. Playing on the sobriquets and monikers, as in the name of the Chalcedonian patriarch Timothy Salofaciolus (meaning, “wearer of a white turban” or “wobbling turban”) and in the name of the Coptic patriarch Timothy Aelurus (meaning, “The Cat”), the essay begins with “‘Miaou!’” and thence proceeds in similar fashion regarding the theological issues at stake (PP 51).40 While Forster is careful to bring out an anticolonial aspect to the Copts’ monastic movement, he barely mutes his aversion to them. He speaks of them as a “wild black army,” and though he astutely comments of the vicious murder of Hypatia that “they [the monks] were the nucleus of a national movement. Nationality did not exist in the modern sense—it was a religious not a patriotic age. But under the cloak of religion racial passions could shelter, and the monks killed Hypatia not only because they knew she was sinful but also because they thought she was foreign” (AHG 56), he speaks of the “Monophysite or Coptic Patriarch, who opposed Chalcedon [as] a regular Egyptian monk, poor, bigoted and popular” (AHG 57), of the monks as being “averse to culture and incapable of thought” (AHG 55), and of the whole movement as “an ignorant monasticism in Egypt” (AHG 79). Such is Forster’s contempt for Egyptian Christianity that, speaking of the theft of St. Mark’s body by the Venetians in 828, he says, “The theft was a pardonable one, for the Arabs never seemed to know that it had been made; it occasioned much satisfaction in Venice and no inconvenience in Alexandria” (AHG 86). Quite apart from the fact that an Arab Muslim historian who died in Egypt in the tenth century such as al-Mas‘udi was aware of the fact that St. Mark was buried in Alexandria, as seen in his Muruj al-Dhahab (Meadows of Gold),41 the statement altogether overlooks Egyptian Christianity and the importance to it of such a relic of the founder of its church.

islam’s “unnecessary lumber” The section titled “The Spiritual City” concludes with a note, of a page and a half, on Islam, which, as Forster himself puts it, provides

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a specifically spiritual commentary, in parallel to the brief historical one, on what he sees as “the thousand years of silence” of Alexandria after the Arab conquest: “The physical decay that crept on her in the 7th century had its counterpart in a spiritual decay” (AHG 84). In this spiritual key of his modulation on the decline-and-fall theme, Forster’s contention is that Islam had no use for Alexandria’s question as to how the human can be linked to the divine, and hence the new faith would have found the city, with all its philosophical and theological apparatuses, “idolatrous and foolish” (AHG 84). Alexandria’s question, according to Forster, was never asked by Islam, by the faith that swept the city physically and spiritually into the sea. “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God,” says Islam, proclaiming the needlessness of a mediator; the man Mohammed has been chosen to tell us what God is like and what he wishes, and there all the machinery ends, leaving us to face our Creator . . . as a God of power, who may temper his justice with mercy, but who does not stoop to the weakness of Love. . . . That old dilemma, that God ought at the same time to be far away and close at hand, cannot occur to an orthodox Mohammedan. . . . Islam, strong through its abjuration of Love, was the one system the city could not handle. It gave no opening to her manipulations. Her logoi, her emanations and aeons, her various Christs, orthodox, Arian, Monophysite, or Monothelite—it threw them all down as unnecessary lumber that do but distract the true believer from his God. (AHG 83–84)

In distilling Islam exclusively to the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith that he quotes, Forster produces a monolithic image of that system of belief, thereby eliding the complexity of its theological debates and the different cultural and philosophical currents that nourished them. While an overview lies beyond the scope of this chapter, for my purposes, I will selectively take stock of two, not disconnected, theological areas overlooked by Forster: Neoplatonism in its Islamic resonance and Sufism. Neoplatonism allows us to delineate the travel and permutation of doctrines, not least from Forster’s Alexandrian “Spiritual City,” to Islamic scholars, thus highlighting the productive reappropriation of classical and Hellenistic traditions within Islam in its treatment of similar questions. Sufism, in addition to its emphasis on love and its path to union with the divine, provides a vital insight into the elisions at work in the relationship between the “Guide” and “History” sections in Forster’s Alexandria.

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alex andria to baghdad: the resonance of neoplatonism The title I give this section invokes a 1930 article by Max Meyerhof, “Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad,” about the transmission and hence transformations of classical learning in domains such as philosophy and medicine from the Mediterranean city to the ‘Abbasids’ capital, as part of what was to become in the twentieth century a growing body of scholarship on the subject by scholars such as Abdurrahman Badawi, Dimitri Gutas, Franz Rosenthal, and Richard Walzer.42 The Islamic contact with classical and Hellenistic philosophy, as reappropriated by Christianity, was effected by its perpetuation in the countries that entered the new religion, such as Egypt, given that the “unbroken continuity of the Western tradition is based on the fact that the Christians in the Roman Empire did not reject the pagan legacy but made it an essential part of their own syllabus of learning.”43 Hence, as has been noted, scholars writing about Islamic philosophy need a working familiarity not only with Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus but also with such thinkers as St. Augustine.44 Begun under the Umayyad dynasty,45 the translation movement of Greek texts, philosophical or otherwise, into Arabic was one of the most signal contributions of the successor ‘Abbasid dynasty, an endeavor patronized by the Caliphs, notably al-Ma’mun and al-Mu‘tasim. Centered in Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) in Baghdad, the translations referred to here were undertaken mainly by Eastern Christian translators, Orthodox, Jacobites, or Nestorians, working either from Greek originals or Syriac renditions made for the Arabs.46 The most prominent figure in this school, the Nestorian Hunayn b. Ishaq (who died sometime after a.d. 870)—who apparently studied Greek in Alexandria and “found Greek scholarship [also] alive in Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia”—would first “establish a critical text of the work to be translated[—] . . . [his] philological methods, which he himself explains in detail, com[ing] fully up to the level of contemporary Byzantine scholarship.”47 Much of the philosophical material translated by this and other schools was transmitted by Neoplatonic philosophers, whether pagan or Christian. Hence, “Aristotle’s distinction between the highest God and the star-gods became more influential in the Neoplatonic age, when the balance of interest definitely shifted from nature and science to the transcendent, and philosophers built up a great hierarchy of

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supernatural beings on the basis of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The form in which this metaphysical tradition reached the Arabs was definitely Neoplatonic, i.e. reality was represented as a chain of spiritual forces emanating from the One in timeless cosmic reproduction like the rays of the sun. . . . This type of metaphysics . . . is common to all Islamic philosophers from Al-Kindī to Ibn Rushd.” Another feature shared by Islamic philosophers—and one in direct contradiction to Forster’s assertion about Islam disposing with Alexandria’s “logoi, her emanations and aeons . . . as unnecessary lumber” (AHG 84)—is the theory of the intellect, which bears the mark of Neoplatonist takes on Aristotle’s “active intellect,” as an “intermediary between the spiritual world above the moon and the human mind, through which both the human mind and the human imagination are linked to the divine.”48 While the “Greek original of the theory of the intellect in Al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīna . . . has not been found,” Walzer has written, “there can be no doubt that it is a late and very natural offshoot of Neoplatonic speculation, possibly originating in Alexandria.” Given that such a theory was problematic for adherents of monotheism, “Arabic philosophers identified this active intellect with the Qur’ānic Spirit of Holiness, i.e. Gabriel, the angel of revelation, or with the Kingdom of Heaven, the ultimate abode of immortal souls.”49 While it lies beyond the scope of my work here to summarize different scholars’ analyses of the reappropriation of specific classical and Hellenistic philosophers, the debates between them, and, no less significantly, the way in which these Muslim philosophers adapted that appropriated heritage for their own purposes,50 two last points should be added. The attitude of the Arabs toward this heritage that goes back to both pagan and Christian times, as well as to other ethnicities, appears to have been one of grateful acknowledgment. Walzer traces what he describes as the “cosmopolitan attitude”51 of Islamic philosophers (a usage of “cosmopolitanism,” incidentally, virtually identical to Forster’s own in the context of “The Spiritual City”) from the earliest Arabic metaphysical work, by al-Kindi—in the preface of which he asserts, “‘It is fitting to acknowledge the utmost gratitude to those who have contributed even a little to truth, not to speak of those who have contributed much. . . . We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples . . . ’”—to Ibn Rushd “three hundred years later, when the history of Islamic philosophy was approaching its end.”52 More recently it

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has been argued that the Greek heritage “brought together Christian, Jew and Muslim in the medieval world . . . not because Hellenism is somehow intrinsically cosmopolitan, but rather because it presented neutral common ground outside the religious boundaries.”53 The other point concerns the transmission of classical and Neoplatonic philosophical works, as seen in the figure of Plotinus, of whose Enneads Forster remarks, “Alexandria produced nothing greater” (AHG 70). Rosenthal’s philological work on a number of Arabic philosophical texts attributed to one “al-Shaykh al-Yunani” (meaning “the Greek Sage” or “the Greek Old Man”) has demonstrated that the epithet for the unnamed author serves as a “label for a compilation, or compilations,” from an unknown Plotinian source that combined excerpts from various texts possibly originating in the Alexandrian Neoplatonist, with the addition of some “pseudoepigraphical material, in the Baghdad of the tenth century.”54 Rosenthal advances several reasons for the paradoxical state of affairs whereby the references to Plotinus’s name are scanty and distorted, despite his far-reaching influence on Islamic philosophy: to wit, that the Muslims, like some of the ancients, may not have been aware of a specific school called Neoplatonism; that the clash between what he sees as “two conflicting strains within Muslim civilization, the philonymous and the anonymous,” “was often avoided by the handy compromise of pseudonymity,” with “anonymity [being] quite often preferred”; and that Islamic civilization’s awareness of its debt to the classical heritage (which he, for one, considers to have been problematic, if in terms of dissemination) meant that to secure its “acceptance and effectiveness” names would have been kept to the minimum of a Plato or an Aristotle, for example.55 Hence the “power of anonymity” in Plotinus’s case, where “there can be no doubt that his work and thought most profoundly affected Muslim intellectual and spiritual life[,] . . . liberat[ing] medieval Islam from disturbing contradictions and giv[ing] it some sort of peace with itself.”56 It is, Rosenthal suggests, a state of affairs the Neoplatonist, who professed a disdain for “having a material existence, might have derived a deep satisfaction from, [given] the fact that his spirit was active in Islam.”57 What may appear as an extended digression from Forster’s Alexandria is called for by Forster’s own foreclosure, in the context of Islam’s encounter with Alexandria, of a potentiality of a spiritual humanism in that system of belief, let alone any connection thereof to this very city. A foreclosure or an unawareness? While the larger

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portion of the Western secondary sources on the transmission of the classical and Hellenistic philosophical heritage to and its reappropriation by Muslims occurs in the twentieth century, the modern field of inquiry dates from the nineteenth century.58 Browsing his copy of the 1914 Baedeker Egypt and the Sudan, Forster’s curiosity could have been piqued by such statements as Islam “is the heir of the late-Hellenistic Christian civilization, which we must regard as the hybrid product of Greek and Asiatic feelings and philosophy,” that Islamic mystics “bridge over the vast gulf between God and humanity by the conception of mediators with God, viz. Saints,” and that “the mystics early borrowed Neo-Platonic . . . and subsequently also Buddhist ideas.”59 With this in mind, Forster’s categorical statements on the subject indicate that he hastened past clues to an Alexandria-to-Baghdad intellectual transference, partly on account of the resonance of the narrative he was producing with his own ambivalences and partly on account of the narratological considerations he was working with, a point to be taken up later. Meanwhile, the critics, editors, and translators60 of Alexandria have unquestioningly perpetuated this distorting lacuna in the account that is based on what the author construes as a lacuna in Muslim thought. But it is not merely a question of filling in a historical lacuna in the account: all this has broader ramifications for the notion of cosmopolitanism as propagated in Forster’s Alexandria and through canonizing critical takes on it.

sufism: the andalusian /maghrebian connection To summon Sufism might seem a willful misreading of Forster’s assertion, “That old dilemma, that God ought at the same time to be far away and close at hand, cannot occur to an orthodox Mohammedan. . . . Islam, strong through its abjuration of Love, was the one system the city could not handle” (AHG 83–84; emphasis added)—even setting aside for the moment the preceding discussion of Islamic philosophy’s engagement with these issues. Yet summoning Sufism, to which Forster’s statements do not apply, becomes compelling when one recalls the association of Islamic mysticism with medieval Alexandria, made visible in a number of mosques in the Bahari area commemorating Sufi figures. My counter-flânerie that cross-references Forster’s treatment of these mosques in the “Guide” to his remarks about Islam in the “Spiritual City” portion of the “History”61 is underwritten by the question what the visible edifices of Sufi Islam

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reflect back on his comments about that system of belief. Conversely, I ask in what way his statements about Islam in the “Spiritual City” inflect his description of the material reminders of a tradition of Islamic mysticism. Many of them located to the west of the city within the pre– Muhammad ‘Ali urban fabric of the “Turkish Town,” the mosques in question are spanned in Forster’s walk “From the Square to Rasel-Tin.” The tenor of Forster’s depiction of the area is mild: “The district is picturesque and, especially at evening, full of gentle charm. The best way to see it is to wander aimlessly about” (AHG 134). Although this recommended spirit of flânerie is, nevertheless, necessarily dropped in favor of the “chief-points-of-interest” mode of the guidebook, Forster’s itemizing of the sites and sights is, at best, of an unevenly informed quality. He mentions the souqs but makes no attempt to delineate their alignment or explore their associations with certain guilds and ethnicities—which would have thrown into relief the different urban order to which they belong. As for the mosques, he comprehensively lists these, and provides detailed description of three of them. Two related points, however, need to be made about the description of the mosques. First, the emphasis, undoubtedly a valid one, is architectural/art historical (dating, architectural style, bricolage of antique columns, etc.), but all too narrowly or exclusively so. Hence the account occludes other significant perspectives, such as some indication of the history/biography of the religious figure after whom the mosque in question is named. Second, as a consequence, there is an absence of information specifically about two of the most important Sufis associated with Alexandria, Abu al-‘Abbas al-Mursi and alBusiri. Forster is only slightly more voluble about the former than the latter. Of the Abu al-‘Abbas al-Mursi Mosque, he notes in passing that it was “built 1767 by Algerians, some of whom still live in the neighbourhood”62 (AHG 137), and throws in one or two architectural features. As for the Busiri Mosque, all we are told is that the building is modern and that the sultan “usually makes his Friday prayer” here (AHG 137). The information is fragmentary and bereft of context, as, too, is the quick detail that “here [the square containing the two mosques] (1922) is the rallying point of the Nationalist demonstrations” (AHG 136). Why, after all, should this square have that iconic, nationalist significance, and why should the sultan choose the Busiri Mosque for his Friday prayer?

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There is no doubt that Forster expended much energy on getting the mosques right, as it were: back in England, he wrote to an Alexandrian friend asking him to check certain architectural details of Alexandrian mosques for his guidebook.63 But Forster’s almost willful obliviousness in the context of Alexandria, coupled with the paradoxical importance of the space of the mosque and Islam in A Passage to India,64 is likely to have been the result of a foreclosure caused by his lack of sympathy with this part of the East, which in terms of Islam he construed as exclusively orthodox and hence, in his view, unappealing, even repugnant. In an unpublished letter sent to his mother from Cairo, he writes of the Ibn Tulun Mosque, one of the most important in the capital: “There is an ancient and almost step-less mosque near here. I drove to see it yesterday with one of the masters of the school—a well-informed Egyptian. One huge courtyard [above this Forster wrote “3 acres!”] with a cloister round— most uninteresting. Mohammedanism undefiled is drearier than the dreariest Non conformity, but fortunately it generally gets defiled— by Hinduism in India, Shi ism in Persia, Christianity in Spain, Sicily, and Constantinople—and in its alloyed condition can produce beautiful art. . . . I wonder if I am jaundiced about Egyptian art! I cannot see that either as a whole or in its details it is good.”65 The reference to Algerians, where Forster mentions their having built the mosque, the sole one in the book, touches upon—even if it never actually tackles—a whole history of Andalusian and North African migration to or passage through Alexandria, and more broadly to Egypt, in the Middle Ages. This history is partly wrought in the travel routes effected by the Hajj (obvious examples being the travelogues of Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta), to an extent by the Reconquista of Spain and the resultant displacement of the Muslims,66 as well as the Jews, of Andalusia and the Moorish lands, by the quest for religious knowledge, the Sufi orders’ solidarities and “internationalism,” and trade.67 This background is evident in the specific cases of Abu al-‘Abbas al-Mursi and al-Busiri, whether in their ethnic backgrounds or in the origins of al-Shadhiliya, the Sufi order they both followed, which was conceived in the Maghreb.68 Indeed, the founder of the order, Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, who was born in Morocco and lived for a while in Tunisia, also lived for some time in Alexandria, this is apart from a number of Andalusian/Maghrebi religious scholars and Sufis who lived in or came to be associated with Alexandria, such as Abu Bakr al-Turtushi and Abu ‘Abdallah al-Shatibi (a district in

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Alexandria bearing the latter’s name)—the subjects of biographies in Yusuf’s book cited in the introduction to this volume.69 As his name indicates, Shihab al-Din Abu al-‘Abbas Ahmad b. ‘Umar b. ‘Ali alKharzaji al-Ansari al-Mursi al-Balansi was born (c. 1219) in Mursiya, or Murcia, in Andalusia’s Valencia, where he received his basic education, and after a shipwreck en route to the Hajj settled for a while in Tunisia, where he met and became the disciple of the founder of al-Shadhiliya (according to the biography by al-Shayyal, one of the Alexandria University historians I discuss in the introduction to this book).70 Both he and al-Shadhili then moved to Alexandria where Abu al-‘Abbas al-Mursi was to become the successor in Egypt of the Shadhiliya order—another branch being the Tunisian one71—until his death about forty-three years later (c. 1287). Although he appears to have left no written texts, Abu al-‘Abbas al-Mursi’s followers, such as his successor, Ahmad b. ‘Ata’ Allah al-Sakandari, have recorded his sayings and interpretations of the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet, and the mosque that was built around his burial place a few years later and then repeatedly restored and rebuilt has become one of the most significant Islamic religious sites of the city. Of North African, apparently Berber origin, Sharaf al-Din Muhammad b. Sa‘id b. Hammad b. Muhsin al-Busiri was born in 1213 in Abusir in Egypt, from which his name derives. He belonged to the Shadhili order, and, though he lived in Cairo for a while, attended the lectures of Abu al-‘Abbas al-Mursi, and was himself noted for his religious learning.72 But al-Busiri’s lasting fame is based on his poetry, and specifically the panegyric to the Prophet Muhammad, “al-Kawakib al-Durriyya fi Madh Khayr al-Bariyya” (Glittering Spheres in Praise of the Best of Humanity), generally known as “al-Burda,” meaning “the mantle” (of the Prophet). Legend has it that al-Busiri had composed this poem while suffering from an illness the recovery from which he had prayed to God for, and had sought the Prophet’s intercession with, before falling asleep and seeing the Prophet in a dream throw his mantle upon him and awakening to find himself cured. Albeit drawing on the canonical conventions of pre-Islamic and classical poetry, such as the “amatory prelude” (nasib), the “Burda” is also inscribed within the genre of “al-Mada’ih al-Nabawiyya” (panegyrics in honor of the Prophet).73 It reflects “the legend of the Prophet and belief in the supernatural powers he commanded long after his death and the cult of sacred relics” the revival of which gained force in

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al-Busiri’s thirteenth century in view of “the fall of the ‘Abbāssid Caliphate in Baghdad (656/1258) and the besetting threat of both the Mongols and the Crusaders; the dynastic struggles and internal conflict which threatened the very foundations of the Muslim nation; and the absence of good leadership.”74 In eulogizing the Prophet, the poem meditates on the earthly and celestial portents that surrounded his birth, on the miracle of the Qur’an, and the Prophet’s nocturnal journey to Jerusalem and thence to heaven (a “popular . . . [theme] whenever Jerusalem was occupied by nonMuslim forces”),75 and ends with supplications. One would not wish to assimilate Sufism to Christianity, and it should be noted that alBusiri cautions against such assimilation by alluding to the figure of Christ where he writes, “Set aside what the Nazarenes have claimed [ma idda‘athu al-nasara] for their prophet, and give praise as you would . . . / Attribute to his person as you would of nobility, and to his standing as you would of greatness.”76 Although al-Busiri’s eulogizing of the Prophet was pronounced “objectionable” by some, it has been suggested that the “deanthopomorphism” that the poet attributes to the Prophet resonates with Ibn Sina’s (Avicenna’s) conception of him “as the link between the celestial and terrestrial realms.”77 Even among a considerable canon of panegyrics in honor of the Prophet, the high renown of “al-Burda” in the Muslim world is not in doubt—witnessed as it is on a popular level (it is recited on the Prophet’s birthday, at weddings, funerals, in religious gatherings) and on the intertextual literary one.78 In terms of poetic engagements with “al-Burda,” these are often in the form of mu‘arada—that is, a poetic repartee in which a poet competitively borrows the metrics and rhyme of a predecessor to better his meaning—a notable example in this context being “Nahj al-Burda,” by the modern Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi (referred to in relation to Cavafy in the previous chapter), whose poem was to reach an even wider audience when verses of it were sung by Umm Kulthum, the foremost Arab singer of the twentieth century.79 The renown of the “Burda,” in any case, stands in sharp contrast to Forster’s totalizing (or, reductive to Orthodoxy) claim about “Islam . . . [as] proclaiming the needlessness of a mediator; the man Mohammed has been chosen to tell us what God is like and what he wishes, and there all the machinery ends, leaving us to face our Creator” (AHG 83). The mosque of al-Busiri, in its current form built by the viceroy Sa’id in the mid-nineteenth century, allegedly containing the body of

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Figure 2. Al-Busiri Mosque, in the foreground, and Abu al-‘Abbas alMursi Mosque in the background, Alexandria. Photographed by Sherif Sonbol.

the Sufi poet, and with its walls inscribed with “al-Burda” (see figs. 2 and 3), is among the legends of the older part of the city, discussed earlier. In his book on al-Busiri, the modern Alexandrian writer and critic ‘Abd al-‘Alim al-Qabbani describes the image engraved on his memory of watching, for years, from his shop, the many funeral processions passing, preceded by the chanting of “al-Burda.” He recounts childhood memories of his father taking him to pray in alBusiri Mosque on Fridays: copies of “al-Burda” would be distributed before it was chanted, the sight of the poem inscribed in gilt on

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Figure 3. Interior of al-Busiri Mosque, with “al-Burda” inscribed on a frieze, and detail showing verses from “al-Burda.” Photographed by Sherif Sonbol.

a frieze elevating it further in his eyes. He suggests that “al-Burda” may have served as his first model of writing poetry.80 Hence it is no surprise that the area in which this and other mosques are situated should have played a significant role in the demonstrations that took place as part of the 1919 Revolution, with some similarities to the role that the Qasba of Algiers was to play later in anticolonial resistance, as a “counter space,” although the North African binary of a European city versus the Medina is inapplicable to Alexandria.81 That this is part of Forster’s obliviousness to non-European(ized) areas of the city is attested elsewhere in Alexandria. One of the most

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significant modern cultural icons of the area in which these two mosques are located, the Turkish Town, is, of course, the formidable anticolonial poet, writer, and social critic of Tunisian origin as his surname indicates, Mahmud Bayram al-Tunisi (1893–1961). Apart from the cursory treatment in the spatial section of the Turkish Town, Forster had already betrayed—and this early on in the “History” section—his disregard for all areas considered “native.” Thus when he dismisses the ancient settlement Rhakotis as “a little lump of Egypt” to which the “native and conservative element naturally rallied,” he goes on to exhort the reader to “Compare it to the Arab villages and slums that have been embedded in the scheme of the modern town— to Mazarita or Kom-el-Dik” (AHG 7). But the instigation proves to be purely rhetorical because the underprivileged quarter “Kom-elDik” (or Kum al-Dikka) does not figure in the organized walk that comprises it.82 Kum al-Dikka—a settlement on a mound inhabited by workers, builders, and traders on a small scale—was to produce, and in times contemporary to Forster’s writing of the book, the composer and singer Sayyid Darwish (1892–1923), so-called father of modern Arabic music, a key figure in the national movement through his lyrical contributions to the 1919 Revolution and collaborator with Bayram al-Tunisi. Among the poorer areas to the south is Kafr ‘Ashri, which was where ‘Abdallah al-Nadim (1845[?]–1896), the innovative writer, journalist, and orator of the 1882 Revolution, lived.83 Ironically, when Forster takes issue with municipal policies vis-à-vis the less privileged quarters, it is on Orientalist aesthetic grounds: “the exquisite Covered Bazaar near the Rue de France [has been] destroyed” (AHG 103). But his observation does not lead him to broach the municipal neglect of underprivileged areas despite their being taxed, a vexed issue even during the time of his sojourn, and the subject of a celebrated contemporary invective about the Municipal Council by Bayram al-Tunisi that opens with, “My heart is woebegone for the love / of one by the name of the Municipal Council / None other kept my sore eyelids open by night but the / ethereal shadow of the Municipal Council / Whenever I get bread, half the loaf I eat / and half I give to the Municipal Council.”84 This entire context, with the two mosques at its core, is missing from Alexandria. In contrast to the long-gone Pharos lighthouse, the imaginative reconstruction of which Forster, rightly, devotes much space to, in contrast to his recommendation to stand at the summit of the Qayt Bey Fort and imaginatively re-create ancient Alexandria (AHG

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152–53), here is an extant material structure, the Busiri Mosque, which had he surveyed it would have yielded a significant modification of his account in “The Spiritual City.” More broadly, though, the histories of the Shadhili Sufis Abu al-‘Abbas al-Mursi and al-Busiri would have nuanced the Hellenocentric tenor of Forster’s account of the city and its spiritual humanist tradition. I should emphasize that in foregrounding these histories, I am by no means upholding them as a more definitive account or, more important, an ideal of cosmopolitanism: al-Busiri, for example, has been noted for his invectives against Christians and Jews.85 However, these histories would have contributed a sense of immigrants from the Maghreb (hence of Alexandria situated along a continuum with the North African coast, and, formerly, Andalusia rather than seen solely with reference to Greece or a Hellenized eastern Mediterranean) and the Sufi contribution to Islam. Both Sufism, even if approached exclusively in its association with Alexandria, and the Alexandria-to-Baghdad reappropriation by Muslim scholars of the classical and Hellenistic philosophical heritage, would have provided Forster’s long-canonical account with other genealogies and routes for intercultural exchange taking off from the space of this city. The discussions of the resonance of classical and Neoplatonist philosophy in Islamic philosophy and of panegyrics to the Prophet as accessed via North African Sufis associated with Alexandria were prompted by Forster’s account in “The Spiritual City,” a section that interrupts and recapitulates through a specific theme the chronological narrative in the “History,” the first part of Alexandria. In now returning with Forster to the rest of the “History,” I shall provide a brief summary of his account before analyzing its underpinnings. The quasi-chronological mode Forster adopts in the “History” is more or less abandoned in the brief remarks he makes on Alexandria from the Arab conquest to the modern period, then taken up again in the description of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century city. While the “History” section brings to modern Alexandria (defined as postNapoleonic conquest) some of the chronological rigor seen in the treatment of Hellenistic Alexandria, the period between the Arab conquest of Egypt (“the catastrophe” [AHG 58]) and Napoleon elicits a mere five pages—designated as “a thousand years of silence” (AHG 84). Although not hagiographic about modern Alexandria, as previously noted, in bracketing out Arab medieval Alexandria Forster also follows a paradigm of arching over from the Hellenistic and late

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antique period to the modern. The revival narrative that reaches back to the Hellenistic city is implicit in the phrase “the sleep of so many centuries had been broken” (AHG 93). Briefly, despite mitigating reservations about Napoleon and Muhammad ‘Ali, respectively (a British chauvinism regarding the former and a critique of the exploitation, despotism, and narrow conception of reform of the latter [AHG 91–96]), Forster draws out from their respective projects and the revivalist ramifications thereof for the city a resonance of Alexander’s own. Hence of Napoleon we are told that “at war with England, he saw himself gaining at England’s expense an Oriental realm and reviving the power of Alexander the Great. In him, as in Mark Antony, Alexandria nourished imperial dreams” (AHG 91), and of Muhammad ‘Ali’s imperial dreams, that “[a] kingdom comparable in extent to the Ptolemaic, had come into existence with Alexandria at its centre, and it seemed that the dreams of Napoleon would be realised by this Albanian adventurer, and that the English would be cut off from India” (AHG 95). This pattern is seen in starker, more codelike form in the structure of Forster’s other Alexandrian book, Pharos and Pharillon. This is divided into two section, with the essays on the ancient city grouped under the rubric “Pharos” and those on the modern under that of “Pharillon” (“the obscure successor of Pharos” [PP 12]); the middle, Arabo-Islamic period is conspicuous by its absence. It is to the underpinnings and models of this pattern that I now turn.

“declining” alex andria: edward gibbon and the correlatives of a tr agic emplotment The arching-over-and-bracketing pattern that emerges from the above—whether in its starker form (in Pharos and Pharillon) or in its more aestheticized and thematized one (in Alexandria’s “Spiritual City”)—is to be further interpreted, I argue here, by adapting a narratological framework from historiography. Forster pays glowing tribute, in the list of authorities for the “History” he provides at the beginning of Alexandria, to Anatole France’s Alexandrian novel Thaïs,86 but the narrative mode that I identify in the English novelist’s account of the city’s history is reminiscent of his comments in Aspects of the Novel about this French novel. That Forster describes Thaïs as having “the shape of an hour-glass”—with the plot of a reversal of fortunes of the two main characters also mirrored in this underlying

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“pattern [which] appeals to our aesthetic sense” (AN 102 and 103)— spelling as it does an affinity with the mode adopted by France, need not stand in contradiction to France’s and Forster’s respective genres (the latter here writing a “history” as part of a guidebook but a “novelist” by profession). Rather, the affinity between the pattern Forster detects in the plot of Thaïs and that which obtains in his “History” is one that broaches what Hayden White has spoken of as the component of “emplotment” to which historians have recourse in narrating their material. To extricate this point from a much larger argument of White’s, “histories gain part of their explanatory effect by their success in making stories out of mere chronicles; and stories in turn are made out of chronicles by an operation . . . [of] ‘emplotment.’” Emplotment, as he defines it, is “simply the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures.”87 For whereas stories as such in the historical record can be infinite, for the Western historian, the “types of stories . . . are limited to the number of modes of emplotment which the myths of the Western literary tradition sanction as appropriate ways of endowing human processes with meanings.” If emplotment occurs according to the generic story forms of romance, comedy, tragedy, or satire, we are reminded that there are no “intrinsic meanings” built into historical situations that dictate any given mode of emplotment, as White demonstrates through different historians’ work on the French Revolution. As for the process of rendering the historical record according to a generic story form, this entails “all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play” such as “the suppression or subordination of certain [events] and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like.”88 Without resorting to the notion of emplotment in history writing, with its emphasizing of certain events and deemphasizing of others, we would be hard put to explain not so much the absence but the paradoxically subordinated presence in Forster’s “History” of texts and events from the historical record of the Arab period. First, it should be noted that conversion of churches into mosques in the Arab period (AHG 86) is incontestable. Otherwise, while Forster provides a few milestones of events affecting the city in the Arab period, they are telescoped toward a picture of an early and more or less homogeneous state of neglect effected more by human than natural catastrophes, as

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a result of the Arabs having “let the city fall out of repair” (he does mention the silting up of the Canopic mouth of the Nile, but only elsewhere, in the “Guide” section, does he speak of the series of earthquakes that took place and were to cause considerable damage to Alexandria) (AHG 146–47). The treatment of historians and writers from the Arab period is no less telling. There are three Arab authors quoted in the “Arab Period”; they are, however, unnamed and are introduced numerically: “One of them,” “A second writer,” and “A third” (AHG 85–86).89 Although Forster cites their flights of lyricism about Alexandria, this is foiled by the general picture of ruination of the city in the Arab period that he projects. Thus it is no surprise that when we come across a reference to “Makrizi (writing in the 14th century)” (AHG 185) he is cited, again, not in the history of the Arab period but in part of the “Guide,” in the context of an incidental detail (and never put in the index of any of the editions)—a reference giving no indication about the identity or nature of writing of this important historian from the Mamluk period. Nor is it a surprise to find that in the list of “Authorities” Forster has an entry on Hermann Thiersch’s Pharos, Antike, Islam und Occident, where he designates the volume “a standard monograph, but exhibiting the defects as well as the merits of German scholarship” (AHG xxxi). The dismissive attitude, paired with Forster’s own summary treatment of the medieval period, gives no indication that Thiersch had compiled quotations from some thirty-six Arab authors on the subject of the lighthouse and analyzed these.90 The three unnamed Arab authors and the displaced Maqrizi are part of a historiographical emplotment a further index of which is Forster’s claim in the “Authorities” section, “Arab period:-Too obscure to possess a history” (AHG xxx). The emplotment in Forster’s depiction of Arabo-Islamic Alexandria, presaged in his representation of the Egyptian Christians, is clearly one of tragedy, a “decline and fall” that entails a further graft onto the writer’s consistent personification of the city of a tragic flaw.91 For if Forster has regularly feminized the city prior to the Arab conquest, he also clinches the tragedy in these terms when he speculates that “it is not easy to see why Alexandria did fall. There was no physical reason for it. One is almost driven to say that she fell because she had no soul” (AHG 61).92 Indeed, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is identified by White as among the classics exemplary of the “resemblance between historical narrative and fictional narrative,” and that “long after its [a great

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historical narrative’s] scholarship has been superseded and its arguments exploded as prejudices of the cultural moment of its production (as in Gibbon’s contention that the fall of Rome was caused by the solvent effects of Christianity on pagan manly virtues) . . . continues to fascinate as the product of a universal human need to reflect on the insoluble mystery of time.”93 Whereas White himself does not consider Gibbon’s work an example of tragedy, regarding it instead as the ultimate expression of the ironical mode of Enlightenment rationalists,94 Forster, for all that he shares the irony of the author of Decline and Fall, read it as tragedy. Gibbon’s work was the subject of pious admiration on Forster’s part for what he (unlike Cavafy) saw as its “accuracy to fact and . . . sound historical judgment,” over and above the Enlightenment historian being “a master of style” (on which latter point the English novelist and the Alexandrian Greek poet are largely in agreement).95 Forster reread the Decline and Fall during World War II in an attempt to “find parallels between the collapse of the Mediterranean civilisation which he there describes and the apparent collapse of world-civilisation to-day” (TCD 169), which would indicate that for him the text was paradigmatic of tragic emplotment. During World War I in Alexandria, he writes, “[I was] anxious to re-read a little history and see how its solemn arrangement of ‘movements’ . . . look now, in the light of actual experience. I have only tried Gibbon, whom nothing can disintegrate.”96 And soon enough, while writing Alexandria, it was to Gibbon, among others, that Forster turned for his depiction of the Christian period (see “Authorities,” AHG xxix). For if Forster famously declared (albeit in 1939) in a manifesto-like essay, “What I Believe,” “My motto is: ‘Lord, I disbelieve—help thou my unbelief’” (TCD 77)—a stance all too vividly witnessed in his caricatures of the church fathers of Alexandria in Pharos and Pharillon—the departure from the chronological narrative to the dramatized, thematized one of the “Spiritual City” has traced, within a much narrower historical and geographical ambit than Gibbon, a similar sloping from a predominantly pagan-inflected classical matrix (subsuming Alexandria’s quest for a link between the human and the divine) to the beginning of the decline with the ascendancy of Christianity and an escalation of the fall with the advent of Islam. Despite twice emphatically exonerating the Arabs from the charge of being barbarians (see AHG 84, 86), Forster’s account is consonant with that of the Enlightenment historian in both specific details relating to Eastern (particularly Egyptian) Christianity and Egyptian monasticism97 and in the casting of the Arabs, for whom

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the author of Decline and Fall was not devoid of admiration, as part of the emplotment that contributed to destroying the Roman Empire. “Mahomet,” Gibbon writes, “with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, erected his throne on the ruins of Christianity and of Rome. The genius of the Arabian prophet, the manners of his nation, and the spirit of his religion, involve the causes of the decline and fall of the Eastern empire.”98 Bringing out the literary undergrid of historiography in Forster’s Alexandria might seem in contradiction to the position that has framed my approach to the book so far, namely, a questioning of the critical enshrinement of this text that reads it on exclusively aesthetic grounds and, hence, a holding up of the text against alternative narratives (Neoplatonism in Islamic philosophy), some encapsulated in a material referent (the mosque of al-Busiri and through it his poetry) that contest the account. Granted, White’s argument for reading the “historical text as literary artifact”99 aims in part at rescuing what he considers historiography’s “greatest source of strength and renewal,” the literary imagination on which it draws; hence his comment, for example, “When—as we do with Gibbon—we move a great historical work out of the sphere of science in order to enshrine it in the sphere of literature as a classic, what we are paying tribute to, ultimately, is the historian’s command of a power that is plastic and figurative, and finally linguistic.”100 However, if White’s ultimate aim is to establish history’s affinity with literature, this does not lead to a depoliticizing aestheticization of the historical text; rather, as he suggests, bringing out the affinity makes for an awareness of the ideological preconceptions that obtain in history writing.

the guidebook and colonial cosmopolitanism To read further the ideological underpinnings of the emplotment in Forster’s “history” also entails setting Alexandria among genres of travel writing, specifically the guidebook. Because the historical account in guidebooks was compact, and tailored to both the expectations of a specific consumer and the conventionalized moves of the genre, their ideological baggage is more visible, and not to be compared with Forster’s Alexandria in its aesthetic richness and the enthralling inexorability of its tragic unfolding. If Gibbon would have served Forster as a prototype for his fleshing out and thematizing of a tragic narrative of decline and fall, the starker arching over from

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the two “high” points of the Hellenistic period to the modern and the simultaneous bracketing out of the medieval period in the case of Alexandria was well in place, by the time Forster wrote his book, in other texts about the city written in this genre, which exhibited undeniable complicities with Egypt’s colonial situation, as seen in the introduction to this book. However, it is worthwhile to dwell on how English writers in the genre modulated the relationship between a construed modern cosmopolitanism and the British occupation of Egypt. Forster’s own description of the modern period ends with the account “The Bombardment of Alexandria”—the beginning of the British occupation of Egypt—to which he gives more than three pages (close to the number of pages he had devoted to all of the Arabo-Islamic period). Here, Forster details military maneuvers and makes mention of the “motives” of Arabi (or ‘Urabi), the leader of the nationalist movement—citing the demand “to secure Egypt for the Egyptians”—only to describe them dismissively as “complicated” (AHG 99, 100). The account at this point drops all semblance of standing outside a British colonial agenda; the buildup, the bombardment, and its aftermath are all written, more or less, in the vein of an official propagandistic colonial spiel. Hence Lord Wolseley is credited with having been “able . . . to harry the [Egyptian] enemy’s outposts”; the British forces are referred to as “our gunners”;101 these gunners, moreover, are said to have been “careful in their aim” so that the town “was scarcely damaged,” except for the Qait Bey Fort and its minaret, which was destroyed, the large-scale destruction of downtown Alexandria being altogether the result of the rioting that ensued (AHG 102, 101). It should be noted that although a considerable amount of damage occurred due to the rioting and fire, it is unlikely that Forster was unaware of the destruction that the bombardment—a “show of enormous English superiority”—wreaked on other parts of the city, not solely the forts of Alexandria, most of the European residents having evacuated earlier (one of the first scholars to reproach the novelist for this account was Tsirkas, in the course of debunking the standard colonial narrative).102 Thence the conclusion of the “History”: “Since the bombardment of 1882, the city has known other troubles, but they will not be here described” (AHG 103). As a set of other writings by Forster that I shall take up later demonstrates, he was by no means oblivious or indifferent to British colonial injustices in Egypt (or, for that matter, in India); these other

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writings have occasionally been cross-referenced, in conciliatory mode, to the novelist’s narrative about the British occupation summarized above. Pinchin remarks amiably that “Forster is fascinated by battles, by conquest[,] . . . [which] provides a strange kind of passage, the touch of two cultures,” reiterates unquestioningly the misleading claim about the Qait Bey Fort and its minaret, and concludes that “the passage is . . . often muddled” but that its “sadnesses” would later produce Forster’s “greatest work,” A Passage to India.103 Be that as it may, surely the question why the “sadnesses” of empire could not have figured in Alexandria should not be elided. If Alexandria’s historical emplotment and depiction of space, as conjoined with the account of the British occupation of Egypt, render the text amenable to colonial discourse, then one is justified to elicit from Forster’s own apologia-like admission about the city’s “other troubles” that “will not be here described” (AHG 103) a “decorum” that might be breached by such an intrusion. Parsing that decorum gives further clues to the ideological freighting of the text. This “decorum,” as I read it, is best understood as a set of generic conventions and expectations associated with guidebooks, especially in this case English ones, and obviously as written by Englishmen. To speak of the guidebook genre in relation to British imperialism, and of Forster’s own Alexandria, given specifically its context and target readership, as a case in point, requires some contextualization. For this, we need to turn to the conjoined genealogies of the museum guidebook in England and the tourist guidebook and the role they play in the production of English national identity and imperial subjectivities along gender and class lines, as admirably discussed by Inderpal Grewal. In the process of vesting artifacts removed from their contexts with meanings, the guidebook of the British Museum inculcated an aesthetic formulated by neoclassicism and Orientalism, as seen in the contrasting commentary on Greek and Egyptian art, Grewal suggests: “Classicism. . . . [was thought to stand] as proof of the superiority of the West over the barbaric East; as such it presented one more reason for the civilization of the East through European colonization.” The modulation on these binaries occurred through the representation of Greek antiquities as attesting to intellectuality, to “rational control of sexual desire for both men and women,” and a perceived “racial purity . . . as the heritage of the English.” Egyptian artifacts, in contrast, “thought to embody a barbaric, nightmarish sexuality, became alien quantities belonging to the ‘East’ and thus

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were separated from those of the ‘West’ with its Greek ‘heritage’”— given that they were packaged for the consumption and edification of the lower middle class and the working class.104 Although Forster himself would satirize this curatorial move, in the context of the British Museum, in his posthumously published novel Maurice,105 in his own account of the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria there is a similar aesthetic at work. While he gives fine glosses on both the ancient Egyptian artifacts and the Hellenistic ones, lauding their hybridity when produced in Alexandria (see, e.g., AHG 129), his tone is markedly dismissive when it comes to objects from the Fayyum oasis on account of their perceived “barbarism,” a sense in which they testify to a Hellenism gone native. “This is the most important non-Alexandrian section of the Museum. . . . [Here] as in Alexandria, Greek and Egyptian mingled, but with different results. It was barbaric and provincial. Note especially crocodile worship” (AHG 118). Forster writes thus of the Fayyum section, in a textual-curatorial move that participates in the production of exclusivist (European) narratives of cosmopolitanism. Although guidebooks and travel narratives, as Grewal demonstrates, were seen as different categories addressing different classes, the tourist “as part of mass culture” and the upper-class traveler, respectively, “tourism, . . . the ability and power of a great many men and women to move around various countries in groups, was no less a display of English power.” Hence the genres shared meticulous advice urging adherence to English dress—“For Englishwomen in particular, the display of national and racial superiority was believed to be critical and was marked on bodies in specific ways”—and the overlaps in where to go and which sights to see. But, in its more tightly formatted and detailed instructions, “what the guidebook constructed . . . was a traveling subject as consumer and the sights as commodities,” hence the wielding of a Murray’s, Cook’s or Baedeker’s guidebook became a marker of English identity as the figure carrying the volume “travers[ed] the tourist geography prescribed in it.”106 It is noticeable that in the guidebook Forster wrote there is an absence of practical tips—concerning hotels and consulates, for example—as well as blatantly racist observations such as Baedeker’s on “intercourse” with “the average Oriental [who] regards the European traveler . . . as fair game, and feels justified in pressing upon him with a perpetual demand for bakshish” so that “intimate acquaintance with Orientals is to be avoided.”107 But there is also an absence

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of any advice to women, of the kind culled from Baedeker that the novelist was to relay to his mother apropos of a climb up the Great Pyramid: “We [Forster and a male friend] each had a well mannered Arab to help us (Baedeker says ‘Ladies should exercise care in their choice’).”108 In Forster’s guidebook, however, the subject projected is decidedly male. That the visitor of a given sight is often referred to as “he” and the city as “she”109 in and of itself conforms to writing conventions of the time, as well as the trope of feminization of the city. However, the male gendering is further entrenched not only by the absence of advice relating to “ladies” but also by the inclusion of such details as the fleeting reference to the red-light district (which Forster sometimes visited): “Left of Rue des Soeurs is the Genenah, a curious rabbit warren” [AHG 183]).110 Would it be overstating the case to suggest that Alexandria as produced in this specific guidebook becomes a “homosocial” space? What should be underscored is that the male addressee is specifically English, and sometimes explicitly imperial. See, for one example, Forster’s reference to the British campaign against Napoleon in Egypt, “the Abercombie Monument [sic], a poor affair, but interesting to Englishmen, as it commemorates our exploits in 1801” (AHG 180), where the use of personal pronouns rather than merely signifying “a very personal approach to history”111 construes the guidebook reader in these terms. Here, I would reiterate that the genesis of Alexandria was a series of lectures given by Forster on the history of the city to the convalescing soldiers being treated at the Red Cross hospitals;112 and indeed the primary target audience of the first edition that was to be published during World War I was the troops, the same readership that—albeit this coincidentally—it was hoped would buy the updated second edition of 1938.113 Forster was not the only Englishman during World War I to write about Alexandria with an eye to entertaining and informing the troops about the city in which they were located as part of the country’s having become a Protectorate. In Through Egypt in War-Time, for example, Martin S. Briggs, whose help with a section of his own book Forster acknowledges (AHG xxxii), explains that “the object of this volume is to picture Egypt as the soldier has seen it.” He then proceeds to imaginatively, though with less literary accomplishment than Forster, reconstruct the ancient city, including the monuments that stood on current British army camps or on sites the soldiers frequented.114 Yet it should be noted that scattered in Alexandria are a few instances betokening a critique of British involvement in Egypt. An

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example is when Forster pauses at the export of Egyptian antiquities to the West, as in the case of the so-called Cleopatra’s Needles (see also PP 59), two obelisks one of which was taken to New York and the other to London, as implicitly indexical of a growing imperial presence, given that the trade in and plunder of archaeological artifacts as commodities in a Western market was sanctioned by Muhammad ‘Ali in return for privileges. Indeed, in these comments of Forster’s, the possessive pronoun is used in censure—“He [Muhammad ‘Ali] won over the British and other consuls to be his agents by giving them license to export Egyptian antiquities, which were then coming into fashion; our own Consul Henry Salt—his tomb is here—was a particular offender in this” (AHG 96, emphasis added; see also 156, 175). In the same vein, witness the fleeting reference in the “Guide” section: “Left of Mustapha Pascha Sta. on the rise, are British Barracks, occupying the site of the Roman; history repeats herself. . . . Octavian’s town of Nicopolis, which he founded in B.C. 30 to overawe Alexandria . . . began here” (AHG 180–81; emphasis added). Then again, these and a few other resistant instances are dispersed traces all but erased by, rather than modifying, the dominant paradigm in the “History” (also as cross-referenced to the city’s sights/ sites in the “Guide”) whereby Alexandria is at “her” peak in the Hellenistic and early Christian period, declines in the late antique period, is undone by the Arabs, but revives again, if without attaining to “her” earlier glory, in modern times demarcated by Napoleon’s occupation and Muhammad ‘Ali’s reign, concluding with an unquestionably and unquestioningly triumphant account of the British bombardment and occupation, thus indirectly sanctioning the colonial status quo. A natural projection of the jointly Hellenizing and quasicolonial paradigm is Forster’s concluding remarks to the “History”: “Politically she is now more closely connected with the rest of Egypt than ever in the past” (this a cryptic allusion to the nationalist movement), “but the old foreign elements remain, and it is to the oldest of them, the Greek, that she owes such modern culture as is to be found in her” (AHG 103). Thus the conception of Alexandria’s modern cosmopolitanism is construed as inimical to the city’s national belonging and as deriving its sole saving grace from Hellenism—a Hellenism, furthermore, that appears disengaged from its context, since there is no other “modern culture” that the city contains, hence an “Alexandrea ad Aegyptum” identity that I detected in his essay

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“A Musician in Egypt.” Already, the revivalist link between modern Alexandria and the ancient one via Greece is secured by Forster in his reference to Napoleon’s desire to “revive . . . the power of Alexander the Great” and to Muhammad ‘Ali’s Macedonian youth and (failed) “kingdom, comparable in extent to the Ptolemaic” (AHG 91, 95). But the mention of the Greek element, of course, directly elicits Cavafy, whose poem “The God Abandons Antony,” linking the Hellenistic past to the modern, by virtue of the poet’s identity as a modern Alexandrian Greek who harked back to the Graeco-Roman city, is reproduced in the book. Indeed the poem, placed as it is at the end of the “History” section and before the “Guide,” is made to connect past and present, as many have observed, all the more so given the essay about the poet in Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon. Here, we may well ask what the reading of Cavafy that preceded my discussion of Forster has to say to Cavafy’s inscription in the paradigm projected in Forster’s Alexandria.

which cavafy? It is my contention that Forster and Cavafy, rather than being consonant in their outlook (with a Cavafy cited and commented on by Forster conferring legitimacy on the English novelist’s view of the city), as an older generation of scholarship that continues to exert its influence has posited,115 were at marked variance on a number of issues not least Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. In arguing here that Forster’s reinscription of Cavafy in his own work is problematic, it is not on the same grounds on which other critics have recently taken the English novelist to task. Forster has been taken to task for an insensitive approach to Cavafy’s Hellenism on account of his lack of sympathy with the Neohellenes. The evidence cited by scholars includes his comments that Greek antiquities were more appropriately placed in the British Museum than in their original contexts, as well as in his assertion in Alexandria that with the death of Hypatia classical Greece “expired” (AHG 56), indicating that for him modern Greeks possessed no continuity with the past and that the place of Hellenism was now the West,116 his dismissive attitude to the revivalist ideology of the Megali Idea as “warped,”117 and his lack of discernment in soliciting Arnold Toynbee’s help with the project of translating and disseminating Cavafy in English, in view of the historian’s position on the subject.

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Setting aside the issue of Forster’s stance toward the Neohellenes and the “Great Idea,” hence bracketing the political component of Philhellenism and focusing on Hellenic/Hellenistic elements in Alexandria, as well as Pharos and Pharillon, I would respond that here, in this landscape, Forster was in fact privileging Greek revivalism across a perceived (Arab) decline and rupture of a thousand years. I would add that while I agree that the rupture itself was initiated, according to him, by the advent of Christianity, in the context of Egypt if not elsewhere, that destructive tear was effected specifically by Egyptian Christianity in Forster’s view. Hypatia’s murderers who caused to “expire . . . the Greece that tried to discover truth and create beauty and that had created Alexandria” (AHG 56) were Copts, as he himself points out, and despite his valid understanding of the nationalist component of the movement expressed in this undoubtedly atrocious act, his satirical comments about Christianity elsewhere in his two books target this group, even more than the Chalcedonian, Orthodox Christians. Hence, in addition to Forster’s agnosticism and aversion to Christianity, specifically in its Eastern manifestation, there is a racial/racist component in his representation of the Copts. In making Cavafy and the modern Alexandrian Greeks the link between the city’s past and its present, to the exclusion of all other elements, Forster was, to my mind, more prone to an elevation of an unalloyed Hellenism than the poet himself and less attuned to a salutary “bastardy” that he would much later locate in his poetry when this was more readily available in English.118 In his essay on Cavafy in Pharos and Pharillon (1923), Forster presciently (prior to the emergence of a full body of Cavafy scholarship) observes “how different is [Cavafy’s] history from an Englishman’s. . . . He reacts against the tyranny of Classicism. . . . Alexandria, his birthplace, came into being just as Public School Greece decayed” (PP 94). Then again, the English novelist speaks of an avant-garde and experimental literary movement, in which the poet was a key figure, as belonging to (and enabled by the condition of) diasporic Hellenism hybridized in contact with other cultures of the Levant, but ultimately concludes that what it testifies to is “the zeal of a race” that is unique among “the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean” in “possess[ing] the literary sense and [a] desire that words should be alive” (PP 92). To this, Cavafy would have responded with the statements he was to make in the 1930 interview that it was precisely the “task” of Egyptiote writers, “whenever they describe the Hellenism of Alexandria,” “to

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make clear” its “peculiar” elements, molded by living circumstances that are not exclusively Greek (P 155). And the speaker of Cavafy’s “Return from Greece” would have responded, “Let’s not be ashamed of the blood of Syria and of Egypt / that flows through our veins, / let us do it honor, let us exult in it” (BTCT 263). Forster’s confining of Alexandria’s culture to a Greek element sealed off from its surroundings is belied by Cavafy’s unequivocal statements that the Egyptiotes’ cultural output “will have something from the Egyptian environment in it” and that a significant part of their role, as he recommends, is as cultural mediators between Egyptian literature and the literature of mainland Greece (P 154). Granted, the drift of Forster’s narrative in Alexandria may resonate with occasional poems of Cavafy’s, such as the metapoetic “Mimiambi of Herodas” and “Word and Silence,” the latter poem indicating that both the English novelist and the early Cavafy share an obliviousness to and foreclosure of a humanist tradition in Islam. Yet again, Forster differs from the Cavafy of “Exiles,” where Byzantine sojourners find the city two centuries after the Arab conquest quite intact, livable, and a place where even the cultivation of Hellenic literary pursuits is feasible if not flourishing. Cavafy’s “Exiles” stands in sharp contrast to the English novelist’s claim that “though they [the Arabs] had no intention of destroying her, they destroyed her, as a child might a watch. She never functioned again for over 1,000 years” (AHG 62). Even if Cavafy’s statements about the philological output and role of the Egyptiotes came late in life (1930), they can be read as an elaboration of an earlier strand in his poetry illustrated in “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” (1908), “For Ammonis” (1915/1917), and “Return from Greece” (1914). Thus, in the main, I find Forster’s vision of Cavafy and his adducing of the poet in his Alexandrian writings discordant with the complexity of positionality in Cavafy’s own texts, which sustained both a bent that precluded the figure of the barbarian and a far more cosmopolitan attitude that recognized a continuum of shifting identities and was increasingly open to the work of transculturation between Greek and Egyptian textualities. While Forster’s sympathies may have lain with the Turks and the pan-Islamist Indians, as expressed elsewhere, in Alexandria/Alexandria, he clearly found Hellenism the chief redeeming grace of the city and perhaps of the region. I would add that Forster’s having reproduced “The God Abandons Antony” in both of his Alexandrian texts, his allusion to Cavafy in Alexandria, and his discussion of him in Pharos and Pharillon inscribe the Alexandrian

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Greek poet in the colonial paradigm of cosmopolitanism the English novelist is working with there, and of which Cavafy was critical.

mohamed el-adl and the question of colonial subalternity But if Cavafy’s inscription in Forster’s two Alexandrian books is problematic, what is even more problematic, in my view, is the writing out of El-Adl not, obviously, in his individual capacity but in that he should focus our attention on the question of an Egyptian subalternity in Alexandria at that time. In designating El-Adl a subaltern in colonial Egypt, I take heed of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s powerful warning against the risks attendant on a “humanist,” insufficiently self-questioning attempt to rescue a subaltern consciousness or selfhood “in a positive or pure state,” incognizant of its discursive constructedness and mediation by elite accounts. It is, then, in keeping with Spivak’s restating of this turn in terms of a “subaltern subject-effect,” “a strategic use of positivist essentialism,” that I designate the figure of El-Adl as a subaltern for the purposes of eliciting the vicissitudes of Forster’s own subject position on Egypt’s colonial situation.119 In the case of El-Adl, any risks of essentializing, of obliviousness to the degree of constructedness at stake, are mitigated by the fact that what is known of his words is entirely funneled through Forster. A few of El-Adl’s words are cited in Forster’s letters home from Alexandria, but then the more important record is some one hundred letters he had sent his English friend; these, however, the novelist tore up, many years later, in the course of vetting and destroying letters from different correspondents, after copying a handful into the memoir he had written about the Egyptian, keeping only a very few mementos of El-Adl (see fig. 4).120 Granted, among the letters that Forster reinscribed are some in which El-Adl criticizes British policy in Egypt and recounts injustices that he himself has directly experienced; and yet these remain a fraction of what he wrote. Aside from a belated stand-taking, there is also El-Adl’s embroilment in the colonial system, specifically in the military, as almost literally a subaltern, and also a complicit one, apart from the fact that he would inherit some property not long before his death. Yet El-Adl’s own experiences, no matter how mediated, ideologically and in terms of social status, can provide an inroad into Egyptian subalternity in the city as known to Forster. El-Adl, who had left his

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Figure 4. Mohamed El-Adl, visiting card. Reproduced courtesy of the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge.

hometown of Mansura, itself an ethnically diverse town, to work in Alexandria, could barely survive on the pittance he received from his job as a tram conductor, so that he jokingly introduced Forster to his room in Bacos—a quarter that contained several affluent mansions but in some of its sectors was lower middle class and also working class—as the “Home of Misery.”121 His job on the trams—with their varied passengers—also repeatedly brought him face-to-face with “many rudenesses from the British”: when he asked an officer “either to get on the tram or off it . . . the officer . . . hit him with his cane,”122 apart from his having received a “blow in the jaw from a drunken Sgt. Major.” While El-Adl himself had the discernment not to pass totalizing, monolithic judgments, “holding [instead] that some British were good and others bad,”123 Forster’s milieu—themselves ethnically and socially varied, though largely European, but otherwise sharing the one feature of being middle and upper class—would have been most unreceptive to the tram conductor. His rejection would have been presumably more on account of his status as an Egyptian from the working class, combined with his dark complexion (Forster: “He is unfortunately black . . . so that our juxtaposition is noticeable”),124 than on account of what would have been understood as his homoerotic bond with the English novelist, although this too would have reinforced his rejection. In other words, it is not solely sexuality but also a complex constellation of issues of race and class, probably as well as religion, that overdetermined the social

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space the relationship could occupy in colonial Alexandria. Cavafy’s homosexuality, known to others, occasionally frowned upon, and handled by the poet with complex maneuvers—“how the city oppresses me. . . . [F]or a man like me—one so different—how necessary a big city is” (SPW 135)—did not debar him from the same circles in which Forster moved.125 In those few cases when someone from Forster’s milieu was introduced to El-Adl, whether in person or in conversation with the novelist, the reaction was one of harsh rejection. His friend Robert Allason Furness, later Sir, who headed the Press Censorship Department in Alexandria,126 when approached about finding El-Adl a job, drew the novelist’s attention to “the danger of my position, and I began to worry unprofitabl[y]. . . . F. would be delighted with us in a book, but he is a scholar and we frighten him. His aloofness, since he is the one person here whom I could address, made me very lonely.”127 Likewise, his Greek landlady, Irene, who was wont to charge Muslim lodgers higher rates than Christians as she considered them dirty,128 clearly “disapprove[d]” of El-Adl: “when she first saw him in Forster’s room she gave a little scream.”129 According to the novelist, El-Adl probed Forster about whether he considered that his desire had led him to know a tram conductor, “a pity for you and a disgrace,” indicating a shame, partly gendered and partly social, attached to the situation (“MMA” 335). The places where the two could meet were the beaches, mostly ones outside the city, the public gardens, “a native eating house,”130 and Bacos, where Forster was introduced, among others, to an Egyptian friend of El-Adl’s, a matrimonial agent, and a neighbor of his, a Syrian midwife with whom the novelist chatted in Italian131— her presence indicating an underprivileged “cosmopolitanism.” In a letter to his confidante Florence Barger, Forster explains, “Yes, I’m [‘we’re’ crossed out] careful. Any expression of this part of my nature must be dangerous—no avoiding that. But one’s [‘we are’ crossed out] full of sense—there is no foolish ‘Why won’t you be seen with me in public?’ for instance. It’s a bore for one wants to go sight seeing—there are some jolly Greco-Egyptian catacombs here for instance, also the Museum.”132 It is symptomatic of Forster’s malaise, and the degree of the contingency of the relationship, that even in the intimacy of his correspondence with his secret sharer concerning El-Adl, he felt that “we” had to be overwritten, first by “I” and then by the impersonal “one.” Yet the subaltern quarters and their vibrant culture to which Forster had been introduced by El-Adl are all but overlooked in Alexandria; El-Adl’s Bacos, in the southeast of Alexandria, is only

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fleetingly mentioned as a stop on one of the two tram lines (AHG 181). El-Adl’s own words to Forster, copied out by the novelist, with parenthetical comments, among recollected conversations after his friend’s passing—“[on hearing I knew only three Egyptians] ‘One is a tram conductor. Who are the other two?’ [On the govt educated in England]. ‘You flatter me to compare me with them. All the same to the Egyptians educated in England I apply the Syrian proverb: He went as a ram he returned as a ewe. They go as scholars. They return as pupils. Their only thought is to cheat us and to secure governmental vacancies’” (“MMA” 334)—should have cautioned him against making such sweeping statements as “the Alexandrians have never been truly Egyptian” (AHG 6). In other words, a gap exists between Forster’s insights, through El-Adl, into Egyptian subalternity and the discourse on the city’s heritage the production of which he would participate in and amplify in Alexandria.133 It may be suggested that the entrenchment of such discursive inscriptions of Alexandria’s space and history even before Forster came to write about it—and see here my discussion in the introduction of Breccia, whose book Forster used as a reference—would mitigate a resistant awareness on his part of the consequent exclusions. Yet when it comes to the contemporary colonial situation in Egypt, there is the undeniable discrepancy between Forster’s complicit representation of the issue in Alexandria and the mistreatment and injustice to which El-Adl was subjected, something of an object lesson in colonialism. The bigger paradox, however, is Forster’s own anticolonial writings that were coextensive with Alexandria. The paradox is of a piece with the paradoxical nature of Forster’s relationship with El-Adl, which was as exploitative as it was empathic.134 Although his moral support and love undoubtedly sustained El-Adl through his steadily worsening condition and although he offered many kindnesses and financial help during El-Adl’s final illness, one can also adduce instances of insensitivity. These include Forster’s visits to his Egyptian friend in Mansura, after the latter had married, which he himself admitted in correspondence he realized was taxing and awkward for his host, and his demands.135 And then there was the release that the Egyptian’s death gave the novelist to write A Passage to India, which, as Rustom Bharucha remarks, seems “an exploitation of life in pursuit of art.”136 But this, as Bharucha also notes, would be to overlook the power and the poignancy of the “letter” he went on writing over a period of seven years to El-Adl after

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his death. The letter or memoir contains the following passage: “You called out my name at Bebbit el Hagar station after we had seen that ruined temple about ten miles from it that no one else seems to have seen. It was dark and I hear an Egyptian shouting who had lost his friend: Margan, Margan—you calling me and I felt we belonged to each other, you had made me an Egyptian. When I call you on the downs now, I cannot make you alive, nor can I belong to you because you own nothing, I shall not belong to you when I die—only be like you” (“MMA” 331). The making of Forster an Egyptian, the (im) possible empathy he experienced with El-Adl, is what simultaneously drove him to essay the task of bearing witness to subalternity in colonial Egypt.137 Already, prior to the publication of Alexandria—with its triumphal descriptions of British battles in Egypt in 1882 and its muting of Egyptian nationalist causes—El-Adl had been battered by the very machinery set in place in 1882. Having refused to be “kept” by Forster, he had accepted the only job that Forster could find for him, that of military intelligence in the Canal Zone.138 There—despite the novelist’s rationalizations about himself and the Egyptian’s finding “it [having ‘made him a spy’] rather beastly, but not very,” and that, in a self-justifying writing off of nationalist awareness of any kind that draws on Orientalist stereotypes, “like all these people he has no [‘sense’ crossed out] feeling for truth except when he is dealing with a friend”139 —El-Adl’s illness and medical treatment, for example, would throw into relief his dehumanization. It was a dehumaniztion with which Forster was in full empathy; writing to Florence Barger, he expresses his anxiety about El-Adl’s treatment in a military hospital where he had been entered for a minor complaint but caught a high fever and nearly died: “I can’t think how to get him away from this military zone which will neither let him come out nor me in. . . . [He] was in this filthy hospital (‘anything does for niggers’) for nearly a fortnight.”140 After El-Adl quit his job in the Canal Zone he was to have a bitter and embittering confrontation with the British military authorities. It was during the 1919 Revolution that El-Adl, by then unemployed for a while, entered into a business partnership to import beans, by boat, from Upper Egypt and Cairo to Mansura. When two Australian soldiers offered to sell the partner a revolver, El-Adl dissuaded him from buying it on the grounds that it would be too risky to carry arms, especially in view of the fact that Egypt was then under martial

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law.141 The Australians returned two hours later with an arrest warrant charging the two partners with trying to buy firearms. During the court-martial, El-Adl, by his own account, lied, with the intention of protecting his partner, claiming that the soldiers had tried to extort “baksheesh,” which the two partners had refused to offer. His story was rejected, and he was sentenced to six months in jail with hard labor. El-Adl describes the meager and inedible food rations, which meant that he had to dole out ample tips to be allowed to have food brought from home, and the overworking and abuse that exacerbated his tuberculosis. At the court-martial El-Adl recounts, “I said I knew an English man [Forster] that said the english [sic] are just and was about to believe him, but now I found myself that I was about to make a great mistake, and from that time I was sent to the Prison what I call it the tyranny place of the livings grave.”142

the (im)possible witnessing of colonial subalternity There is no doubt that Forster’s relationship with El-Adl both supplied a firsthand account of British colonial injustice from the vantage point of one of its victims and reinforced his “indignation”143 against the empire, an indignation fueled by the Amritsar massacre in India, as well as the British treatment of the Egyptian leader Sa‘d Zaghlul and of his fellow nationalists campaigning to put an end to the Protectorate and achieve Egypt’s independence.144 In two texts that Forster wrote at the time, El-Adl’s experiences are either directly cited or residually present in the commentary on the treatment by the British of the working class and the fallahin, in the context of their place as subalterns, in the original sense of the word, even though Forster does not use the term. In a letter to the editor, published in the Manchester Guardian on March 29, 1919, at the height of the demonstrations and strikes in Egypt demanding independence, under the headline “The Trouble in Egypt. Treatment of the Fellahin,” Forster draws on his experiences of more than three years in the country to confirm the account given by a previous writer in the same forum, namely, that “the causes of the present unrest must be sought for in something deeper than the grievances of the Nationalist party. The fellahin have become embittered, for the first time in the history of our occupation, and there is no doubt that the military authorities of the E. E. F. are

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mainly to blame for this.”145 He outlines the abuse of the peasants and the working class in terms of both recruitment and treatment. He explains how the peasants were initially recruited as volunteers in the Labor Corps, at good pay, but when the “supply . . . ran low” the authorities “gradually adopted a system of compulsion,” one that was kept “absolutely secret.” “The districts that suffered most were the country ones,” he continued, “where public opinion could least express itself.” The system was later extended to the towns, with the exception of Cairo and Alexandria (“TE” 8). Forster adds that “opinions vary” as to the treatment of the Egyptians when they were healthy, though some British soldiers had confirmed “that it was brutal,” while “with regard to their treatment in sickness there is only one opinion. It was disgraceful” (“TE” 8). In elaborating this point, Forster draws directly on El-Adl’s hospital experience: “Insufficient in number, ill-equipped, unsupervised, the hospitals promoted rather than checked the typhus epidemics that were raging. The official view, apparently, was that Egyptians are never ill, but if ill are certain to die, and treatment seems scarcely to have existed. In a case for the facts of which I can vouch, a native was sent into one of these hospitals with some slight ailment and at once caught a fever which almost carried him off. He had to bribe the orderly for everything, including a bed, and around him men were dying unattended” (“TE” 8). Forster urges that while “we can never replace the fellahin whom we have so needlessly destroyed . . . we can perhaps enter into the feelings of the survivors and realise why the present disturbances have occurred quite as much as in the country as in the town.” He rounds off the article with two verses, coinciding with “the time of our victories,” from an Egyptian “plaintive little popular song . . . sung to a minor tune about the streets.” The quoted verses—“‘My native town, oh my native town! / The military authorities have taken my boy’” (“TE” 8)—raise the question who it was that translated them from Arabic for the English novelist and the possibility of its having been El-Adl. Whereas, again, the purpose of my eliciting this is not to suggest that Forster had access to a subaltern “consciousness,” what I wish to point out is that the quoted song shifts the emphasis of the response in England from a focus on elite nationalism (which could thus be written off as unrepresentative of the populace) to subaltern grievances and insurgencies. Here, too, his knowledge of El-Adl’s experiences is pooled into a more encompassing attempt, supplemented with other sources such as popular songs,

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to retrieve and witness the situation of the rural and urban poor and the colonial injustices they have sustained. Having been approached by Leonard Woolf, then secretary to the Labour Research Department, to write a report on the situation in Egypt, Forster accepted to write “the pamphlet for the sake of Mohammed and his sufferings,” with his “eyes open” to the possibility that he “should be refused a pass-port to the country.”146 Forster’s contribution to the pamphlet consists in a historical background, charting the history of Egypt from the reign of Muhammad ‘Ali to the current situation, followed by a set of four recommendations. Having considered and rejected several possibilities—of retaining the Protectorate, returning to the 1881 pre-British occupation conditions, which would reinstate Ottoman influence, and granting the demands made by the Egyptian nationalist party of complete independence, with guarantees from the League of Nations and the restoration of the Sudan, which he suggests is unlikely to be accepted by any British government—Forster allows for a thoroughly conditional mandate being granted to Britain by the League of Nations (“NE” 12). P. N. Furbank remarks that it is “without much conviction” that Forster comes down in favor of this solution; indeed Forster’s language when he considers this solution is riddled with qualifications (see “NE” 12).147 Yet despite Forster’s unequivocal criticism of the occupation and its policies he does stop short of endorsing full independence. What is remarkable, however, is that the minutiae of the historical account that Forster gives in his “Notes on Egypt”—he enumerates among his sources “personal experience” in the country (“NE” 3)—are almost a mirror image of the historiography provided in Alexandria. To start with, the “we” and “our” used here are not those of triumphalism but of self-chastisement: “We . . . commandeered food, fodder, animals, often paying tardily and inadequately,” and “We broke promises and made mistakes both before and during the war” (“NE” 6). In fact, he refers to the European powers as “the foreign menace”—the exacerbation of which coincided with the rise of the Nationalist Party (“NE” 3). No longer are the “motives” of the nationalist leader Arabi (‘Urabi) “complicated” (AHG 100), but he is credited with having “induced the new Khedive to grant a constitution and to support a movement for emancipating Egypt from foreign control in politics and finance” (“NE” 4). In place of the successful “harry[ing of] the [Egyptian] enemy’s outposts” in 1882 (AHG 102), the reader encounters the condemning statement, “Thus perished a

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movement which, if treated sympathetically, might have set Egypt upon the path of constitutional democracy” (“NE” 4). Of even more direct relevance to Alexandria/Alexandria, at the cusp where the city’s economy makes both for its ethnic heterogeneity and for its function as an acute symptom of the broader colonial situation in the country, is Forster’s discussion of the role of foreign residents in Egypt. Citing population figures that demonstrate the relatively small numbers of European communities, he underscores their disproportionate economic power and goes over the Capitulations and the privileges they guarantee foreigners. Of the foreign residents, Forster has this to say: “At the worst they include some unmitigated scoundrels, at the best they contain men of great character and culture whom it is a privilege to have known; but in all cases they are aliens in Egypt and have come to exploit it; they despise Oriental ways, they are agnostics or Christians who have no sympathy with Islam, and they feel for the natives a fear that too often proceeds from a bad conscience” (“NE” 9). What is worth noting is the reversal, in all but the “men of great character . . . ” (no doubt a private allusion to and exemption of Cavafy, as well as a few others), of Forster’s positions in Alexandria and elsewhere.148 He is now willing to dismiss foreign residents as “in all cases . . . aliens in Egypt [who] have come to exploit it,” in an unequivocal unpacking of the formula “cotton, onions, and eggs” fleetingly scattered in the novelist’s Alexandrian texts (AHG 103; see, similarly, PP 91). In underscoring the “despis[ing]” attitude of residents of foreign origin—whom Forster collapses together indiscriminately—to “Oriental ways,” and their lack of “sympathy with Islam,” his discussion also stands in sharp contrast to the treatment of Islam in Alexandria where that system of belief is depicted as devoid of a humanist tradition, as I have argued above. Indeed, Forster goes to great lengths in his report on Egypt to clear Islam from stereotypical imputations, albeit without fully revising the narrative about it in Alexandria. In the course of his discussion of the proclamation of the Protectorate, for example (where he contrasts the behavior of “the Colonials”—“who ought never to be quartered amongst friendly Oriental peoples”—against the tolerance of Muslims in Egypt seen specifically in underprivileged areas), he writes, “I have walked alone, both in the native quarters of towns and in the country, and always met with courtesy and kindness, and I have entered without difficulty mosques that were supposed to be fanatic.

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The mild and cheerful Egyptians seemed (especially to one who had known Indians) an easy people to live with. But evil influences [of censorship, of the press combined with the prevention of meetings of the Legislative Assembly, conscription and commandeering, later detailed in his text] were at work” (“NE” 5). Forster also astutely deflates any allegations of Islamic fanaticism in the 1919 Revolution—“The present disturbances are anti-British, not anti-Christian. Copts have sided with Mohammedans. . . . Nationalist flags displayed the Crescent and the Cross together”—and underscores that al-Azhar made no official pronouncement until “British soldiers violated [its] sanctity” (“NE” 11). In the last analysis, then, what we are getting in the report, if it is projected back onto the Alexandria from which some of Forster’s comments derive, is a delineation of a colonial city that is the opposite face of the coin of the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, despite the presence in each of a trace of the other. When Forster wrote his “Notes on Egypt,” Alexandria had not yet been published; he did not, however, attempt to rewrite any portion of it in keeping with his position in the Labour pamphlet.149 While time constraints may have deterred him from making major changes to the first edition (1922), this was not the case with the second edition, also published in Alexandria, in 1938—hence after the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1936) and the Montreux Convention (1937), dates along the tortuous route to Egypt’s political and economic independence. This edition, brought out at the instigation of an American judge in the Mixed Courts and president of the Archaeological Society of Alexandria, Jasper Yeates Brinton, was revised by an entire team of Alexandrians, mostly British and American. Yet the changes they made were more in the nature of updates, corrections of errata, and toning down of some of Forster’s assertions that may have been deemed offensive,150 which nevertheless left the broader paradigm informing the text virtually unaltered.151 Forster himself made no intervention within this flurry of revision of minutiae to rectify or reconsider more substantively the text whether by inflecting it with the political positions of the report or, at the very least, by taking the account in the “History” section beyond the year of the British occupation of Egypt. Indeed, there is evidence that he became aware of even other lacunae in his account, those concerning Arabo-Islamic Alexandria, but made a point to disallow any major alterations in the broader sweep of the account.152

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Forster did comment on his decision not to reconsider the text and introduce major revisions. In the talk he gave on the subject of Alexandria in 1956, he says that friends have suggested a third edition: “But they point out that it would have to be revised, since as it stands it might offend Egyptian national susceptibilities. Well it might. Indeed I don’t know whose national susceptibilities this pert little work does not offend. . . . No—there can be, there need be, no third edition. Alexandria, A History and a Guide, written in English, is the product of a transitional age, which age is at an end” (“LG” 358). Furthermore, he eventually approved the reprinting, in the United States (1961), of the first edition of Alexandria, in the new introduction to which he makes comments similar to the above, adding that “the only locality it shouldn’t offend is Alexandria herself, who in the 2,000 years of her life has never taken national susceptibilities too seriously” (AHG xxiii). Hence, on the one hand, there is a tacit admission of the book being a period piece, freighted with the historiographical and generic baggage of an “age [which] is at an end,” and, on the other, a reluctance to reconsider and revise.153 Did Forster feel that he had made his contribution to the issue in his “Notes on Egypt” and hence need not bring it into line with this text his Alexandrian book? Was his reluctance to modify or rewrite Alexandria brought about by genre expectations, in other words, did his decision to leave the book unaltered but for factual revisions emanate from a sense that the guidebook genre did not allow for anticolonial critique the place of which was a political pamphlet? Did he feel, as some scholars of his work do,154 that he had resolved, or at least grappled in a more concerted way with, some of the colonial issues encountered during his Alexandrian sojourn in A Passage to India? Would it be far-fetched to speculate that Forster would have been unwilling to revisit and intimately if textually reengage an Alexandrian terrain haunted by a ghost that it had taken him seven years to lay to rest? In any case, the shying away from the task is in keeping with the ambivalence of his own positionality—his avowals and disavowals, both personal and political. Bracketing the question of authorial intentionality, the dichotomy in Forster’s account that my analysis has brought out should not be reduced to a single reason but rather ought to be accounted for by a set of issues that likewise need not be all of a piece. The co-opting expectations of the guidebook genre at the time become all the more visible in this case, not solely in terms of implicit addressee, but also

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on the evidence of the contemporary political tract “Notes on Egypt” that yields an almost diametrically opposite picture. Generic conventions may also serve to account for the collision of colonial and anticolonial perspectives in A Passage to India, where the environment of a novel per se, as distinct from a novelist’s guidebook, allowed for the contradictory attitudes that strained the two previous texts in opposite directions to be “dialogized.”155 That Alexandria was only partially revised in the second edition in a manner that did not alter the paradigm I have identified and critiqued and that it was the first edition that has since been regularly reprinted made for the far-reaching diffusion of the paradigm at work in the book. That the text’s blanking out of indigenous and nationalist elements was amenable to the further extension of Eurocentric discourse into the postindependence period was already presaged, shrewdly, with a colonial bias toward impending decolonization, by an English reviewer of the second (1938) edition who speaks of “the latest of Alexandrias [now] also [as with the Ptolemaic city], unless we misread the signs, in its decline.”156 It is not solely that some later guidebooks and travel texts continued to echo some of the themes that carry Forster’s imprimatur.157 What is at stake is the emergence of a new strand of the Eurocentric, quasi-colonial historiography of Alexandria, a latter-day projection of the decline-and-fall trope that adduces the rise of Egyptian nationalism and post-Suez decolonization as the undoing of Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism and the descent of the country into chauvinism, seen particularly in memoirs by émigrés that I discuss in the conclusion to this study. But texts other than Forster’s have informed this colonial nostalgia, not least Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, the text to which I now turn.

chapter three

Uncanny Hybridity into Neocolonialism Lawrence Durrell

In 1961, a year after the last volume of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet was published, Frantz Fanon presciently diagnosed in The Wretched of the Earth the predicament of national consciousness in decolonized countries, decrying “the apathy of the national bourgeoisie, its mediocrity, and its deeply cosmopolitan mentality.”1 The obstacles facing the nascent nation-states, visible even at the time when he was writing in a rise in ethnic and religious chauvinism, were concomitant on the bourgeoisie’s dissociation from the people and its deep-seated mimicry of the West. Detecting in this class the “psychology of a businessman” and a propensity for “networking and scheming,” Fanon designates its “vocation” as “not to transform the nation but prosaically serve as a conveyor belt for capitalism, forced to camouflage itself behind the mask of neocolonialism.”2 Nor was Fanon the only intellectual involved in the liberation movements of the 1950s to be already warning against the pitfalls of neocolonialism. Bracketing ideological differences between him and the Martinican, one would invoke Kwame Nkrumah who in 1965 would devote a book-length discussion to neocolonialism, outlining, beyond its economic workings, the “methods of religious, educational and cultural infiltration” it resorts to, not the least of which is “the ancient, accepted one . . . [of] divide and rule.”3 Although the emphases of their respective arguments were on different players (the local bourgeoisie’s complicity in the case of Fanon; the mechanisms of EuroAmerican distant interventions following the end of colonialism in the case of Nkrumah), for neither the Martinican nor the Ghanaian 179

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did decolonization, per se, secure full sovereignty and independence from subtler forms of imperialism. But Fanon’s use of “cosmopolitan” calls for comment. His deployment of the adjective renders it synonymous with elite disengagement whereby the term is defined, in context, against allegiance to the nation’s masses. It is not that affiliation beyond the nation is absent from The Wretched of the Earth: quite the contrary, but its impetus there is a Third Worldist internationalist one. The “cosmopolitan” orientation that Fanon pits himself against, then, belongs to the older European understanding of the word, as privileged deracination defined in contradistinction to national belonging. I invoke his critique of the pitfalls of neocolonialism facing decolonized nations and the role therein of a specific cosmopolitan formation of the local elite because it seems to serve as a particularly apt framework for interpreting Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, published coextensively with the far-reaching moment of decolonization. My reading of The Alexandria Quartet suggests that Durrell, like Fanon, was acutely aware of the reinvention of modes of metropolitan domination aided and abetted by the local bourgeoisie’s “networking and scheming” (to again borrow Fanon’s phrase): but whereas Fanon explicitly warns against a given phenomenon, Durrell, through the altogether different techniques of the novel genre, can be interpreted as scripting, in a valorizing vein, the role that a local cosmopolitan elite can play in neocolonial interventions. Long celebrated as iconic of an Alexandrian cosmopolitanism of the first half of the twentieth century that was supposedly eclipsed after the 1952 Revolution, The Alexandria Quartet has recently been the subject of critical studies that astonishingly reclaim it as a postcolonial text, or one that instantiates the beginnings of such a turn. It is not on the autobiographical grounds of Durrell’s background as an Anglo-Indian that I disagree with that interpretation: an ipso facto equation between a metropolitan writer and colonial discourse or, for that matter, between one from the “Third World” and anticolonial/ postcolonial discourse is untenable, as several studies have cogently demonstrated. See, for example, critical discussions that have variously brought out the critical awareness of class, race, and gender inequalities in Egypt in the early twentieth century of Enrico Pea, the Italian writer resident there; the neocolonial complicities of the Trinidadian novelist V. S. Naipaul; and the riposte to imperialism in the fiction of a writer born in the Caribbean of Welsh Scottish

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ancestry such as Jean Rhys, to take but a small sample.4 It seems to me that what is at stake in the reclamations of the Quartet as an instance of postcolonial fiction is primarily its “twilight of empire” time of narration, the intimations of that moment in the text being construed as indicative of a Durrell attuned to postcoloniality. This, in turn, is premised on a misapprehension, or limited apprehension, of “postcolonial” in an exclusively temporal vein as denoting that which comes after colonialism. I shall take up this temporal misapprehension of “postcolonial” later. The point I wish to make is not solely that whatever signs of impending decolonization the Quartet bears are refracted back onto the Egypt of the mid-1930s and 1940s from the late 1950s time of writing when the country had gained its independence, and that representing intimations of the end-of-empire per se does not warrant a novel’s designation as postcolonial. Rather, it is my wager that the text looks forward to, as in tries to conceive of and conjure up, a neocolonial afterlife of older imperial forms. It is in this sense that I reinterpret the Quartet’s much-vaunted cosmopolitanism as a hybridity that the text construes as potentially threatening but also as ultimately amenable to perpetuating the decolonized nation’s dependency. I do not wish to deny the Quartet’s modernist experimentation but to urge that this too be read within the framework of a belated permutation of colonial discourse. If Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism were merely a matter of its ethnic and religious heterogeneity, then there would be no dearth of evidence to shore up from the Quartet to nominate it as the ur-text of this cultural matrix. One would certainly begin by citing that chestnut of the cosmopolitanism of the Quartet’s Alexandria: “Capitally, what is this city of ours? What is resumed in the word Alexandria? In a flash my mind’s eye shows me a thousand dust-tormented streets. . . . Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbour bar. But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them” (J 14). One would then quote—having first pointed out that this is a leitmotif of creative writing about Alexandria, not only in English, but in Arabic (al-Kharrat) and Italian (de Zogheb, see the next chapter)5 —the incantation-like passages that invoke a cultural compositeness encapsulated in place- and street names, as in “Rue Bab-elMandeb, Rue Abou-el-Dardar, Minet-el-Bassal (streets slippery with discarded fluff from the cotton marts) Nouzha (the rose-garden,

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some remembered kisses) or bus stops with haunted names like Saba Pacha, Mazloum, Zizinia[,] Bacos, Schutz, Gianaclis. A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants” (J 63). In like vein, one would also cite the list, reproduced twice almost verbatim, of names of Alexandrians, where the narrator luxuriates in their ethnic diversity.6 Other anthologizable nuggets include linguistic borrowings and pidginization—such as the newspaper boys’ “soup-language which was deeply thrilling—Greek, Arabic, French were the basic ingredients” (M 162),7 Mnemjian’s “Babylonian barber’s shop” (J 36), and the “Toto-tongue” in which Toto de Brunel, who “spoke indifferent English and French . . . [and] whenever at a loss for a word . . . would put in one whose meaning he did not know[,] . . . almost reach[ing] poetry” (B 25). Or the cultural readings of cityscape: Darley, on hearing Justine recite “those marvellous lines of the old Greek poet,” Cavafy, claiming that he “felt once more the strange equivocal power of the city—its flat alluvial landscape and exhausted airs—and knew her for a true child of Alexandria; which is neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian, but a hybrid: a joint” (J 27). But then what of “the strange equivocal power” of a city emphatically marked as “a hybrid,” in the passage just quoted? And what of the same Darley, albeit at a later date, proclaiming, “Alexandria, princess and whore. The royal city and the anus mundi. She would never change so long as the races continued to seethe here like must in a vat; so long as the streets and squares still gushed and spouted with the fermentation of these diverse passions and spites, rages and sudden calms” (C 63); or, for that matter, of David Mountolive’s hearing “the soft hushing of strings and the familiar voice of the city breaking in upon him once again with its perverted languors, its ancient wisdoms and terrors” (M 294)? Clearly, the image of the Quartet’s “cosmopolitan” city has darkened considerably: for all its “ancient wisdoms,” for all the “familiar[ity]” of its “voice,” it is now permeated with a decidedly uncanny quality of “perverted languors,” “rages,” and even “terrors” “seething,” “gush[ing]” and “spout[ing]” beneath a familiar, sometimes deceptively “calm” surface. My contention about the Alexandria of the Quartet is that it is constructed neither solely as an extension of Greece/Europe nor as an “Oriental” city, despite the pronounced presence in the text of both Orientalist and Greek/Hellenistic elements. The city’s depiction is to be understood as a function not only of these aspects, or only of a cosmopolitanism that it allegedly celebrates, but of what the

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text construes as an “uncanny” space of “colonial hybridity,” a space that poses a “menace” to a (would-be) sovereign, and decidedly male, imperial subject—whether that of the colonial administrator or of the Western writer, Durrell himself having doubled in the two roles.8 The Quartet’s projection of Alexandria’s space as one of uncanny hybridity is, in my view, in line with the long-standing colonial deployment of the term Levantine to designate a suspect “mimicry,” one that Durrell’s magnum opus will ultimately salvage, in an adumbration of metropolitan distant interventions in the decolonized peripheries.

hellenism and orientalism in the alex andria of the QUARTET The first volume of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Justine (1957), opens with the protagonist and narrator-novelist, the Irish L. G. Darley, on a Greek island to which he has moved, a few years before World War II, after a spell in Alexandria, and another in Upper Egypt, working as a teacher. It is from the vantage point of the unnamed Greek island that Darley hopes to come to terms with and reconstruct the city in the novel he is writing, Justine. The two following volumes, Balthazar (1958) and Mountolive (1958), go over roughly the same time period covered in Justine, albeit from different perspectives (Mountolive being in the omniscient narrative mode, harking back to an earlier period), adducing different motives for actions previously rehearsed, variously refracting events narrated in preceding volumes and introducing new ones, while the last volume, Clea (1960), is set during World War II.9 Durrell’s stated intention is to provide a “four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity preposition” with the first three parts “deployed spatially”—with time being “stayed,” each volume providing a different take on overlapping events—and the fourth representing (a move forward in) time, and hence a sequel (B “Note,” n.p.). Like Justine, Clea begins on the Greek island, which Darley is now leaving for Alexandria, and also ends on the island, to which the narrator returns in the closing pages of the novel.10 The Greek framing of Alexandria—which comes close to being a spatial parallel to Forster’s temporal move of arching over from the Hellenistic and late antique city to a modern Alexandria redeemed by its Greek element—is not a mere echo of the autobiographical fact of Durrell’s having been evacuated from Corfu to Egypt in 1941, or indeed of his Cypriot sojourn during the writing of the Quartet.11 To an extent, it

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is a reflection of a Philhellene aesthetic sustained and promoted by Personal Landscape, a group of fellow writers who likewise had to flee a Greece fallen to the Axis. Durrell—who first worked as foreign press officer in the British embassy in Cairo (1941–42), then as public information officer in Alexandria (1942–45), his main task being to spread pro-Allied, anti-Axis propaganda—was a founding member of and key contributor to the group’s journal produced in Egypt.12 In “An Anatomy of Exile,” his introduction to Personal Landscape: An Anthology of Exile, Robin Fedden provides pointers to the aesthetic preferences of the group by setting up a series of contrasts between Egypt and Europe, specifically Greece, from which several of the poets had been exiled. Essentially, what Fedden does here is define Egypt by default, as the vilified converse of a valorized Europe in the eyes of the exiled writers. The reasons for this perception include natural ones, such as a flat landscape fertilized by the “almost indecent stimulus” of being composed “not [of] soil but [of] bone-mould and excrement. The exile everywhere walks on the dead and their excrement”13 —it not being clear why he should consider this state of affairs specific to Egypt. But cultural and social conditions further consolidate this sense of alienation. Fedden diagnoses a historical décalage as yet another “indecent” cause of the malaise of the poets in exile: “Hypostyle halls and medieval mosques are well enough to visit and admire, but they don’t connect up the way one thinks. What is missed and missing is the middle distance: where there should be an eighteenth century, there is the Turkish hiatus. . . . For the average cultured European with his seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from which his taste may wander but to which it invariably returns, a recent historical continuity is the very ground he stands on and this lacuna . . . seems almost indecent.”14 It is hardly surprising that Fedden’s all too familiar projection of a Eurocentric historiography and periodization is paralleled by a sense that Islam constitutes a formidable stumbling block for those formed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, “in Egypt where the substratum of thought is so profoundly and aggressively Muslim.”15 As for the elite Cairene and Alexandrian “cosmopolitan society,” this “epitomizes all that the word Levantine means: money and money values, a total absence of taste and tradition, and a pseudo-French culture,” as well as exploitation of a class from which it lives in total isolation.16 But then when he complains that Egypt’s neutrality during, and the populace’s alleged indifference to, the war has made it difficult to obtain a sense of urgency

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or collectivity, Fedden himself appears unaware of the impact of the war on Egyptians at large, particularly the working class. Contrast this against the vivid portrait of World War II in Chahine’s semiautobiographical film, Iskindiriyya . . . Lih (Alexandria . . . Why?, 1978), which offers lovingly detailed vignettes of the struggle for survival of middle-class as well as workingclass Egyptians at the time, including such minutiae as the pawning of possessions. Or Abdel Meguid’s 1996 novel, La Ahad Yanam fi al-Iskandariyya (No One Sleeps in Alexandria), in which the hardships of the two central down-and-out migrant railway workers living in the underprivileged southern quarters are paired with documentary material drawn from contemporary newspaper cuttings.17 While Forster had in his earlier Alexandrian years located some promise in the Europeanized eclecticism of northern Egypt before eventually appealing to Cavafy in a now-Hellenized narrative, Fedden—partly thanks to Forster’s efforts18 —makes this move of appropriating the Alexandrian Greek poet. Granted, there were other, compelling reasons for “the vital part which Greece and things Greek play in” the anthology,19 as an act of solidarity with a country that had fallen to the Axis; among the Greek poets whom the anthology featured were George Seferis, in Egypt with the exiled Greek government. 20 In the context of this alienation, “Cavafy, the first authentic voice out of Alexandria in a thousand years, fits most appropriately into an exile anthology.”21 Thus, at one stroke, Cavafy, as he has already done in Forster, tides over the alleged millennium-long abyss, and is also turned into a sort of emblem of the predicament of exile from Europe/Greece, a patron figure for—to reverse the title of his own poem, “Return from Greece”—a symbolic “return to Greece.”22 Durrell’s own feelings at the time were not far removed from Fedden’s either about Greece or about the cosmopolitan “Levantines” of Egypt. “Then this smashed up broken down shabby Neopolitan town,” he complains to Henry Miller in 1944, “with its Levantine mounds of houses peeling in the sun. A sea flat, dirty brown and waveless rubbing the port. Arabic, Coptic, Greek, Levant French; no music, no art, no real gaiety. A saturated middle European boredom laced with drink and Packards and beach-cabins. NO SUBJECT OF CONVERSATION EXCEPT MONEY.”23 Fedden’s and Durrell’s invocations of the term Levantine in speaking of Egypt emanate from an entire colonial trope that I elaborate below. That for Durrell, in particular, the gauge against which the Egyptian city was to fall short

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was Greece becomes clear in his poem “Alexandria,” published in 1946, with its modulation on the theme of exile from and mourning of a lost Greece. The lighthouse, perhaps in its capacity as a reminiscence of the Ptolemies, is twice invoked in the poem to convey darkness, blindness, and isolation accreted onto the unstated irony of its very absence from the landscape. Hence, “Here at the last cold Pharos between Greece / And all I love, the lights confide / A deeper darkness to the rubbing tide; / Doors shut, and we the living are locked inside / Between the shadows and the thoughts of peace.”24 In its second invocation—“the last pale / Lighthouse, like a Samson blinded, stands / And turns its huge charred orbit on the sands”25 —the sense of tantalizing, unavailing hope (witness the repetition of “last”) is transmuted into an image of captivity and impotence. Geography itself bespeaks a biblical mourning over exile: “At the doors of Africa so many towns founded / Upon a parting could become Alexandria, like / The wife of Lot—a metaphor for tears.”26 But the poem leaves off on a redemptive note despite isolation, possibly also subliminally signaling this potential through the metaphorical recourse it has to a European feature of landscape: “the artist at his papers / Up there alone, upon the alps of night.”27 Yet, when Durrell finally got working on his long-gestating “Book of the Dead,” soon to become the Quartet, he decided against setting it in Athens, as had been his plan. “I had strict historical references to Alexandria,” he explained, “and the important factor was that Alexandria was the source of our entire culture. . . . All the religions met in a head-on crash there, all the metaphysics; our science was born there: the first measurement of the earth: Euclid. It was the birthplace of our mathematics.”28 Here, Alexandria, once chided for not being Greece, despite its pallid reminiscence of Hellenism, is now seen as more originary to Western culture than Athens. Durrell made these comments in a 1970 interview, long after the publication of the Quartet: is this, then, a case of retroactive attribution of motives? I would say that the two attitudes, the one expressed in the poem and the other avowed in the interview, do engage each other in the Quartet, betraying a perception of the city’s space as precariously poised between, on the one hand, a quasi-Greece/Europe and, on the other, a quasi-Orient. The codified 1970s reading of a Durrell “influenced” in the infusion of Hellenism into the Quartet by Cavafy and also by Forster, the latter as likewise influenced by Cavafy, is not unsubstantiated. 29 The

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evidence, both textual and paratextual, abounds, although Hellenic references drawn from other sources such as Plutarch are also reappropriated. 30 Cavafy (translated, quoted, alluded to, bodied forth in the character Balthazar, a look-alike who lives on the same street on which Cavafy lived, was also the poet’s friend, and who listens to recordings of his voice on the gramophone [J 141]);31 Alexander and the Macedonians (in Nessim’s “visions,” discussed below); Antony and Cleopatra (their various—European—literary renditions already the subject of an appendix in Forster, here consistently referred to and incarnated in different character pairings, with Cleopatra also informing the feminization of Durrell’s Alexandria);32 the space of the library (evocations through actual libraries, manuscripts, 33 and the mise-en-abyme of the many texts-within-texts in the Quartet);34 the Graeco-Roman Museum (a onetime nocturnal meeting place of the Cabal, [see J 101, 176–77]), characters’ comments on it, taking off from Forster’s description of the artifacts, forming part of the “Consequential Data” at the end of Justine (see J 250).35 But then, such Hellenic allusions, far from indicative of any consonance of vision between the Quartet and the Alexandrian texts of Forster and Cavafy, can be read, at an immediate level, as a bid by Durrell to accrue authentication and authority from two writers who had become canonical of the city. At a second remove, this density of Hellenic intertextual allusions provides one pointer toward what may seem to make for unlikely bedfellows, namely, Hellenism and Orientalism, sharing the space of the Alexandria of the Quartet. Outside the world of the Quartet, or for that matter of Cavafy’s poetry as seen in the first chapter of this study, the relationship between Hellenism and Orientalism is riddled with paradoxes in the modern period, whereby Philhellenism identifies Greece as its cultural origin while lapsing into Orientalizing Greeks, and Hellenism itself is not free of Orientalist tendencies.36 Indeed, Durrell’s oeuvre has been faulted for a paternalistic (quasi-)colonial attitude toward Greece and Greeks; but I maintain that within the world of the Quartet allusions to things Greek are favorably coded as European.37 I would also note that one issue that is at stake in the coexistence of Hellenism and Orientalism in the Quartet is the exceedingly textualized, markedly constructed representation of the city in both these frames of reference, prompting one to read Durrell’s disclaimer “Only the city is real” (see the “Note” to Justine, n.p.)—so often taken to heart—in an ironic vein. In one of the earliest (1962),

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and still among the finest, critiques of the text, the Alexandrian scholar Mahmoud Manzalaoui takes Durrell to task primarily for his “renchérissement of traditional western pseudo-orientalism” but also for his misconstrual of Greek elements, albeit in both cases on the grounds of factual errors.38 “As for the ‘curling’ streets of Alexandria . . . which extend ‘radiating out like a starfish from the axis of its founder’s tomb,’” Manzalaoui writes, “the reader with some education does not require an Alexandrian to tell him that Mr. Durrell’s much-vaunted Hellenism must have been fast asleep, and that for a Hellenistic grille-plan he has, by an unnecessary and uncouth substitution, introduced midnineteenth century radial planning.”39 I would suggest that Durrell’s “radiating” Alexandria stems from an intertextual misprision—one that betokens the extent to which his is a city of the mind, one that he is textually refounding40 —of Forster’s Alexandria in which the walks and excursions, rather than the streets, set out in different directions from the same starting point, the Muhammad ‘Ali Square.41 While Forster does, elsewhere in Alexandria, discuss the grille plan, Durrell’s Hellenism in the context of Alexandria—the quasi-Hellenistic grille plan misplaced by the Macedonian’s mausoleum made central to a fictional/fictive urban plan—eschews the materiality of the place and is no less text-based than his Orientalism.42 Having named as one important source for details of the Quartet, J. W. McPherson’s 1941 Moulids of Egypt (Egyptian Saints-Days),43 the critic comments that Durrell follows his “misunderstanding of the words of a popular song, ‘Hassan Abu Ali Saraq el Meeza’ (Hassan Abu Ali stole the goat), and gives this, substantially, as the name of a character in the epic: ‘the mishap that befell them from the doing of Abu Ali Saraq el-Méeza’. . . . Book-knowledge is not a source that, I think, Durrell would care to admit.”44 Durrell’s book knowledge in the context of Egypt—many sources, not least Edward Lane, having been identified45 —situates him squarely in the Orientalist tradition. I would even suggest that there is a species of “Orientalist kitsch” (akin to Manzalaoui’s “pseudo-orientalism”) in the Quartet, a simulacral quality reminiscent of Egyptomania in the decorative arts.46 This is witnessed, among other things, in a prostitute who is like “Petesouchos the crocodile goddess, no less” (B 166), in a “huge glass lift, so like a Byzantine sarcophagus” (M 114), in the procedure at “the Ptolemaic parlour” (B 24) of the barber’s which entails being “swung smoothly down into the ground wrapped like dead Pharaohs”

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(J 36). Albeit not all as arbitrary as the above suggests, such instances of kitsch Orientalist décor are part of what contributes to the humor of a text that has been read as a comedy.47 Other indices of Orientalist representation in the Quartet, however, have much more serious consequences. In identifying, as others have,48 the absence of the referent in the Quartet as an extravagant manifestation of what Said has shown to be the mutually citing, internally canonizing peculiarity of Orientalism, I would add that it is above all the discursive underpinnings of an Orientalism of that specific moment. Manzalaoui’s vexation with the truth claims that the Quartet makes49 and their acceptance by readers is justified. But it is not so much on the grounds of expectations of verisimilitude as of a colonial discourse faced with resistances, contemplating the prospect of its own dissolution and adumbrating transmutations that ensure its survival that the Quartet should be tackled.50 First, however, it would be useful to take stock of the way in which Quartet appears to distribute Arab, Coptic, Islamic, and Greek elements along Alexandria’s cityscape and the Egyptian landscape beyond it as a step toward identifying the slippages in the threateningly ambivalent space of Durrell’s cosmopolitan city. Apart from a few important scenes set in Cairo, 51 the two cardinal settings in the Quartet are Alexandria and, to a lesser extent, the marshy countryside close to the city. The latter, represented in the farm belonging to the Coptic Hosnani family, Karm Abu Girg, which is intended to gesture toward the life of the Egyptian peasantry, elicits sketches and annotations, mostly in Mountolive, replete with (pseudo-)ethnographic detail. As for Alexandria, “the white city” (J 62; B 70, 152), it is in the downtown area, as well as the Quartier Grec off Rue Fuad—the Europeanized part of the city with mansions and townhouses built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, home to members of the foreign communities and the Egyptian elite—that the key characters live and where their main actions unfold. This is the part of town associated in the text with the Hosnanis’s mansion, Clea’s studio, the Atelier, the cafés, the hotels, the banks, and so on. The social calendar here is punctuated by balls and culminates in the annual carnival, marking the beginning of Lent, as on “the other side of the Mediterranean” (see B 188). However, the text does offer several sketches of what it variously calls “the Egyptian quarter” (J 66), “the strident native quarter” (J 185), or “the Arab quarter” (B 71)—ill defined since unnamed in the Quartet but roughly the same

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area as the “Turkish Town” in Forster, meaning Bahari, and probably specifically Anfushi—and also uses this as the stage for several important scenes. Religious festivals, mulids, marked according to the Coptic or Islamic calendar, 52 are some of the events set in this quarter, and a locus repeatedly visited is that of the child brothel. The adjectives allocated to this part of town belong to the register of squalor and animalism, and the description is from the vantage point of a decidedly voyeuristic foreign sojourner or the Alexandrian of European descent, never from the point of view of inhabitants of the area.53 Durrell’s relentless denigration of Islam and Muslims is by no means confined to these “native” quarters: he does have the minister of interior, of whom one character reflects that “to register an idea in a Moslem mind is like trying to paint a wall: one must wait for the first coat to dry (the first idea) before applying a second” (M 272), receive bribes in rare copies of the Qur’an. But it is there that the novelist projects his starkest stereotypes, as in “the copulations of boabs [doormen] shaking the house like a palm-tree. Black tigers with gleaming teeth. And everywhere the veils, the screaming, the mad giggle under the pepper-trees, the insanity and the lepers” (J 62). Of similar examples, Soad Sobhy makes the apt comment, “The vast anonymous crowds of Egyptians, Arabs, and Turks in the Quartet find their precollective, preofficial existence in the vocabulary of Orientalism.”54 Despite the significant difference in scenery between the marshy countryside of Karm Abu Girg and the urban “native quarter” of Alexandria as depicted in the Quartet, they are continuous in that they comprise those elements of indigenous cultures the text will allow for, in whatever distorted form. They are interconnected via the mulid scenes—that described in the countryside, or rather the desert outside it (see M 117–25), the one devoted to “Sitna Damiana,” mirroring in its phantasmagoric details that devoted to “Sitna Mariam” in Alexandria (see B 152–68). It is against the European quarters of Alexandria, rather than the “native quarter,” that the countryside is thrown into relief—on a visit from Alexandria to Karm Abu Girg, Nessim reflects that this is “really Egypt—a Copt’s Egypt—while the white city, as if in some dusty spectrum, was filled with troubling and alien images of lands foreign to it—the intimations of Greece, Syria, Tunis” (B 70). Thus far, it might seem that the landscape of the Quartet is a “compartmentalized,” Fanonian one of the settler’s city (Hellenized in this

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case) and the native’s quarters (Orientalized here), in sharp contrast economically and politically, and locked in mutual antagonism.55 In terms of “cosmopolitanism,” Stefan Herbrechter plausibly suggests that “Durrell’s Alexandria is a very curious place, which is split into two parts,” the Arab and the European, and asserts that “the dichotomy . . . somehow clashes with the insistence on the ‘melting-pot’ character of Alexandria.”56 But I will offer that there are slippages between the contrasting and seemingly mutually exclusive parts of the city as conceived in the Quartet. These and the “uncanny” quality lurking in the familiar cityscape are in part a function of Western modernist experimentation in a colonial setting; but they should primarily be read as a reflection of the end of empire in the eyes of the British male characters.

alex andria the “uncanny” city: a modernist experiment? Where the uncanny breaks out is in the marked cultural loading of the description of space and topography, in the superstitions and hysteria that beset the Alexandrian “exemplars” of the city, and in the political conspiracy, which, through the “mimicry” and doubling, undermine the subjectivity of the British narrators and point to the limits of their knowledge of and power over the Orient. What Darley perceives as an “unburied city” (J 114), whose “familiar voice” bespeaks “ancient . . . terrors” from which Mountolive flees (M 294), may be elucidated through Sigmund Freud’s essay “The ‘Uncanny.’” Combining an etymological investigation of the relationship between “heimlich” (homely/canny) and “unheimlich” (unhomely/uncanny) with literary depictions and firsthand experiences of the uncanny, Freud brings out a slippage whereby the unheimlich lurks, often in the form of a secret, within the familiar, the homely, and the domestic: “everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light”—hence something repressed that returns. Among the hallmarks of the uncanny that Freud highlights in his examples, two should be isolated for my purposes: the theme of the double and the repetition and recurrence of the same feature or incident, sometimes in a spatial dimension. Freud’s discussion of the double—whether constituted as such through a physical resemblance or a psychological identification whereby “the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is,

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or substitutes the extraneous self for his own,”57 is elaborated in Otto Rank’s work on the issue. Bringing out the emphasis Rank places on the connection between the double and “reflections in mirrors” (a leitmotif in the Quartet, it should be noted), Freud also elicits from his study the connection between the double and the belief in the immortal soul “as a preservation against extinction.” Working with the notion that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, Freud suggests that even as the ancient Egyptians “develop[ed] the art of making images of the dead in lasting materials” for this precise purpose, “[s]uch ideas . . . have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and the primitive man.” But for those who have surmounted this “stage,” “the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”58 While Freud also discusses “a special agency [that] is slowly formed” in the process of the ego’s development, one that has the attributes of the superego in his account, although he does not name it, and how the rest of the ego which it treats as an object becomes a sort of double, he also retains his anthropological approach in claiming the survival there of “those things which seem to self-criticism to belong to the old surmounted narcissism of earliest times.”59 Thus: “When all is said and done, the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the ‘double’ being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted. . . . The ‘double’ has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.” Likewise, when conditions that elicit “residues of animistic mental activity”60 —survivals of a belief in spirits that has been surmounted—are present, an uncanny effect is produced. Durrell does invoke Freud as the frame for one of the Quartet’s self-avowed themes, that of “modern love” (see “Note,” B n.p.); the first of the two epigraphs to Justine reads: “I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four persons are involved. We shall have a lot to discuss about that. S. Freud: Letters” (J n.p.).61 But my sense is that it is Durrell’s Key to Modern Poetry (1952), based on a series of lectures the novelist gave in Argentina in 1948, that yields a more pertinent “key” to the Quartet, specifically the production of an uncanny effect in it. In the course of introducing the birth of psychoanalysis and its key concepts in order to bring out “its effect on language and symbolism,” Durrell

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speaks admiringly of an “astonishing discovery [that] came to light” when Freud turned his attention to the interpretation of dreams: “The fantasies of his individual patients were often copies of race-myths and folk tales of savage peoples. Psycho-analysis and anthropology joined hands at this point” (KMP 53). Durrell then poses a series of rhetorical questions: “How was it that a twentieth century man, living in a modern city, was often found dreaming things which were being recorded as the myths or religious beliefs of some savage tribe in Africa? Was the myth, then, a kind of fantasy-product which enabled him to satisfy his desires, so to speak, in his imagination? If primitive myth was based on this idea, what about modern myth—what about modern art and religion?” (KMP 54). Although he goes on to contrast Freud against Jung, whom he sees in a more favorable light, Durrell concludes that the connection made by Freud “between racial myths and individual dreams . . . yielded a vast new tract of knowledge” (KMP 54). Some ten years after posing his rhetorical questions about Freud’s work, Durrell would experimentally work much of this material into his homely/uncanny Alexandrian space. Although the uncanny in the Alexandria of the Quartet owes more to the twilight-of-empire moment of the time of narration, as I will later demonstrate, it is in part a result of Durrell’s fictional mulling over the connections between psychoanalysis and anthropology that his Argentinean lectures had adumbrated. Granted, Freud was not the only source of the uncanny in the Alexandria of the Quartet, Einstein, it may be suggested, being no less a resource for this experiment. Think of the way in which the Quartet repeatedly designates the city as a force, and a malevolent one at that, which dictates the actions of the characters, as in the “grim mandate which the city exercised over its familiars, crippling sentiment, steeping everything in the vats of its own exhausted passions” (C 23). That Durrell repeatedly has Darley refer to this urban force as a gravitational field—“we had been trapped in the projection of a will too powerful and too deliberate to be human—the gravitational field which Alexandria threw down about those it had chosen as its exemplars” (J 18–19; see also J 41 and C 98)—would seem, at least by virtue of its (quasi-)scientific language, to indicate that it is in consonance with the “space-time” experiment that Durrell claims he draws from Einstein. In a chapter of his Key to Modern Poetry, “Space Time and Poetry,” Durrell relates changing notions of time in modern literature to Einstein’s theory of relativity. “Einstein,” he explains, did

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away with the separation between the two dimensions of space and time by “suggest[ing] a marriage of the two into a four-dimensional volume which he called a ‘continuum’ . . . [yielding] a new space-time hybrid. . . . Einstein’s time was not a past-present-future object. . . . It was a sort of time which contained all time in every moment. . . . In the space-time continuum . . . time is an ‘Is-ness’” (KMP 28–29). Apart from his claims, rightly questioned by some critics,62 to have structured the Quartet as a fictional demonstration of the theory of relativity, Durrell punctuates several passages where Alexandria is designated as a force with the phrase “space-time.” However, this, in and of itself, does not explain why the spirit attributed to this specific place, Alexandria, should be an uncanny one. For this, one should turn to both a diachronic explanation, relating to Durrell’s take on Freud, and, more apropos, a synchronic one wrought by the cultural and political ambivalence of the time in which the Quartet is set as well as the later moment of writing.

possession by the alex andria archive Durrell’s Alexandria is both a modern city and one that comprises a perceived African primitiveness as part of what I read as the novelist’s appropriation from Freud of the notion of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. This is at its most visible in the characters’ “race-dreams,” hysteria and possession by an archive of the place perceived as disturbing. Nor is Durrell unique among modernist writers in undertaking experimentation with the uncanny in the novel form. Suggesting that the “list of factors” that Freud cites as conducive to the uncanny “reads like a thumbnail sketch of modernism itself and not just a genre called gothic or horror literature,” Vincent Pecora proposes that “modernism . . . went a long way toward the incorporation and domestication of the uncanny as literary technique. Technique . . . becomes what the modernist writer has instead of the psychic experience, or suspension of disbelief, necessary for the uncanny itself to appear in all its monstrosity. Or rather, technique is the uncanny for the modern writer, the shamanic formula that performs the magic by which, as in the Joycean epiphany, the dead are brought to life.”63 The superstition and instances of quasi-haunting that beset the “exemplars” of the Alexandria of the Quartet are as much a product of Durrell’s technical experimentation with the uncanny by having characters revert to Alexandrian myths and historical avatars cast in a primitivized vein

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as they are—as I shall demonstrate later—of a politically inflected reading of the city’s contemporary space as ambivalent, as drifting toward Europe but on the brink of being overtaken by a “primitive” Africa it has repressed. The construction of Nessim’s “great cycle of historical dreams” (J 175)—although they may have been feigned to further keep Darley in the dark about his political machinations64 —offers an overdetermined prototype of Durrell’s experimentation with Freud. Nessim’s waking dreams, we are told, are a receptacle “into which the City now threw itself—as if at last it had found a responsive subject through which to express the collective desires, the collective wishes, which informed its culture” (J 175). This may not fully correspond to Carl Jung’s universal collective unconscious, being a projection “en montage” (J 175) onto the character’s lived reality of “the giant footprints of the historical memory which lies behind the recollections of individual personality, its mentor and guide: indeed its inventor, since man is only an extension of the spirit of place” (J 175).65 The central historical vision Nessim has is of Macedonian soldiers marching on the “alluvial coast” of Egypt (J 177),66 possibly heading for Siwa for the oracle Alexander sought,67 supplemented by later, Hellenistic scenes, such as the Mouseion. This is traversed by a hallucinatory account of his moonlit meeting at the Graeco-Roman Museum of Alexandria with fellow Cabalists, in which the Hellenistic artifacts—“The inscriptions on the marbles of the Museum murmured to him as he passed like moving lips” (J 176) on his way to his friends “sitting on a marble sarcophagus-lid” (J 177)— merge into his possession by the historical archive of the city just as the meeting becomes a pretext for recollections of the “Spiritual City” (à la Forster). But it is not as though the text would confine the connections between modern and ancient Alexandria to echoes, genealogy (Mouseion/Museum),68 or décor: “While the gallery of historical dreams held the foreground of his mind the figures of his friends and acquaintances, palpable and real, walked backwards and forwards among them, among the ruins of classical Alexandria, inhabiting an amazing historical space-time as living personages” (J 176). Hence, through this allusion to space-time, the text also emphasizes, paradoxically perhaps, in addition to race memory, a simultaneity, “an ‘Is-ness’” (KMP 29) to the apparently two “discrete” moments, the present of the city, and what would seem to be its historical past. Nessim relives, or witnesses, the march of the Macedonians along the coast, then into the desert, their disorientation, hunger, and

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thirst. A resonance of the ambiguity of the coast seen in depictions of the modern city in the Quartet echoes in the description of the Macedonians: “The brave plumed helmets with which they had been issued were too hot to wear at midday. Africa, which they had somehow visualized as an extension of Europe—an extension of terms, of references to a definitive past—had already asserted itself as something different: a forbidding darkness where the croaking of ravens matched the dry exclamations of spiritless men, and rationed laughter fashioned from breath simply the chittering of baboons” (J 178). In the perception of Africa as “an extension of Europe” undermined by its being “something different: a forbidding darkness,” the passage offers a primordial foretelling of the menace of the Quartet’s contemporary, twentieth-century city. What this complex reflecting back and projecting forward does is to attribute to the landscape itself, via the possession of an Alexandrian by the so-called race memory of the place, an extension in time of the quality of uncertainty, a slippage that is in fact a product of a Western imperial perspective, as I shall show later. Nessim’s “memory’s memory” (J 179) accesses the Macedonians’ own memories as their sense of perdition suffuses him. The dreamlike sequences merging present with nightmarish historical past culminate in Nessim’s reflection, “Was all the discordance of their lives a measure of the anxiety which they had inherited from the city or the age? ‘O my God’, he almost said, ‘why don’t we leave this city . . . and seek an atmosphere less impregnated with the sense of deracination and failure?’ The words of the old poet came to his mind” (J 180). The anxiety deemed part of the spirit of place is then given vent in the quotation from Cavafy’s poem “The City” (J 181). The “sequences” close with Cabalistic percepts, and an epiphanic invocation of Plotinus—“like the distant reverberations of the city’s memory, the voice of Plotinus speaking, not of flight away from intolerable temporal conditions but towards a new light, a new city of Light. ‘This is no journey for the feet, however. Look into yourself, withdraw into yourself and look’” (J 181, emphasis added; a rendition of that quotation in Forster, AHG 71).

the ef /feminized irr ationality of the “exemplars” If, as I have been suggesting, the Quartet constitutes Alexandria’s geographic location and its literary and historical archive as an exemplary

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space for conducting its modernist experimentation with the Freudian uncanny, this move is also shot through with an imperial legacy of “denial of coevalness,”69 of allocating, that is, the Other to an earlier historical stage of the (Western) self’s evolution and advancement. In the Quartet Alexandria is repeatedly referred to as “a town of sects and gospels” (J 98) and “the capital of superstition” where “Sects abound” (M 115). Melissa reads the dregs in the coffee cup (J 60), as well as Pursewarden’s palm (M 173); Justine reads the Tarot after making love (J 180), and practices “bibliomancy” (M 231); Clea has her “horoscope cast” every day (M 115); Scobie makes a prediction to Clea (C 206–7); and so on. These are examples of what Freud would call “residues of animistic mental activities”70 and belief in magic that Durrell finds fit within his conception of the cultural ambivalence of the city. Durrell’s Alexandrian encounter with a Cabalistic group71 and his interest in Gnosticism aside,72 the sects and the gospels are drawn, in large part, from Forster’s “Spiritual City” and his appendixes “The Modern Religious Communities” and “The Uncanonical Gospels of Egypt.” It is not so much a matter of such borrowings from Forster (often credited)—as Justine being compared, in her capacity “as an exemplar of the city,” to the Sophia of the Gnostic thinker Valentinus (J 40; AHG 76)—which are enlisted to cast the characters in mythical roles. Rather, what we have in Durrell is a different approach to syncretism taking off from that in Forster’s account. As my discussion in chapter 2 has demonstrated, the syncretism that Forster addressed was the exchange of influence between various theological schools in Alexandria. His account presented it as the cosmopolitan city’s humanizing hallmark in its philosophico-theological quest for a link between the human and the divine. Durrell, too, considers syncretism in relation to cosmopolitanism, but the formula of syncretism he reads into Alexandria is of an altogether different order: Of the Cabal itself, what is there to be said? Alexandria is a town of sects and gospels. And for every ascetic she has always thrown up one religious libertine—Carpocrates, Anthony—who was prepared to founder in the senses as deeply and as truly as any desert father in the mind. “You speak slightingly of syncretism”, said Balthazar once, “but you must understand that to work here at all—and I am speaking now as a religious maniac not a philosopher—one must try to reconcile two extremes of habit and behaviour which are not due to the intellectual disposition of the inhabitants, but to their soil, air, landscape. I mean extreme sensuality and intellectual asceticism. Historians always present syncretism as something which grew out

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of a mixture of warring intellectual principles; that hardly states the problem. It is not even a question of mixed races and tongues. It is the national peculiarity of the Alexandrians to seek a reconciliation between the two deepest psychological traits of which they are conscious. That is why we are hysterics and extremists. That is why we are the incomparable lovers we are.” (J 98)

What might have been a spiritual content given to a cosmopolitanism gestured toward in the “question of mixed races and tongues” rapidly descends into a matter of manifestations of excess ascribed to the extremes of asceticism and licentiousness, which in turn are dictated by the place (“the national peculiarity of the Alexandrians”). As an example of the spiritual contribution of the city in a syncretic key, Balthazar’s Cabal is not given much of a chance; even in this, one of the early passages introducing it, it already has a somewhat spurious ring (“speaking now as a religious maniac not a philosopher”). It has been suggested that the Quartet presents Balthazar as a gay man in a positive light, granting him the role of a “teacher/guide” to Darley;73 but while it is the case that several of his statements read as fine aphorisms, what the text produces here is an image of Eastern superstition, irrationality, and excess. Later, reporting the demise of the Cabal, Balthazar says that he had hoped it would release him from sensuality, that his commitment to it was not as disinterested as he had thought, and that “Mystagogues arose, theologians, all the resourceful bigotry that heaps up around a sect and spells dogma!” (C 67). In another context, that of the “natives,” syncretism is exoticized to the point of farce, as witnessed in the mockery with which one of the “exemplars,” Clea, recounts the assimilation of her dead friend Scobie, the cross-dressing former sailor and English Bimbashi in the Egyptian police, to a Coptic saint (see C 80–85, 259–71).74 Durrell’s mockery of Egyptian popular religious beliefs could not stand in sharper contrast to the subtlety with which a writer such as al-Kharrat treats them. As I have argued elsewhere, al-Kharrat’s novels reach into the premodern archive of orality and practices of syncretism—as seen in popular mulids and the interfaith exchange of religiously marked culinary gifts on feast days—to elicit nonelite solidarities across ethnic boundaries. In so doing, he rearticulates cosmopolitanism in a radically different idiom, distancing it from Eurocentric complicity and simultaneously imagining a more tolerant, pluralistic nation.75 But to return to Balthazar’s syncretism, Durrell’s emphasis on superstition goes hand in hand with the feminization of, and homophobia

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projected on, the city, as well as its uncanny quality for figures like Darley, Ludwig Pursewarden, and Mountolive. Pinchin, in a valuable essay titled “Durrell’s Fatal Cleopatra,” takes on the novelist’s “misogyny.” “In the Quartet,” she claims, “sex and hate are heterosexual” —seen, among other thing, in the portrayal of women characters as abject, all of which reinforces the “major concern of Durrell’s fiction [as] writing” whereby if “the couple is Alexandria and the artist” then “mating becomes conquest, and even a kind of murder,” and hence it “is as if each Antony must pull his Cleopatra from her pedestal, must both affirm and reverse history, save and desert his queen.”76 Her interpretation is valid, as far as it goes, but it does not pay due attention to the place of Orientalism, and also homophobia, in the Quartet. Joseph Boone, on the other hand, in “Mappings of Male Desire in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet,” endorses Pinchin’s emphasis on misogyny but harnesses it to both a “curiously elliptical negotiation of ‘other” sexualities” in Durrell and the tension that this creates with the novelist’s “at least partially phallocentric creed” from which “ensues . . . a profound case of authorial anxiety in which the ‘imaginary geography’ of Durrell’s eroticized Egyptian landscape helps to throw the modernist and masculanist tenets of his text into disarray.” Building on Orientalism, and reinscribing in a now-homoerotic key Said’s discussion of Flaubert’s journey to Egypt, Boone traces parallels between the respective accounts of the French novelist and the British one whereby the landscape of Egypt is one of “‘a threatening excess’” that also bespeaks an “othered,” repressed homosexual desire.77 This question of a gendered othering of the “Orient” in Western texts brings me to what I alluded to earlier as a tension in the Quartet’s simultaneous appeal to Orientalism and Hellenism across the space of Alexandria. I suggested that what would seem to be Manichaean, colonial cityscape of a “white city” (aligned with a European/ Hellenized culture) versus a “native quarter” (aligned with an Orientalizing gaze on the indigenous) in the Quartet belies slippages between the two orders. This I had ascribed to an uncanny hybridity that the text projects and went on to advance a partial, diachronic explanation for it by eliciting Durrell’s fictional application of Freud’s psychoanalytical-anthropological unheimlich for which Alexandria seemed an exemplary site, situated in an Africa perceived of as savage and sustaining a “modern” European culture. Indeed, years later on a visit to Alexandria, in response to an interviewer’s comment, “Your

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Alexandria is the city of despair, and incest,” Durrell offered, “I’ve perhaps exaggerated those qualities. But it’s teetering, like the house in the Chaplin film, on the edge of a precipice. You see, it isn’t Europe and it isn’t Africa. And it’s in the middle of a tug-of-war between these two influences. In that sense, it is always in despair because the values are diametrically opposite.”78 Here, the novelist does not locate any potential for a commerce of influence, for syncretism or transculturation, but reinscribes what the Quartet had referred to as “a hybrid” (J 27) as a form of menace. But what should also be underscored is that he attributes a timeless quality (“always in despair”) to the tension, indeed conflict, between the cultural influences that the space of the city sustains. I would want to historicize this “tug-ofwar” by turning to a more immediate, synchronic explanation, relating to the twilight-of-empire setting and early decolonization time of writing of the Quartet.

the menace of levantinism The menacing hybridity in the space of the Quartet belongs to the colonial genealogy of “Levantine,” which overlaps with, although it is not identical to, what Homi Bhabha has called “mimicry.” For Bhabha, “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” 79 The discourse of civility, as Bhabha argues, is built around an ambivalence whereby it will allow for only a partial appropriation of the other, hence undermining its own premises and opening up an “area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double.”80 Bhabha’s reading of Thomas B. Macaulay’s “Minute,” which called for “a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,”81 as the specifications for the production of “mimic men” who are the “effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English,”82 shares some similarity, in the Egyptian context, with Lord Cromer’s comments about the Europeanized Egyptians and the Syrians vis-à-vis British rule. Cromer recognizes in what he calls “a class of individuals many of whom are . . . demoslemised Moslems and invertebrate Europeans”83 a rejection that goes beyond being a flawed colonial mimesis: “It is

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not to be supposed that the educated Egyptian fails to note the defects of his European monitors, be they French or English. He often sees those defects clearly enough, and the result not unfrequently is that, even though he may himself become partially Europeanised, he will despise European civilisation. In what respect, he says to himself, are we Egyptians morally inferior to our teachers?. . . . The result is that the Europeanised Egyptian often returns to Egypt in order to become, both by percept and example, an apostle of anti-European ideas.”84 Cromer finds himself unable to make any confident pronouncements about the “demoslemised Moslems and invertebrate Europeans” (a coded reference also to a number of the nationalists of the time)—a state of affairs he blames on “Egyptian society [being] in a state of flux,” on the “Anglophobia” instilled by “the misrepresentations of the vernacular press,” and the influence of French culture, against which he sets the “moral superiority of English . . . training”85 —or, for that matter, about the Copts.86 Thus, he will turn to the Syrian Christians instead as potential mimic men. These are “a godsend” in handling “the Egyptian administrative chaos” that Britain inherited, with its linguistic requirements that the British do not possess.87 “A high-class Syrian,” according to Cromer, “is an accomplished gentleman, whose manners and general behaviour admit of his being treated on a footing of perfect equality by high-class Europeans. . . . It may be said with truth that he really is civilised. In this respect, he is probably superior, not only to the Copt, but also to the Europeanised Egyptian, who is but often a mere mimic.”88 But if the Syrian’s attitude “towards the British reformer” was vexed, due to his Francophilia, “under the circumstances, the best thing the Syrian could do was to be Anglophile or Francophile according to the requirements of the moment.”89 The underlying mercenary quality that is being attributed to the Syrian is one that helps Cromer explain away the existence of Syrians who are not amenable to British rule, for he goes on to say, “He [the Syrian] would even, under the pressure of self-interest, occasionally emit sparks, which to the uninitiated might appear to emanate from the forge of Egyptian patriotism.”90 Elsewhere, Cromer notes that, though their “ethnological status defies diagnosis,” there is a “process of manufacturing Levantines,” namely, their being “more or less Orientalised Europeans”; and though he purports not to pass blanket judgments, indeed notes that “they necessarily present every gradation of character,” he does observe that, in the most acute cases, they are “tainted with a remarkable degree of moral obliquity” and that

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“the Levantines do not generally bear a high character,” seen in their exploitation of Egyptians.91 The etymology of the term Cromer is deploying, Levantine, is the subject of various speculations, one of which suggests that it was coined in the sixteenth century by the French, who are said to have derived it from “soleil levant” (rising sun). In any case, the ethnicities the term covered changed over time from European traders resident in the Levant to Westernized bourgeois members of minorities including Syro-Lebanese Christians, Sephardic Jews, Maltese, Cypriots, Armenians, and Greeks living in the eastern Mediterranean and involved in Ottoman trade with the West. But the colonial designation “Levantine” gradually acquired the pejorative connotations of a mercenary person “whose business dealings were ethically tainted.”92 To extrapolate from Cromer’s account, the distinction between the Levantines and the Syrians rests on the perception that the former are self-serving whereas the latter can be induced to act in service of the British colonial authority. But the questionable wholesale amenability Cromer locates in the Syro-Lebanese, particularly the Christians, belongs to the broader colonial trope that generally goes under the selfsame label of Levantinism, a form of ersatz hybrid of Middle Eastern and European values—often figured as a “dragoman”93 construed as a treacherous translator—whose suspect but hoped for complicity can then be valorized with the label “cosmopolitan.” Others, it should be added, have used the same term to refer to the SyroLebanese, and the notion of Levantine as a mercenary mimic man was in any case quite current in the 1940s and 1950s, as in Fedden’s “Anatomy of Exile” or Durrell’s letter to Miller, above, to be applied to the cosmopolitan classes of the big cities of Egypt.94 Durrell, as I see it, would take this colonial genealogy of “Levantine” and give it a new, neocolonial lease on life, extending it into the postindependence period in which the Quartet was published. If, geographically speaking, Alexandria is not situated in either Europe or the Levant (i.e., the eastern Mediterranean), Durrell’s Quartet seems to locate the city on the fault line of an ambivalence. Mountolive reflects, “The Alexandrians themselves were strangers and exiles to the Egypt which existed below the glittering surface of their dreams, ringed by the hot deserts and fanned by the bleakness of a faith which renounced worldly pleasure: the Egypt of rags and sores, of beauty and desperation. Alexandria was still Europe—the capital of Asiatic Europe, if such a thing could exist” (M 146). What the text construes

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as Alexandrians not only precludes those of European descent who did not see themselves as strangers and exiles, such as Cavafy, but more startlingly Egyptians, and specifically Muslims. (Is there not in Durrell’s spuriously “bleak [ . . . ] faith which renounced worldly pleasure” a distant, garbled echo of Forster’s questionable “Islam, strong through its abjuration of Love, was the one system the city could not handle” [AHG 84]?)95 In construing the Alexandrians as European(ized) strangers and exiles, the text has recourse to a species of “imaginative geography” used by other writers too to dispossess the city from the country and ascribes it to Europe, as in Alexandrea ad Aegyptum.96 But if the Alexandrians are European(ized), then they are, as evinced in the geographic metaphor, mimic men, following Bhabha, in that they are almost the same (“was still Europe”) but not quite (the aptly anomalous “capital of Asiatic Europe”)—in a sense a paraphrase of Levantinism. In another passage that likewise draws on spatial imagery to articulate cultural identity, the perspective shifts from the Alexandrians’ European ascription to a fear of the return of a repressed Africa. “This city,” reflects Arnauti, is “built like a dyke to hold back the flood of African darkness; but the soft-footed blacks have already started leaking into the European quarters: a sort of racial osmosis is going on” (J 66). This quotation, however, unlike the first, shifts gear from an ethnic/religious designation of Alexandrians as quasiEuropean to racial discourse marked by paranoia about miscegenation. It is significant that whereas the quotation begins, like the earlier one, by setting Alexandria against a bigger entity to which it belongs but against which it is defined (here Africa, against which the city is “built like a dyke”), it gradually transpires that what is meant by Alexandria is the homely “quarters” of the “white city,” secured and buttressed against the racial Other who is within the city, presumably in the so-called native quarter, and which constitutes a stealthy, “softfooted” menace. Indeed the zooming in from the city to the European quarters may not be merely a matter of a more accurate definition of what the text constructs as Alexandria but also an expression of a growing sense of being under siege. The words quoted above are preceded by a description of the “women of the foreign communities here”: “Fear, insecurity dominates them. They have the illusion of foundering in the ocean of blackness all around” (J 65, 66). And leading up to this is Arnauti’s comment about his first meeting with Justine that emphasizes “passing”: “She pretends to be a Greek, but

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she must be Jewish. It takes a Jew to smell out a Jew; and neither of us has the courage to confess our true race” (J 65). Durrell’s conception here—the Europeanized Levantine mimicry of the “cosmopolitan” elite of mixed origins versus the menace of “racial osmosis” with the “blacks”—conforms to what Bhabha identifies as the “ambivalence of colonial authority [which] repeatedly turns from mimicry—a difference that is almost nothing but not quite—to menace—a difference that is almost total but not quite. And in that other scene of colonial power, where history turns to farce and presence to ‘a part’ can be seen the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably.”97 What reinforces the racist paranoia in the Quartet, however, is a class one,98 a fear of what is within the time frame of the Quartet an impending—and, it should be added, projected back from the 1950s time of writing99 —Egyptianization of the economy of the city, itself an index of the weakening of Britain’s hold on the country. In terms of the local elite of the Quartet, the Levantines whose Europeanization is construed as precarious, their politically and psychologically threatening quality is clinched in the “conspiracy.” One of the key plots in the book, the unfolding of which grafts layers of different motives onto actions hitherto partially understood or altogether misunderstood (alliances, affairs, treacheries, and disappearances), this political scheme of Nessim’s brings Copts and Jews together, hence his marriage to Justine, to prove his credentials to Jewish fellow conspirators. The plot consists in an underground network concerned with smuggling arms into Palestine in an alliance with the Jews there, in hopes that a triumphant Zionism, when it has overthrown the British mandate in Palestine, would work to protect the interests of non-Muslim groups in the region, specifically the Copts, against the perceived hostility of a rising tide of Arab nationalism.100 Although the conspiracy is uncovered by a certain Brigadier Oliver Maskelyne who conducts local British intelligence, action on it is repeatedly foiled and delayed due both to the curtailment of England’s power in Egypt in the wake of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty and to what is arguably the seduction and helplessness of the two British officials whose task it is to put an end to the conspiracy. These are Pursewarden, who has an important post in the embassy, and Mountolive, the ambassador, both of whom are intimate with Nessim and his milieu. Maskelyne’s report is shelved, and he is transferred by Mountolive to Palestine, where he is “killed in desert sortie”

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(C 231). When proof of the soundness of Maskelyne’s report on the conspiracy reaches Pursewarden, he refers the matter to Mountolive and commits suicide. Mountolive, albeit dazed and preferring not to take action, refers the matter to London, which, no longer empowered to intervene directly, prevaricates, until further evidence means that the matter is put to the Egyptian government. Eventually, after his bribes to the minister of interior can no longer stay the latter’s hand due to other pressures, Nessim’s assets are sequestrated, and both he and Justine are placed under house arrest (years later, they will make a comeback, with new political plans). But who is Nessim Hosnani? The scion of an established, landowning Coptic family, a banker and a socialite, his education in Oxford and Germany, we are told, has given him a cerebral, metaphysical bent at the expense of his love for painting and rendered him something of a misfit (J 28). Yet again, Nessim is undoubtedly one of Alexandria’s cosmopolitans, an “exemplar” of the city, indeed its very “darling” (C 116). It is as such, as a member of an elite perceived as European/ ized and tractable, that he is trusted by the British against whom he is secretly plotting. Faced with the document concerning “our Nessim,” detailing a “Conspiracy Among the Copts,” Pursewarden finds the evidence unlikely “knowing Nessim” (M 107; emphasis mine). What makes Nessim “ours,” one of “us,” is not solely the friendship that binds him to both Mountolive and Pursewarden, but the fact of that friendship being forged in an atmosphere of a shared European “worldliness” to which Nessim’s inherited Anglophilia additionally exempts him from suspicion.101 Thus, “our gentle Nessim” (M 109) is part and parcel of what the British characters mistakenly at first take for a Levantine, Europeanized amenability of the cosmopolitans of the Alexandria of the Quartet. It is this mimicry-turned-menace that brings about the unhinging, both emotional and epistemological, not only of Darley, but also of Pursewarden and Mountolive, as they get drawn into “the slime of plot and counter-plot” (B 22). The quotation is from Darley’s interior monologue at the beginning of Balthazar when, now made aware that he has been used as a decoy in Justine’s hands, although not yet in full possession of the facts of the conspiracy, he reflects on the seething sordidness of Alexandria. In a prototypical image of abject feminization, he fervently wishes to get to the bottom of the story to be delivered “from this whore among cities” (B 23). In the suicide note Pursewarden writes to Mountolive when he has discovered that he

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has been duped by Nessim and Justine, he, likewise, speaks of “the slime of plot and counterplot” (M 183). If the uncovering of and miscarriages in dealing with the conspiracy allegorize the loss of British control in Egypt, or “the destruction of the imperial self,”102 then the background given the three Englishmen involved, Maskelyne, Mountolive, and Pursewarden, is all the more significant. Maskelyne, a remnant from the War Office Agency in Egypt that dates back to the Protectorate, the autonomy of which can no longer remain after the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, judges all things thus: “‘A good show for the Raj’ and ‘Not such a good show for the Raj’” (M 106). When Maskelyne dies, it transpires that his grandfather had taken part in the battle of al-Tall al-Kabir in 1882, in which ‘Urabi and other nationalist leaders were defeated; hence, his imperial genealogy traces back directly to the beginning of the British occupation of Egypt. As for Pursewarden, who will “Thank God for the Irishman and the Jew who spat in my blood” (M 113), who is ill at ease with his own inevitable sense of exile— “How marvelous it would be,” he reflects, “to feel the same assured relations with his own country, the same certainty of return!” (M 161)—his father, a soldier who died during World War I, performed, in Maskelyne’s words, one of those “acts of gallantry [that] come as much out of cowardice as bravery” (M 137), as would the son, in his desire to serve a country to which his belonging is not secure. Of the three men, Mountolive is the most explicitly drawn along the lines of an Orientalist. His father, originally a judge in India, had become “preeminent in Indian scholarship, an editor and interpreter of rare and neglected texts,” and had stayed on after sending his family to England, living in a Buddhist lodge (M 96). The novelist’s sketch of Mountolive pére places him in a genealogical line of descent from Sir William Jones whose legal scholarship—when combined with his foundational role in the study of India—Said considers of “symbolic significance for the history of Orientalism,” which is reflected in the careers of other English Orientalists in the subcontinent as indexical of the distillation and codification of the Orient’s classical past, eventually to serve its governance in modern times.103 Mountolive’s introduction to Egypt had occurred years before he became ambassador to the country; as a young man in the Foreign Office he had spent a year there improving his Arabic. As a guest for two months at the Hosnanis’s Karm Abu Girg estate, the youthful Mountolive sets the reality of his experience against the canon

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of Orientalist scholarship in which he has been tutored. Much as Mountolive will speak of moving out of the confines of previous assumptions and acquiring an education, presumably based on an empirically experienced reality of a portion of the East, his own metaphors pull elsewhere. The figures of speech he uses betray a reinscription of the referent within a canon of textual representation the authority of which he will not question: the world of Karm Abu Girg in which he moves is made to project out from “the canvas his own imagination had painted,” that is based on the “world of Burton, Beckford, Lady Hester” (M 22). Significantly, his question is not whether the worlds authored/authorized by these Orientalists had really existed; rather, he rhetorically confirms that they still existed. The “soil of his new life” is not there to yield its own readings but to sustain the “transplanting” of “a whole huge intact world from his imagination” (M 22; emphasis added). Hence a coherent textual and representational canon that is consonant not only with Said’s observation that “Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object”104 but also with the centrality to the discourse of given Orientalist authors. For just as Said will remind us that “Edward Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians was read and cited by such diverse figures as Nerval, Flaubert, and Richard Burton,”105 so will Mountolive consider “the conventional study by Lane as the true gospel of Egypt” (M 43), jot down ethnographic notes about his experience in the manner of Lane, and indeed on one occasion, much later, mimic the author of Manners and Customs, in that he goes out disguised. There remains the image of “penetrating a foreign country.” At the Hosnanis, Mountolive is taken on as the lover of Leila, Nessim’s mother, whose husband is an invalid. The relationship between Mountolive and Leila is very clearly meant to allegorize a love affair between England and Egypt. Leila, an Alexandrian, had excelled at her studies in Cairo, we are told, and had “nourished the hope of going to Europe to continue them” (M 23), but her dreams were curtailed by an arranged marriage. Thus, in her formation and background, Leila is ascribed to both a cosmopolitanism of an Alexandria oriented toward Europe, and, through the fact of her being a Copt now also living in the countryside, to Egypt. Significantly, when the young Mountolive asks this older and much more experienced Egyptian woman what she sees in him, her answer is to quote an English book, all about the English manly ethos, then

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comment, “‘You ask me why . . . Because,’ with a sigh, ‘you are English, I suppose’” (M 29). Although while reflecting on this identification of his country with him—“Mountolive listened to her voice with astonishment, pity and shame. It was clear that what she saw in him was something like a prototype of a nation which existed only in her imagination. She was kissing and cherishing a painted image of England” (M 29) that is “an absurd book-fed dream” (M 29)— he, likewise, will identify Egypt with a woman—“‘Egypt,’ he said to himself as one might repeat the name of a woman. ‘Egypt’” (M 12). Theirs, then, is an affair that allegorizes the colonial relationship between England and Egypt even as the end of the affair enacts the demise of Britain’s hold over Egypt.106 Returning to Egypt to take up his duties as ambassador, the tune that should have sounded a note of warning to Mountolive is one played by a band at the official reception in his honor. The “band suddenly struck up raggedly, playing woefully out of key; and under the plaintive iterations of a European melody played somehow in quartertones he recognized his own National Anthem. It was startling, and he had difficulty in not smiling. The police mission had been diligently training the Egyptian force in the uses of the slide-trombone. But the whole performance had a desultory and impromptu air” (M 132). The Egyptianized national anthem of Great Britain belongs within what Bhabha would have designated “the ambivalent world of the ‘not quite/not white,’ on the margins of metropolitan desire, [where] the founding objects of the Western world become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouvés of the colonial discourse—the part-objects of presence.”107 When as ambassador he wrestles with the issue of the conspiracy, Mountolive finds his will paralyzed partly on account of his emotions toward Leila, as well as the alignment in sensibility between her and her son Nessim,108 which further ensure the young diplomat’s identification with a man whom he had from the start seen as a kindred spirit.109 The narrator, moreover, implies a quasi-incestuous dimension to Leila’s attraction to Mountolive: “He was both a lover to her and a sort of hapless man-child who could be guided by her toward his own growth” (M 30).110 What precipitates Mountolive’s impression of unreality and loss of sense of self (see M 236) in the months after the confirmation of the conspiracy is not exclusively the knowledge that, after the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, “they could no longer give orders in Egypt as once the High Commission had been able to do” (M 251). Nor is it

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solely “the old conflict between duty, reason and personal affection which every political man knows is his cross” (M 185–86) that makes him guiltily wish that Nessim and his wife should go unpunished. His incomprehension arises as much from the fact that he “believed too firmly in the English mystique to realize fully that anyone could have lost faith in it and the promise it might hold for future security, future stability” (M 247) as from a long-held belief that Nessim is a “cosmopolitan” and, as such, ingested within a pro-British identity. Confronted with proof irrefutable about the conspiracy, all Mountolive can think of this “piece of gratuitous madness” is, “How typical of Egypt! Yet, strangely, how untypical of Nessim!” (M 247). Having long repressed his knowledge of Coptic grievances against the British which Hosnani père had outlined for him during his youthful sojourn in the country, and trusted Nessim both because he is Leila’s son (see M 186) and an Anglophile semblable of himself, the ambassador now “feel[s] almost persecuted” (M 251). Through the doubling of Nessim and Mountolive,111 metaphors of hollowness, entrapment, and death proliferate in the ambassador’s self-perception as well as in his perception of the perpetrators of the plot, Nessim and Justine. When they meet socially, Mountolive and Nessim mirror each other in a suavity of manner that conceals the shared knowledge of the divide that separates them: “Nothing of what was going on beneath the surface showed in the elastic and capable manner of the two tall men who stood smoking by the front door, waiting for the car to arrive. . . . Then leaning back in his beflagged car . . . Mountolive felt his innermost soul become as dusty, as airless as an Egyptian tomb” (M 190). It is significant that the expression of Mountolive’s sense of spiritual atrophying, following on his meeting with Nessim, should be couched in Egyptian terms. For if, as Freud suggests, the function of the double has traveled from being the preserver against death evidenced in the ancient Egyptians’ funerary statuary and masks of the dead to being “the uncanny harbinger of death,”112 Mountolive’s meeting with his Egyptian double whom he now recognizes as a threat to himself and the authority he represents places additional markers on the image of the “Egyptian tomb.” Likewise, Mountolive cannot perceive the Hosnanis other than in metonymies of presence, in language that recalls the blurring of the dividing line between dream and reality in Freud’s reading of the uncanny. Reflecting on his own powerlessness, Mountolive also thinks of his contenders, Nessim and company, as “etiolated projections of a

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sick imagination,” “empty suits of clothes,” and “expressionless waxworks” (M 269). Such images resonate, of course, with the examples given by Jentsch, as cited by Freud, of the uncanny “impression made by waxwork figures, ingenuously constructed dolls and automata,” as illustrative of the terror induced by “‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.’”113 But the emptiness is also an expression of Mountolive’s “powerlessness to act” (M 269) and his inability to fully apprehend how the familiar, Anglophile Alexandrian friends could have turned against himself and Britain’s interests in a “colorless drama of contending wills” (M 269). Elsewhere, Mountolive’s anxieties about the conspiracy, and his uncertainty about whether his former lover Leila, Nessim’s mother, has any part in it, assert themselves in a dream reminiscent of Nessim’s Macedonian visions in its recourse to the Hellenistic archive. In the dream he sees himself on a boat on the lakes surrounding the Hosnanis’ estate, sensing the presence of the brothers, Nessim and Narouz, albeit unnamed and seen in “silhouette,” figures of menace, “armed with long-barreled rifles,” whom he knows will overtake him (M 248, 249). But the threat would seem to be held at bay by the “warm in the circle of Leila’s arms, as if he were Antony at Actium.” The fact of Leila being identified in Mountolive’s mind with Egypt, when combined with the historical reference to Actium, where according to traditional historical accounts Cleopatra abandoned Antony and hence precipitated his defeat, would indicate, albeit in muted form, an anxiety that here too is a sense that imminent defeat and treachery await Mountolive by Egypt/Leila.114 As it will fall out, the treachery will be in the gap between his romantic Orientalist representation of Egypt and a reality that the novel will nevertheless insist on presenting as sordid. Prior to going into an exile that Nessim has imposed on her due to the uncovering of his conspiracy of which she was unaware, Leila makes a rendezvous with Mountolive to plead with him on behalf of her son. Seeing Leila for the first time in years—after an attack of smallpox, she has been living as a recluse on the farm—Mountolive cannot relate to the much older, disfigured woman who has come to meet him in a horse-drawn cab. He “felt as one does in a dream when one walks without touching the ground. . . . His feelings, like antennae, were reaching out toward the dark figure, trying to gather and assess the meaning of these tumbling phrases and to analyze the

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queer sense of disorientation which they carried, buried in them, like a foreign intonation creeping into a familiar voices” (M 278; emphasis added). Unable to identify this woman with his “familiar,” idealized image of Leila/Egypt, his sense of estrangement will be projected onto his former lover as being unheimlich in a specifically racialized vein. As the cab uncannily circles over and again around the Auberge Bleue, as Mountolive comes to see the scarred face she has bravely made a point of not covering, as he notes the reek she exudes of heavy perfume and the whiskey she has had to bolster herself for the meeting, he can only perceive her in the starkest, most denigrating stereotypes. Leila’s rapid transformation in Mountolive’s eyes goes from an ascription to the Orient of romance to that of squalor and animalism: he sees her as “a cartoon of animals dressed up and acting as human beings” (M 280). This, aside from bringing to the surface the intimate connection between a feminized Orient and an animalistic eroticism, emblematized in the figure of the odalisque, for example, now makes her coterminous not with Alexandria’s drawing rooms but with the imagery associated with the city’s “Arab quarter,” Mountolive’s next destination. Mountolive appears to have a sudden insight into the distorting construction he had borne about the country: “Leila had suddenly left him face to face with a reality which, he supposed, had always lain lurking behind the dusty tapestry of his romantic notions. In a sense she had been Egypt, his own private Egypt of the mind; and now this image had been husked, stripped bare” (M 283; emphasis added). Yet if he now seems to be aware that she had been an Orientalist construct all along, it is only a momentary awareness: in his visit to the “Arab quarter” in hopes of recapturing something of “his” Egypt, he will choose to go in Oriental disguise, à la Lane and so many other Orientalists, so that he is “not simply lost in the Arab quarter, [but] lost in a series of texts.”115 Mountolive’s inebriated thoughts as he heads toward the “Arab quarter” are provided in a stream-of-consciousness-like passage that constitutes a pastiche of imagery associated with the East, in the “world of Moslem time stretch[ing] back to Othello [himself an exemplary figure of menacing mimicry] and beyond” (M 285). Engaging a sheikh in hopes of gaining “some mystical vision of religious truth” (M 288), he is thrust into the very same child brothel where Justine had gone in search of her lost child (J 43–45) and from which she had been “rescued” by Nessim and Darley, and to which she was later to return with Pursewarden (C 146–50).

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The many uncanny returns to this locus, reminiscent of Freud’s unwitting circling around in the red-light district of the Italian town that he mentions in the essay “On the ‘Uncanny,’” appear to be one more example of the “gravitational field” of Alexandria.116 Locked in among the child prostitutes, the sheikh having deserted him, Mountolive is “attacked” by the children who are afraid that his protests might lose them “a lucrative client” (M 291). The similes drawn from plant and insect life, with a suggestion of the carnivorous about them—their arms around his waist are “like lianas in a tropical jungle” (M 290) and their fingers “rov[ing] over him” bring to his mind the image from his readings “of a man staked down upon the burning sand over a nest of white ants . . . soon [to] pick the flesh from his very bones” (M 291)—when coupled with “tropical jungle[s],” are not that far removed from colonial stereotypes of cannibalism.117 But the children, in robbing Mountolive of his wallet, studs, and cufflinks and effectively destroying his assumed identity, call into question the voyeurism and the assumed textual upper hand conferred by Orientalism.118 It is at this point, fleeing Alexandria, that Mountolive recoils from the city’s “perverted languors, its ancient wisdoms and terrors,” and resolves (though his resolution will not bear fruit) to ask to be transferred to another country: “He would waste no more time upon this Egypt of deceptions and squalor, this betraying landscape which turned emotions and memories to dust, which beggared friendship and destroyed love” (M 294 and 293, respectively; emphasis added).

neocolonialism in the

QUARTET

If in the process of drawing on Orientalism, the Quartet undermines the gestures and tropes associated with that archive, does this mean its perspective is postcolonial? My insistence on revealing a neocolonial subtext to the Quartet derives its urgency from a tendency in Durrell criticism in the past two decades that suggests the presence of a postcolonial worldview in this work and/or interprets it as offering cosmopolitan affiliations that seek to overcome chauvinistic exclusions. For example, Roger Bowen argues that the Quartet’s Orientalist discourse is both “elegiac and ironic,” but he nevertheless detects in the text the emergence of “traces of postcolonial discourse.”119 Anne Ricketson Zahlan concludes a Bakhtinian carnivalesque reading of the Alexandria of the Quartet as a “city of many fusions” that enacts

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the dethronement of the “colonial white man,”120 thus: “Past and present; Europe, Africa, and Asia converge in Alexandria, and The Alexandria Quartet evokes the flux of inter-cultural contacts within a changing world. . . . Lawrence Durrell establishes the fitness of the novel to chronicle the reluctant lurchings of Western culture through the crisis and change of the post-colonial moment.”121 I concur with the reading of the Quartet as a text of the end of empire. But then I find that in Durrell’s retroactive prognostications about the decolonization moment he already indicates neocolonial opportunities that should sound a warning against the viability of his text for a rethought cosmopolitanism in alignment with postcolonial perspectives. Part of what underwrites such interpretations of the Quartet is the cachet that the term postcolonial garnered in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, in the 1990s proponents and critics alike of the newfangled term postcolonial would take on the temporal occlusions wrought in its prefix, in particular, the assumption that decolonization is a done deed. The prefix post-, indicating that which succeeds, “potentially inhibits forceful articulations of what one might call ‘neo-coloniality,’” as Ella Shohat puts it, making “it easier not to see, and therefore to theorize, the continuities in international imbalances in imperial power,” in Anne McClintock’s words.122 Hence there is a need, as these two scholars have argued, for resorting to different frameworks in tandem, deployed flexibly in relation to given locations and power configurations for the purposes of a more radical criticism.123 It is not that the recent Durrell scholarship is altogether oblivious to the neocolonial aspect of the text. Rather, when the neocolonial is invoked by Bowen and Zahlan—and in passing at that—it is ascribed to the political recommendations of a single British character, Pursewarden, who suggests to the incoming British ambassador, Mountolive, “I believe we should reorient policy and build Jewry into the power behind the scenes here. And quick” (M 104), and his reference to Copts as foreigners.124 With that cursory reference, the Quartet is then reclaimed as a text of twilight-of-empire that is not out of sync with postcolonial perspectives. By contrast, I claim that the Quartet, past its occasional ironies about Orientalism, ultimately goes on to perform a new gesture in which literature and neocolonial power this time are in collusion, witnessed in Durrell’s concoction of the highly contrived Coptic-Jewish anti-Arab nationalism pro-Zionist conspiracy. This brings me back to the contemporaneous but contrasting takes on decolonization in

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Fanon and Durrell that I touched on earlier, whereby the former warns against neocolonialism and the role therein of a local cosmopolitan bourgeoisie and the latter, in my interpretation at least, charts the same pattern in a commending fashion. To start with, it is not just Pursewarden, the colonial Brit, who refers to the Copts as foreigners: in the space of a few pages within the same installment of the Quartet, Durrell will have had the Copts described as such,125 twice by the Coptic Nessim himself, the second time in italics, “‘If only the Jews can win their freedom, we can all be at ease. It is the only hope for us . . . the dispossessed foreigners’” (M 199; see also M 198). It is essential, therefore, to dwell at some length on the possible sources and ideological effects of the Quartet’s Coptic-Jewish “conspiracy.” Durrell’s main source on the Copts is S. H. Leeder’s Modern Sons of the Pharaohs: A Study of the Manners and Customs of the Copts of Egypt (1918).126 Written on the eve of World War I, Leeder’s book is a combination of ethnographic detail, anecdotes based on firsthand experience, travel writing, and historical notes addressed to an English audience and intended to draw sympathy toward the Copts whom English writers like Lane (the echoing of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians in Leeder’s title is by no means a coincidence)127 and British policy in Egypt have slighted. Although patently working within an Orientalist ethnographic tradition, in a few of the details of his account Leeder goes against the grain of received canons of wisdom about Egypt and the Orient, as in the misguided perception that Muslims have always discriminated against Egyptian Christians, which he dispels.128 But the ultimate aim of his book is, by dint of foregrounding the Copts and what he argues is their demotion in public life and government posts under the British, not so much to question the occupation but rather to call for a “reformed,” more evenhanded colonial administration of this part of the empire.129 It should be noted that when Modern Sons of the Pharaohs first came out, Forster (then busy on his Alexandria book, with its “Spiritual City” section) reviewed it for the Egyptian Mail. Giving praise, among other things, for the author’s “great . . . fairness of mind that . . . does not fall into the temptation of depreciating Islam,” Forster nevertheless takes issue with the book’s “confused and sketchy”130 historical account and, not unfairly, its fuddled approach to the “sons of the Pharaohs” designation of the Copts in the title. But Leeder’s vagueness, as well as occasional Orientalist statements, I would add, is a far cry from what Durrell would get out of his text.

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Durrell appropriates from Leeder the narrative of Coptic grievances against the British to altogether different ends, for the purposes of the background of the Coptic conspiracy in the Quartet. He culls passages from two of Leeder’s chapters, breaks them up, and reproduces them—with some modification, a heightening of tone and a few interjections introduced—in the form of bouts of indignation against the British by Nessim’s father, in response to Mountolive’s gaffe about the religious identity of his hosts.131 The Crusaders’ scorn for and brutality to Eastern Christians, the names of Copts occupying high posts under Muhammad ‘Ali and his descendants, the downgrading of Egyptian Christians in governmental positions after the British occupation of Egypt—all come directly from Leeder. The tirade culminates in the invalid’s requesting that a certain book (Leeder’s, albeit unidentified in the text) be brought to him, reading out loud a passage that clinches British injustices to the Copts, and commenting, “These are the words of an Englishman. It is to his honor that he has written them” (M 43).132 The key point to make, though, is that in laying the groundwork for the Coptic conspiracy, Durrell shifts the emphasis in Leeder’s account to produce a rankling Muslim-Coptic sectarian problem. Although, following Leeder, Durrell has the Coptic family in the Quartet note that religious intolerance is contrary to the teachings of Islam, unlike him, he will rewrite what the author of Modern Sons of the Pharaohs depicted as tensions, and decidedly remediable ones, between Muslims and Copts, fostered by British policy into a narrative of sectarian discrimination and hatred. Where Leeder will assert that “the cleavage between Copt and Moslem . . . dates only from the British occupation; the two have no innate antagonism, as history has again and again proved,”133 Durrell will have the Hosnani invalid rant, “‘There were never any differences between us and the Moslems in Egypt before they [the British] came. The British have taught the Moslems to hate the Copts and to discriminate against them’” (M 40; emphasis added). For the purposes of the conspiracy, Durrell will also conveniently ignore the decades between the publication of Leeder’s book (1918) and the second half of the 1930s, at which time he has Nessim explain to Justine—herself a local—apropos of the conspiracy, “‘We all know, that our days are numbered since the French and the British have lost control in the Middle East. We, the foreign communities, with all we have built up, are being gradually engulfed by the Arab tide, the Moslem tide. Some of us are trying to work against

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it; Armenians, Copts, Jews, and Greeks here in Egypt’” (M 198; emphasis added). The question to be asked is, what was Durrell overlooking in the interim between 1918, the date of Leeder’s book, and the late 1930s, when Mountolive returns to Egypt as ambassador and Nessim is working on the conspiracy?134 For someone of Hosnani père’s generation in Egypt, memories of the 1919 Revolution demanding the end of the Protectorate and complete independence were very much alive. The central emblem of the revolution—the cross and the crescent— together with “priests and shaikhs sharing the pulpit in mosques and churches,”135 was a clear message of national, religious unity against the occupation. The wafd, or delegation, that went to the peace conference in Paris in 1919 to present Egypt’s demand for independence included three Copts,136 and the community would continue to feature prominently in the political party that sprang out of the revolution. When in 1922 Britain granted Egypt independence (which was to prove partial), it reserved three prerogatives; one of these was “the right to intervene in Egyptian affairs to protect minorities and foreigners,” to which “Coptic opposition . . . was vehement.”137 In the first parliamentary elections after the end of the Protectorate, a debate ensued about whether the proportional representation guaranteed the community by a British law should be maintained, and this was rejected by most Copts.138 As for the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, in which Copts like Makram ‘Ubaid played a prominent role, this “made no mention of minorities,” despite the lobbying of the Egypt Inter-Mission Council for the protection of minorities.139 When Britain later “pressed the Egyptian government” to make a statement on the matter to the League of Nations, Coptic as well as Muslim key figures of the Wafd, the secular anti-British party that came into being out of the 1919 Revolution, rejected this.140 True, such a stance was “not unanimous” among the community, and the British would continue to intervene “on behalf of” the Copts in election campaigns, if sporadically, after 1936,141 and post-1936 Coptic apprehensions did exist and should not be glossed over.142 However, these are nothing compared with the terror Durrell depicts, let alone the unthinkable fiction of treason that he contrives in a literary replication of the divide-and-rule colonial policy that the British applied in a full-fledged manner, if in India, his place of birth, and not consistently in Egypt.143 Michael Diboll has broached the possibility that, given Durrell’s World War II work for British intelligence in Egypt, and the latter’s

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tendency “to view any indigenous articulation of political power as a plot against the British presence in Egypt, could not the origin of the Quartet’s fictitious ‘Coptic conspiracy’ lie in British misgivings about Christian secularist movements in Egyptian politics?”144 While he does hedge his bets, he goes to great lengths ascribing the Quartet’s Coptic-Jewish pro-Zionist conspiracy to the Wafd, producing an allegorical reading of the various Hosnanis that equates them with given trends within that party. Seeking in the Quartet textual evidence to endorse the Zionist component of this reading of the conspiracy, all that Diboll can cite by way of corroboration is a parallel between Nessim’s appeal to the Zionist movement when trying to win over Justine—“but with the Jews—there is something young there: the cockpit of Europe in these rotten marshes of a dying race” (M 200)—and a collaboration between the Wafd, with its prominent Coptic membership, and the Association de la Jeunesse Juive Egyptienne.145 The textual evidence is flimsy, as is the suggestion that the conspiracy may have been “based on what Durrell had heard of distorted British perceptions of the Wafd while he was working for the British administration in war-time Egypt.”146 For it was precisely during World War II, in 1942 in fact, that the Wafd— already under a cloud among other nationalists for what they perceived as the compromises of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty— compromised itself further by accepting to be thrust, by the British, upon King Farouk as more amenable to their agenda. Diboll cites Nessim’s conversation with Justine where he says, “If only the Jews can win their freedom, we can all be at ease. It is the only hope for us . . . the dispossessed foreigners” (M 199; emphasis in original). But he does not pause to consider the flagrant contradiction in an Egyptian, and a Copt at that, including his community among foreigners, on the one hand, and the various strains of nationalist thought in Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century that Diboll himself has cited in his discussion of the Wafd, including the NeoPharaonist one, on the other. Then again, this is a critic who has put up a defense of the Quartet by arguing that its “attitudes towards ethnicity and gender” should not be unduly judged by the standards of posterity, that these attitudes pale in comparison to the colonial discourse in texts by the likes of Anthony Trollope, that “post-colonial theorists feel squeamish about the fact that Durrell’s crumbling Imperial world is not so historically remote as that of Conrad or Kipling,” and that the Quartet “makes it

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clear that the future of the Middle East clearly lies in the hands of the Arabs, Copts, Greeks and Jews that populate it.”147 What, then, to make of this anomalous statement by Nessim about the Christians of Egypt as “foreign” in a text, specifically Mountolive, where Durrell has culled from Leeder and put in the mouth of Nessim’s father, “‘Do you know what they call us—the Moslems? . . . I will tell you. Gins Pharoony. Yes, we are genus Pharaonicus—the true descendants of the ancients, the true marrow of Egypt. We call ourselves Gypt—ancient Egyptians’” (M 41)?148 Could Durrell have been attempting to lend plausibility to his highly contrived plot by designating its perpetrators as foreigners? The contradiction between the “genus Pharaonicus” and the “foreigner” designation would indicate otherwise. What is more likely is that this is a lapse on Durrell’s part. Yet it is a telling lapse in terms of the ideological consequences of the fictional conspiracy. If one is to consider the source of the conspiracy, one might turn to Durrell’s time, not in Egypt, but in Cyprus (1953– 56),149 which immediately precedes the writing of the last three volumes of the Quartet and overlaps with the writing of the first volume, Justine.150 It was at that stage, while Cyprus was a British crown colony and the EOKA, or the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters, pushing for union with Greece, was at the height of its activity, that Durrell became director of public information. The post meant that “he would be in charge of government press releases, publications [e.g., the Cyprus Review], and the Cyprus broadcasting service.”151 In a meticulous reading of the content and packaging of the Cyprus Review under Durrell’s editorship, David Roessel traces changes the English novelist introduced to provide “far more sophisticated propaganda” in “support [of] the colonialist position,” and, this in Durrell’s own words, to produce “something to stand the government in good stead . . . ”—changes that included running literary texts by English writers to “help spread the British ethos and give the island an identity,” even as the journal kept silent about the brewing crisis on Cyprus.152 The use of literature for propagandistic purposes, even more explicit here than in Durrell’s Egyptian sojourn, would be transposed to the Quartet. Indeed, Ian MacNiven, Durrell’s biographer, has claimed that the Quartet’s conspiracy originates in Cypriot events recast in Egyptian garb: A phase of Cyprus’s complicated history that was to find its way into The Alexandria Quartet, albeit with a shift in location and actors, was the part the Cypriots had played years earlier in running guns to

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Israel [Palestine under British mandate?] to arm the Irgun, the Stern Gang and the armed Jewish insurrection. A brisk trade in contraband weapons brought substantial profits to local merchants and smugglers. Larry [Durrell] would transfer this activity wholesale to the Copts of Egypt—who were innocent of the charge.153

Whatever the specifics of the Cypriot-Zionist connection MacNiven adduces, I would broach another connection. “Operation Susannah,” also known as the “Lavon affair,” unfolded in 1954 when Israeli Military intelligence had a number of Egyptian Jews whom it had recruited as spies conduct attacks, including firebombing Alexandria’s main post office, a number of cinemas in Alexandria and Cairo, and other establishments. The aim of this operation that was exposed the same year may have been to persuade the British that Egypt was volatile, in hopes that this would put paid to their negotiations with the Egyptian government to withdraw their forces from the Suez Canal zone. 154 I would add that, whatever the historical provenance of the “conspiracy,” what is more pertinent is to consider the new elements factored in with the fictive “transfer” of a pro-Zionist activity to the Copts specifically in the Quartet. While the activity runs counter to British and also Arab interests, transposing it to the Copts turns the plot into “an insider job,” which has several consequences in the late 1930s and early to mid-1940s time frame of the Quartet. It forges a fictional division within the region, as it alienates a rooted community by contriving solidarity between it and a movement that sought to establish a new settler colony on Arab lands. For if the uncanny quality that the British characters had detected beneath the surface of the city had pointed toward its progressive Egyptianization, the menace that Nessim posed, while it undermined British interests in the region, was conducted not in the name of the nation but in the name of a new stage of colonialism at a time when decolonization was on the horizon. But if we consider the time of writing of the Quartet and its publication, the second half of the 1950s, a new constellation of implications is yielded by the transposition of the activity to the Copts. Before holding up the Quartet against the Egyptian postindependence era of the time of writing into which readers would inevitably project the text’s ideological baggage, I should note that the 1956 Suez Crisis and subsequent war had not yet occurred when Durrell planned the conspiracy, the genesis of which is already present in Justine (1957). Nevertheless, he would have had in mind, at least by virtue of his position on Cyprus, the unilateral Egyptian abrogation

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in 1951 of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, the 1952 Revolution that was to put an end to the monarchy and usher in the first Egyptian ruler in more than two millennia, and the 1954 negotiations for the withdrawal from the Suez Canal Zone of British troops (whether or not he was aware of the related “Operation Susannah”), as well as the sequestrations first of property of the Egyptian royal family and the beginning of the agrarian reform policies, which meant expropriation of land from big landowners. In the (deceitful) foreshadowing of the leaking of the “soft-footed blacks” “into the European quarters,” in the pronouncements that “one of the major characteristics of Egyptian nationalism is the gradually growing envy and hate of the ‘foreigners’. . . . [whom] the Moslems started . . . to bully and expropriate” (J 66, M 107), Durrell would have his readers likewise project the apprehensiveness of the exemplars of his “foreign communities” into an alleged xenophobia by the postindependence regime, propagandistically translating a largely secular postrevolutionary project into a fictionally (and fictitiously) foretold religious fanaticism. If this were not the case, one would be hard put to explain Durrell’s apparent concern for the Copts and the Jews, two constituencies that otherwise have come under attack in his texts, sometimes jointly, as in a Frenchman, apropos of his love life, wanting “to be left alone— above all, mon cher, from this Judeo-Coptic mania for dissection” (J 21). Elsewhere in the Quartet the anti-Semitism is unmistakable, of which “Plenty hysteria. Plenty Judaic melancholy” (M 109), said of Justine, is a representative sample. Or consider Durrell’s “Coptic Poem,” a scatological invective that takes as its subject “A Coptic deputation, going to Ethiopia / [that] Disappeared one morning. . . . Coptic and Mellifluous. . . . / Fuzzy-wig, kink-haired, with cocoa-butter shining. . . . Walking the desert ways howling and shining.”155 Furthermore, in his introduction to a reprint of Forster’s Alexandria, Durrell takes a swipe at postindependence Egypt but on an altogether different count: “The long flirtation of Nasser with Communism had produced [by the time the novelist revisited Alexandria in 1977] the inevitable deadening effect” (“INE” xviii). But depicting Copts arming the Zionist cause in the 1940s as their last recourse against a perceived fanaticism, read from the vantage point of the 1950s, also patently accrues to a by then extant Israel the status of a necessary, and apparently only democracy in the region. It may be suggested that in interpreting the conspiracy in the Quartet as projecting a neocolonial imaginary conjoined with propaganda for

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Israel I am overstating the case. Here, however, I would adduce a text closely associated with the Quartet, and one that Durrell wrote not long after publishing it, namely “Judith.” This story for a scenario, written for a 1966 film by the same title directed by Daniel Mann, centers on Judith, a German Hungarian Jewess Holocaust survivor whose Nazi officer husband had betrayed both herself and her son. Scarred above all by not knowing the whereabouts of her son, she is illegally smuggled into Palestine under the British mandate where she is taken to a kibbutz the leader of which, Aaron, she falls in love with. Through various plot twists and turns involving a romance with a British officer in Jerusalem, Judith tracks down her husband in Cairo where he is helping the Egyptian army prepare for war with the Zionists and, with Aaron’s help, has him smuggled into Palestine. But before she can get out of him information about their son, he commits suicide, leaving her word with a priest to whom he confesses that their son is dead, as well as a riddle. Back in the kibbutz soon after the UN’s declaration of the founding of the state of Israel and the pulling out of the British, she delivers to Aaron the riddle, which proves to be the key to defending the kibbutz from Arab attacks, with the couple reunited in a happy ending. Confining the discussion to Durrell’s story—which the film version, starring Sophia Loren as Judith and Peter Finch as Aaron, adapts156 — we find that the narrative is palpably teleological. Depicting Judith as initially a self-obsessed woman, unable to put behind her the scars of the past and invested solely in finding her lost son, the story has her by the end embrace the cause of Zionism in parallel with and as endorsed by the happy ending with the kibbutz leader. The story itself spells this out on the last page when Judith briefly thinks that Aaron has died in the attack: “She sat back on her heels, looking at the man she loved. For the first time in years, her whole being was filled with a grief and regret that were not for herself. . . . How little they could spare this man; how much they needed him at this moment when the infant State of Israel was struggling to stay alive.”157 Not only is the kibbutz itself presented as a model of the communal work ethic, but, with the exception of a stray “Abdul” (a stock colonial misnomer), a smuggler at that, Palestinians are nowhere represented in the text, apart from brief references to Arabs (their cause referred to merely as “prevent[ing] the setting up of the new State of Israel”) and, even more tellingly, “the enemy.”158 It only follows on the undisguised Zionist propaganda that the text should participate in occluding the Palestinians, thus projecting in its representation the Zionist slogan

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“A land without a people for a people without a land.” According to MacNiven, when Durrell traveled to Israel in 1964 to make a short CBS film showing Sophia Loren the sights, “Moshe Dayan as Minister of Defence helped arrange the permits for both the CBS film and for Judith, since they were viewed as good propaganda for Israel.”159 More than an initial is shared by Judith and Justine. Like Judith, Justine spends time on a kibbutz; like her, she is in search of a lost child and is likewise gradually “converted” to Zionism; like her, she has a relationship with a British man mired in politics and participates in a smuggling plot on behalf of the cause (in Justine’s case, of arms into Palestine; in Judith’s case, of illegal immigrants into the same country). In broader terms, as I see it, “Judith” both intertextually extends and throws into starker relief the ideological drift of the Quartet, now stripped of the intellectual psychoanalytical, experimental flesh. Popularized in the form of a scenario, as well as the film itself, what emerges is the skeleton of the neocolonial, Zionist propaganda in the earlier text that critics conveniently overlook. But there is one salient difference between “Judith” and the Quartet: the latter has an Egyptian, Nessim, participate in the conspiracy. To return, then, to the Quartet in a different vein: what throws Mountolive into disarray and kills Pursewarden is the passing of empire, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, as witnessed in the disloyal conspiracy of their very trusted Anglophile friend Nessim. That said, however, the Quartet cannot by any stretch of the imagination be appropriated for “postcolonial perspectives” or be said to articulate “postcolonial discourse.” It is not only that the text does not allow for any adumbration of a more just, self-determining, and sovereign society; it does not even gesture toward the existence of a subaltern—the only working-class Egyptians we see, as in the manservant, “one-eyed Hamid, the gentlest of Berberines” (J 58), are barely traces of presences. Furthermore, Nessim aside, anyone who is anti-British is construed as shady: Memlik (whose name is a patent pun on Mamluk), the half-Nubian, half-Albanian (the latter component a throwback to Muhammad ‘Ali and his dynasty) minister of interior, legendary for his venality (bribes received in collector’s copies of the Qur’an) and “Oriental despot” barbarity (“He punished hard and often, without asking questions” [M 255]) is anti-British, we are told, but in absence of any interest on his part in the welfare of the nation, of any platform other than his self-serving interests, one is left to conclude that his dislike of the British is little more than a matter of

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(bad) taste, indeed, possibly even part and parcel of his corruption. If, as has been validly suggested, Memlik is modeled on King Farouk,160 then the latter’s hatred of the British for their intervention in Egyptian affairs and curtailment of his own power is written out from the figure of the minister of interior. What is more, the new incarnation, as it were, given to Nessim and Justine after their fall from grace is amenable to a new stage of imperialism, after the end of occupation as such, as so presciently critiqued by Fanon and Nkrumah in the years succeeding the publication of the last volume of the Quartet. Indeed, Durrell has consolations for certain constituencies in store—for which we need to turn to those who are leaving in that last volume, Clea. With “leave-takings . . . in the air,” Mountolive is posted to France, Clea moves to Paris, Darley returns to the Greek island, and Nessim and Justine are headed elsewhere (C 279). In a letter he sends Clea from the island at the close of the novel that bears her name, Darley declares, “Were it not to see you again I doubt if I could return again to Alexandria. I feel it fade inside me, in my thoughts, like some valedictory mirage—like the sad history of some great queen whose fortunes have foundered among the ruins of armies and the sands of time! My mind has been turning more and more westward” (C 276). Here, in what would appear to be a note of farewell to empire, is the closing of the curtain on Cleopatra’s city now that the armies have withdrawn. But then in the very same letter, Darley, speaking of his job installing a relay station on the Greek island, adds: Things alter their focus on this little island. You called it a metaphor once, I remember, but it is very much a reality to me—though of course vastly changed from the little haven I knew before. It is our invasion which has changed it. You could hardly imagine that ten technicians could make such a change. But we have imported money, and with it are slowly altering the economy of the place, displacing labour at inflated prices, creating all sorts of new needs of which the lucky inhabitants were not conscious before. Needs which in the last analysis will destroy the tightly woven fabric of this feudal village with its tense blood-relationships, its feuds and archaic festivals. Its wholeness will dissolve under these alien pressures . . . It seems inescapable the death we bring to the old order without wishing it. . . . The site which they chose for the relay station is on the mountainous eastward side of the island. (C 272–73; emphasis added)

Ostensibly elegiac and remorseful, the passage nevertheless casts the introduction of the island into Western capitalism and patterns of economic dependency as a unidirectional, teleological inevitability.

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But where are Nessim and Justine, in their new incarnations, off to? Justine’s last words in the Quartet are, “‘We have started something, Nessim and I. We have made a break through at last. . . . I am so happy I could cry. It is something much bigger this time, international. We will have to go to Switzerland next year, probably for good. Nessim’s luck has suddenly changed’” (C 281). Significantly, in this new incarnation, Justine is described as “some powerful engine of destruction [that] had suddenly switched on again” (C 280). For the complicit, pro-Zionist orientation, when coupled with “something much bigger[,] . . . international,” and the Swiss context (hence a base that suggests an absence of “accountability”), spells out a new phase, that of neocolonialism, of distant interventions, enabled by free-floating subjects, deterritorialized, and insulated from responsibility for their actions as well as from possession by that “gravitational field” of “perverted languors,” “ancient wisdoms and terrors,” and above all uncanny landings among starving child prostitutes as the specter of poverty and abjection in which they are complicit. In this, Nessim and Justine’s capital would be not merely their bank account, presumably also in Switzerland (see C 57), but their linguistic flexibility and their transnational network of contacts at “home” and abroad—“cosmopolitan” qualifications all, but ones that in their case specifically, and in view of their agenda, make for particularly unsavory versions of transnational subjects. In passing parentheses, G. S. Fraser comments on Nessim and Justine’s “even grander conspiracy,” “Where did it end, one wonders—Suez, 1956, or the Israeli victory of 1967?”161 Suez, with the “international” (to borrow Justine’s boastful words), or tripartite, efforts of Israel, France, and Britain, would have been all too present in the minds of readers when Mountolive (1958)—let alone the author in the process of writing this installment162 —which fully unfolds the “conspiracy,” was first published. But I would argue that the conspiracy also leads beyond such direct military incursions as the Suez War and the 1967 War and, conjoined with its Zionist propaganda as seen in the foregoing, presages neocolonial interventions that make double use of economic dependency in the form of debts and aid often in conjunction with the weapon of minority protection in maneuvering for political influence and guaranteeing economic interests. This neocolonial use of the “minority” card has indeed been visible in Egypt in recent years in the role of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) as conjoined with the

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lobbying of a small number of Coptic émigrés, in the United States and elsewhere, presenting allegations of discrimination against the Christians of Egypt, with the question of economic repercussions brought to bear on the issue. By no means denying Christian grievances, I argue that this situation is best understood in its political context, namely as an instantiation of neocolonialism using the weapon of “divide and rule” that Nkrumah had warned against and that Durrell had adumbrated in literary form, and that has been reinforced by the U.S.-backed Mubarak regime. I would add that such moves have been rejected across the Egyptian Muslim-Christian religious spectrum as well as by intellectuals and members of civil society, on several grounds, not least those of foreign intervention into the internal affairs of Egypt as a sovereign state.163 It was this stance of national unity that so powerfully articulated itself in Egypt in January–February 2011. The recouping of the iconography of the 1919 Revolution, the crescent and the cross referred to above, which had begun in the wake of the bombing of the Two Saints’ Church in Alexandria on the eve of 2011, was to become ubiquitous in the revolution that broke out on January 25. The multiple translations into action of that emblem of national unity during the 25 January Revolution—again, begun weeks earlier when Muslims went to churches on January 6 for Coptic Christmas eve mass to serve as human shields and express solidarity—were a nonelite assumption of agency in the articulation of interfaith solidarity that firmly countered sectarianism to lay claim to egalitarianism and citizenship in face of the multiple complicities of the national elite with neocolonialism.164 With this trajectory in mind, I posit that it is in the vein of a cautionary tale, against the grain of the text, that the Quartet should be read—as a text that effects a smooth, almost slick, transition from twilight-of-empire in the “Levantine,” menacing space of Alexandria to long-distance neocolonialism enabled by exilic, cosmopolitan figures. In the next chapter, I take up an Alexandrian writer of SyroLebanese origin whose articulation of Levantinism, in dialogue with the writers so far discussed, is of a rather different order.

ch a p t er four

“Polypolis” and Levantine Camp Bernard de Zogheb

Spending a few days in Rome in 1957 as part of his annual trip to Europe, Bernard de Zogheb noted in his diary: “I went to mass at the Greek Catholic church round the corner: Saint Athanase. I wondered how many people in the congregation were Levantines.”1 The reference to Levantines, though of a piece with some of the constituents of Greek Catholicism, is far from a random reflection prompted by the occasion. Levantinism, I would wager, was central to the sensibility and self-perception of this artist and librettist—that and his city, Alexandria. Whereas identification with one’s city, especially if as freighted with mythological and literary associations as Alexandria, is not uncommon, identification with Levantinism would seem to be less obvious. Geographically speaking, Alexandria is not located in the Levant, a term associated with the eastern Mediterranean. Warranted, perhaps, by de Zogheb’s descent from a family, long resident in Alexandria, of predominantly Syro-Lebanese origin? But would that not make him shami, the Egyptian Arabic term for one who hails from the Arab eastern Mediterranean? And what if one recalls the colonial genealogy of the adjective Levantine, as discussed in the previous chapter, and the fact that the borrowing “lifantini”2 barely exists in Arabic, unlike the loanword from cosmopolitan, “kuzmubulitani”? What would be the connection between self-identifying as Levantine and Alexandria’s enduring association with cosmopolitanism? How do such issues play out in de Zogheb’s libretti, most of which remain unpublished, written in pidginized Italian?

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The surviving corpus of ten libretti was written between the 1940s and 1990s, against the backdrop of the dissolution of empire in the eastern and southern Mediterranean and the postindependence period. Born into an Alexandrian Levantine elite that would lose ground, the librettist’s grappling with that formation gained complexity from his queer orientation. The performativity of the libretti, as I posit, is instantiated in a parodic camp reclamation of verbal mongrelization and gilded mores. In this sense, the libretti undertake a dual process of self-actualization, of homoeroticism and an upper-crust Alexandrian Levantine cosmopolitanism. They do so in dialogue with Western redactions of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and Levantinism and also engage canonical writers associated with the city, as well as writers whose work engaged the literary triumvirate. But my reading of four libretti that represent signal points in de Zogheb’s operatic output reveals the limitations of this aesthetic project. The antiessentialism that valorizes the hybridity of the Levantines to bring it in line with a queer sensibility falls short of wholly embracing other ethnicities and less privileged classes. The libretti’s extraordinary exploits of pastiche and macaronics ultimately betray an undertow of interpellation that prevents them from fully coming to terms with the survival of colonial tropes of Levantinism in a Mediterranean reinscribed in terms of the North and the South. By the time Bernard de Zogheb (1924–99) was born, the colonially conceived “Levant” was a setting sun, even as the fortunes of his family were on the wane. A Greek Catholic family who originated in Damascus, the Zoghebs are thought to have settled in Egypt in the early nineteenth century, an ancestor, it is speculated, having worked with the French during the Napoleonic occupation. His mother Mary de Zogheb’s paternal family, the Debbanés, were Syro-Lebanese apparently from Sidon. They were prosperous timber merchants, owned large plots of land in Alexandria, one ancestor serving as consul of Brazil, hence the title of count; they also established a church named after them, as well as a theater. His mother’s maternal family, the Bacos, who seem to have hailed from the north of Lebanon, settled in Egypt in the nineteenth century; they owned big tracts of land on which their mansion stood in an area to the east of Alexandria that came to bear their name.3 Like the Debbanés, the Zoghebs prospered in Alexandria, acquired the title of count, in their case from from the king of Sardinia, and dabbled in artistic patronage. Bernard’s immediate family was to lose its wealth over time, partly on account of a

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Figure 5. Georges (“Ziquet”) de Zogheb, left, in a revue titled “Bal Français” on 22 April 1950 at the San Stefano Hotel in Alexandria. Reproduced by permission of Margot de Zogheb-Bogert, Anne Anka, and Patricia de Zogheb, image courtesy of CEAlex.

cotton crash and the father’s horse race betting. But the family’s status and activities in Alexandria would remain untouched, his father, Georges de Zogheb, coauthoring and acting in revues in French, the lingua franca of the city’s elite (see fig. 5).4 Mostly an autodidact who kept meticulous lists of books read and films and plays watched and occasionally participated in dramatic performances (see fig. 6), Bernard de Zogheb received art lessons in Alexandria from a student of André Lhote. He would later give up oil painting in favor of watercolors—mainly Mediterranean cityscapes and landscapes of Egypt, Italy, Greece, France, and England—apparently regarding his art as a useful craft that could tide him over when his finances were in shambles (see fig. 7).5 In the 1950s he also contributed society columns and satirical feature articles to the Alexandrian weekly publication La Réforme Illustrée, employing his draftsmanship, talent at collage, and skill at “faction.”6 In 1960 de Zogheb left Egypt for what would turn out to be more than two decades of living first in France where he worked in journalism and in tourism, an occupation he would continue with in Morocco and Greece through the 1970s and early 1980s. He was to

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Figure 6. Bernard de Zogheb in a dramatic performance in 1949. Reproduced by permission of Margot de Zogheb-Bogert, Anne Anka, and Patricia de Zogheb, image courtesy of CEAlex.

return to settle in Alexandria in 1984 where he held exhibitions and wrote one more libretto, “La Vita Alessandrina,” which also remained unpublished—“Je serait posthume,” he would quip.7 In 1999, while visiting Paris, de Zogheb was diagnosed with a terminal illness;8 he decided to return to Alexandria where he died a few months later.

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Figure 7. Watercolor of the Shallalat Garden, showing part of the premodern Arab wall, Alexandria, 1997, by Bernard de Zogheb. Reproduced by permission of Margot de Zogheb-Bogert, Anne Anka, and Patricia de Zogheb, image courtesy of Jean-Yves Empereur.

coordinates for a reading I elicit three aspects of de Zogheb’s biography—his languages, cultural identifications, and sexual orientation—to provide coordinates for situating my reading of his libretti. Growing up in Alexandria’s polyglot environment, de Zogheb picked up several languages early in life, a fact so puzzling to British newcomers to Egypt that he wrote an essay arguing that it is the language one swears—rather than dreams or thinks—in that should be considered one’s mother tongue, in which case his would be English. By his own admission, he was trilingual; his other two languages were French and Italian. His weakest language was Arabic, his colloquial Greek inflected, and his knowledge of classical Arabic virtually nonexistent, as was typical of a certain Europeanized “Levantine” background, as distinct from Arabophone Syro-Lebanese.9 To this, one should add “code-switching”—a term coined by linguists to refer to “the selection by bilinguals or multilinguals of forms from an embedded variety (or varieties) in utterances of a matrix variety during the same conversation”—which would amply manifest itself in his libretti.10

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Asked why he had left Egypt—his family’s loss of fortune, after all, meant that they were untouched by the postrevolutionary prosocialist nationalization and sequestration laws—de Zogheb had spoken of his desire for privacy and the lure of an image of Europe first conceived during childhood sojourns in France, where he had been born, then nurtured by his wartime contact with European servicemen and exiles.11 Indeed, the evidence from de Zogheb’s pre-1960s diaries is largely of an enacted identification with an “Alexandrea ad Aegyptum,” that is, Alexandria as detached from Egypt and as reminiscent of a desired Europe. Hence an évolué’s disdain for Egyptians at large (as distinct from the upper-class set he frequented), seen as an undifferentiated subaltern mass once referred to pejoratively, including by Westernized Arabs, by the label “les Arabes”;12 the holding up of monuments and vistas in his hometown against the yardstick of Italy;13 the posing as a tourist in Egypt;14 and a paranoia about what “the Egyptians” might do to “the European colony” in the wake of decolonization.15 Yet again, a perusal of letters sent during his long sojourn abroad to an Alexandrian friend indicates that whereas Europe would continue to be the object of de Zogheb’s cultural desire, Alexandria would eventually rise to the status of the capital of his universe—more so when he was finally based in Europe.16 But the queer orientation that was to have so much bearing on the aesthetics of de Zogheb’s operettas was no less part of why he left the country. The fact that it was the librettist’s wish that his diaries be made available to scholars, as well as his having consented to have his (somewhat revealing) side of the correspondence with the American author James Merrill archived at a U.S. university, allows me to touch on this issue for the purposes of the discussion of his texts.17 It would seem that the fact of being gay in de Zogheb’s generation and his background was not discussed, an aspect of the librettist’s that his contemporaries would refer to as “a difficult personality” or by saying “Bernard, being the way he was. . .”18 “In those days being gay was a hush, hush affair although it was talked about ‘entre nous,’” observes his childhood friend Jacky Lumbroso Nimr.19 The euphemisms and the known but disavowed are symptomatic of the “phenomenon of the ‘open secret’ [which] does not, as one might think, bring about the collapse of those binarisms [of “private/public, inside/outside, subject/object”] and their ideological effects, but rather attests to their fantasmatic recovery.”20 In terms of the Arab world, Joseph Massad has cogently argued that with the advent of

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colonial modernity, intellectuals in the region, albeit often writing in resistance to Orientalism and its construction of Arab sexuality, hotly debated issues of sexual desire in relation to unquestioningly internalized “European notions of ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ and their commensurate insertion in a social Darwinist idiom of ‘evolution,’” as well as “Victorianism,” which would include the borrowed terminology concerning “homosexuality,” now as a category rather than as sexual practices. 21 This Victorianism is evident in de Zogheb’s diaries, particularly early ones that betray little interiority and may have been edited, yielding an “epistemology of the closet” exercise, full of traces, lacunae, and occasional disclosures.22 Though they comprise references to gays and lesbians in his milieu, his early diaries only hint at his own sexuality, as in collated postcards showing male nude statues. 23 While it would be misleading to suggest any narrative of a progressive “coming out”—in 1972 in Morocco, for example, he “was amused reflecting on how my new [British] employers would react if they knew that the last two times I danced like this were . . . in Malindi and at a queer club in London!”—there are somewhat more, and slightly more full-fledged, references to his queerness later in the diaries. 24 De Zogheb was much more open in correspondence with gay friends: writing to Merrill, he would make quite explicit references to his sexuality and affairs, though he would occasionally use euphemisms, describing an acquaintance as “je pense comme ça, mais je n’en suis pas absolument certain” (that way, I think, though I’m not absolutely sure) and “(though discreetly) he was one of us.”25 It is no surprise that the two libretti by de Zogheb that engage homoeroticism belong in the latter part of his corpus—“Stoningtonia” (1970) and “La Vita Alessandrina” (early to mid-1990s). To account for this, one might suggest primarily his relative independence from his family and the experience of living abroad, the 1960s counterculture that his letters suggest he was keen to immerse himself in, 26 and, finally, having had his first libretto published as well as two other operettas staged. It was thanks to Merrill, who had heard of the librettist from common friends and met him in Paris, that Le Sorelle Brontë was published in the United States (later to be reprinted in Italy), and “Le Vacanze a Parigi” was performed in New York in 1969 and for some seasons afterward by a puppet theater, the Little Players, which also put on his “Phaedra” in 1971. 27 Of particular relevance here is de Zogheb’s 1970 “Stoningtonia”—the title clearly an allusion to

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Stonington, where Merrill and his partner David Jackson shared a house for many years—which is set in New England and dedicated “to the people of the States.” The libretto seems to have been written in response to Stonewall in that it explicitly tackles homophobia toward a hunter and a sailor (the latter part of nautical leitmotif, with homoerotic inflections, that de Zogheb favored) who discuss samesex male love and embrace.28

ayoub sinano’s “polypolis” De Zogheb seems to have left no expository essay concerning Alexandria and Levantinism. In a 1996 interview I sounded him out on Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and the “golden age” trope of the modern city recapitulating its Ptolemaic predecessor, and whether he thought the modern “golden age” existed or whether it was a nostalgic re-creation. “I think there was a golden age,” he commented, before adding, “well, more an age of gilt bronze than gold.” In answer to my question whether he thought Alexandria in the modern period was a melting pot or inhabited by different ethnicities that coexisted but did not mingle much, de Zogheb said he endorsed the view—of ethnic intermingling predominantly among the elite—put forward by the writer Christian Ayoub Sinano (1927–89), his childhood friend, relation, and confidant, in the entry “Levant” that he had contributed to the Dictionnaire du Snobisme (1958). 29 Before turning to this article, I would like to touch on a related text by Ayoub Sinano. While working on his PhD in comparative literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, Ayoub Sinano published his first novel, Artagal (1958), set in a city named Césarée (Caesarea) that bears a marked resemblance to Alexandria. A modernist Bildungsroman that renders “a portrait of the artist as young man” in which the first-person narrator self-reflexively meditates on the process of writing by addressing his double, Isidore, Artagal is also a paean to a Caesarea that is both a real city in its specificity and an archetype of southern-eastern Mediterranean cities. Ayoub Sinano’s choice of Caesarea as the name of the city, to my mind, indicates a tacitly critical response to his erstwhile mentor and later friend Liddell’s novel Unreal City (1952), set in an Alexandrialike Caesarea and centering on Christo Eugenides, a gay Greek man of letters originally from Smyrna who is a thinly veiled portrait of Cavafy. Unreal City casts Caesarea as “Levantine,” with the Western pejorative baggage of the term intact, the fictional Cavafy being its

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sole redeeming grace: “How interesting this mixed, cosmopolitan city ought to be, Charles thought—and yet, on the lookout though he always was for something of interest to tell Eugenides in the evening, he found very little. . . . Yet this Babel lacked the coherent interest of a place with a single, indigenous culture. Above all it was in the possession of a superior educated class that Elizabethan London was so much richer than Caesarea. Here only Eugenides would be a worthy contemporary of Shakespeare.”30 Overlapping with Unreal City in time frame, Artagal presents in contrast multiple tropes of Levantine cultural mobility and interethnic porosity—including etymology and mixed monetary systems (“These systems . . . were vestiges of a happy era in which all along a golden strip many peoples lived side-by-side and mixed without harming each other. Another mosaic . . . ”).31 In answer to an Englishwoman long resident in the Levant who observes that the Levantines’ facility for acting English in England and waltzing in Vienna makes them suspect in English eyes, an uncle remarks: What is the Levant? . . . Some trading posts unified by that sea the Arabs call the “Central White Sea” [the Mediterranean sea]. . . . We the inhabitants alone were never barbarians—the world belonged to whoever conquered us. If the Hebrews had not come to us, they would have had neither Temple nor Bible and you would not have known Moses or Christ. What would the Greeks have been without Ionia, Carthage without the Phoenicians [les Tyriens], Rome without Palestine? And the Saracens without Baalbek, the Turks without Byzantium? What would the Church have been without Paul of Tarsus, all of Europe without the Orient?32

The uncle’s discourse undermines the Eurocentrism of the West’s claims of originary civilizational superiority by positing the indispensably constitutive contributions of the region. Yet again, if Ayoub Sinano mythologizes Caesarea he—no less than Liddell although differently—mutes the political stakes in the southern-eastern Mediterranean port town in the twentieth century. In giving their cities the name Caesarea (widespread in several places once under Roman rule) in its capacity as an echo of Alexandria as a city that goes back to antiquity, the two novelists seem to shy away from dealing with the Caesarea of Palestine and what Palestinians underwent in the 1940s with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Granted, when Ayoub Sinano speaks to political unrest in the final pages of his novel, the allusions seem to fit Egypt’s 1952 Revolution

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and military rule; but he goes on to call in the closing pages of Artagal for “a new Caesarea that would resist the barbarians.”33 Thus Artagal’s work of recouping the specifically intercultural potency of the eastern Mediterranean gives way when it comes to an indigeneity it construes as the barbarian Other.34 It was probably likewise in response to Western writers’ depictions of the Levantinism that Ayoub Sinano contributed the entry on “Levant” to the Dictionnaire du Snobisme, published in the same year as Artagal. “Levant” opens with the valorizing image of a southern-eastern Mediterranean pan-city so intricate in its construction of pedigree and prestige as to be a veritable “labyrinth” to the nonindigenous snob. Designating this prototypical regional cosmopolis as “Polypolis,” Ayoub Sinano endows it with a tongue-in-cheek etymology of variant names: S’il n’a recours à un guide éclairé, s’il ne possède aussi une petite expérience et quatre grains de discernement, le jeune snob se rendant au Levant risque fort de se perdre dans les venelles du faux snobisme. Dans Polypolis (la Pelpel des Phéniciens et de la Bible, la Boulboul des Arabes et des Turcs, la Polople des Croisades) qui tient de Smyrne et d’Alexandrie, de Péra et de Salonique, de Beyrouth et de Damiette, du Caire et de Damas, de Jérusalem et de Sidon, d’Antioche et de Tripoli, d’Alep et de Césarée, d’où qu’il vienne il sera dépaysé, et de plus habiles que lui s’y sont égarés. If he does not have recourse to a well-informed guide, and if he also lacks a bit of experience and a dash of discernment, the young snob who goes to the Levant runs a high risk of straying into the alleys of phony snobbery. In Polypolis (Pelpel of the Phoenicians and the Bible, Bulbul of the Arabs and the Turks, Polople of the Crusades), which has a likeness to Smyrna and Alexandria, to Pera and Salonika, to Beirut and Damietta, to Cairo and Damascus, to Jerusalem and Sidon, to Antioch and Tripoli, to Aleppo and Caesarea, wherever he comes from he will be disoriented, others much cannier than him having lost their way. 35

That the article’s main concern is with the elite goes some way toward explaining its focus on a cosmopolitanism understood as the acquisition of European trappings of worldliness and privileged intermixing—“bit by bit, thanks to Progress, [Levantine] snobbery became Europeanized,” reaching for titles and placing a high premium on marriages into the European aristocracy. On the other hand, there is a foreclosure in the assumption that other, nonelite forms of cosmopolitanism did not exist in the Mediterranean cities distilled in Polypolis.

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Ayoub Sinano’s account also betrays curious silences lodged in the heart of its eloquence: he suggests that “if he does not apply himself, the young snob would have a hard time distinguishing the Turks from the Arabs, and these from the Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Jews, Copts, Greeks, Armenians, Maltese, and other Levantines.”36 The series that ends with “and other Levantines” includes several Arab ethnicities, yet these are to be distinguished from the Arabs. Would the distinction then be religious, as in the Levantines being Christian and Jewish, with “Arabs” functioning as shorthand for “Muslims”? Although Arabs are to be distinguished from Turks—presumably on account of ethnic differences—they are both marked out from the series of Levantine groups, which would seem to endorse the religious criterion. If Ayoub Sinano offers a riposte to Orientalist takes on Levantinism here, I would suggest, as I did regarding his treatment of Polypolis’s cultural cognate Caesarea, that it is only partial. “Mimicry” and amenability thereto—touchstones of Western constructions of Levantinism—are central to his account. While the historical condition of such mimicry, imperialism, is merely alluded to, if in an ironical euphemism, as “Progress,” his article “rehabilitates” that imitativeness by steering away from the morally suspect associations of Levantinism and bringing to the fore a complexity of identifications that predate Western imperialism. In describing the “habitus”37 of the Levantines, he adumbrates a multicultural richness; and it is here that one would locate an “ennobling” of that mimicry in place of an impoverishment of identification often attributed to them. But the ethnic-elitist elisions surrounding “les Arabes” are the point where his construction of a regional cosmopolitanism gives way.38

queering levantinism As I read him, de Zogheb’s own articulation of an Alexandrian Levantine sensibility, embedded in his libretti, is partly in dialogue with Ayoub Sinano’s; but this calls for some nuancing. Some thirty years before the interview in which he cited Ayoub Sinano’s “Levant,” on the eve of the publication of his first libretto, Le Sorelle Brontë, de Zogheb wrote to Merrill registering, among other things, a rather different position on the piece. “Christian [Ayoub Sinano] wrote today. He says he is impatient to see Le Sorelle in print, and wishes he also had written a preface to it, he has so much to say about it,” de Zogheb

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writes. “Possibly he will do a ‘letter to Mr. J. M. [James Merrill]’ with additional information. I can’t think what additional information he means—and I’m not sure that I want him to write anything.” Referring to the volume Dictionnaire du Snobisme as “a pretentious collection of rather unwitty remarks written by [‘the’ crossed out] snobs for a parvenu audience,” de Zogheb adds that Ayoub Sinano “had written an article—most uninteresting, I found, for Parisian readers, listing the ‘familles bien’” of his native city. The one text of Ayoub Sinano’s he finds “enchanting” is an unpublished “little Coptic tableau called ‘Habalily’s wedding’. It is certainly in the same spirit as ‘Le Sorelle.’”39 It is impossible to tell what de Zogheb meant by the latter remark since the manuscript of “Habalily’s wedding” was eventually lost. But what to make of de Zogheb’s comments on “Levant” in view of his adducing it thirty years later? A reluctance to share his hardwon limelight with a friend who already had a novel and several other texts to his name? Would citing the article in the interview, therefore, have been an act of homage to Ayoub Sinano, who had died some years earlier? A wish to distance his libretto from ascription to Ayoub Sinano’s “Polypolis”? That de Zogheb takes issue with the elitism in “Levant” resonates with my own reading of Ayoub Sinano’s piece; but then it was the elitist construction of cosmopolitanism that he later adduced. Furthermore, as I demonstrate below, de Zogheb’s libretti— not least “Il Canale,” which he started writing about three years after his remark to Merrill—intertextually dialogue with Ayoub Sinano’s literary texts, including their Polypolitan aspects. Beyond autobiographical connections between the novelist and the librettist, there are marked resonances. For both men, Levantinism was a sociocultural identification rather than a territorial/national sense of belonging to a Levant understood as the Greater Syria from which many of their ancestors had hailed. Indeed, while de Zogheb eventually obtained Lebanese nationality, he never actually lived in Lebanon, remarking apropos of his first visit: I might well have sung ‘Che citta e quella?’ on arriving, for it is at least strange, when bearing a passport of a nation, to arrive there for the first time of one’s life, not speaking the language—or hardly— especially when the profession marked in one’s passport is ‘translator’—However—the Lebanese must be used to that sort of thing— they greeted me charmingly in French, and welcomed me to my homeland, with a lot of flowery wishes that now I was here, I should stay with them for always. Actually—although I enjoyed seeing

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friends & relations, and although the sea and mountains are lovely, I was not crazy about the Homeland—How could I be, arriving from Greece.40

In this 1960s letter, written about two decades before he would return to settle definitively in Alexandria, de Zogheb bears an uncanny resemblance (if in geographic mirror image) to the persona in Cavafy’s “Return from Greece.” Ayoub Sinano worked as a journalist for a spell in Beirut but on return to Alexandria wrote critically of “Lebanese society, its vanity and recklessness [inconscience].”41 In both cases, the window onto Levantinism was Alexandria: they were Alexandrian Levantines. I venture that de Zogheb’s operatic refractions of “Polypolis” stand in productive tension with its construction in Ayoub Sinano’s “Levant.” It should be noted that de Zogheb had written his first libretto some years before Ayoub Sinano published the article. But the distinction between the two writers’ depiction of Levantinism—taking their work in aggregate—does not lie in whether they represent nonelite classes. In his fiction and poetry, Ayoub Sinano accords representational space to a louche demimonde, as well as the working class, alongside the “familles bien.”42 As for the librettist’s macaronic Italian, this originates in the Zogheb kitchen: he originally picked it up from their maid, Anetta, “a tiny and delightful little Syrian. . . . [who] did speak exactly the same strange Italian of the triestine [sic] maids, from whom she had doubtless learned it.” De Zogheb dedicated his first libretto, Le Sorelle Brontë, to his childhood friend, the artist Adrien de Menasce, with whom he had initially composed two arias from which the libretto later germinated. But, as the librettist himself put it, “Adrien always said that it was really Anetta who inspired Le sorelle Brontë, and I expect he was right. She was still with us when it was written.”43 When the text was published, Ayoub Sinano observed that Anetta—whom de Zogheb later commented was the original of Tabby, the Brontës’ cook—should have been the dedicatee.44 Aside from differences in genre, Ayoub Sinano’s writing stands in contrast to de Zogheb’s first, by virtue of its erudite literary allusions and belletristic style. Second, and more important in this context, Ayoub Sinano adopts an ironical distance toward his characters— especially in the later books such as Pola de Péra, its characters described “with the somewhat cruel, somewhat ironic tenderness of a disappointed lover,” the disappointment, presumably, being caused by nationalism as already presaged in his novel Artagal.45

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De Zogheb’s mode, on the other hand, is consistently camp parody. Profoundly fascinated with the soi-disant, with things semiprecious and things seen-better-days, with intimations of immortality that prove illusory, with the frivolous taken to heart as much as the epochal reduced to miniature proportions,46 this man-abouttown and Mediterranean flâneur’s contribution to Levantinism was a parodic camp sensibility. The particular convergence in de Zogheb of a superannuated aristocracy and a queer orientation enabled his construction of the Levantines’ extravagance and theatricality as camp. “Camp” was indeed part of his lexicon: he once described a woman friend as, “delightfully camp and scatterbrained and snobbish, and gushing over my being a count, which is always flattering.”47 As Susan Sontag declared in her 1964 “Notes on Camp,” of what would have been his generation with a partially closeted experience, “Aristocracy is a position vis-à-vis culture (as well as vis-à-vis power), and the history of Camp taste is part of the history of snob taste. But since no authentic aristocrats in the old sense exist today to sponsor special tastes, who is the bearer of this taste? Answer: an improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute themselves as aristocrats of taste.”48 Eminently heir on two counts to this taste, de Zogheb would have agreed that “to perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” But to claim that he found in the posturing of Levantines an apt equivalent of camp’s “metaphor of life as theater” is not to suggest that the ethnically mixed denizens of the southern-eastern Mediterranean or that the Syro-Lebanese at large are exemplary of camp.49 If a specific cultural formation associated with a given upper-crust Levantine society could appeal to such a sensibility, this also owed something to de Zogheb’s status as an insider; after all, other non-Levantine writers, such as Liddell, as we have seen, queer but colonially sovereign, rather than elicit an amenability to camp in the Levantines reacted with repulsed ambivalence. The queer aestheticization of Levantine lifestyles and artifice responded to an implicit dual process of self-legitimization in de Zogheb. The mutual investments of cosmopolitanism and queerness in antiessentialism came together in his libretti in the form of Alexandrian Levantine camp. His was a semicloseted sensibility, selfactualizing by promoting “camp taste, which definitely has something propagandistic about it [. . . being] a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.”50 In this sense, the

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form itself, the light opera, was a perfect match for, indeed part and parcel of, the queer aesthetics de Zogheb was adumbrating, one that was open to the beauty of bad taste and kitsch. In this, his libretti were doing their own “queering [of] the pitch,” the title of an influential collection of essays advocating a “gay and lesbian musicology” that has variously demonstrated both the commonalities of music production and queer identities—central to which is performativity—and the “social control” equally at work in the terms musicality and homosexuality.51 While, as Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood have argued, “the entire opera world (and to some extent that of musical comedy and other music-theatre genres) had long been a stage on which gays and lesbians could perform,” “people in music all share to some extent the taint of the effeminate or feminized,” hence traditional musicology’s “heteronormative” closeting of the connection. 52 Brett and Wood identify camp—in its capacity as a “self-marking performative style”—as one of “the most effective tactics” to which the music world had recourse prior to the 1970s when “coming out” became the more effective act.53 As a further parody of the high art of opera, offering an “opportunity . . . for a contrast between silly or extravagant content and rich form,”54 to de Zogheb the operetta form was exceedingly conducive to the histrionic and outlandish. In its appropriateness for a camp take on Polypolis, the light opera genre he opted for proffered the Levantines an insouciant calling card bearing an aesthetic, rather than social, insignia. Insouciant because it genially, nonjudgmentally delighted in the foibles, excesses, and ostentation of Levantines, as much as it undercut the assumptions of good taste, purist language, and genre conventions of the European Mediterranean. To speak of Polypolis in de Zogheb’s libretti, then, is to speak of parody. Levantines and Levantinized Europeans populate his dramatis personae; but it is in the vein of camped up parody—of the ersatz mores dismissed in European representations—that they are reclaimed. The operettas also engage European high art’s conventions and the canon’s figureheads, but these are likewise camped up and rendered burlesque. In these libretti illustrated with his faux naïf drawings, the scores are culled from an eclectic repertoire of popular tunes, their recognizability enlisted either to inspire, amplify, or furnish ironic commentary on the sung words.55 Yet it is the unrestrained performative play with language that lies at the heart of the parodic energy of the operettas. In their use of pidginized Italian, de Zogheb’s texts can be read as a camp

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celebration of the verbal mongrelization elsewhere denigrated in context of the Levantine dragoman and the middleman. Simultaneously, this celebration of pidginzation forges a convivial appeal to a common language and a language of commonality.

languages of the “contact zone” and italian musical theater in egypt One such Mediterranean common language of commonality existed, namely lingua franca, and the prefaces to the two editions of Le Sorelle Brontë do well to invoke it.56 As a “contact zone,” Alexandria’s polyglossia comprised lingua franca—the nineteenth-century Egyptian intellectual Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi, passing for the first time through Alexandria in 1826 en route to Paris, observed that “the majority of the commoners speak a species of Italian or the like”—but there were other partially hybridized languages such as “Franquette,” in addition to colloquial Egyptian Arabic, with its quality of ingesting lexical items from several languages, including Italian.57 The Alexandrian nationalist writer, orator and journalist ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, for one, wrote critically of pidginization and code-switching as having an adverse effect on national belonging and hence on resistance, despite himself adopting a markedly accessible prose-style in Arabic, including Egyptian colloquial.58 That linguistic hybridity fascinated de Zogheb is attested in two consecutive entries in one of his “list books.” The first is an etymological note about a word of uncertain origins: copt kypt—or gypt—two theories: 1/ from the greek for egypt: ai Ky WtoY 2/ from the ancient egyptian name for memphis: hakaptah.

The second entry comes from a contemporary context: franco-arabic used in algeria “tombil krazat wahid bil torna wa drassoulou brouss birbal” (l’automobile a écrasé quel’qu’un au tournant, et on lui a dressé un proces verbal) (from anna bajocchi) 59

With its Arabizations redolent of the contact zone and not far removed from the sorts of verbal exploits de Zogheb would perform

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in his libretti, one can see why such a reported nugget was logged in.60 Whereas others, such as Molière in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, included a speech in lingua franca in their texts, as “a macaronic joke fit for the mouths of comic characters,”61 de Zogheb would produce something of a parallel pidgin for a wider range of purposes. In writing his libretti in “kitchen Italian,” de Zogheb, rather than merely make a virtue of necessity—an imperfect knowledge of the language—seems to have been experimenting with the production of a sort of lingua franca with Italian as matrix. Introducing an a cappella performance he gave of “La Vita Alessandrina”—recorded in Alexandria a year before his death by Stéphane Olry and Jan Vromman—de Zogheb commented that “j’écris les libretti des ces opéras en italien, parce que pour moi l’opéra n’existe qu’en italien, et sur des thèmes un peu inventés, très, très imaginatifs.”62 Still, the question begs to be asked why specifically Italian for operettas rather than opera. A Syro-Lebanese adapting something from the Italian operatic tradition for very different purposes was hardly unprecedented in Egypt. For its part, the Italian colony in modern Alexandria—the second largest foreign one in the city—enjoyed performance arts by Italian visiting, later sometimes local, troupes.63 Apart from a long history of indigenous dramatic performances in Egypt, the emergence of modern theater, as well as more obviously opera, was a European-inflected process in the first half of the nineteenth century before Egyptian and Syro-Lebanese dramatists and directors would forge an Arabic theater. Against the backdrop of Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt followed by the policies of modernization along Western lines adopted by Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha and later in the century differently undertaken by his grandson Khedive Ismail, “it was the European theatre, performed in French or Italian, that was paramount and was given precedence by the authorities, not the nascent Arabic theatre.”64 The number of European theaters grew by the 1840s, “audiences [being] particularly fond of lighter works: operettas, comedies, farces and vaudevilles.”65 The “first Italian opera performance recorded in Alexandria” was “of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore” in 1841, to be followed the next year during carnival time by “L. Ricci’s Chiara di Rosembergh, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, and Bellini’s I Puritani di Scozia,” with the Italian theater becoming such a presence in the city that regulations, written in Italian, were issued by the minister of foreign affairs placing it under the authorities’ supervision.66 Among the Alexandrian theaters specializing in French and Italian performances from the

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1860s on—the Zizinia, the Vittorio Alfieri, the Vittorio Emanuele, and the Teatro Rossini67—the latter belonged to the Syro-Lebanese comte Debbané, an ancestor of de Zogheb’s on the maternal side. Setting aside new Arabic plays sometimes drawing on indigenous texts such as The Arabian Nights, both Syro-Lebanese and Egyptian dramatists engaged European theater and opera through translation and adaptation. While Ghislanzoni’s libretto for Verdi’s Aida was translated into Arabic for the use of the audience of the Italian performance in Cairo in 1871, the Lebanese dramatist Salim al-Naqqash, who had moved to Egypt in 1876, brought a repertoire comprising three Arabic plays and five European texts he had adapted, including an Aida Arabized into an operetta set to popular tunes.68 But it is arguably the career of the playwright Ya‘qub (or James) Sannu‘ (1839–1912), an Egyptian Jew of half Italian origin at whose hands modern theater in Egypt first began to take shape in the early 1870s, that illustrates a “contrapuntal” dialogue with Italian and French drama and lyrical theater.69 Sent as a teenager, through royal patronage, to study in Livorno (his father’s native city) for two years where he is said to have written a few plays in Italian, he developed a further interest in drama while watching French and Italian theatrical and operatic performances in Cairo.70 Having, by his own account, taught himself dramaturgy by reading Molière, Sheridan, and Goldoni (the latter apparently frequently performed by European troupes in Egypt), Sannu‘ “became keenly aware of the need to arouse the interest of the average, non-Westernized Egyptian in drama.”71 In the short period when his Cairene theater was thriving before Khedive Ismail turned against him, Sannu‘ wrote and directed plays of social criticism mostly in colloquial Arabic, “the influence of Italian opera” seen in the emphasis on song as much as the imprint of the local premodern genre of shadow theater.72 Bursat Misr (The Cairo Stock Exchange), a comedy critical of arranged marriage set in the milieu of bankers and speculators at the stock exchange, reproduces the Italian borrowings in their lingo, together with the Nubian-accented Arabic of a servant and the pidgin of a local European housekeeper. Another play, al-Amira al-Iskandaraniyya (The Alexandrian Princess), set in Alexandria and replete with the pidginized Arabic of foreigners and Frenchified Arabic of Egyptians imitating them, is a delightful comedy of manners critical of Westernization.73 This latter play was adapted into Italian under the title L’Aristocratica Alessandrina and was performed in Cairo

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and Alexandria, other plays by Sannu‘ in Italian having been put on in Genoa and in Italian theaters in Turkey.74 This is apart, of course, from a number of lyrics satirizing different accents, lingos, and pidgins that formed part of the repertoire of the Alexandrian nationalist singer and composer of operettes Sayyid Darwish. Whatever resonances of that nineteenth-century Italian musical tradition in Egypt, no doubt given impetus by Verdi’s Aida, may have reached de Zogheb—through family accounts of the Teatro Rossini owned by his ancestor, or otherwise—is not known. What can be ascertained is that while Italian musicians and actors continued to appear on Egyptian stages in the twentieth century, the theaters hosted performers from a range of ethnic backgrounds and dramatic and musical traditions. While Alexandria’s illustrious Théâtre Zizinia was demolished in the early twentieth century, to be replaced by the Théâtre Muhammad ‘Ali, there were other thriving venues such as the new Théâtre Alhambra.75 But it was the Théâtre Zizinia that had witnessed the “époque d’or de l’opéra italien”—in which Giacomo Puccini attended a performance of his Madama Butterfly—in the words of Enrico Terni. (The Alexandrian Italian musician Terni, who was to marry the novelist Fausta Cialente, was a friend of Forster’s during the British novelist’s sojourn in Alexandria; see Forster’s lecture “The Lost Guide” and his article “A Musician in Egypt,” cited in chapter 2.) In a nostalgic compte rendu on the European musical scene in the city in the first half of the twentieth century, Terni laments what he sees as a lack of appreciation among Alexandrians for “la musique pure” (chamber and orchestral music), ascribing it, somewhat questionably, to a lack of an indigenous musical tradition, a lacuna that affects second-generation foreigners, hence, in his view, the fondness above all for opera.76 De Zogheb wrote an entire operetta, Il Ultimo Giorno di Pompeii (1978), in “the style of a Neapolitan opéra comique,” using for tunes only Italian songs, and while never pretending to be musical himself,77 he frequented musical milieus. In addition to friends who taught at the Conservatoire de Musique in Alexandria—he helped design the décor for a production of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s opera La servante maîtresse (La serva padrona) at that venue78 —he numbered among his friends several Italians involved in the music scene. These included the maestro Piero Guarino, whose concerts he attended, as well as Enrico Terni’s grandson the future musicologist Paolo.79 In fact, some of the performances de Zogheb gave of Le Sorelle,

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attended by Alexandrians of different ethnic backgrounds, were hosted by Guarino (1955) and Terni (1955 and 1958).80 In his memoir Suite Alessandrina, Terni pays tribute to de Zogheb as emblematic of Alexandria in the years following World War II and recalls having hosted at his home a performance by his Syro-Lebanese friend of Le Sorelle. Although he cites de Zogheb’s avowed reason for the linguistic choice—“‘perché tutte le opere sono italiane’”—Terni is initially bemused that Bernard who is neither musical nor particularly proficient in Italian has composed an opera in that language.81 In any case, Terni describes de Zogheb’s very successful “one-man-show” in which he made multiple use of his foulard and shifts in tone to match characters’ speeches with airs then in vogue, and ascribes the language of the libretto to the “lingua franca” used among masters and servants in Alexandria.82

techniques of pidginization and multilingual puns The sources of loanwords in de Zogheb’s libretti seem to vary somewhat from one operetta to the other, in response undoubtedly to subject matter, though variations in language were also bound to occur in a corpus produced between the 1940s and the 1990s. Given that only the first one has been published in book form, it is worth listing them: Le Sorelle Brontë (1947–51); “Byrone” (1959–62); “Le Vacanze a Parigi” (March 1962); “La Cava delle Antiquita” (October 1965); “Phaedra” (April–May 1969); “Malmulla ou Il Canale” (1965–70); “Stoningtonia” (March 9–12, 1970); “Salome” (1971); “Il Ultimo Giorno di Pompeii” (July 1978); and “La Vita Alessandrina” (early to mid-1990s).83 While making reference to other libretti, I shall focus on the first and the last ones, Le Sorelle Brontë and “La Vita Alessandrina,” as well as on two from the middle period, “Le Vacanze a Parigi” and “Malmulla ou Il Canale.” This selection, in addition to spanning signal points in de Zogheb’s career as librettist, is also informed by thematic considerations. One of the most basic forms of pidginization is loanwords smuggled in with recourse to orthographic/phonetic tweaking. Here, the characteristic tactic is a phonetic rendition of foreignisms à l’Italienne, as in j transcribed as z or dz, for instance in the French “jour” in “Andiamo presto / Che fa ancora dzour” when Anna Brontë decides to join her sister Emiglia on her outing “sopra il moor” in Le Sorelle

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(SB 4).84 This and similar transcriptions—such as “Dzen Ayre,”“Dzen Austin,” and, for gin, “dzin”—are, of course, meant to generate a humor that would relish “impure” accents (SB 3, 17, 21, 27). Nor are the marked accents confined to Italian: consider the Greek-accented French of la Lupa, a gaudy, shoplifting woman who barges into the titular “Cava delle Antiquita” (Cavern of Antiques) in Athens with the greeting, “Khamon Talivou, mie signor?” (OJH 90). Among other recurring techniques of embedding borrowings in the matrix language is their grammatical adjustment of Italian. Hence, when the courtesan la Pola in “Il Canale” seduces de Lesseps, he is led away “protestando molamente” (protesting feebly), the French adverb mollement given a quasi-Italian ending (OJH 119; my translation). This technique seems to be at the base of two kinds of neologisms in the libretti. There are portmanteau words—Lewis Carroll style, or perhaps á la James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—composed of borrowings given a quasi-Italian morphology, as in the use “Cimanfesan” (a combination of the French “chemin faisant”) when Cavafy, in “La Vita,” is reciting his poem “Ithaca”: “sperare la strada sera lungha, / Con aventure Cimanfesan . . .” (wish that road may be long / with adventures on the way . . . [VAHH 19]).85 De Zogheb, who had a passion for doing and composing crossword puzzles, could translate his verbal play visually, as in a rebuslike triple pun on “mole” (see fig. 8). The libretti also contain what may be described as typographical puns, dependent on an alternative phonetic transliteration of a word, acronym, or phrase, as when the two American tourists in “Le Vacanze” are waxing lyrical about Paris to the effect that it’s not true that its sky is gray, “Come diccono nel you essah” (As they say in the USA/you essah [OJH 79]). The more complex jeux d’esprit of the libretti are in part enabled by the tendency of grammatically Italianizing loanwords. When, in Le Sorelle, Anna Brontë, disenchanted by scandals and misfortunes, decides to enter a monastery, she announces, “Vado io, entrare nel covento / Devro dimenticar le hauts di hurlo vento” (SB 33). In what she resolves to forget, only the article le, the preposition di, and the noun vento (wind) are immediately recognizable as Italian, while “hurlo” only looks Italian because of its ending and its reminiscence of the cognate urlo (to howl). What is at stake is a partially Italianized rendition of the French translation of Wuthering Heights, Les Hauts de Hurlevent.86 There is at least one instance where what seems to be a loanword encodes a philological puzzle involving etymological

Figure 8. A page with a drawing from Bernard de Zogheb’s 1957 diary. Reproduced by permission of Margot de Zogheb-Bogert, Anne Anka, and Patricia de Zogheb, image courtesy of CEAlex.

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play. When in “Il Canale” the Sultan of Turkey prostitutes his mistress, la Pola, to de Lesseps, her aunt Madame Marigoula Pacha harangues him, insisting that when she brought her niece to him “Lei era un birlante, non era un putan” (She was a birlante, she wasn’t a whore [OJH 119]). To the Italian-speaking reader/listener, “birlante” may register merely as a foreignism. But, as de Zogheb is likely to have known, it is actually an Egyptian colloquial Arabic loanword from the Italian brillante 87 (in both cases meaning “diamond”), often used of a woman to suggest a cross between “sterling character” and “a pearl among women.” “Birlante,” therefore, functions as a mirror image of what is called “false friends”—identical or very similar words in two languages that carry different denotations—being nothing less than a true kin, hiding behind a falsely foreign mask of reshuffled consonants. Solving some of the linguistic riddles that the libretti present by thinking in terms of anagrams is one solution. Merrill seems to have considered it when writing the preface to the first edition of Le Sorelle Brontë. De Zogheb wrote in a letter to Ayoub Sinano from Paris in 1962, “Today Jimmy [Merrill] sent me his preface of ‘Le sorelle Bronte’ for my approval before sending it to the publishers. It is beautiful, excepting for one great mistake. He identifies venti para as being a form of ‘paravent.’ I quickly wrote explaining about paras. . . . I hope he gets it in time to stop the publication.”88 The phrase comes in the opening words of the libretto where the cook Tabby, lamenting the death of the Brontës’ father, adds that he “Non ha lacciato nella casa / Nemeno le venti para” (SB 1) (He did not leave in the house / Not even [some] venti para). As de Zogheb explained in his letter to Merrill, whenever as a teenager he would ask to borrow money from the maid Anetta, she would either lend it to him or “say ‘non ho nemeno venti para’”—referring to a coin dating to Ottoman times.89 Merrill wove in the information while retaining his perceptive proposal, made parenthetically, for approaching textual conundrums: “(What is venti para? the Italian student will ask. It is in fact an old Turkish coin. Lacking such information, the Italian student could do worse than to think first of the French—in this case, paravents—so that later he will be able to fathom Carlotta’s falsa cuccia and Dickens’ libro di chevetto).”90 If de Zogheb, rightly one would argue, seldom condescends to provide a gloss in a footnote,91 the strategy of overcoming cognitive dissonance by plunging headlong into an exercise of decoding puzzles as anagrams in other languages as groundwork for reading the texts translationally is a sound one.

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As part of the translation work into Italian that the libretti undertake, idiomatic expressions rank high. Dickens’s comment in Le Sorelle that Vanity Fair is his “libro di chevetto”92 (livre de chevet, or bedside book)—combining a French phrase translated verbatim (“libro di”) with what is likely a compound word combining chevet (bedside) and the Italian letto (bed)—is not the only such instance. There is the little speech in Le Sorelle that Carlotta, laughing hysterically according to stage directions, makes when Dickens and Thackeray, there to meet her in London with the editor MacMillione, are shocked by the scandalous accusations she exchanges with her siblings and decide to leave: Andate, vai, vai, vai, vai, Thackeray, Io non ho piu, piu, piu bisogna Lei, Ni di tu Signor MacMillion, Ni tu Signor Dickens— Farò la mia billion, Non conterò mie tsickens! (SB 24)93

Dismissing the three men with the claim that she no longer needs them, Carlotta has recourse, amid megalomaniac assertions, to the idiomatic English expression about not counting one’s chickens, rendered in the characteristically code-switching part-translation, part-phonetically adapted transliteration formula. The rhyme with “Dickens,” after all, could have been preserved if “chickens” had been rendered as is. The accented “tsickens” garners further hilarity in its rhymed conjunction with the great writer even as it echoes the Anglicism “billion,” which likewise rhymes with—and, in an implicit mathematical pun, outbids—another name, “MacMillion.” The Anglicisms in Carlotta’s speech are part and parcel of an aspect of pidginization best described as the internal code-switching of a given character, mimicking the interpenetration of his or her language and Italian. Another, if less frequent, aspect of pidginization is a sort of linguistic dialogism—to loosely invoke Mikhail Bakhtin— not dialogue as such, but the mutual corruptions, in dialogue, of a character’s speech by another’s code-switching. In other words, these are symbiotic slippages of foreignisms into one character’s speech that would properly belong to another character’s linguistic environment. The same Carlotta resorts to Gallicisms, paired with an Italian verb, when she says she would “shout from the rooftops” her love for and wish to marry Signor Hegez in Brussels, whose child she claims she is carrying: “ . . . Signor Hegez lo sposerò, Signor Hegez lo amerò /

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Perche m’ha fato un bambino, sur les toits lo griderò!” (SB 16). One of the achievements of the libretti is their interweaving of both modes, the internal code-switching of a given character and the dialogic mutuality of code-switching, with aptly chosen tunes that enhance them. Queen Victoria’s first words in “Il Canale,” addressed to Prince Consort Albert, are set to the tune of “Mein Lieber Augustin”: “Mein Lieber little Albertin’ / Albertin’ Albertin’—/ Son qui per far la Parlantin’ / Ecco mi qui” (OJH 121).94 Before she segues into Italian, the opening lines of Queen Victoria’s speech contain a word from her language, “little,” and a phrase from Albert’s own language that is taken from the German lyric with his name having been tweaked to echo “Augustin.” In such instances, regardless of whether the original lyric was patriotic, its tune is pressed into service of linguistic hybridity and a camp effect.

the libretti’s alex andrian levantine camp It is “Malmulla ou Il Canale” and “La Vita Alessandrina,” by virtue of their settings, Alexandria in the latter and Egypt, mainly, in the former (albeit with scenes in Turkey and England), that immediately come to mind as consummate examples of Alexandrian Levantine camp. But it would be a mistake to suggest that a camped up Polypolis is confined to these two libretti, not least because things Alexandrian explicitly or implicitly infuse the most far-flung settings in other libretti. Of course, at the most basic level, there is an assumption in the libretti, regardless of their setting, of an “insider” elite Alexandrian audience possibly identical to the society that read La Réforme. Indeed, the winks at such an audience sometimes draw on de Zogheb’s society column strategies. In “Byrone,” for example, one comes across Farfallina Piha, “A fat Venetian Jewess,” as one of the dramatis personae and recalls that, in a previous incarnation, Piha was one of the characters de Zogheb had invented and regularly added to his Réforme Illustrée accounts of parties in Alexandria. In the same vein, compliments to Alexandrian acquaintances or digs at them are woven into the libretti in the most unlikely contexts.95 In the published version of Le Sorelle, to take another example, the Brontë sisters meet a showy couple at their hotel in Brussels, Rosa and Giovani S—. The use of the man’s initial was an editorial decision by Merrill intended to avoid libel, and a footnote was inserted into both editions of the libretto explaining that this is a

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reference to a “wealthy family in Alexandria” (SB 13).96 Meanwhile, de Zogheb’s manuscript of the libretto continued to cite Giovani’s surname, “Stagni,” an Alexandrian Italian acquaintance of his.97 “As for having created a selfish, deluded and foolish Phaedra,” de Zogheb wrote to his American friend, “I suppose its [sic] because I modeled her on Greek middle-aged women I knew in Alexandria and Athens, rather than on Racine.”98 The compliments to Alexandrian friends could be so subtle as to be hardly recognizable by anyone other than their recipients. An entry in de Zogheb’s 1958 diary records that he had given his first performance of Le Sorelle in two years at the Ternis’s in honor of “the reverend father Pierre Riches”: fifty years later, the librettist’s Alexandrian friend recalled that the detail of Emiglia’s receiving the last sacrament from a priest had been added in tribute to his having entered the order.99 At a second remove, the citations of Alexandrian names and cultural referents can be said to be a reflection of the latter-day moment in which the libretti were composed, the period immediately preceding and following decolonization. Not only was the first operetta— Le Sorelle Brontë (1947–1951)—written at the beginning of this sea change, de Zogheb himself would compose all the rest, with the exception of “La Vita,” while living abroad. It is little wonder that when Le Sorelle was published, several of the librettist’s Alexandrian friends, whether living at home or abroad, spoke of the nostalgia it evoked.100 Consider the names of Alexandrian contemporaries of the librettist’s in the lovers’ duet between de Lesseps and his mistress La Malmulla in “Il Canale,” fictively projected several decades back and set to the tune of “It’s You, It’s You, It’s You”: Lesseps:

Non e Joyce Ades, ni Mika Vitiades, E te, e te, e te—

Malmulla: Non e Marke Zervudachi, ni Costia Mitarachi— E te, e te, e te— Lesseps:

Non e Mary Totah, ni Gloria Saporta, Ne meno un de quelle vale mio bébé—

Malmulla: Non e Avellino, ni Piero Guarino— Nessuno altro voi per me— Tutti Due: E te, e te, e te . . . Lesseps:

Non e Lilia Ralli, ne anche Jeanne Palli, E te, e te, e te . . .

Malmulla: Non e Mario Colucci, ni Jeannot Beneducci—

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Lesseps:

Non e Billy Christou, non e Dorothy Sistou, Ne meno un de quelle e fata per me—

Malmulla: Non e Georges Mavridis, ni Pani Coumidis— Tutti Due: E te, e te, e te . . . (OJH 130) [Lesseps: It’s not Joyce Ades, nor Mika Vitiades, / It’s you, it’s you, it’s you—/ Malmulla: It’s not Marke Zervudachi, nor Costia Mitarachi—/ It’s you, it’s you, it’s you—/ Lesseps: It’s not Mary Totah, nor Gloria Saporta, / Not even one of them is worth my baby—/ Malmulla: It’s not Avellino, nor Piero Guarino—/ None of them do I want for me—/ Both: It’s you, it’s you, it’s you . . . / Lesseps: It’s not Lilia Ralli, neither Jeanne Palli, / It’s you, it’s you, it’s you . . . / Malmulla: It’s not Mario Colucci, nor Jeannot Beneducci—/ It’s you, it’s you, it’s you—/ Lesseps: It’s not Billy Christou, it’s not Dorothy Sistou, / Not even one of them is made for me—/ Malmulla: It’s not Georges Mavridis, nor Pani Coumidis—/ Both: It’s you, it’s you, it’s you . . . ]

In the years when de Zogheb was writing this libretto (1965–70), most Alexandrians of the backgrounds summoned in these names—likely also chosen to attest the city’s ethnic heterogeneity—had emigrated, as had his friend Molly Tuby, who inspired la Malmulla according to the dedication.101 In a sense, then, one function of the lovers’ duet is an act of memorialization and a lyrical appeal to a polyglot, multiethnic Polypolitan society mostly rendered diasporic. His childhood friend Jacky Lumbroso Nimr who, after leaving Alexandria, lived for a while in Morocco, remembers getting together there with de Zogheb: “it must have been in 1972, he was wearing his Union Jack . . . and he was working for a company taking tourists around . . . And my daughter was about nine at the time, and she was laughing, laughing, laughing with Bernard doing all his operettas and singing.”102 De Zogheb’s diary entries about that reunion indicate that while his friends enjoyed “Phaedra,” which he sang, it was certain arias from “Le Vacanze” and “Il Canale” that were most successful.103 But such exercises, even as they addressed the dispersal of that society, also aesthetically reinscribed it in terms amenable to a queer sensibility while diffusing it in other cultural contexts. (And de Zogheb, it should be added, eventually come to think of his audience as including Americans, evidence of which is his having written an Englishlanguage version of “Phaedra.”)104 This is perhaps what Merrill was gesturing toward when he prefaced the first edition of Le Sorelle with this observation:

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The reader will search in vain for the gloomy, introspective Brontës of his literature class. In their place, three wild extroverts ride the familiar Mediterranean pendulum between the most lavish endearments and the coarsest recriminations. They are concerned with money, food, sex, and renown. It is what one had always suspected of great writers, and it is but a single strand in the web of truths that M. de Zogheb has woven.105

In Le Sorelle, as seen also in the foregoing linguistic discussion, de Zogheb was putting to use the high canonicity of the Brontës’ lives and works in order to throw further into relief his reworking of the story into the melodramatic and the outrageous. As in the hysterical speech by Carlotta, cited above, in which she dismisses Thackeray and Dickens, the reinscription of the story elicits a draglike quality that parodically casts the perceived fixities of Victorian morality and literary value in Levantinized garb. Of the rest of his operatic texts, it is “La Vita Alessandrina,” his last known libretto, that combines explicit references to queerness with an Alexandrian setting populated by Levantine dramatis personae. Long before de Zogheb based “La Vita Alessandrina” on the life of Cavafy, the Alexandrian Greek poet had become an icon of sorts among his literary friends, constituting an intertextual connection between their writings. The life of the poet that the librettist drew on was Cavafy: A Critical Biography (1974), by the friend he had first met in 1940s Alexandria, Liddell, dedicated “à Bernard de Zogheb et aux autres amis alexandrins,” likely including Ayoub Sinano whose insights into the social history of Alexandria the biographer acknowledges, the biography itself having been reviewed by Merrill.106 In fact, the libretto has as its genesis two Cavafy poems de Zogheb had translated into Italian and set to popular tunes for A Birthday Tribute book Merrill’s friends had compiled for him on the occasion of his turning sixty. Merrill and Liddell, as de Zogheb has said, were his most devoted admirers who gave him the incentive to write “La Vita.” Liddell died while the librettist was starting work on it, and Merrill appears to have seen only a first draft of Act I; “La Vita” is dedicated to their memory. It should be noted that there had been social connections between the Cavafys and the Zoghebs, long before the librettist was born, as well as the Debbanés. Stéphane Olry has made the astute observation that the librettist’s method of distributing his texts resembles the poet’s,107 and one could add autobiographical parallels such as cosseting mothers and impoverishment. But it is above all in

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the fact of their being two Alexandrian gay writers, albeit of different generations and producing differently articulated homoerotic texts, that the affinity lies; one might even suggest that in this libretto, de Zogheb came close to rendering a veiled “vita” of himself. This “biographical opera in three acts”—“the fortunate years,” “the reversal of fortune,” and “old age”108 —modulates the life of the poet through two tonalities: pathos and bathos. The pathos is allocated to the poet’s voice in the libretto and elicited from situations into which he is thrust. The bathos arises from the mores of mondain and demi-mondain Alexandrians of Levantine backgrounds pushed to a parodic extreme and, as such, embraced. These two keys are at moments set up as dissonant—the gay sensibility of Cavafy versus social constraints—and at others as assonant—in the sense that the poet’s milieu is camped up in a comic vein that amplifies the queer theme summoned in the central figure. The opera opens with a miseen-abyme frame story in that Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the barbarians,” where a decadent society awaits in vain the arrival of barbarians who might have reinvigorated it, is miniaturized and transposed to the Alexandrian salon, specifically the poet’s mother’s “at home day.” Everyone in the opening scene—including a monsignor, a consul, and a general, these inspired by figures in the poem—awaits the arrival of a lady from a Greek family, the Zervudachis.109 The social satire enhances the sense of the poet’s claustrophobia as he is called on to recite one of his compositions—the melancholy “Candles” on one occasion and on another “As Long as You Can” (the latter ironically cautioning against cheapening one’s life through social transactions and quotidian trivialities)—to much cloying adulation from the assembled ladies.110 Establishing a queer atmosphere are homosocial spaces or ones in which the poet moves mainly among male friends. These include a brothel from which the French madame, having welcomed Cavafy to the tune of “Milord,” dismisses at his behest the female prostitutes for the evening: “Sta sera e speciale, serrata masculine” ([VAHH 5] “This evening is special, it’ll be all-male”) set to “Mon Ménage à Moi.” There is also the seafront café in which Cavafy gets together with Giuseppe Ungaretti, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and, later, Forster, as well as the Billiard Palace where the Alexandrian Greek poet gets introduced to the “archangels,” three louche boys he is known to have frequented in later life. The archangels, together with the figure of the muse and patroness, Anoleri, described as

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an Irish American woman, contribute signal camp hallmarks to the libretto. When in Act I the timid young Cavafy is being coaxed by his mother and her lady friends to recite a poem, Anoleri makes her first appearance: Anoleri: Son Anoleri, Anoleri, County Kerry, Tra la la Son Anoleri, Anoleri, Brooklyn Ferry, hop la la. John, Peter, Paul:

Anoleri, Hakelberi,* Tomangieri,* Umpapa

Tutti:

Anoleri, Anoleri, Bladimeri,* Tra la la. (VAHH 2)

That footnotes (in Italian) gloss the asterisked words as, respectively, “An American Finn,” “American cat and mouse,” and “An American tomato juice” puts the last touch to the ludic pop apostrophes introducing this most epic of figures, the muse, set to the tune of “Hallelujah” (VAHH 2). When in Act III, Scene 3, as Cavafy approaches the end of his life, Anoleri reappears, still young and beautiful, the stage directions speculate that she may have had a “face lift” (in English in the original). By contrast, the possibility of a face lift is raised, then rejected as an explanation of the abiding youth of the three archangels in the next scene, for they—and not the muse— “son immortale” (VAHH 21); and indeed when Cavafy dies, the archangels bear him aloft on their winged shoulders and exit the scene. While it may be suggested that, as in the treatment of the archangels in “La Vita,” the libretti lend representational space to the underprivileged, I would argue that this occurs primarily in the name of queerness rather than egalitarianism. De Zogheb deliberately endows the three archangels with a multiethnic background: his source, Liddell’s biography of the poet, gives their names—Spyro, George (“a book-keeper at a café”) and Toto (a mechanic)—which, while indicative of their belonging to the foreign colonies of Alexandria, are not so marked.111 In the libretto, their backgrounds are amplified through culturally apposite tunes, iconic of the intersection of Levantine cosmopolitanism and queerness. In one of the Billiard Palace scenes, observing that Cavafy is interested in them, the archangels “si mettano ‘al gardavou’” ([VAHH 3] from the French “se mettent au garde-à-vous,” or stand to attention). They introduce themselves to something in the order of ethnic theme tunes: Gaby, father from “Ispahan,” mother from Cairo, himself a football champion of a Macchabi club in Alexandria, to the tune of “My Yiddishe Mama”; Raf, a Neapolitan seeking to make his fortune in the Egyptian city, as

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he recounts in an aria set to “Ciao, Ciao Bambina”; and Michali, come from Crete to look for work, to the tune of “Eime Andros.” The archangels are later moved to flights of multilingual lyricism about their mothers by Cavafy’s recitation of “Prayer” (1898; disseminated)—to the tune of “Blackbird has Spoken”—a poem that centers on a sailor’s mother who, unaware that he has drowned, lights a candle in church and prays for her son’s safe return while the Madonna’s icon listens, knowing he will never be back. Raf, to the tune of “O Sole Mio,” says, “O Mamma mia, dove sei tu? a d’aspetarmi . . . / Nel porto, a Santa Lucia, O Mamma mia, o Mamma mia” (O mommy dearest, where are you? Are you waiting for me . . . / In the port, at Santa Lucia, O mommy, mommy dearest). Michali waxes in Greek, intermingled with Italian, set to “Irrisse”: “Mamamou, e si pou este Mamamou / Spetando mi nel Pirea, con tutto sua parea / Mamamou Egho thelosis, Mamamou / Grigora ritornare del altra parte l’mare” (Mamamou, where are you Mamamou / Waiting for me in Piraeus, with all his group of friends / Mamamou, I want you, Mamamou / Grigora will be back from the other side of the sea). Glosses on the first and third lines are provided in footnotes to the text, but one should also note the assonance of the Greek words Pirea and parea embedded in the Italian line. Gaby’s aria, to the music of “If I Were a Rich Man,” is, “Mia buona madre / Lei e molto molto fina, lei e very very good / Spetando la, nel Kharet el Yahoud* / legendo piosamente il Talmud” (My good mother / She looks very very refined, she’s tellement bonne / Waiting there in Jews’ Alley / Intoning piously the Talmud). Underscoring the pathos/bathos tonalities of the text, stage directions have Cavafy “laugh[ing] with some bitterness” here before musing about “terrible” mothers who are “veritable castrators” (VAHH 6).112 Another signal moment in which homoeroticism and Levantine hybridity are brought together is one that plays off Forster’s sojourn in Alexandria, namely, his relationship with El-Adl, on which see chapter 2 of this book. It should be noted parenthetically that, although de Zogheb may not have known of this, Forster had turned his own hand to writing affectionately satirical skits about and poems imitating Cavafy.113 It is at a seafront café, soon after Cavafy recites to Ungaretti and Marinetti “The Tobacco Shop Window,” which seems to be among the few explicitly homoerotic poems of his cited in the libretto, that Forster joins the company. He bursts on the scene with the spoken words about three men, “Rama Dam Dam,

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tre uomi nel tram, / Mohamed, Mustapha, e Abdel Salam” (VAHH 13), and is cajoled into divulging his latest adventures on the tram. Set to a tune that ironically recalls a fleeting, obscure object of heterosexual desire, “The Girl from Ipanema,” this portion is worth quoting at length: Forster: E ben . . . Inspirato del Bush Telefono Son salito a San Stefano* Che diccono un gran’ merchato d’amore Fermato a la stazion Zizinia* Trovato uno Copto di Minya Chi mi volevo subito dare suo cuore. E Puoi, arrivato a Rouchdy* Un Greccho che sempravo un puo “pouchti” Mi ha deto “Bon Giorno Signore, Accetate di me questi fiore” Puoi, arrivando a Sidi Gaber,* Ho comminciato un gran’ palaber Con un nubiano parlandomi con calore Ungaretti, Marinetti e Cavafy (Parlando) E puoi? e Puoi? e Puoi?? Forster: Un puo piu tarde a Ibrahimia,* Uno vestito di galabia, M’ha offerto mangiare pomodore A Campo Cesare,* in Stazione Ho avuto dele propozitione Di un soldato biondo venuto di fuori A Chatby,* un bel studente M’a fato diclarazione ardente Mi offriva con lui di andar Nela sua famiglia pranzar Ma pensando promenata finita Son ceso del tram a Mazarita* E ecco mi, amice, senza dolore (VAHH 13–14)114 [Forster: Well, here goes. . . / Apprised by the Bush Telefono / I hopped over to San Stefano / Which they say is a great market of love / Stopping at the station in Zizinya / I found a Copt from Minya / Who promptly lost his heart to me / Then, having reached Rouchdy, / A Greek, always a bit “poushti,” / Said to me, “Good day, Sir, / Please accept from me these flowers” / Arriving next at Sidi Gaber, / I got into a huge palaber / With a Nubian, speaking with much fervor. / Ungaretti, Marinetti and Cavafy (speaking): And then? And then? And then? / Forster: Then, a bit later in Ibrahimia / A man dressed in a galabia / Offered me a tomato / In the Campo Cesare station / I got a proposition / From a

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soldier, blond and foreign / At Chatby, a handsome student / Made passionate declarations / Offering to take me / To have lunch with his family / But deciding that my outing was now finished / I hopped off the tram at Mazarita / And here I am, friends, whole and unscathed.]

The sheer variety of ethnicities and histories encoded in Alexandria’s place-names, including of tram stations, has long been a variously articulated trope in literary texts about the city as well as scholarly texts about toponymy as a “milieu de mémoire,” as we have seen.115 But in Forster’s speech, the signifiers of cosmopolitanism in the names of tram stations are aligned with the homoerotic through the encounter in each with a male from a different ethnic and social background— the Copt, the Greek, the Nubian, the working-class Egyptian, the foreign soldier, and the student. The speech that begins with a nod to an “in-the-know” gay subculture in the cryptographically capitalized “Bush Telefono,” then, sets up something of an equivalence between the Mediterranean cosmopolitanism of the city and queerness. That the use of pidginized Italian for the libretti speaks to their camp texture is clinched in its instantiations here through the counterpoint of rhyme: for example, the adaptation of “palaver” (a word from lingua franca) as “palaber” to echo “Gaber” and of what appears to be the Greek slang term for gay man, “poustis” (or perhaps the English “pushy”—possibly even a Greek-English portmanteau word), rendered as “pouchti” to rhyme with “Rouchdy.”116 Thus linguistic “form” is indivisible from the queered Alexandrian Levantine “content.” Forster’s words also construe the tram—one of the urban spaces of mobility, bringing together individuals from different “walks of life”—as amenable to chance sexual encounters. This scene in “La Vita” is appropriately rounded off with Italianized loanword toasts by Ungaretti of “trinquiam” (footnoted as derived from the French trinquer) and Marinetti of “drinkiam,” with Cavafy having the last word by directing the toasts to “our old tram”: “Drinkiam, beviam, al nostro vecchio tram!” (VAHH 14). Whereas “Malmulla ou Il Canale” does not have explicitly homoerotic content, its recourse to Orientalist tropes that it both replicates and renders kitsch makes something of an appeal to a queer aesthetic in the process of celebrating the would-be but doomed ancien régime world that is Polypolis. The key political players on a world stage characterized by the scramble of France and Britain for territory over the body of “the sick man of Europe” are presented, together with the Ottoman sultan, a viceroy, and a khedive of Egypt, in a satirical drama. This “historical opera in 3 acts”—“Birth of an

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Idea,” “The Great Project,” and “The Canal Gala”—centering on the Suez Canal project opens nowhere other than in Alexandria, in the antechamber of the viceroy Mohamed Said, who welcomes de Lesseps’s proposal on the grounds that the waterway would be quite “Un colpo al perfido Albion” ([OJH 115] a blow to perfidious Albion). Meanwhile, the sultan of Turkey, whose authorization of the project de Lesseps has sought, fears precisely that the canal might jeopardize his control over Egypt. In England, where de Lesseps has next sought Queen Victoria’s approval of the project, the decision is made to construct the canal as long as Britain has the upper hand and beats the French to it. The decision is sealed with a mise-en-abyme intertextual nod toward Verdi, who makes a cameo appearance, to the tune of the “Marcia Trionfale” from Aida: Verdi:

Io scrivero Una belissima opera seria Per questo bell occasion,— Le Egyzzian Serano tutti tutti in isteria A quello inaugurazion—

Alberto: In Cairo a l’opera— Ogni uno che stoppera Dira cosi—“comme c’est jolie— Comme c’est exquis.” Tutti:

Lui scrivera Una bellissima opera seria Tutti andiamo a veder Non ci sera Altre cose cosi belle nella Berberia Tutto devrano lo saper— Tutto devrano lo saper (OJH 124)

[Verdi: I will write / A beautiful serious opera / For this beautiful occasion / The Egyptians / Will all be hysterical / At the inauguration— / Albert: In Cairo at the opera— / Each one who will stop / Will say—“How pretty it is— / How exquisite.” / Everyone: He will write / A beautiful serious opera / We will all go to see / There won’t be / Anything else so beautiful in Berberia / Everyone will have to know it— / Everyone will have to know it]

The sly wink at Verdi serves to measure the distance between the grandiose tragedy (the “beautiful serious[ness]”) of his opera and de Zogheb’s own “Il Canale” as a spoof by a child of “Berberia” of the moment of genesis of Aida.

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The spoofing variously draws into play tropes of the Oriental despot and of Eastern extravagance. The strategy at work seems to be to burlesque the Orientalist motif to a point where it is winningly innocuous. When de Lesseps and his wife are ushered in by the castrati for an audience with the “stupendo [Viceroy] Mohamed Said,” the viceroy rattles off compliments, to the tune of “Tea for Two,” about Mme de Lesseps before asking what she would like to drink: “Bella signora de Lessepsi / Vorei un cafe’? Vorei un Pepsi?” (OJH 114). But the libretto reserves its most farcical depiction of grand ceremonial to the canal inauguration festivities, the stuff of historical legend. In a scene set in Cairo, Empress Eugenie is welcomed to the gala by Alexandrian hostesses who, speaking French, in deference to the empress, present the buffet they prepared for her to the tune of “Mack the Knife”: Una Donna:

L’alakerda, c’est de Gerda— La Tabouli, c’est de moi

Un’altra Donna:

La Coubeba est de Beba— La Bastourma, c’est pour toi—

Un’altra Donna:

La Batiha est de Miha— La Cometra c’est de moi

Una Donna a la sua Amicca: Yalla mange ton orange Si tu veux un chocolat— (OJH 134)117 [A Lady: The alakerda is from Gerda / The Tabouli is from me / Another Lady: The Coubeba is from Beba / The Bastourma is for you / Another Lady: The Batiha [watermelon] is from Miha / The Cometra [pear] is from me / A Lady to Her Friend: Yalla [Come on], eat your orange / If you want a chocolate.]

The names, the foods, the internal rhyme with the women’s names, the fact of a predominantly French matrix, embedded with an Arabic filler (“Yalla”)—all render this a sort of Levantine theme song. In the endearing incongruity it introduces into an occasion of pomp and ceremony—the atmosphere of a potluck dinner, with the women making homemade introductions of the dishes they have contributed—is a fine instance of the naïveté Sontag locates in true camp,118 here elicited from the mores of Polypolitan society. And “Il Canale” underscores the carte d’entrée it is forging here for the Polypolitans when it has Empress Eugenie advising Prince Albert to pretend to like the food, then later spit it out and vomit, before they are both converted to the delicious Oriental dishes they thought would be “horrendo” and “carrion” (OJH 137). If there is a “carnivalesque” at work here, it

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is not of the folk Bakhtinian order but rather belongs to Alexandria’s “carnival,” marking the beginning of Lent, an affair largely of the European colonies that if anything reaffirmed their hierarchically superior position.119 The most Orientalist element in the libretto by far is the courtesan figure, and although de Zogheb had written another libretto titled “Salome,” “Dopo Oscaro Salvagio” ([OJH 151] After Oscar Wilde), its principal intertext in “Il Canale” is Ayoub Sinano’s Pola de Péra suivi de Proses pour Pola. This opens with a sequence of nine poems, in a bittersweet elegiac tenor that sets the tone for the whole volume, tracing the life of the courtesan Pola: her childhood, loves, short-lived career as diva at the opera of Péra (a Christian neighborhood of Istanbul), ambition to attain stardom in a harsh Paris where she works as a prostitute, return to Turkey and resumption of a prostitute’s life, then final testament legating her belongings to her nearest and dearest, some of whom, such as her cousin Chouchoula la Marigoula, germinate as the central figures in the stories that follow. These prose texts, in which Pola serves as an inverted moving spirit of sorts, describe in their urban settings the arc of Polypolis in Ayoub Sinano’s article, “Levant,” or the multiple incarnations of a Caesarea he had first traced in Artagal, if inhabited in this book not so much by an elite as by a déclassé society. While some of the stories bear a resonance with Cavafy, the main intertextual dialogue in Pola de Péra is with Orientalist texts that deploy the courtesan trope and the various figures associated with it, including Durrell’s Quartet. It should be observed, parenthetically, that de Zogheb, for his part, had an indirect biographical connection with Durrell, having been a childhood friend of the novelist’s Alexandrian third wife, Claude Vincendon, and made the acquaintance of his Alexandrian second wife, Eve Cohen.120 The second of the poems with which Aoub Sinano’s Pola de Péra opens, “Pola Diva,” already presages the courtesan trope: Les grands effets ont de subtiles causes: Quand tu chantais Madame Butterfly à l’opéra de Péra Les spectateurs sentaient tes relents d’ail Et c’est pourquoi l’on te couvrait de roses. Ah, l’émouvant parfum de tes salades! En se mêlant avec la mer calmée

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dans l’opéra de Péra Il faisait se gonfler tes seins d’almée Qui remuaient au rythme des roulades. Vingt ans après—dans quelque lupanar— Voyant, sans voix, sur un divan, la reine de l’opéra de Péra Le client de la nuit, à ton haleine, Reconnaît le rossignol du Phanar.121 [In Merrill’s translation: “Sensational effects have subtle causes. / Whenever you sang Madame Butterfly / At the Pera / Opera / The crowd inhaled the garlic of your high / Flat c’s, and therefore pelted you with roses. / Ah how your salad fragrances afloat / One fine day over doldrums canvas blue / At the Pera / Opera / Would merge with bosomy undulation to / Defray the steep expenses of each note. / Years later, in the dive where ends our tale, / You loll, mute queen (a lame divan for throne) / At the Pera / Opera / Whom evening’s client, by your breath alone, / Knows to have been the Phanar’s nightingale.”]

With its allusions to the Orientalist trope in its manifestations in the Far East (Madama Butterfly) and in the Middle East via Flaubert (“almée”), it may have been this poem that de Zogheb had in mind when he contributed a drawing to a limited edition Egyptian offprint of the nine poems from Pola de Péra.122 But his own “Malmulla ou Il Canale” would compound his readings of the courtesan figure via Ayoub Sinano’s take. Among other dedicatees of “Malmulla ou Il Canale,” is “Christian Ayoub Sinano who first imagined the characters of la Pola and her Aunt Madame Marigoula Pacha.”123 As the Ottoman sultan’s concubine, Pola’s epithet in this libretto is “lusignola del Phanar” (nightingale of Phanar) in a wink to “Pola Diva.” Several motifs amplify Ayoub Sinano’s Pola in the afterlife de Zogheb gives her, for example, the song she sings to the tune of “La Comparsita,” when, conniving with the sultan, she seduces de Lesseps to distract him from his project: “Io son la lusignola— / Lusignola del Phanar— / Menero la barcarola / Si deviam ricominciar—” ([OJH 120] I am la lusignola— / Lusignola of Phanar— / I will lead the barcarole / If we have to start again—). “Il Canale” also imagines a more illustrious launch of Pola’s Parisian career. At the canal inauguration ball, Verdi himself promises, to the tune of “‘Parigi,’ Traviata,” that “A Parigi, Bella Pola, / Ti faro cantare, / Dolce lusignola / Del lontan Phanare” ([OJH 138] To

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Figure 9. An illustration by Bernard de Zogheb for his libretto “Malmulla ou Il Canale,” showing Malmulla and de Lesseps. Reproduced by permission of Margot de Zogheb-Bogert, Anne Anka, and Patricia de Zogheb, image courtesy of Jack Hagstrom.

Paris, Beautiful Pola / I will have you sing, / Sweet lusignola / From far Phanar). In another latter-day textual infusion of lifeblood into the courtesan trope à la Levantine, de Zogheb provides his own answer to la Pola in the parallel figure of la Malmulla, the poor cousin of Khedive Ismail’s mistress, la Moghnagua. Young and innocent, la Malmulla is offered to de Lesseps and becomes his mistress (see fig. 9), only to discover at the canal gala that he is married; she therefore drowns herself in the canal. The libretto, which bears her name, grants her a tongue-in-cheek apotheosis in that it is decided to give her name “a la nuova strata / In dove si vende l’amor” (to the new street / Where they sell love) and it is even suggested that “Marinai de tutte le nazione / Saluterano sua statua di metal” ([OJH 140] Sailors of all nations / Will salute her metal statue)—thus, implicitly, displacing the statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps that had long stood at the entrance to the Suez Canal. Granted, this is not a straightforward duplication of the courtesan trope but rather a redeployment with affectionate spoofing. In de Zogheb, the courtesan figure—as a long-established literary, operatic, and artistic trope—would have responded to a taste for theatricality,

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to a camp “relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms.”124 But it is not just that the odalisque figure could serve as emblematic of a larger-than-life femininity; it seems also to have been deemed useful as part of the stock currency of an Ottoman Levant in an Orientalist imaginaire. And therein lies the rub—that in the service of Alexandrian Levantine camp a bizarre perpetuity is lent this trope in an age of dissolution of empire and the project of “decolonising the mind,” in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s phrase. The parodic drive here hardly dispels a degree of interpellation in that the puckish celebration of the courtesan figure in “Malmulla ou Il Canale” comes quite close to auto-Orientalism. Consider, by contrast, an example from Algeria, a context I shall return to, namely, Malek Alloula’s Colonial Harem, a compilation of quasi-erotic postcards of the algérienne under the French occupation in the first three decades of the twentieth century in a mass production of “the phantasm of the harem” that the critic analyzes and attempts to subvert, “lagging far behind History, [by] return[ing] this immense postcard to its sender.”125 Yet again, it should be underscored that a taste for a showy femininity would yield, in another libretto by Zogheb, a figure whose conception if hardly politicized is not altogether apolitical, namely, the “Levantina” in “Le Vacaze a Parigi.”

the political limitations of polypolitan camp Tucked into this apparently most frivolous of de Zogheb’s operettas is a submerged drama concerning European racism toward Arabs that calls to be read in the context of the France of 1962 in which the text was written. The scene in this “comic operetta in one-act” unfolds both just outside and inside the Parisian restaurant Prunier at which de Zogheb dined with Merrill and his partner, David Jackson, when they first met.126 “Le Vacanze a Parigi,” which is “Dedicato a due vecchi Amicci conosciuti tropo Brevamente” ([OJH 77] Dedicated to two old friends known all too briefly), is about two young American students vacationing in Paris who, accosted by a French prostitute (see fig. 10), take refuge in Prunier where, unable to pay the bill for their lavish dinner, they hide in the art nouveau ladies’ bathroom. No sooner have they won over Mme Lavabo (Madame Washbasin), an impoverished Russian aristocrat, than a Levantine woman barges in. Scandalized by the presence of the two young men in the Ladies, she hysterically berates Mme Lavabo, who answers offensively. The

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Figure 10. An illustration by Bernard de Zogheb for his libretto “Le Vacanze a Parigi,” showing the two American students, outside Prunier in Paris, being accosted by the prostitute. Reproduced by permission of Margot de Zogheb-Bogert, Anne Anka, and Patricia de Zogheb, image courtesy of Jack Hagstrom.

maitre d’hotel who has come to investigate the fuss sides with Mme Lavabo, kneeling in apology before her while the Levantina throws out that she has decided to leave France. In the meantime, the two American tourists have slipped out unnoticed and are accosted again by the prostitute, though this time they decide that in the bed of this beautiful woman, “Noi possiam studiar amare il vrai Paris” ([OJH 85] we can learn to love the True Paris). De Zogheb had written “Le Vacanze a Parigi” as a thank-you for patronage received from Merrill, soon after their first meeting. The operetta is replete with teasing of de Zogheb’s newfound friend, “Jimmy” Merrill, the well-heeled gay cosmopolite. In the farcical plot about American innocents abroad (“senza alcun esperienza” [OJH 77]), “Dzimmy” and his friend David, on a tight budget, are lured into the Parisian dens of sin. The contretemps in the Ladies furthers the farce most of all when the “Levantina isterica” ([OJH 77] hysterical Levantine woman)—modeled on an Alexandrian Levantine friend living in Paris at the time, Germaine Nahman, who worked in the haute couture business and who had brought Merrill and de Zogheb

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together—turns up.127 The Levantina throws a fit that she “cannot even do Pipi / Without finding men here / Not even in my country, it’s not like this—no! no! no!” (“nemeno far Pipi / Senza trovare uomini qui / Nemeno in mio paese non e cosi—no! no! no!” [OHJ 84]). One can get so carried away by the sheer lightness of the comedy and witty situational ironies as not to notice the traces of race and class issues embedded in the dialogues. When they find that divulging their problem to Mme Lavabo does not help, Dzimmy and David appeal to her maternal instinct by suggesting that she must have a son and can therefore understand. Mme Lavabo softens and lets drop, “E si, e vero, mio Bibi—/ Soldato fa, di la in Algerie. . .” (Why yes, it’s true, my Bibi—/ A soldier he is, there in Algerie). It is just when this piece of information about the “naturalized” Russian’s son serving the cause of France’s colonial war against Algerian independence is disclosed that the Levantina, an Arab, steps in. Stage directions describe her as wearing a Dior dress, “molto sic” (very chic), “but with too many diamonds and bracelets.”128 What is fascinating about the fracas that ensues is the escalation of exclusions of the Levantina. Her prudery affronted, the Levantina accuses Mme Lavabo of being “nothing but an old prostitute,” to which the Russian replies, “But Madame, don’t say this / In my country I was a sultana / Before coming to live in Paris / But you are a stranger / Who knows where you’ve come from / To sow discord with your manner / Among everyone around you.”129 Despite admitting to being a stranger herself in Paris, Mme Lavabo betrays a measure of xenophobia when she reserves the status of stranger for the Levantina, the demarcation line spelled out at this point being a known origin, and one of aristocracy for that matter. Such a line might seem to be a matter of face-saving self-aggrandizement on the part of Mme Lavabo vis-à-vis a customer who visibly sports status symbols (and indeed the Levantina says she has been insulted by an inferior). But the exchanges that follow ascribe it to a different frame of reference. When the maitre d’hotel materializes on the scene, Mme Lavabo, to the tune of “Yellow Rose of Texas,” complains: Lei m’ha deto quell signora che io son putan’ In vece son contessa, e nata nel Kazan Non puosso suportare qu’un cliente oriental’ Mi vien cosi troublare nel mio urinal (OJH 84) [That lady there called me a prostitute / Me, a countess, born in Kazan / I won’t have a customer who’s an oriental / Harass me in my urinal]

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Here, over and above the irony of a grandiosity coupled with “my urinal,” the demarcation line between the “U” and “non-U” is drawn along a racial distinction in that the Levantina is identified as “oriental”: it is as such, not as someone who has behaved inappropriately, that she is marked out and identified as Mme Lavabo’s inferior.130 As if to underscore that racism is not confined to this one voice and to hint that it is part of a broader phenomenon, “Le Vacanze” has the maitre d’hotel reply: Scusati la contessa—lei non sa cosa fa— Nel suo paese certo, grande dame come lei non ha Come puote lei capere, che seduta tra le fior Siete una grande dame, e vi do il mio cuor— (OJH 84) [Excuse her, countess—she does not know what she’s doing / It’s sure that in her country they don’t have grandes dames like you / How could she understand that, seated amid the flowers, / You are a grande dame, and I give you my heart—]

With these words, the maitre d’hotel goes down on his knees in front of Mme Lavabo. The Levantina’s signifiers of distinction, then, decode as something visibly “worn on the sleeve” in contrast to the matronly, tricot-knitting Mme Lavabo ensconced in her urinal whose true class, however, shines through. Yet one would argue that what might seem to be “innate” about Mme Lavabo is no less “skin deep” than in the case of the denigrated Levantina. It is ascribable to being white in 1962 France, in contradistinction to the fact of being a “colored” Arab, that annuls the intricacies of social structures that Ayoub Sinano was so keen to delineate in Polypolis (“It’s sure that in her country they don’t have grandes dames like you”). The Levantina’s response suggests a further elaboration on the political climate in France vis-à-vis Arabs at the time. Seeing the maitre d’hotel’s reaction, she rants to the tune of “Brazil”: E ben, Prout! Non voglio pui vostro choucroute Ni vostro buon pate en croute Io ritorno a Beyrouth—Beyrouth! E meglio che Prunier Mangio Coubeba a Zahlé, Mangio Tabouli a Saidé— Mangio Baklawa con café— Beyrouth! Beyrouth! Beyrouth! (OJH 85)

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[Blast it! / I don’t want your choucroute / Nor your lovely pate en croute / I’m going back to Beirut—Beirut! It’s better than Prunier / I’ll eat Coubeba at Zahlé, / Eat Tabouli at Saidé— / Eat Baklava with café— / Beirut! Beirut! Beirut!]

What may seem to be an overreaction to exit not just Punier, but France underscores that the xenophobia and racism she has encountered is part of a larger phenomenon that may be interpreted as metonymic of anti-(Arab)immigrant discourse. If the Alexandrian hostesses’ song in “Il Canale” is a theme tune of Levantinism in full flower on the Polypolitan home turf, then the Levantina’s is a swan song of that identity once transplanted to the Western diaspora. Although the incident with the Levantina is presented almost as a dramatic device to further the comic plot about the hapless American tourists, de Zogheb visually fleshed it out. In one of two of his “Opere” notebooks, de Zogheb made two illustrations for this operetta, the second of which shows the maitre d’hotel kneeling in front of Mme Lavabo.131 While these two figures occupy the foreground horizontally, the Levantina stands vertically in the background, drawn to an apparently smaller scale, as if to underscore her diminishment, bejeweled arm waiving agitatedly. That she is framed in the doorway might be read as emphasizing her exclusion even as the strong mauve-blue color reserved mainly for Mme Lavabo and her stoutness anchor the Russian at the center of the composition. Papers by de Zogheb seen so far that date from his sojourn in Paris, mainly letters, reflect homesickness and a degree of boredom, but there is no indication as to how he responded to the war in Algeria or what repercussions it may have had on him as an Arab living in Paris. Yet apart from his immediate contact with breaking news from Algeria through his work at the Associated Press during his first year in France, he was living in Paris in 1961 when, on October 17, in response to increasingly repressive policing measures against Algerians, the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) organized peaceful demonstrations that were put down in “the bloodiest act of state repression of street protest in Western Europe in modern history.”132 How would he have been perceived in daily dealings in relation to the Algerians, and the Pieds-noirs, given his Francophone proficiency and recognizably Christian first name? Judging by “Le Vacanze,” these issues were not far from his mind—one can imagine him sighing, “la Levantina isterica, c’est moi.”133 Beyond his camp affinity with an exaggerated femininity and the mutual “Levantine” identification,

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the Levantina’s hysteria can be read as symptomatic of what may have been his own panic about racism. Either way, one would err not to interrogate the representation of the Levantina vis-à-vis the plight of Arabs in France in 1962. It is telling that while the libretto touched on the racism toward Arabs in that place and time it could not do so except on behalf of an elite figure, so that ultimately class takes precedence over the residue of the colonial politics of race in the “acting out” of disenfranchisement. Although it is on the cue of the reference to the war in Algeria that the Levantina steps onstage and despite the dismissive designation of her as “oriental,” it is the charge of her misrecognition of class and rank that proves to be the last straw. The Levantina in Paris in 1962 marks the extent of brinksmanship de Zogheb was willing to undertake in pushing against the limitations of Polypolis as his libretti conceived of it. “Le Vacanze” is the point at which Alexandrian Levantine camp comes face-to-face with a political (colonial/postcolonial) reality, briefly nods toward it, and then glances away. If the libretti’s camp, qua camp, makes a persuasive case for queerness, the texts’ poetics are ultimately undermined by their depoliticized take on Levantinism. It was after “Le Vacanze” that de Zogheb wrote “Il Canale,” with its backward-looking if elfish courting of a Khedival-Ottoman world seeking admittance into the circles of the European Great Powers.134 That by then Polypolis had been undone is an index of the retroactiveness of the libretti’s labor, their retrograde inability to fashion a new imaginary in which their antihomophobic intent would be conjoined with a more ethnically and socially egalitarian one. To speculate whether following this line of argument might lead to unraveling the fabric of de Zogheb’s extant operettas is to pose the question what lasting value this corpus has. Writing about a virtually unpublished author comes with a set of risks,135 not the least of which is of adversely coloring the perception of the texts in question before they have had a chance to reach a general readership. Adducing the libretti’s long-standing manuscript form and the fact of extensive quotations made in the foregoing discussion is less germane than to ask, should they be published? There, the answer would be emphatically in the affirmative, on several grounds. It has been suggested, by a loyal admirer of de Zogheb’s,136 that his libretti are dependent on his own presence, an opinion corroborated by the many private allusions in his work and the charisma of the man himself. Certainly, de Zogheb was an all-rounder whose multiple talents—drawing, dramaturgy, dramatic performance and

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singing, social satire, pastiche and polyglot verbal play—were pooled into his libretti. Whether the libretti can actually be performed, with or without much adaptation (of, say, the lyrics set to new scores in place of tunes now forgotten), is an open question. But if the texts themselves were to be annotated to give background information, as by the editor of Le Sorelle and by de Zogheb himself in “La Vita,” what would they speak to? In the much-vaunted globalized order of the world, with increasing transnationalism, trajectories of mobility in all their contrasting negotiations of allegiances become a compelling subject of study. The life and work of de Zogheb encapsulate one such trajectory that traces back to a history of Ottoman migration in the eastern and southern Mediterranean as it spans postcolonial displacement between the South and the North. Himself a figure of the dispossessed Mediterranean flâneur, de Zogheb’s libretti speak of a certain cosmopolitanism that formed him even as they constitute cosmopolitan artifacts. To have demonstrated the complicities of that cosmopolitanism under the rubric of Levantinism is not to dismiss the libretti but rather to provide a framework for their appreciation. For, as Said has put it, “we can better understand the persistence and the durability of saturating hegemonic systems like culture when we realize that their internal constraints upon writers and thinkers were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting.”137 To a certain extent, the libretti entered into a dynamic dialogue with the colonial culture that forged Levantinism, rehabilitating and aestheticizing a suspect hybridity as it may never have been before or since. To a certain extent: the limitations I have detected in de Zogheb’s libretti, while they instantiate cosmopolitanism understood not as an all-embracing universality but as a particular articulation, also call for a comparative approach.138 The most immediate constituency that would take an interest in the libretti is that of scholars as well as a general readership interested in Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, with its entrenched paradigm that I have outlined in this book. Taking off from de Zogheb’s texts, one could propose an approach that would brush against the grain the paradoxical Eurocentric provinciality of that discourse of cosmopolitanism by suggesting that the libretti be read against Creole texts from the Caribbean and modern Arabic texts, Alexandrian or otherwise, with attention to nonelite contexts. The previous chapters have sought to draw in Arabic texts; my Epilogue/Prologue takes us further in that direction.

Epilogue/Prologue

Foundation myths, for all the skepticism they arouse, not uncommonly return to haunt. The myth of an Alexander who founded Alexandria to become a cosmopolis returned with some force at the turn of the millennium. The occasion was the proposal of an equestrian statue of the Macedonian, to occupy a main intersection at one end of the oldest streets and close to his presumed burial site in the city he founded. The controversy that unfolded in 2000 centered on the vexed question of Alexander’s imperial/cosmopolitan legacy. Already, the city’s Hellenistic legacy and its revival, in the form of the concurrent underwater archaeological excavations and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina project, had been center stage while propelling Alexandria to world attention. And indeed it was on the fringe of the celebrations for the Bibliotheca’s opening in October 2002 that the statue—proposed by an Alexandrian architect who designed the plinth, the statue itself having been presented by Greeks of Alexandria and Greece—was inaugurated.1 In the debate about cultural identity and cosmopolitanism generated by the iconic figure of Alexander, some of the arguments marshaled against the placement of the statue conceded that “there is no objection to celebrating Alexander the Great, not in his capacity as a leader of a military campaign, but as the founder of an important city that continues to bear his name, and as . . . a symbol of a flourishing rational civilization; and the notion of inter-marriage and intermingling of the Egyptian and Greek civilizations deserves celebration.”2 Other critics, however, asserted that the Macedonian was a 271

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conqueror and colonizer (the semiotics of an equestrian statue, hence the aspect of conqueror, eliciting commentary).3 Furthermore, the elevation of his figure was perceived to elide the Egyptian anteriority of the coast, evidenced in the town of Rhakotis on that same site that predates Alexandria,4 as well as the influence of Egyptian culture on the Hellenistic city.5 The arguments put forward in defense of the placement of the statue appealed to a legacy of Hellenism intermingled with Egyptian elements in which Alexandria was the capital of cosmopolitanism,6 its role to sustain symbiotic cultural exchange. The narrative produced was in consonance with the arching over from Hellenistic Alexandria to the modern city that I have critiqued in this study in that Alexander is cast as the liberator of the Egyptians from the Persians,7 with the city emerging—from a (much later) decline—like a “phoenix”8 at the hands of Muhammad ‘Ali, himself hailing from Kavalla, close to Alexander’s land of origin.9 A number of iconic figures, like Cavafy and Taha Husayn,10 as well as the archaeological excavations and the Bibliotheca,11 were also foregrounded. One agenda behind this enshrinement of Alexander as figurehead in the promoters’ discourse was a pitting of hybridity and world culture against ethnocentrism12 and “ideological, religious or intellectual fanaticism.”13 While some have placed the debate under the sign of chauvinism or cultural amnesia,14 I take it to be a potently generative moment of reflection on and reclamation of the city’s cosmopolitan archive— undertaken this time by Egyptian, largely but not solely Alexandrian, participants registering a spectrum of positions. Remarkably, by winter 2011, in the aftermath of the January 25 Revolution in Egypt, two of the signifiers of revivalism of Alexandria’s Hellenistic legacy were reinscribed in the iconography of protest. During the revolution, the statue of Alexander was one of the many platforms around which protests in the city rallied. The Bibliotheca, meanwhile, came to serve as a showcase for further protests, such as those calling for putting on trial the former president, and its administration became a local nodal point for campaigning for more democratic practices in the cultural arena.15 What had been elite appeals to the Hellenistic past for the purposes of cultural revivalism had now been reappropriated as sites from which to stage popular protest and calls for pluralism. The question of how the newfound associations of these icons with the revolution and its aftermath will come to affect collective memory in the long term is, of course, a matter of speculation.

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The dominant narrative of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism critiqued in this study has been polyphonically modulated in recent decades. While Egyptian writers and artists have engaged this legacy in diverse and sometimes contrasting ways, constituencies such as émigré Alexandrians have given that imperial paradigm a new lease on life. Consider, in addition to the literary critical studies discussed in the introduction to this book, the plethora of texts that Alexandrian émigrés, of non-Egyptian or mixed descent, have recently produced, many in the memoir genre. In contradistinction to the canonized triumvirate—Cavafy, Forster, and Durrell—who, for all the differences between them, witnessed the so-called cosmopolitan period, émigré Alexandrians have written “cosmopolitan Alexandria” and reinscribed themselves into it after the fact—the fact of decolonization, of Suez and the sequestrations in its wake of assets of British and French subjects as well as stateless Jews, of the socialist-inspired policy of sequestrations and nationalizations that affected both foreigners and Egyptians alike, and of immigrations of members of these communities. Steeped in “postcolonial melancholia,” these invocations of a lost origin and a lost youth by émigré Alexandrians are distinctly elegiac in tone and more often than not essay a closure to an unresolved mourning by denigrating post-Suez Alexandria.16 There are exceptions, of course, even within the corpus I have chosen to deal with here: for example, the marked affection toward Egypt seen in Lorenzo Montesini’s My Life and Other Misdemeanours may be on account of the fact that both his mother and his grandmother had Egyptian companions. But rare are those who, like Zananiri, would write: Alexandria was the city of my joys and disappointments. It was not only the city, but the “country” that I loved deeply and where, generations before, my family had put roots. The city where I lived and had been privileged, ignoring all the experiences of those who surrounded me, thinking only of myself and of the advantages from which I benefited. Alexandria . . . was also the “country” where we lived [isolated] in bell jars—as in other trading centers [villes des échelles] of the Levant—because we felt superior as much as crushed. . . . We were aware of what our families had done centuries ago. We were the elite who never wanted to become integrated and this is why, at the rise of Middle-Eastern nationalism, we were excluded. Such was the result of our own indifference. Surely, I could have continued to live in the city that witnessed my birth. But I could no longer bear the silent reproach of a collectivity which, free at last, wanted at any cost to detach itself from those who participated in its rise with a detachment consisting of reserve marked with paternalism.17

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By contrast, André Aciman: “I had come [to Alexandria] to bury the whole thing, to get it out of my system, to forget, to hate even, the way we learn to hate those who wouldn’t have us.”18 With such telling titles as Out of Egypt (Aciman) and Losing Alexandria (Victoria Thompson), many, albeit not all, of these texts resort to virtually identical leitmotifs. Not unexpectedly, in keeping with the sense of loss and displacement that one encounters in those of the texts where there has been a physical return to Alexandria, an emplotted itinerary, redolent with pathos, of revisiting the landmarks of former home, school, place of worship, and cemetery prevails. Examples include Gini Alhadeff’s The Sun at Midday, in which Bernard de Zogheb helps the author finds the graves of her ancestors, and an essay by Aciman included in False Papers, which followed on his Out of Egypt.19 These memoirs, however, occasionally give pause by aspects that cannot be glossed over as a function of the oft-discussed murkiness between fact and fiction, memory and imagination in the memoir genre. There is, for one, a heedlessness of historical accuracy that, to my mind, is primarily on account of the Third World status of the country represented, misguided assumptions, stereotypes, and lack of fact checking being par for the course. For example, Alhadeff claims that “when she [her mother] finished school there was no question of her going to university, because there were none in Egypt, because she was a woman, and because of the war.”20 The statement is belied by the fact that Cairo (formerly Fuad I) University, from which women had graduated by the 1940s, has been in existence since the first decade of the twentieth century, not to mention that Alexandria (formerly Farouk I) University was established during World War II, 1942. Aciman, on the other hand, takes liberties of varying degrees with facts: Out of Egypt, subtitled A Memoir, casts him as an only child, whereas False Papers discloses that he has a brother; his narrative about discrimination endured in school days in Alexandria does not quite correspond to archival material about that period in his life; and it has been alleged that the colorful great-uncle Vili—spy and swindler, so well connected to the king of Egypt whose property he would later auction, an encounter with whom opens the book—is a relative with whom the author may not have met.21 Underscoring the sheer constructedness of these memoirs, often taken as historical documents, is a step toward understanding the texts’ Janus-faced dynamic whereby they are doubly overdetermined by

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“postcolonial melancholia” vis-à-vis the lost space of the native city and by self-actualization vis-à-vis the countries to which the authors have immigrated. That the memoirists have profited in the countries where they settled thanks to “Old World” prestige conjoined with the “cultural capital”22 acquired in Egypt is amply evidenced in their texts. Witness the sprinkling of titles or, when none can be proffered, connections to Egypt’s monarchy. 23 “Farida, the young Queen of Egypt, laughed”: thus Montesini opens My Life and Other Misdemeanours, the occasion being the author’s mother modeling for the queen. Montesini’s (apparently disputed) claim to the title of prince, on account of his maternal family’s Constantinopolitan descent, facilitates an engagement with an Australian society heiress that he then terminates. 24 The Alexandrian formation—polyglot, multiethnic, educationally and culturally wide-ranging—is credited by the memoirists for kudos at schools in countries of immigration, increasing professional opportunities, social distinction, and mobility. 25 Although none of the memoirists would attempt anything remotely comparable to de Zogheb’s verbal exploits, the fact of multilingualism is repeatedly emphasized: “the five languages I speak at the age of four”; the “constant translations”; “‘switching,’ as an Alexandrian called it.”26 Quoted samples are offered— whether the pidginized code-switching of Egyptian servants, as in “‘Al bambino bita Mohammed getu morto,’” or the polyglot family lexicon: “Ornamental objects were called ‘dust-gatherers,’ in French ramasse-poussières, or harabish in Arabic, worthless things, and halintranke (de puerta) in Ladino.”27 My larger point, though, is that if one is struck by the narrowness of the range of literary references, then this too owes in no small measure to a specific notion of Alexandria’s cultural heritage: namely, the discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and the canonical literary triumvirate. Thus there is barely any mention of an Egyptian writer on Alexandria, and there are virtually no references to Italian authors such as Ungaretti, even by memoirists vaunting their knowledge of Italian, whereas Cavafy, Forster, and Durrell are invoked again and again.28 Hence, too, the fact that, in virtually all the cases discussed here, the Alexandrian memoir is the debut book by a given author, after which other books, whether about Alexandria or otherwise, follow. But in what consist the references and allusions to the canonical authors, and what are their implications?

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The materializations of the three canonical writers in the Alexandrian émigrés’ memoirs and essays under discussion can be quite astonishing in their narrowness of range and paucity of creative engagement. Aciman’s essay on the return to his native city has him, by the second paragraph, standing on the balcony of the Cecil Hotel, a key venue in the Quartet, “thinking of Lawrence Durrell and of what he might have felt standing in this very same hotel more than fifty years ago, surveying a magical, beguiling city.” He later spots “Durrell’s pastry shop,” and tries unsuccessfully to buy his books and Forster’s guidebook (likely out of print by the time of Aciman’s visit) at the Graeco-Roman Museum. 29 It is with a quotation from Durrell and a few verses from Cavafy’s “The City” (1894/1910), made to modulate his own possession by Alexandria, that Aciman closes this essay the title of which, “Alexandria: The Capital of Memory,” is taken from Justine (J 188).30 Variations on the Durrellian phrase abound—“City of Memory” is the title of Thompson’s first chapter, “The Capital of Memories” that of Montesini’s sixth chapter, not to mention that “City of Memory” is the subtitle of Haag’s book. Allusions to Cavafy’s “The City” and “The God Abandons Antony,” which latter poem of course furnishes the refrain of losing Alexandria, abound.31 Some of the memoirists even seek to proffer biographical connections, if of a tenuous order, to the canonical writers. For instance, Alhadeff, who left Alexandria at the age of three, works out from a family tree that Durrell’s third wife, the Alexandrian Claude Vincendon, is a distant relation. She also quotes a relative saying that as a child he was patted on the head by Cavafy who was then on his deathbed in the Greek hospital, and that, at a party given by his mother, he had witnessed “Durrell, standing completely naked in the bathroom with the [electrical massage] belt around his backside.”32 Thompson is to be lauded for citing in her acknowledgments references she has drawn on: she “could not have written [the] book without Forster, Durrell and C. P. Cavafy—these sublime masters of language, place and memory.”33 While she can proffer little by way of biographical connections, she has recourse to a dramatic device instead: a feverish sleep has her visited by the spirits of Cleopatra (who gossips about her amorous alliances), Cavafy (chastised for pederasty), and Durrell (who waxes misogynistic, his speech littered with profanities).34 Tinged with humor, this could have been a refreshingly kitsch send-up of other memoirists’ possession by Alexandria’s pantheon.

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But then one is struck elsewhere by the extent of Thompson’s internalization of Durrell’s Orientalism: although as a young woman in Australia her future in-laws who have just read the Quartet call her Justine and describe her as “exotic, enchanting, alluring, odalisque,” the memoirist herself reflects, “Like Durrell’s Justine, I believe that love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness. I feel I have many things in common with Justine,” and confesses to fantasizing about meeting Durrell.35 Construing the Quartet as a quasidocumentary representation of Alexandria, Thompson, who says she left the city at the age of thirteen, replicates the text’s Orientalism. For example, at several points she attributes the patriarchal attitudes of her male relatives to an assimilation by the “sophisticated Europeans” of “the behaviour of Arab men towards women, that of master and slave.” She draws female character sketches à la Durrell and whisks up a catalogue of exotica, including female genital mutilation and child brothels, that she explicitly connects to scenes of the “strident native quarter” (J 185) in the Quartet, apart from serving up racist items that escaped the British author.36 Literary name-dropping and borrowed limelight aside, the ramifications of this insistent appeal to the three canonized writers are that memoirists have further amplified the colonial inflections of the dominant narrative of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. In identifying and critiquing that colonial paradigm of cosmopolitanism, I have also argued in the introduction to this book, against critics’ misprisions whereby the three canonical authors are cast as consonant on the ineligibility of all elements Egyptian, Arab, or Muslim for a cosmopolitan orientation. The memoirists, joining hands with the literary critics I discuss such as Pinchin and Liddell, reiterate their Eurocentric interpretations and duplicate the decline-and-fall narrative about AraboIslamic Alexandria as projected onto the postindependence Egyptian city. That an unquestioned or valorized colonial history has been largely adopted by these Alexandrian émigré memoirists is palpable in their virtually identical recapitulation of the propagandist narrative about the ‘Urabi nationalist uprising in 1882 and the British occupation of Egypt. “At the beginning of the British occupation, in 1882,” declaims Thompson (clearly borrowing from Cromer’s account as cited by Liddell), “there was a massacre of Christians. An Arab sheikh, bursting with hatred, shouted: ‘O Moslems, come and help me to kill the Christians!’”; while Alhadeff interjects the gory detail that “Europeans were massacred and hung on meat hooks outside

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the shops on the Rue des Soeurs [in Alexandria],” and Montesini ascribes the deed to “Araby Pasha [who] revolted against Turkey and began slaughtering the European population,” setting the figure of the Europeans “butchered” at “two thousand.”37 Forster’s account of the British bombardment of Alexandria and subsequent occupation of Egypt, we recall, bore the accents of colonial propaganda. It should be added, however, that he nowhere makes assertions as wild as the memoirists’; in fact, he remarks that “there is no reason to suppose that he [‘Urabi] planned the riot” and adds that “about 150 Europeans are thought to have been killed that day, but we have no reliable statistics” (AHG 100). Furthermore, he had produced, in his rarely adduced “Notes on Egypt,” a rather contrasting account of 1882 lamenting the imperial nipping in the bud of democracy in Egypt. In contrast to Forster’s self-dividedness, the memoirists, writing some seven decades after the British novelist, betray no misgivings about the colonial provenance and questionable reliability of the accounts of 1882 to which they subscribe. While Montesini and Aciman recapitulate, in an unselfconscious manner, the historical narrative that elides medieval Alexandria or subtracts cosmopolitanism from it,38 it is Thompson who most explicitly draws a parallel between the medieval and the post-Suez city. She does so by availing herself of Durrell’s disparaging pronouncements on postindependencee Alexandria (“Once again, Alexandria has sunk into oblivion, wrote Durrell on a visit in 1977”), and Forster’s account, abridged and closely paraphrased, of Alexandria’s decline in the Christian period and its fall after the Arab conquest (“these colonists did not realise they had taken a city like no other, a city that had been the intellectual birthplace of Christianity . . . the Arabs did not look after the city, and so it fell into neglect. . . . [and] remained so for nearly a thousand years, until the arrival of Napoleon”).39 Indeed, Aciman casts émigré Alexandrians’ trip to the city in temporal and not exclusively spatial terms, and this not solely in the obvious sense of a journey in search of time past but in a quasi-anthropological “denial of coevalness” register that renders Alexandria as noncontemporaneous with the “advanced” Western countries from which the émigrés have returned. “Each year,” he breezes, “the city sees many exAlexandrians return. . . . Revenants and time-travelers, some come back from the future, from decades and continents away, A.D. people barging in on B.C. affairs.”40 But the temporal disjuncture reaches its most apocalyptic in Thompson’s pronouncement, “Alexandria will

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die one day, along with Egypt. . . . As Africa becomes more populated, as the desert encroaches towards places where trees and grasses used to be, and as the rivers dry out because the rains no longer come, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse will make more frequent forays into Africa. . . . And Egypt will die when the Nile dies.”41 In the meantime, in Egypt itself, instantiations of cosmopolitanism—whether as practices or in artistic representations and public debate—have been quite vibrant. Granted, there is an occasional commodification of the label “cosmopolitanism” that has tethered itself to Alexandria, and there are instances of unquestioning acceptance of Western literary critical takes on the city; but even if one were to confine the discussion to Egyptian engagements with Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and the three canonical authors, one would find that these are not all of a piece. The reception of Cavafy, Forster, and Durrell would require a study onto itself, but for here it should be mentioned that while these canonical writers have been the subjects of largely English-language scholarship,42 translations of their texts into Arabic and their resonances in the cultural field more generally have been varied. It was not until 2000 that Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide was translated into Arabic, and, with the exception of feature articles that draw on it, it has not received much attention.43 Durrell’s Quartet has fared rather differently in Arabic: translations of Justine and Balthazar were published in Beirut in 1961 and 1962, respectively, but the translator, the Palestinian Jordanian critic Salma Khadra Jayyusi, did not turn her hand to the rest of the Quartet, on account of administrative issues with the publisher and also “political reasons in the next volume,” Mountolive.44 Another translation of Justine was published in Cairo in 1969; this was undertaken by the Egyptian Marxist Fakhri Labib, who published the remaining volumes, together with a reprint of the first, in 1992.45 In the introduction to her translation of Justine, Jayyusi lays out what in her view lends distinction to Durrell’s text—the relativity proposition, the treatment of the city as a character, the holistic approach to love and sex, the theme of the artist’s coming to maturity, and the style—saving her criticism and what she considers the most significant element to the last paragraph: “However, the Arab reader will benefit from an important aspect that the foreign reader may be indifferent to, namely the political dimension.” She comments on Justine’s political wiles as they unfold across the volumes, and concludes that even if the characters and events are fictional, “I still

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maintain that they constitute a realist fabric that exposes the methods used by the enemy” in the Arab world.46 Jayyusi, writing in 1961, is quite right about the obliviousness of many Western interpreters of the Quartet to its politics, an agenda amenable to Zionism but also neocolonialism more broadly, as I hope to have demonstrated. But while she construes the politics as secondary to the Quartet, I consider it central and interpret the “conspiracy” as symptomatic of the text’s inscription in “the last stage of imperialism” (to borrow Nkrumah’s designation of neocolonialism). Labib, on the other hand, has spoken of his admiration for the narrative execution of the relativity theory and the lyricism of the text; his point in translating the Quartet, however, was that “everything written about Egypt should be translated for Egyptians.” But he has consistently questioned the Quartet’s representation of Alexandria as a European city, the text depicting primarily those quarters inhabited by Europeans and scanting popular neighborhoods. Of the politics, particularly given that he himself is an Egyptian Christian, Labib construes Nessim as “a contemptible character,” designates the text as “colonial,” and adds that while he was never reproached about making available the Quartet in Arabic, it is his view that “Durrell’s racism is racial not religious.”47 His views accord with my argument that while the text seems to side, no matter how questionably, with Copts and Jews, it also depicts both religious constituencies stereotypically as “Levantines,” the telos being the use to which the two religious subgroups can be put in sustaining Western interests and supremacy in the region. “It is 1966 and the Alexandria of Lawrence Durrell has become that of Naguib Mahfouz. All is calm now in this Egyptian city and only the landlady of the Pension Miramar remembers other days”: thus Ilbert signals a metamorphosis, that of a perceived cosmopolis (Durrell’s) into its apparent converse, an “Egyptian city” (Mahfouz’s).48 Of Alexandria as the setting of Mahfouz’s 1967 novel, Miramar, named after the pension in which much of the action unfolds, I have argued elsewhere that it is far from arbitrary.49 Why should Mahfouz, a writer primarily associated with Cairo—its medieval vistas as much as its modern urban fabric—have turned to Alexandria, in a series of texts of which Miramar is one, and in the 1960s specifically? My contention, contra Ilbert, is that it is precisely because of Alexandria’s long-standing association with cosmopolitanism that Mahfouz chose it as a setting for Miramar, the novel he published almost literally on the eve of the 1967 War and that is widely viewed as having

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predicted the defeat and the unraveling of the Nasser regime. It is not solely Mariana, the Alexandrian Greek owner of the pension who stands witness to days of yore: the novel is replete with references to Alexandrians of foreign origin as well as to cafés, restaurants, and cabarets owned by Europeans. That these establishments are hastily changing hands as foreigners depart following the nationalization laws of 1961 represents, in my view, the novel’s criticism of the execution of these policies, the much bigger burden of Miramar’s criticism of the revolutionary regime being its authoritarianism. I read Mariana allegorically, as a representative of the prevailing narrative of cosmopolitanism in its Hellenized inflection, an adjunct of which is the feminization of the city as a Cleopatra-like courtesan, as I noted in the introduction to this book. The novel explicitly places markers on this feminizing trope when it has Amer Wagdi, the oldest lodger, comment, “‘My dear Mariana, you are Alexandria . . . ’”50 The feminization of Alexandria is, of course, at its most visible in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, a novel Mahfouz has said he was acquainted with and to which his Miramar has been compared.51 The polyphonic structure of Miramar—four narrators going over the same set of events from radically different points of view—is closer to the relativizing project than Durrell was able to execute. But there is a more significant front on which Mahfouz’s novel is a riposte to the British writer, and the discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism in his Quartet. It is precisely this discourse that Mariana, its latter-day exemplar par excellence, has recourse to when she says of Alexandria, “But we created it.” This Mariana says apropos of a postindependence Alexandria she denigrates—“‘ . . . It’s all changed. The streets nowadays are strewn with litter.’”52 Amer Wagdi’s reply—“‘My dear, it had to be claimed by its people’”53 —situates Miramar, among other things, as part of postcolonial literature that “writes back” to colonial discourse, in this case Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. Meanwhile, Zohra, the peasant woman who has migrated to Alexandria and works as a servant at the pension, intertextually intervenes within the canonical trope of an Egypt feminized generally as a rural woman. The novel thus sets two, overlapping, traditions of feminization—of Alexandria and of Egypt—in dialogue, even as it represents through Zohra both the mitigated possibilities of enfranchisement the revolution held out to the subaltern and enacts, in the young woman’s function as allegorical of Egypt, the country’s would-be transition from an agrarian society to industrialization.

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Egyptian Alexandrian novelists such as al-Kharrat and Abdel Meguid depict quarters that do not feature in guidebooks, Forster’s included. These areas are referred to, if at all, in other genres as a single, undifferentiated “native quarter,” as they are in Durrell’s Quartet. Quarters beyond the Western imaginary that these two writers map lie on the other side of the Mahmudiyya Canal, and on the other side of the railway tracks—whether literally or metaphorically: workingclass and low-income neighborhoods with semirural names like Kafr ‘Ashri and Ghayt al-‘Inab, whose inhabitants in the past earned their living through cattle breeding and dairy production, as craftsmen, or as workers in dockyards and warehouses.54 That both writers are in dialogue with Western texts about the city is not in doubt. AbdelMeguid’s La Ahad Yanam fi al-Iskandariyya (1996; English trans. No One Sleeps in Alexandria)—set during World War II, hence part of the period the Quartet covers—paratextually emphasizes this in that three of its epigraphs are drawn from the British writer. The novel thus underscores its status as counternarrative in that it places center stage Egyptians, mainly working-class, who are for the most part absent from the Quartet. When in 1994, based on comparative work I had previously undertaken, I probed al-Kharrat on whether the Alexandria of his texts “draws upon and is defined against Durrell’s,” as well as Joyce’s Dublin, it seemed to me he protested too much: “The answer is a definite, categorical no.”55 Taken together, al-Kharrat’s two semiautobiographical novels—Turabuha Za‘faran (1986; English trans. City of Saffron) and Ya Banat Iskindiriyya (1990; English trans. Girls of Alexandria)—cover the time period from the 1930s to the mid-1950s, thus overlapping with the setting of the Quartet. In analyzing al-Kharrat’s texts, I have argued that they undertake a dual move. First, they recoup from the city’s archive histories of interethnic coexistence, and cross-confessional solidarity, in the underprivileged quarters that complicate facile binaries of colonizer and colonized. But they also make the literary imaginary of Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism more hospitable to the icons and idioms of components both Coptic and Islamic so long overlooked in canonical texts. 56 That al-Kharrat is critical of some aspects of the dominant narrative of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism can be seen in his essay “My Alexandria, the Meeting Place of Cultures: Images of the ‘City of Saffron’ in Literature” (1995). 57 Despite the essay’s undeniable investment in bringing out the Kharratian contribution to writing

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Alexandria, as it were, and reinforcing the novelist’s bid to canonicity by dint of comparisons with other writers, including Mahfouz, 58 that cast him in a more favorable light, some of the text’s observations are significant for the contrast his novels make to the canonical texts. Al-Kharrat’s claim about Alexandria, namely, that “it is the Mediterranean metropolis par excellence, and yet, like the culture to which it belongs, it is a city with roots that run deep . . . into a multi-layered heritage,” constructs the city as a cosmopolis, and also indirectly rejects its long-standing designation as “Alexandrea ad Aegyptum.”59 The city, he observes, is not only “Greek, Hellenistic, and Byzantine” but also “heir to the cultures of the dynasties of the Pharaonic period,” and its culture is now “indivisibly bound to Arabo-Islamic culture.”60 The novelist takes issue with Pinchin’s anecdote about the barbarians that I cite in the introduction to this book: “What did Pinchin mean by this story? Who are the barbarians? Those who came later, or those who had arrived about a century earlier? The soldiers [the Free Officers of the 1952 Revolution], or the English?”61 Astute as the remark is in bringing out the complicity with colonialism in the “barbarian” paradigm, it overlooks the Hellenocentric inflection of that paradigm which arches over from the Hellenistic (read Greek) to a Hellenized modern period.62 Among several examples al-Kharrat adduces in the course of a critique of the Orientalism of Durrell’s “masterpiece,” as he calls it, is the way in which the Quartet creates a rupture between Egyptian Muslims and Copts (“consider how his [Durrell’s] whims prompt him to refer to the Egyptians as ‘Arabs,’ at times, and ‘Copts’ at other times, but he never calls them ‘Egyptian’”) and the text’s suggestion that Christians are not safe in Alexandria, which al-Kharrat refutes as applied to both Egyptian and foreign Christians, based on his autobiographical experience of the city.63 In the course of his discussion of Cavafy, al-Kharrat pauses at the following quotation from the Alexandrian Greek poet’s notes: “‘I have grown accustomed to Alexandria, and even if I were rich, most likely I would remain here. Despite this, however, how the city oppresses me . . . [but] it is like a homeland, because it is connected to my life’s memories’” (SPW 135).64 Al-Kharrat remarks, “‘like a homeland’—what a strange phrase: he lived, and loved, and died in this city that was truly his city, his birthplace, and yet he could just barely speak Arabic. Alexandria was, indeed, alone [unto itself], his ‘homeland.’”65 It would not be altogether fair to fault the novelist for an

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obliviousness to the Egyptian elements in Cavafy’s texts, the presence of which I have tried to demonstrate in chapter 1. For he is reading Cavafy in translations extant at the time of writing of the essay, as well as from secondary sources such as Pinchin’s and Keeley’s books, which, as I have shown, are deeply invested in framing Cavafy as a figurehead of the dominant narrative of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. But it should be added that by contrast to Forster and Durrell, translations of Cavafy into Arabic as well as familiarity with his poetry and intertextual literary engagements with it in Egypt have a long history that cannot be covered in this space, although I have gestured toward some of it in the chapter on the Alexandrian Greek poet.66 To account for this, one may adduce two factors, the fact of Cavafy being a “habitant,” a local (as we have seen, his poetry was known to at least Francophone Egyptians during his lifetime and anecdotes about the man himself were in circulation until the 1950s, if not later),67 and a much stronger affinity with his work than with the two English authors (see the vicissitudes of Arabic translations of the Quartet discussed above). But what I wish to bring out here is the hitherto unstudied resonance of Cavafy’s life and poetry in Egyptian fiction and cinema. My discussion of a novel and two films that follows is geared specifically to their intertextual dialogue with Cavafy within the larger framework of my argument about the poet in relation to Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. The 2012 al-Haya al-Thaniya li-Qustantin Kafafis (The Second Life of Constantine Cavafy) by Tariq Imam (b. 1977) is a metafictional postmodern novel that engages the Alexandrian Greek poet’s life and work, as well as Forster’s Egyptian sojourn and texts. Noted for its Borgesian experimentation, the novel is a mise-en-abyme of texts in a veritable “mataha” or “tih” (labyrinth)—a word that resonates in al-Haya al-Thaniya (HTQK 125, 271, 287, 312, 323, 400, 419, 439, 473, 474, 511, 527)—made all the more vertiginous by the frequent shifts in narrative voice and point of view, albeit these occasionally demarcated by font type and size.68 In dialoguing with two of the canonical figures of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, however, the novel also insistently refracts their lives and their texts toward their contemporary colonial Egypt. Imam draws out of the margins of the poet’s biography the figure of Alexander Singopoulos, his young friend, later neighbor, heir, and literary executor, albeit dispensing with the latter’s wife, Rika.69 Whereas Cavafy is known to have used Singopoulos, who apparently did not have notable literary

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inclinations, on at least two occasions as his mouthpiece, Imam makes him the author and for the most part narrator (variously omniscient, first and third person) of the novel. The core of al-Haya al-Thaniya is a work-in-progress of a novel that Singopoulos is writing about Cavafy in his final months of illness during which he lost his voice, the eight chapters of which unfold over the three sections of the book. The eight titled chapters, however, alternate with two categories of texts. There are thirty-five numbered chapters that constitute an intricate frame story: a few of these are narrated by Singopoulos in the first person; in the rest, Singopoulos is a character and Cavafy comments on Singopoulos’s manuscript and ruminates on his own life, the point of view shifting from omniscient to third person, occasionally even first person. The numbered chapters, furthermore, alternate with and occasionally include asterisked or parenthetically demarcated scraps that are Singopoulos’s observations on the poet and working notes for the manuscript. Some of these, in turn, are the subject of commentary by the poet in the numbered chapters. Apart from the first nine chapters, the numbered chapters are belatedly written by Singopoulos and make free use of a large notebook in which Cavafy recorded comments on his manuscript, constituting “an entire novel, framing, hedging and intersecting with Singopoulos’s manuscript” (HTQK 562), according to the “Afterword” signed “Alexander Singopoulos, Athens, April 29, 1983”—the date marking the fiftieth anniversary of Cavafy’s death, hence his decision to publish the book (HTQK 563). The chapters of Singopoulos’s manuscript—with the exception of the first, titled “Tram”—take their titles from Cavafy poems. The first six chapters are divided into subsections named after characters some of whom existed, such as the poet’s mother, Haricleia, and Forster, others being fictional, their genesis a poem used as an epigraph in the subsection in which they first make their appearance. Thus the first subsection carrying the name of the (fictive) Italian lesbian singer Claudia who is obsessed with the poet has as it epigraph Cavafy’s poem “Salome” (1896; hidden) in which the titular persona is besotted with a Greek sophist who jokingly demands, then turns away from her head when it is brought to him (see HTQK 65). As for Theophilos—an ancient gay libertine and suspected pederast, a ribald and diabolical defrocked priest who presides “as a personal god of his [Cavafy’s] body” (HTQK 259)—his origin lies only partly in the Alexandrian Greek’s poem that furnishes the epigraph to the

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subsection named after him, “Theophilos Palaiologos” (1914; hidden). The Theophilos of the poem is a scholar and mathematician related to the last emperor of Byzantium at the time of Constantinople’s fall to the Turks (see BTCT 348). But Singopoulos also draws for this character—for whom he invents a disquisition on Epicureanism—on a cruel prank Cavafy plays when he sends him looking for a nonexistent book titled “A New Introduction to Epicureanism” by a likewise nonexistent Alexandrian defrocked priest-philosopher named Theophilos (see HTQK 115, 191, 214–15, 259). In Cavafy, Imam seems to have found an ideal subject to interrogate notions of authorship, processes of canon formation, interpretation, biographical approaches, and historiography—in what appears to be a fictional project that speaks to poststructural critical readings of the poet.70 Citing several references in his acknowledgments, Imam remarks, “But I am indeed indebted to these references just as much for helping me to distort certain other events or invent them within the imaginative fabric of the work, especially in view of the gaps in some periods of the poet’s life, in addition to the occasionally muddled or contradictory facts and dates . . . [which] gave me a golden opportunity to reinterpret a life” (HTQK n.p.). The novelist’s words echo the poet’s in “Kaisarion” in which the speaker addresses Cleopatra’s son, “There are only a few lines / about you to be found in history, / and so my thought shaped you more freely” (BTCT 55)—a poem that furnishes one of the epigraphs in the novel. It follows that Imam cites, paraphrases, and multiply alludes to Cavafy’s aphoristic musings in “Twenty-Seven Notes on Poetics and Ethics,” directly quoting, among others, the note in which Cavafy reflects on a poem he had written about the countryside, despite never having lived there. To extract the portion relevant to my discussion, Cavafy writes, “The poem . . . is the most insincere thing there is; a proper lie. But now the question passes through my mind—is this really insincerity? Doesn’t art always lie? Or rather, isn’t it when art lies the most that it creates the most?” (SPW 129; HTQK 273–74). In the same spirit, Imam has the poet competing with the author of the novel about him, Singopoulos, not over the production of a veracious portrait, but rather of a fittingly fictive text that deconstructs critical certitudes surrounding Cavafy’s biography and corpus. The foregoing quotation comes in one of the numbered chapters in the course of Cavafy’s reflections on Singopoulos’s scraps for the novel that they are in a “confessional, documentary” key that “may be read as the

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most accurate testimony about him”; and despite the poet’s resigned certainty that a prurient curiosity would follow his death, “he was piqued” by Singopoulos’s attitude that suggested “that he owned the key to his truth” (HTQK 271, 272; see also 114). Hence the “second life” of the title. Singopoulos’s comments about his manuscript—“it is a novel written in darkness . . . in this Alexandria perpetually setting even in the brightest of mornings . . . its leaves sprouting only in secrecy” (HTQK 39)—and the conceit of writing with a pen the poet has dipped in his anus place a marker on the text’s thematization of the hidden, underground aspects of Cavafy’s life and the fictions about the lacunae in his biography that apply just as much to the treatment of Alexandria in alHaya al-Thaniya. In another vein, this time that of numerological symbolism, the title can be interpreted as part of Imam’s novel’s play on the Cavafian cryptic and esoteric—not least the dates in several poems such as “For Ammonis”—for the frame story unfolds in the nine months between the poet’s surgery in Athens in 1932 and his death in Alexandria in April 1933. “I feel,” writes Singopoulos in a scrap dated April 1933, “that an entire lifetime was born, and is to end, in those nine months between two hospitals. . . . (Nine months! Our true life, our only life, leading every one of us slowly but surely toward the end, toward death, madness, and perdition)” (HTQK 47). It is the same Singopoulos who ends his manuscript, completed some three months before Cavafy’s death, with a death scene of the poet visited by the ghostly revenant of his pregnant mother in labor and the words, “He is being born now” (HTQK 555). It is almost an allegory of “the death of the author” and his rebirth as text, paralleled by the close of the last numbered chapter in the frame story where Cavafy, on his deathbed, watches his young friend, “guesses that he is rewriting the novel and wishes desperately that he could read it, but knows that he will not be able to. . . . He will gaze at Alexander, and smile for the last time” (HTQK 559).71 The surreptitiously collaborative work between Cavafy and Singopoulos on the latter’s manuscript in the frame story reinforces the reflexivity on Cavafy’s corpus more broadly in al-Haya al-Thaniya. Early on, spying on Singopoulos’s manuscript, Cavafy resolves that, “for him to distort or disfigure me, he needs to have at his disposal some facts. . . . Facts! What horror this word evokes in him—what falsity! ‘What resembles facts,’ or perhaps ‘what appears to be facts’—either one of these is more apt” (HTQK 23). He thus

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undertakes a “game” of leaving scattered pseudo-drafts of letters to Forster containing anecdotes about three fully or partially invented individuals he has known—allegedly part of “my secret life” to be entrusted to the English novelist—as fodder for Singopoulos’s manuscript, Singopoulos referring in the “Afterword” to “that childish spying by the great poet on the manuscript of my novel” (HTQK 26, 562). The production of Singopoulos’s novel is depicted as a dynamic of competitive complicity: as Cavafy observes after reading Singopoulos’s first chapter, which had used for character sketches not only the three apocryphal anecdotes but also the poems as more potently generative than the Alexandrian Greek’s life, “the young man had gently shoved aside what Cavafy had given him; perhaps he made some use of it . . . but he would not submit to the authority of an invisible god covertly manipulating him. It was as if Singopoulos was sending him a message subverting his game” (HTQK 112). Ultimately, however, what al-Haya al-Thaniya subverts is Alexandrianism, in the sense that I have given it in the introduction to this book, and specifically an Alexandrianism of which Cavafy has been cast as figurehead. Multiple tropes in al-Haya al-Thaniya thematize an Alexandria profoundly textualized. Quite apart from the commentary-upon-commentary and obsessive marginalia involved in and surrounding Singopoulos’s novel-in-progress with Cavafy at its center, al-Haya al-Thaniya is replete with references to texts, acts of writing, editing, reading, and reception. These include Forster’s letters; the manuscript of his Alexandria; the manuscript of the second edition of that book; a draft of his Passage to India; his desk littered with unfinished texts that he adds lines to in rotary style; tram tickets kept as mementos of El-Adl, inscribed on the back with dates and recollections of the Egyptian; the diary of Cavafy’s young friend Christina, temporarily stolen by Singopoulos; Cavafy’s schoolteacher Constantine Papasis’ obsessive-compulsive bibliophilia; and Claudia’s insistent revision of the pronouns in Cavafy’s poems to inscribe herself into them (see HTQK 471–72, 429, 135, 78–79, 347–54, 196, 68–69). But al-Haya al-Thaniya amply thematizes a longue durée of Alexandria as an archive of archives. Thus Forster’s reflections when he decides to write Alexandria: The novel [A Passage to India] is not important at the moment. I’ll write about Alexandria, to recapture her past and stretch out among her error-riddled maps that, if I were to put them side by side, I’d see as many cities not one of which bears any resemblance to the other

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or has the same boundaries. Then again, isn’t this Alexandrian truth itself? The city dons mask after mask as if securing her disguise at a ball where she must never reveal her essence. In some mysterious sense, that city’s nudity resembles her garments, almost as when a woman casts off all her clothes only for one to discover that she’s clad in her skin. (HTQK 371)

The density of (mis)representations that Forster addresses is compounded by the palimpsest-like quality of an Alexandria built over several older Alexandrias (“her past”; “mask after mask”). That the referent or truth (“essence”) of the representation is Protean and unattainable—an elusiveness that goes hand in hand with the figuration of the city as a woman—is a point I shall take up later. The novel deploys a whole lexicon of images drawn from archaeology, cryptography, and paleography. Citing Cavafy’s manuscript-like conception of his poetry, and reflecting on his own manuscript-inprogress about the poet, Singopoulos muses: I have heard about many cursed manuscripts lying in the vaults of this mysterious city, the mere naming of which suffices to cause shudders in a bystander who promptly intones private protective invocations—manuscripts in Arabic, Greek, Syrian, Demotic and other languages long since fallen into disuse. Alexandria is a city whose true face is concealed, as though her sole truth was buried before she was born and is not to be exposed to light. I have no desire that this manuscript be cursed; it will not be one of those manuscripts that spread poison in the veins of a reader the instant he begins to read it, nor one whose leaves turn blank the minute you open it, nor yet one of those manuscripts whose words turn to profuse blood on opening. (HTQK 40–41)

In signaling Alexandria as an arch-archive, the most marked intertext in this passage is Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose in the image of poisoned manuscripts. Relatedly but more visibly elsewhere, one encounters the master trope of the chthonic that I discuss in the introduction to this book reminiscent of the scene of Alexander’s soma in Chahine’s Iskindiriyya Kaman wa Kaman (Alexandria Again and Forever, 1989). The chthonic is established in an overpoweringly occult strain, pervasive imagery of cemeteries, both modern and ancient, and the leitmotif of professional women mourners in the streets of the city who provide something of a melancholy chorus (see HTQK 204, 246). In the “Constantine” subsection of the chapter titled “The City” in Singopoulos’s manuscript, the poet free-associates about the

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genesis of the verse from that poem, “my heart is buried, like a dead man” (BTCT 3), having been “an exhausting day amid the cemeteries,” and relives, with allusions to other verses, the journey that took him to the Jewish burial grounds, the alabaster tomb thought to have been Alexander’s, the Protestant cemeteries, and various GraecoRoman catacombs, and concludes that “a person does not become Alexandrian except in death. . . . that reconciliation with the city” (HTQK 361, 368). In the same vein, Singopoulos’s novel imagines revenants in Cavafy’s life, his mother and more prominently his sister, Eleni, who died in infancy before his birth and who functions as a sort of double of the poet’s. An “ectoplasm,” with affinities to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, who takes to living an entire lifetime in a single day (HTQK 130; see also 249), Eleni is the subject of a dream Cavafy has in which he sees the city through her eyes in a fashion overdetermined by Alexandria’s archive. The infant revenant leaves her tomb, watches the geologic formation of what would later become the city, overhears underground voices of a buried city of the elderly, and travels through Alexandria’s ages; she hears Alexander giving instructions to found it, glimpses the Ptolemaic capital’s monuments, and is enraptured by a huge fleet whose commander (clearly Napoleon), speaking a strange language, reminds her of the founder (HTQK 250–54). Bearing a certain resemblance to Nessim’s dreams in the Quartet, the dream—distilling the foundational myth of Alexandria, its “golden age” and the spark for its “rebirth” in the modern period—constructs Cavafy as the custodian of the city’s historical memory (vide “city of memory” and “capital of memory”) according to what I have designated as the dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. Although I would argue that it is only at a first remove that al-Haya al-Thaniya would appear to corroborate the prevailing account of Alexandria and that the novel indeed undermines it, it is worth it to dwell on all the markers placed on Cavafy’s canonicity. Forster thinks of Cavafy as “the city’s rusty key, face corroded by iodine” (HTQK 370), and in a letter addressed to the Alexandrian Greek confides that he now understands certain aspects of the city through him and vice versa, adding, “I believe that when the city’s face is fully composed before my eyes in this guidebook, it will be your face itself that I see” (HTQK 372). Elsewhere, al-Haya al-Thaniya—in addition to several tableaux of the city historically informed by Forster’s Alexandria and citations from the Pharos and Pharillon essay about the Alexandrian Greek who shrewdly detects an element of the “scoop” in the Englishman’s

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promoting him in England—makes much imaginative work of Forster’s literary deferral to Cavafy’s authority. This includes a labyrinthine dream the Englishman has, after completing the guidebook, in which the city materializes out of a map on which Cavafy appears in multiple disguises as the doorman who eventually shoves him out of Alexandria (HTQK 473–4). But al-Haya al-Thaniya foregrounds Cavafy’s centrality not only to Forster but also to the formation of a literary canon that includes him and, beyond that, an entire conception of Alexandria. Significantly, Cavafy thinks of himself, if with a measure of irony, as “a postman between the dead and the living,” and both his house and Lepsius Street on which he lives are believed to be haunted (HTQK 372; see also 235, 241, 388, 451–53). An allegorical prose poem in the chapter titled “Waiting for the Barbarians,” presented as a recurrent dream of Cavafy’s in which he is “a seller of faces,” brings together the leitmotif of masks, disguise balls, and carnival. In an antique Alexandrian agora featuring the ceremonious preparations by the emperor, senators, and consuls drawn from “Waiting for the Barbarians,” all anticipate the arrival of the “faceless Greek man, well, not exactly, rather his face is like a flat blank sheet of paper of dark flesh” (HTQK 280). Hailed as “one sort of resolution” (HTQK 281; BTCT 93), the man advertises his “cage of living faces” to “those who wish to change their faces.” Having “ascertained that Alexandria in its entirety has lost its old features,” his cage “thronged with the original faces of its inhabitants,” he leaves, while the new features of the Alexandrians melt and drop (HTQK 283). Ironically, in reinscribing the poem, long pressed into service of casting Egyptians as barbarians, the parable confounds the Greek/barbarian binary by placing the Greek poet in the position of the barbarian. An allegory of the poet as bestower of masks and personae, it also powerfully signals the Cavafian literary sway and dominance over the city. Toward the end of the novel, surveying his notes on Cavafy’s “Notes on Poetics and Ethics,” Singopoulos has a cri de coeur: There is a hand that is moving me, someone else who is writing me on a sheaf of papers. Yes, just so, it’s as if each person in this city is writing someone else, hence the final outcome is: a city of paper inhabited by nobody. Then again, is it feasible that a real city should exit behind all these illusory persons? Can there be a truth we might call Alexandria? (HTQK 497–98)

The questions, to my mind, write back to Durrell’s tongue-in-cheek disclaimer at the beginning of Justine, “Only the city is real” (J n.p.)

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and, past him and other writers, to a whole body of criticism that has unproblematically accepted the “citationary” self-referentiality of Western texts on Alexandria such as the Quartet at face value. Far from being a rhetorical flourish, Singopoulos’s questions speak directly to Said’s exasperated swipe, with recourse to the trope of “Alexandrianism,” at critical practices that construe “the text as existing within a hermetic, Alexandrian textual universe, having no connection with actuality.”72 Thus, I argue that at a second remove, al-Haya al-Thaniya subverts Alexandrianism and the textual dominance it has accorded Cavafy along several axes: it interrogates the notion of a Cavafian canon, probes the limits of Cavafy as an authority over Alexandria, and seeks to situate him and Forster in the sociopolitical context of the Egypt they knew. It is not solely that the novel is replete with “false diaries,” drafts of dead letters, notes by Cavafy on Singopoulos’s notes on his “Notes on Poetics and Ethics,” fictive “unfinished” poems by Cavafy (such as “Mirage of the Valley”) and suppressed ones (such as the sequence in memory of his sister, “Poems Dedicated to Eleni’s Body”) (see HTQK 28, 30, 255, 493–502). The novel rampantly plays on the idiosyncrasies of the Cavafian in-progress self-publishing apparatus, having the poet, for instance, remark, “poets live to become books; as for me, I live as a manuscript—I am a manuscript, Alexander, always ready to be written time and again. I do not wish to become a book, that completed life, that complacency, the certitude, the existence that cannot be recanted” (HTQK 40). The novel goes beyond Cavafy’s noted thwarting of definitiveness to devise subplots that dramatize the role of others’ editing in the taxonomies (canonical, hidden, repudiated, unfinished) of his poetic corpus (HTQK 277–79, 331–33); metaphors for the place of hazard therein, as in the dispersal of his rejected poems, sent flying out of his window (HTQK 88–89); and the coincidental preservation of a poem on account of a sketch on the verso of the paper (HTQK 358–59); as well as reflections about the question what constitutes the final version of a text, what criterion is to be used in determining which draft is to be preserved (HTQK 355– 58, 494). That Cavafy discovers parts of his city via Forster and, on receiving the manuscript of Alexandria, ruminates with “resentment, spite,” that “this Englishman managed to write Alexandria during a promenade, while you spent your entire lifetime in it without knowing it”—while no doubt heinous to Cavafologists, and indeed straining against my own critical interpretations—is surely part of al-Haya

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al-Thaniya’s fictional project of relativizing the Alexandrian Greek’s authorial authority over the city by underscoring the textual (HTQK 473; see also 441). Simultaneously, al-Haya al-Thaniya represents both Cavafy and Forster, albeit in rather different ways, as standing at ambivalent angles vis-à-vis contemporary Egyptian realities. Possibly playing off Forster’s “Notes on Egypt,” al-Haya al-Thaniya has the English novelist writing a draft of a report titled “Alexandrian Jews’ Views of the Balfour Declaration.” Forster explains to Cavafy that the project of writing the report was inspired by questions about the subject put to him by the city’s Jewry and that if published in London, it would transmit the “vision of a city that may be more concerned than others since it lies within the same geographical ambit” (HTQK 136). That al-Haya al-Thaniya should have Forster consider the Balfour Declaration foregrounds British complicity with Zionism and proleptically harks toward the impact that the establishment of Israel, as well as its role in the Suez War, would have on the Arab world as well as on the ethnic variety of Arab cities, not least Alexandria—as seen, from an ideologically reversed vantage point, in the Quartet. “I don’t believe the city is concerned,” Cavafy comments on the project, “well, perhaps the Jews, perhaps some Egyptians. I withdrew, early on, from these political games, and I suggest you do likewise. Such things loom large in their day and age, and mislead many into thinking they will change the face of history” (HTQK 136). This does, of course, short-shrift the Cavafy who would bear witness to colonial injustices as in the poem “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.”; but it elicits the persona, as such, that the Alexandrian Greek poet projected of himself, the Cavafy whose position on another irredentist ideology, the Megali Idea, Cavafologists would continue to try to parse, the Cavafy who would be described as possessed of an “astute cynicism about politics.”73 Then again, al-Haya al-Thaniya undercuts an aspect of what I have designated as the colonial historiography of Forster’s Alexandria, specifically its narrative of the 1882 British bombardment and the teleology at stake in ending the “History” section with it. Admitting to a visceral revulsion to Egyptians, Forster confides in Cavafy, “I believe that if these people achieve self-rule, they will avenge themselves on others, on anyone who is other.” Cavafy recuses on account of being “the son of this city [but not] of its inhabitants” (HTQK 236). Granted, in “Notes on Egypt” Forster had adopted an anticolonial

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position, albeit not taking it to the conclusion of recommending full self-determination. If al-Haya al-Thaniya makes no reference to “Notes on Egypt” and focuses instead on Alexandria, it does so to a diametrically opposite effect from Western critics’ and memoirists’ readings of the latter text in the sense that it critically has Forster explicitly voice the position that their readings of a city fallen to chauvinism would uncritically take out of his book and project onto the postindependence period. This, to my mind, explains the novel’s repeated references to the fact that Forster uses Cavafy’s “The God Abandons Antony” to demarcate the “History” that ends with the 1882 bombardment from the “Guide.” The novel’s further contribution is to imagine the event itself as witnessed by Cavafy, and to do so specifically in Singopoulos’s chapter significantly titled “Waiting for the Barbarians.” The relevant subsection is structured as the dying Cavafy’s feverish hallucinations about the sea, interweaving passages from his metapoetic prose poem “The Ships” (1895–96; hidden), as well as a pastiche of other citations, marked or not, including from Forster’s account of the event. In flashbacks mediated by Singopoulos, the younger Cavafy of 1882 witnesses the events in fascination with the sailors—this subtly dovetailed with the imagery of “The Ships,” and only implicitly alluding to barbarians—who pour into town, “their currency gold,” going about their business while “every morning the city received a new generation of corpses, though never of a single one of them,” sailors who were “slim specters proceeding with heads held high as if their bodies lay beyond all moments of danger” (HTQK 291– 292). The montage includes a few politically declarative statements: “A black month. Alexandria all clamor. Britain bombarded it as in a blood wedding. He grieves over the silence that has been bruised”; “how many wars and plagues did he witness pass over the face of this city, leaving each time a new mark, a deep wound?”; “two men had a fight and Alexandria burst into flames (how is he to believe this story now? The one truthful thing was the face of the woman [Haricleia] who kept throwing up as if the war was taking place inside her guts)” (HTQK 290, 292). The use of free indirect discourse, together with the shifts in point of view (Singopoulos’s and Cavafy’s), enables the alternative account of the bombardment while retaining a degree of narrative indeterminacy. In radical contradistinction to the memoirists’ deployment of Cavafy, al-Haya al-Thaniya stages encounters between Cavafy and

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Forster, on the one hand, and Egyptians and Muslims with whom they had or might have had interactions, on the other. Taking his cue perhaps from the figure of El-Adl, Imam re-creates Toto. One of the three young men Cavafy frequented, the “archangels” of de Zogheb, materializes here not as a camp Levantine but as a working-class Egyptian whose original name, ‘Abd al-Fattah, the poet has turned into a diminutive the man finds repugnantly infantilizing, “not even the [traditional diminutive] ‘Abdu” (HTQK 99). The fictional portrait of Toto, the broad brush strokes of which Cavafy surreptitiously supplies Singopoulos with, is of a car mechanic whom the poet picks up and then reinstates as a newspaper vendor. The epigraph introducing the first subsection of Singopoulos’s manuscript titled “‘Abd alFattah” (tellingly, not “Toto”) is Cavafy’s erotic poem set in a shady room, “One Night” (1907/1915). This suggests al-Haya al-Thaniya’s endeavor of filling in blanks of what would have been Cavafy’s relationships with non-European men as complemented by the altogether fictive character, Husayn, a gay Turkish man in Istanbul who is the business associate of Cavafy’s grandfather, with whom the poet has his first relationship. In contrast to Husayn, ‘Abd al-Fattah and El-Adl are emphatically represented as subalterns. They belong to what Forster describes as “an army of illiterates. Café workers. Drivers. Tram conductors. They possess no weapon but the one between their thighs, ready at the slightest sign. All you need to do is produce the money and turn to be stabbed in the back there where your desire resides. Where, then, are the gods of the city, what mythical male members do they bear between their flanks?” (HTQK 370–71). Whereas Forster will reflect that Alexandria “humbled his [Cavafy’s] superiority precisely as it did with you, through these little soldiers, and there’s the farce,” the novel itself strains to represent the abjection and exploitation of both ‘Abd al-Fattah and El-Adl. Indeed, the relationship between the Englishman and the Egyptian in al-Haya al-Thaniya resonates with what I have sought to show in my discussion of colonial subalternity in the context of El-Adl. Forster “remembers him now, seated at his feet in the gardens, not daring to raise his eyes to meet his—a master and a servant, a cultured, civilized Englishman and a miserable Egyptian, teeth stained with strong tea and clouds of tobacco smoke. Clothing was the condition of slavery reversed when they undressed and Mohamed became his man” (HTQK 406). The novel visualizes a relationship that is both coercive—El-Adl divulges a nightmare in

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which they catch fire while having sex that Forster interprets as his fear of scandal, the Egyptian having implored him not to write about their relationship—and not without (condescending) affect—“for his sake only, [Forster] made the biggest concession of his life, to narrate his novels” in a “simplistic” and “entertaining” manner (HTQK 407). ‘Abd al-Fattah, who goes from being the lover of the “khawaga”— an Egyptian term for foreigner, often referring to a local one, such as an Egyptiote—to his pimp and occasional manservant, is filled with resentment (see HTQK 160–61, 387). As a more or less illiterate newspaper vendor, ‘Abd al-Fattah “can’t understand the ‘poet’ who sits raptly in front of a heap of newspapers,” and “these big sheets of paper make him feel all the more impotent. In his eyes, Alexandria’s always seemed a city of words that he wanders through, unable to read them. All the things and places are signs, mostly in foreign letters, sometimes Arabic, that he can tell from each other only by sight” (HTQK 99). What his reflections force us to consider is that Alexandria’s barely lettered or illiterate Egyptian subalternity is separated by a yawning abyss from the “city of words,” this being precisely the title of Haag’s short essay introducing his updating notes appended to Forster’s Alexandria which states, in a further enshrinement of the triumvirate’s canonicity, that the “architecture of Alexandria is found in the words written about her, and among her builders are Cavafy, Forster and Durrell” (AHG 243). ‘Abd alFattah’s reflections are also a forceful riposte to Durrell’s recollections unapologetically vaunting colonial nostalgia, in the course of introducing Forster’s Alexandria, about his visit to Alexandria in 1977: “All foreign posters and advertisements have vanished, everything is in Arabic; in our time film posters were billed in several languages with Arabic subtitles, so to speak” (“INE” xviii; emphasis added).74 Aged, let go of, consumed by a “mysterious disease” (“a doctor! These things are for the likes of you, but we die when we must die, as a fruit drops from a tree”), ‘Abd al-Fattah visits the wincing Cavafy for a last time, and, for once “not closing his fist on the money” his ex-lover doles out, rapes him in an instantiation of the reversal of colonial violence (HTQK 489–90). Fanon, specifically the one of Black Skin, White Masks, comes to mind just as vividly in relation to Futna, one of the invented characters in Singopoulos’s manuscript, an Egyptian aspiring Anglophone poet and a louche woman in love with Cavafy. The Cavafy poem

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Singopoulos selects as the epigraph for the first chapter subsection that bears her name is “The God Abandons Antony,” albeit with one major difference: in the epigraph, the second-person singular imperative verbs have been rendered in the feminine form, which Arabic grammar allows for. The Cavafy poem, in having Antony as the addressee in dialogue with Plutarch, is beside the point here. Imam’s own statement that in creating Futna he was assuming that a poet of Cavafy’s stature is likely to have received an Egyptian woman poet, even if there is no biographical documentation of such an encounter, and was motivated by the question what if a woman desired Cavafy, takes us only so far.75 Futna figures both a feminized Alexandria that is Egyptian (a tacit counterpoint to Antony’s female counterpart, Cleopatra, so emblematic of the city’s feminization in a Hellenized vein) and a feminine Egyptian textuality that throws into relief the gendered limitations of the larger portion of Western texts about the city. The choice of Futna’s name can be interpreted as ciphering this intervention in the Hellenizing feminization trope: it registers dissonance with a near-homonym, the Greek name Fotini (denoting light), while engaging the polysemy in the Arabic word fitna (meaning allurement, seductiveness, but also discord, sectarianism) thus reinforcing her allegorical function. This function, to my mind, is thrown into relief by the fact that the name Futna denotes an acacia flower, thus engaging Mahfouz’s Zohra, whose name denotes blossom, and hence the dialogism in Miramar between the feminization of Alexandria as a Greek woman and of Egypt as a peasant woman. Much evidence in the text suggests that Futna stands for Alexandria;76 but it is in Alexandria’s capacity as metonymic of an Egypt repeatedly conquered and subjected to foreign domination. Thus, “something akin to inspiration prompts Futna to reflect that she is exactly like Alexandria; she has given her body to all strangers; they conquered her, settled in her, cohabited within her”; she muses that she is “a prostitute,” for “Brits, Armenians, Russians, Italians, Greeks and many indigenes [awlad al-balad],” which has made her “a woman without a nationality” (HTQK 378). In contradistinction to Durrell’s “Alexandria, princess and whore” (C 63), the city’s celebrated ethnic diversity, seen from the vantage point of the indigenous, is a function of conquest that strips indigeneity of its dignity, integrity, and most basic rights. Hence not only the “deafening” and “invisible chorus” of female voices that recalls to Futna the verse about losing Alexandria in “The God Abandons Antony” but also her visions of

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submergence, drowning, getting hit by a tram associated with Cavafy himself (HTQK 379; see also 96). In a relationship depicted as sadomasochistic, Futna repeatedly seeks Cavafy’s sanction of her poetry and is rebuffed. “Here, madame, you are no poet,” Cavafy says as he hands her back her poems; he later pronounces the title of her collection—significantly Wujuh Sakandariyya (Alexandrian Faces), clearly a complement/counterpoint to Cavafy as the “seller of faces,” despite the first poem being dedicated to him—amateurish (HTQK 90, 279; see also 476). While my own analysis of Cavafy has foregrounded the Egyptiote-Egyptian continuum, Imam’s novel has Cavafy contemplating the afterlife of his poetry and construing the possibility that it may be translated into Arabic as inconceivable: Egyptians reading my poetry! Egyptians! These people!. . . . He thinks of his poems . . . read from right to left. How? What he always treats as a back cover (unimportant, not necessarily worth reading) becomes the front one for these people. They move in the opposite direction to life, opposite time, opposite his poems, retreating as time moves forward. (HTQK 332)

This certainly does not accord with Cavafian texts I cited, such as “On the Intellectual Affinity of Egypt and the West,” but accords with Imam’s statement-cum-disclaimer about his fictional project “re-creating a life, to the point of creation and conjecture” (HTQK n.p.) while speaking to my broader points about Alexandrianism as a critical discourse. When Futna muses that she is “a woman of paper made” and wonders, “which of his poems have I issued from? He writes only of men” (HTQK 475), it is not a matter of adducing from the corpus that bears Cavafy’s name the counterevidence of such poems as “Dünya Güzeli” but rather of suggesting that within the economy of the novel a figure like Futna as subject rather than object is occluded in the canonical Alexandrian texts of which Cavafy has been constructed as archsignifier. Without lapsing into an assumption of consistency within and between the texts of the Alexandrian triumvirate that I have argued against in this book, this interpretation of Futna accords with my reading of homosociality in several texts discussed, such as Forster’s Alexandria and de Zogheb’s “La Vita Alessandrina.” Futna’s interactions with other Egyptians in colonial Alexandria foreground the classed and gendered dimensions of the Fanonian psychodynamics of race. Letting Futna in to Cavafy’s house, ‘Abd al-Fattah, whom she perceives as “arrogant,” “addresses her in Egyptian Arabic, as if reminding her every time that she does not belong here.

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She, in return, answers with snobbish brevity in English phrases she struggles to keep curt and assured as if to say, I can’t make out a word of what you say, you wretch” (HTQK 93). While ‘Abd al-Fattah massages his sense of social inferiority by self-aggrandizing on account of his erotic proximity to the European man, Futna’s reaction of brandishing her greater access to European privilege (her knowledge of English) partakes of “mimicry,” of a desire to pass. This manifests itself at an Egyptian literary meeting of the Alexandrian Culture Group (which makes a nice counterpoint to several important scenes set at meetings of the Alexandrian Greek literary group Nea Zoe [New Life] that Cavafy is known to have frequented [see HTQK 153, 260 passim]). When, during a heated discussion about “those arrogant foreigners,” one of the poets taunts her about her demeaning relationship with Cavafy, Futna consoles herself with the thought that outside the room the man “would go back to being a slave,” that he is “a black [aswad], a Nubian who has no place except underground,” who cannot “defeat all these whites” with his poems, and that he desires her (HTQK 385). Despite her own fury at the “hateful whites,” the “masters” who “own the city,” her revenge on the group, in typical évoluée fashion, is to announce that she no longer writes in Arabic, her latest poems being in English (HTQK 384). Hence her reflections: Do I really hate those khawagas [foreigners]? Or is it rather that I hate the dark [al-sumr] people I was fated to belong to? I hate everyone, hate this hybridized [muhajjana] city whose apparent finesse conceals pent-up blood in search of a breach through which to burst out and stain all the streets and facades of houses henna-red. (HTQK 387).

The deformities of internalized racism that would lead an Egyptian woman to look down on her compatriots, and more so an Egyptian man darker than herself, the Nubian poet, to believe that Arabic textualities are of no value as compared to European ones, show up the cosmopolis (“hybridized city”) as secured by colonial violence (“pentup blood”). In contrast to al-Haya al-Thaniya, the two Egyptian films to which I now turn adapt and engage Cavafy in non-Alexandrian settings. Yousry Nasrallah’s 1999 film al-Madina (The City) not only lends narrative flesh to Cavafy’s poem from which it takes its title, but thematically refracts the Alexandrian Greek’s “The City” toward the sociopolitical. The film’s protagonist, ‘Ali (played by Bassem Samra),

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has a degree in commerce, works as a cashier at a butcher’s shop in Rawd al-Farag—an old Cairene neighborhood known for its huge market slated for relocation during the present time of the film—and dreams of becoming an actor. We witness the close-knit community relations in Rawd al-Farag and the mutual affection between ‘Ali and his neighbor Nadia (played by Basma), as well as the bond he shares with his group of male friends that occasionally carries homoerotic undertones.77 In addition to playing minor theater roles, ‘Ali goes for an interrogation-like interview with an arrogant director who is making a film about why young people want to act and fails to answer this key question. When the bullying of his exploitative father reaches physical violence, ‘Ali moves out and makes up his mind to leave for France in hopes of pursuing a career in acting there. In France, though, he can find no job other than in rigged boxing matches— ironically a mockery of acting, as he is aware—uses a forged identity card procured for him by his “manager,” and sends money home as often as possible. Alienation and personal defeat, the themes of “The City,” translate into many valences such as displacement, dispossession, illegal immigration, and exile as ‘Ali enters the world of his manager. A Beur called Roschdy (played by Roschdy Zem), his manager works as a labor contractor of Arab illegal immigrants, many of them Palestinian, whom he contracts out as cheap labor. Taunted about his exploitation of fellow Arabs at a gathering that includes ‘Ali, Firas (played by Mess Hattou), and a new contingent of Palestinian sans papiers whom the latter has arranged to bring over, Roschdy draws an analogy between himself and the German hero of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, Schindler’s List: “I’m the Schindler of illegal Arabs,” he declares (AM). Fed up with the racism he experiences in France and fearing retaliation for his dealings, Roschdy decides to change cities and, in a geographic reversal of ‘Ali’s trajectory, steals the Egyptian’s passport and moves to Cairo where he lives under ‘Ali’s name. Shortly thereafter, ‘Ali is hit by a car (it is suggested in revenge), and though his life is saved by a French nurse who continues to care for him for a while, he loses his memory. Hence, after the loss of his identification documents, the apparent loss of grounds for identity per se—the one piece of information he knows about himself being that he is Egyptian. After a spell living on the streets of Paris and befriending a homeless man, he appears to recover some vestiges of memory and is repatriated to Egypt, deciding to live for the rest of his life in Rawd al-Farag.

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The film opens with a few production credits against a black background immediately followed by the second, final stanza of Cavafy’s “The City” in classical Arabic. The verses unfold on the screen in white letters: “You will not find other places, you will not find other seas. / The city will follow you. . . . And you will age in these same neighborhoods; / and in these same houses you will go gray / . . . For you / there is no boat. . . . / The way you’ve botched your life here, in this small corner, / makes for your ruin everywhere on earth” (BTCT 3; AM).78 While the lines are onscreen, we hear strains of music and voices, apparently of vendors calling out their wares, from an extradiegetic source. The sequences that follow the epigraph open with images of Rawd al-Farag Market and, in voice-over, ‘Ali’s interior monologue, as he comes into view: “This is Rawd al-Farag Market before it was torn down—all hustle and bustle and laughter and crying . . . and to each his own life and desires and fears. I was born here and know no other place. I used to think no force on earth could make me budge from my place; I thought there were strong bonds that tied us all together. When I graduated from university and started asking myself what I wanted out of life, and when the talk of relocating the market . . . began, I suddenly had this terrifying insight: each one of us is overwhelmed by loneliness and the strongest bond between us is fear of loneliness. Then I had to reconcile myself with this insight” (AM). These, the first spoken words in the film, refract the epigraph’s themes toward the social, intertwining alienation with questions of community and dispossession. The poem is also visually dovetailed with the narrative in the alternation between the brightly colored market images and the black screen that had served as background for the epigraph from Cavafy. These sequences close with a black screen bearing credits in white that end with the name of the director and the title of the film, this being the second time we see this title on screen, thus braiding Cavafy’s “City” with Nasrallah’s Madina. In its direct citations from Cavafy, however, the film tellingly reverses the order of the poem’s stanzas. While the second stanza makes for the epigraph, the first is recited by ‘Ali almost halfway through the film, at the cusp of the most radical upheaval in his life—shortly before the car accident that would result in his amnesia. Crushed by Roschdy’s theft of his passport just when he had been wanting to return to Egypt, ‘Ali recites the verses amid melancholic reflections that he confides to Firas: “I thought that if I changed cities,

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I’d find myself; that if I sent my parents a lot of money, I’ll have done my bit . . . What a fool I was!” (AM). Turning his head in semiprofile and switching from Egyptian colloquial into classical Arabic, he segues into the poem, “You said, ‘I will go to another land, I will go to another sea. / Another city will turn up, a better one than this. / . . . . and my heart is buried, like a dead man. / And my mind, how long will it remain in this morass. / Anywhere I turn my eye, anywhere I look, / the black ruins of my life are what I see here, / where I have spent so many years, where I have botched and spoiled so many’” (BTCT 3; AM). He then transitions back to Egyptian colloquial with the remark that Roschdy is not to blame, that like both of them he does not know what he wants. The reflections preceding and succeeding the verses from the poem paraphrase it into the elements of the narrative. Furthermore, that the words are spoken, instead of voiced-over, by ‘Ali to Firas privileges and dramatizes a reading of the poem as a dramatic monologue rather than an interior monologue (the proselike, albeit not prosaic, texture of Cavafy’s poems allows us to use the latter term here). The dialogism suggested by the presence of a listener to the dramatic monologue—even, or perhaps because, ‘Ali remarks that he shares this predicament with his two companions—suggests a shift of the poem beyond the discrete, isolated self of Cavafy’s “The City” mired in angst and hints at forms of alienation underwritten by specific sociopolitical circumstances. The composition not only translates the poem visually but also amplifies its interpretations. To the left of the screen, in the foreground, is ‘Ali’s head, while Firas stands to the right, the background occupied by a mattress base propped up against the wall, its crisscrossing metal bars suggestive of prison bars. As Firas lights a cigarette, its smoke suffuses the shaft of blue light pouring in from a breach in a wall to the right (see fig. 11). Indeed, right before this sequence, the camera had lingered on the exterior of the room in which ‘Ali and Firas are talking, zooming in especially on its long window, crudely walled up with brick and mortar, and the single breach in it. The smoky blue light, the crisscrossing metal bars, the walled up window—all these elements are a translation into visual vocabulary not only of “The City” but also, to my mind, two other thematically aligned, near-contemporary Cavafy poems: “The Windows” (“In these dark rooms, where I go / through weary days, I wander back and forth, / looking for the windows. . . . But the windows aren’t there to be found, or I’m unable to find them . . . ”

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Figure 11. ‘Ali, left, reciting Cavafy’s “The City,” as Firas listens, in Yousry Nasrallah’s AlMadina. Screen capture provided by the author.

[BTCT 91]) and “Walls” (“Without regard, without pity, without shame, / massive and high all around me they’ve built walls. . . . But I never once heard a noise or any sound come from the builders. / Imperceptibly they’ve shut me away from the world out there” [BTCT 97]). Then again, Nasrallah’s al-Madina subtly but determinedly rewrites the crushed self of “The City” into a self that, no less crushed, assumes agency. This is evident in a series of assertions and decisions ‘Ali makes on return to Egypt and Rawd al-Farag. Amnesia notwithstanding, ‘Ali experiences echoes of old affects: responses to place, callings, family, loves, friends, and community that correspond to his former self’s affections and disaffections. He stands up to his father who presses him to follow the trend of flight from Rawd alFarag, slated for demolition, to the new satellite town to which the market has been relocated: “Anyone who wants to leave is welcome to leave. I love it here” (AM). Likewise, when a jealous peer, an old foe, taunts him, ‘Ali asserts, “I thought I’d been kicked out only once in my life, from France—now I realize I was kicked out twice, once from France, and before that from here. It looks like I’ll be kicked out a third time. But get this . . . it’s not going to happen” (AM). He then turns to Nadia and confesses his love. Most significant for what I read as al-Madina’s intervention into “The City” is ‘Ali’s assumption of his old vocation, this time with far greater insight into acting than he had had prior to his departure for France.79 In the film’s closing sequences, we hear in voice-over the question, “‘Why do you want to become an actor, ‘Ali?,” and his reply,

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Figure 12. Recital of Cavafy’s “Ithaca” in Ibrahim El Batout’s Ithaki. Screen capture provided by the author.

“You know, when I’m on my way to work in the morning, I stop to buy a pack of cigarettes as I am rushing to catch the bus to make it on time, then I see a gorgeous girl. But you know, I don’t actually see any of it. If I put myself in the frame of mind of acting and do the same things, I see it all, every little detail of it. I feel then that I’m holding the entire world in my embrace. And I no longer feel alone” (AM). As the words unfold, we watch ‘Ali enacting the scene he describes, followed by “Cut!” from the director who had interviewed him before his departure to France in what turns out to be a rehearsal for a film titled The Farm. ‘Ali’s closing words, along with his other statements and positions after his return, constitute, in my view, a cinematic coda inserted at the end of Cavafy’s “City.” In this sense, the second, concluding stanza of the poem with which the film opens does not serve the conventional function of an epigraph—as a key, as the sign under which the text is to be interpreted—but is best seen as a point that finds it counterpoint in the last sequences of the film. Asked whether—as the scenario’s coauthor, in addition to being the film director—he had taken the poem as the premise and proceeded from there or had first constructed the story line and then retroactively selected Cavafy’s “The City” as a fitting epigraph, the Cairo-born Nasrallah (b. 1952) asserts that it was the former. “I [first] read Cavafy’s ‘City’ when I was [living] in Beirut, and it stayed with me,” he comments. Nasrallah’s reference to his years, long before becoming a filmmaker, living in Lebanon during the Civil War— during which he resided in the Western, predominantly Muslim part of the capital that served as the base for the Palestinian resistance,

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volunteered to make a film with the PLO, and eventually became a film critic—bring the alienation and sense of ruination in Cavafy’s “The City” in dialogue with the sociopolitical in a manner that resonates with what the film does with the poem.80 His first acquaintance with Rawd al-Farag came when Nasrallah served as assistant director on the Alexandrian filmmaker Youssef Chahine’s docudrama, alQahira (Cairo; 1991), a film that includes scenes of the market before its demolition. “The idea linked in this way,” Nasrallah comments, “and we started writing this way.”81 War in conjunction with another Cavafy poem would yield Ibrahim El Batout’s first feature film, Ithaki (2005). Previously, El Batout (b. 1963) had worked for about eighteen years as a cameraman with various news agencies documenting conflict zones and wars, as well as directing documentary films for television channels. Of the genesis of Ithaki, the director recalls, “I was living in Cyprus between ’91 and ’97 and in ’92 I met a Cypriot friend who gave me the poem right before [my] going to Bosnia—and going to Bosnia was a difficult decision [to make] because it was in the middle of the war . . . and I wanted to go and live there and stay there. So he . . . told me there is someone who was living in your country who wrote a poem, read it. So I read ‘Ithaki’ and it immediately touched my soul.” El Batout’s film, as he elaborates, would seem to be an act of homage to and reinterpretation of Cavafy’s “Ithaca” in the light of his own experiences: “I was inspired by the poem . . . and it helped me understand different things about life and it helped me [make] certain important decisions. So when I switched from making documentaries to making fiction I wanted my first film to be called Ithaki. I call it Ithaki not Ithaca because Ithaki is the original name in Greek. . . . I grew up with my neighbors who were Greek when I was in Port Said so I have this nostalgia [for] the Egypt we once knew.” Of his mode of independent filmmaking, El Batout’s comments that these are “almost no-budget films . . . and they’re all made without going to the censorship and taking permission, they’re all done guerillastyle,” using largely amateur actors.82 Ithaki does have a film director character, Ahmad (played by Ahmad Kamal), who, like El Batout, spent eighteen years covering conflict zones and wars and has likewise won an award for a documentary on mass graves in Iraq.83 In a similar semiautobiographical vein, the film closes with a dedication “To all those who went to war and never came back / To those who came back broken and to those who came back stronger” (I). Indeed, toward the end of Ithaki, there

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is a scene in which Ahmad explains that he is undertaking a feature film project in improvisatory, quasi-collaborative fashion. At a meeting with some of the other characters whose participation he is soliciting and whose life stories he will weave into his own film, Ahmad comments, “I want to tell you about the film, but I won’t talk about scenes . . . there are no scenes anyway; there’s nothing at all, actually. There are characters: these characters are the key to the film” (I). His words echo El Batout’s on Ithaki, which he wrote, as “mood-based, not plot- and story-based at all . . . I picked characters that represent ‘Ithaki,’ in a way, or represent the journey, in a way.”84 Beyond Ahmad’s story, Ithaki multiplies its Cavafian Odysseus figures based on local life stories—as suggested by the fact that several of the characters bear the first names of the actors playing them—drawn from contemporary Cairo in docudrama fashion. Ithaki’s interpretation of Cavafy’s “Ithaca” modulates on the path, both visually and thematically, in a spiritual key as much as a political one. Playing off the imagery of Eastern cities in Cavafy’s poem, the film creates an allusively spiritual aesthetic safeguarded from autoOrientalism by the barely tenable balance its strikes with its concern for the ravages of twentieth-century collective conflict and mass violence. This aesthetic is variously woven through: mise-en-scène and antique venues; occasional soft focus shots; images that stand out as markedly metaphorical; aphoristic language; and the soulful music of the Cairo-based Algerian singer Karima Nayt who plays (a somewhat fictionalized version of?) herself under the same first name. The film opens with a black screen on which numbers unfold in countdown mode, accompanied by digital sounds, followed by the title in English, Ithaki. Then a crescent slowly traverses the black screen downward, with English subtitled words superimposed on it and rendered into Arabic at the bottom of the screen. Accompanied by a melancholy hummed tune that the viewer will later come to associate with Karima, the words read: “Thousands of years ago after the end of the Trojan war . . . [t]he Greek mythical warrior Ulysses started his journey back to his homeland Ithaki. . . . A journey that should have taken him days . . . lasted for many years. . . . In 1911, the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy living in Alexandria . . . [w]rote the poem Ithaki” (I).85 The spectator now cued to Cavafy’s, as distinct from Homer’s, Odysseus, the following sequences are accompanied by the first two of the five stanzas of the Alexandrian Greek poet’s “Ithaca” recited

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in Greek in an extradiegetic woman’s voice. Onscreen is the back of a blond man unhurriedly driving a car heading toward Qasr al-Nil Bridge in Cairo at dawn with the last words of the quotation recited as he is halfway across: “As you set out toward Ithaca, / hope the way is long, / full of reversals, full of knowing. / Laistrygonians and Cyclops, / angry Poseidon you should not fear, / never will you find such things on your way / if your thought stays lofty, if refined / emotion touches your spirit and your body. . . . Hope the way is long. / May there be many summer mornings when, / with what pleasure, with what joy, / you shall enter first-seen harbors; / may you stop at Phoenician bazaars / and acquire the fine things sold there, / nacre and coral, amber and ebony, / and sensual perfumes, every kind there is, / as much as you can abundant sensual perfumes; / may you go to many Egyptian cities / to learn and learn again from those educated” (BTCT 11; I). The Cairene bridge does not merely serve the purpose of an establishing shot, but iconically illustrates a “way” (“dromos” in the original [TP1 29–30]), bathed in the dawning light of a “summer morning,” at a passage into an Egyptian city. The same bridge will be taken up in a different key before the closing credits. The closing sequences take us back to Qasr al-Nil Bridge, at dawn, except that this time it is Karima who is driving, alone, while some of the other characters walk across the bridge either in a pair or in small groups. The scenes that follow immediately on the opening sequences of the film are tone-setting and constitute one of its interpretations of the poem. The blond man unlocks and swings open an old-fashioned, wrought-iron gate and walks into a home of apparent antiquity that the camera explores to the theme tune by Nayt. The many light fixtures lend sepia-like tones to an interior cluttered with objets d’art, mementos, earthenware, paintings, glass flasks, antique pieces of copper, period portraits, like that of the young King Farouk, a mural painted with lotus flowers—suggesting a collector’s den, quite likely also an artist’s live-in studio. That the interior intimates a sensual aesthete who, much as Cavafy urges his Odysseus, has “acquire[d] the fine things . . . / nacre and coral, amber and ebony, / and sensual perfumes, every kind there is,” is corroborated when the man sits watching slides. These show what seems to be one of the pyramids at Dahshur, a man atop a palm tree gathering dates, a man gripping what may be a lamppost, then another shot apparently of the same man from a different angle. Whatever one may make of the recurrence of the male figure in the slides, the scene modulates on the spiritual

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key of Cavafy’s “Ithaca”—“ if refined / emotion touches your spirit and your body”; “may you go to many Egyptian cities / to learn and learn again from those educated”—when the camera zooms in on two particular objects on a desk amid a display that includes a pyramid. These are a statuette of Buddha and a slab showing, in barely distinct silhouette, a seated Horus, placed close together. The repertoire of Eastern mysticism underlies the transition, almost imperceptible in its fluidity—an image of a metal grille with the Arabic words for “prayer is illumination” inscribed on it—from the man’s home to the following sequences about Amr (played by Amr Fekry), a Sufi photographer, and his partner Karima, the Algerian singer. Amr represents one of the film’s reinterpretations of the poem’s image of “the way,” in this instance as “the path” in a Sufi sense. His corporeal interpretation through dancelike motions of Sufi notions is paralleled by his photographic interpretations of them. In answer to a question from Mandy (played by Mandy McClure), a Cairo-resident American anthropologist, at an exhibition of his, Amr explains an installation composed of a shrinelike tomb, a maqam that emanates “pulsating” or “breathing” light—“the passage from matter into light”—through a projector onto a succession of translucent screens. “It’s about the journey through life,” he observes, “about each person’s yearning for spiritual advancement . . . about the aspiration to fulfill one’s existence beyond life and death. My inspiration is Sufism and the Sufis’ notion of maqamat [stations] . . . in the sense of attaining a more elevated level” (I). In contrast to the photographer’s spiritual modulation on the path is the diegetic director’s temporal one. Talking to a roomful of students about a clip from his documentary on female genital mutilation in Ethiopia that has caused them to wince, Ahmad apologetically explains that this will be their profession too. Reflecting on the ethics of empathic witnessing of trauma as a cameraman in conflict zones—“for me to sustain this is much more bearable than to live it, as these people are living it” (I)—and of ascribing victimhood for oneself at the expense of the true victims, he illustrates with an anecdote. Filming a man carrying a child in an Albanian refugee camp in Kosovo, he is told by the translator that the man was asking where to bury his son. The anecdote is but one of several other references to wars (Iraq) and civil conflict (Algeria). Ahmad’s insight into his trajectory, particularly the contrast he draws between the warfront and his homeland, as well as the way he comes to terms with it when he settles back in Egypt, speaks to

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the coda of Cavafy’s “Ithaca” that will be recited toward the end of the film. In answer to Mandy’s question as to why he had taken up that profession, Ahmad muses, “maybe because I was looking for answers, I wanted to know why all these wars, what it’s all about. I thought if I threw myself into these wars, I’d find answers to my questions, since war is the worst form of human conflict” (I).86 He recalls a growing “gap” that separated him from everyone at home whenever he returned on vacation and found people’s concerns mundane and trivial by contrast to the massacres elsewhere, and hence his inability to sympathize—vide the poverty of Ithaca. Ahmad concludes that after eighteen years, he realized that there was not such a vast difference between people’s experiences in war-ridden societies and ones free of war, in the huge proportions in which individuals in either context see their problems, even though war remains by far the harsher reality. The flashbacks that punctuate these reflections are composed of montages: a young man detonating explosives; Ahmad and friends dancing at a Cairene wedding party; explosions; fireworks. He goes on to ruminate that if one has experienced war for eighteen years, whether by choice or not, one would “search for a way [tariq] to continue. As I saw it, the way has to be within me, that I need to work on myself, to come back to myself” (I). In a film that proceeds in nonlinear fashion and that leaves many loose threads at the end, Mandy’s ethnographic interviews serve to throw into sharper relief some of the characters’ narratives about themselves, as in the case of Hanan (played by Hanan Youssef). A sculptress married to Pissou (played by Boutros Ghali)—an alcoholic whose hobby is to drive a cab once a week in search of adventures and chance encounters—Hanan expounds to Mandy a world view based on acceptance and nonintervention in the lives of others, such as her husband. She believes in rising above the immediate and seeing moments of personal crisis that take on overwhelming proportions as “a mere speck in the history of the universe” (I). Schooled in this outlook and in white magic by her grandmother, Hanan explains that she tries to vest the objects she makes with love, for others who use these objects later “to avail themselves of this energy for love, or rather to discover it within themselves, or uncover it, because it is there, only covered in dust” (I). Hanan’s words place a marker on a central theme in the film, namely, the resistance to instrumentality and the broaching of a more organic human community. This is variously witnessed in

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the characters’ interactions, in the refractions of their relationships through a shared love of place, and in the gift-giving of objects that recoups their use value. Essam (played by Essam Abdel-Fattah), an army veteran, who lost an eye, has a passion for classical music and lives in a room on a rooftop. He takes an antique box as a gift for Sama (played by Sama Aaglan), a deaf and mute young woman who lives in a house with a swimming pool. As he hands her the box— explaining that only its original owner knows the secret of opening it—she gives him a gift of a violin, with a note inside the case urging him to take care of it. One might be tempted to locate a resonance here of gift exchange within and between groups—accruing recognition and solidarity through a threefold obligation of giving, of receiving, and of reciprocating—that Marcel Mauss has analyzed in premodern, premonetary societies.87 Certainly, there is solidarity in this instance of gift exchange, one that cuts across class and speaks to mutual vulnerability. But I would argue that the gift-giving in the film goes beyond the exchange, which is not disinterested, to gifts that will not be reciprocated, as in the origin of the violin. Earlier in the film, Mandy’s husband Amgad (played by Amgad Naguib)—a collector of antiques who will give Essam the box—takes Sama for a walk in downtown Cairo and explains his passion for its elegant early twentieth-century buildings, and for the taste and sense of proportion that the older inhabitants of the neighborhood display in all their possessions such that, “you know, Sama, when I see one of the old-timers of the downtown area, I feel we have something in common, maybe our love for the same place” (I). Upstairs, in one of the old buildings, they meet with an elderly man (played by Sedik El Batout) who explains to Sama that he trusts Amgad who mentioned that she would be giving the instrument to a man who has a passion for the violin. “The most important thing,” the elderly man comments, “is to urge him [Essam] to give it to someone who deserves it, just as its owner did when he gave it to me, and just as I’m about to do now” (I). In one of the closing sequences where a reassertion of community takes place we hear from an extradiegtic source the beginning of the remaining stanzas of Cavafy’s “Ithaca” in Greek that continue in the following sequences in the house of the blond man with whom the film opened and whose voice it is. We never learn the story of the man (played by Youssef Abagui), who remains unnamed: is he a latter-day Cavafy-like figure? To Mandy, who sits opposite him, he recites (see fig. 12): “Keep Ithaca always in your mind. / Arriving there is what

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has been ordained for you. / But do not hurry the journey at all. / Better if it lasts many years; / and you dock on old man on the island, / rich with all that you’ve gained on the way, / not expecting Ithaca to give you wealth. / Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey. / Without her you would not have set out. / She has nothing more to give you. / And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not fooled you. / Having become so wise, with so much experience, / you will have understood, by then, what those Ithacas mean” (BTCT 11–12). If the foregoing discussion has suggested that Egyptian articulations of cosmopolitanism are confined to engagements with the three canonical authors, this would be a rather partial picture. In two 2010 feature films set in Alexandria Hawi (Juggler), directed by El Batout, and Microphone, directed by Ahmad ‘Abdallah, the multiethnic heritage of the city is not thematized, merely alluded to in choice of sets (the Jesuit Cultural Center in Hawi), and names (a warehouse once owned by a Bolanachi in Microphone, a store named Edouard in Hawi). Both films have casts that include Alexandrian non-actors in a salutary collaborative turn, tap into local popular culture such as underground music bands (as well as graffiti artists in Microphone, and dance in Hawi) and dwell on the dynamic between alternative culture, state-sponsored culture, and the police state. And much cultural output in Egypt in recent years has addressed the hinge between Alexandria and cosmopolitanism as well as resorted to different cultural archives for a cosmopolitan orientation, in periods overlooked by the dominant Alexandrian narrative (such as the medieval) and in settings to which it is oblivious (other cities such as Cairo and rural areas). One major tributary that has fed this move is independently published journals that have adopted rubrics such as the cultures of places (Amkenah) and hitherto unexplored points of intersections such as the comparative work that the twinning of Alexandria with New Orleans as port towns can yield (Meena).88 This epilogue is therefore a prologue to a discussion I hope to undertake at greater length in a future study, bringing out this radically different cosmopolitan orientation, as well as various Egyptian artists and writers who have contributed to it.

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notes

introduction 1. Very occasionally, as when transliterating the phrase from a folkloric adage, I reproduce colloquial Egyptian pronunciation. I borrow in this paragraph some phrases from my 2002 article “On Being an Alexandrian.” This article is a version of a presentation titled “Cosmopolitan Alexandria and Postcolonial Melancholia: The Case of Youssef Chahine” that I gave on a panel at the Modern Language Association convention in 2001 organized by Deborah Starr of Cornell University, on which Natalie Melas of the same university and Faiza Shereen (then) of the University of Dayton also presented. My presentation drew on the broader argument in the doctoral dissertation that I had started to write. The dissertation, “The Alexandria Archive: An Archaeology of Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism,” filed at the University of California, Los Angeles, in March 2004, made the central argument about colonialism and cosmopolitanism that I build on here. The dissertation comprised four chapters addressing C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, Lawrence Durrell, and Edwar alKharrat. I have been writing about various aspects of Alexandria and cosmopolitanism since the early 1990s. Some, but not all, of these texts are in the bibliography of this book. It is understood, however, that one’s positions have been somewhat modified and revised. In what follows, I use the term Arabo-Islamic, despite its limitations, in a task-specific way, to designate the centuries from the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century to Napoleon’s occupation at the end of the eighteenth in the context of Alexandria. 2. For a compilation of accounts of Alexandria, by travelers and in guidebooks, in different centuries, see Manley, The Nile: A Traveller’s Anthology, 43–56. 3. Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt, 29. 4. Flaubert, Voyage en Égypte, 43; translation mine. I allude to Flaubert’s Tentation de saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony). For a cogent discussion of Flaubert in Egypt, see Behdad, Belated Travelers, 53–72. 5. Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt, 15, 16, 25, 19; see also the editor Kararah’s gloss on the languages used (16). Ilbert, in Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 1, xxvi–xxvii, having surveyed European travelers’ shifting attitudes to Alexandria in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, observes

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their Orientalist turn and the European linguistic usage in the city deemed unattractive. 6. According to Reimer in Colonial Bridgehead, statistics for the population of Alexandria in the period before 1848 are not readily available. However, the census of 1848 shows that of a total population of 104,189, Ottoman subjects were 7,087, and European subjects and protégés were 4,824. In 1878 there were 42,884 Europeans resident in Alexandria. The 1882 census figure for European subjects and protégés was 49,693 of a total of 231,396—hence “almost a quarter of the population of the city and a tenfold increase over the European population in 1848.” Speaking of the 1830s and 1840s, Reimer remarks that “internal, not international, migration was the primary reason for growth,” a fact that he is keen underscore “since it is sometimes imagined that the city was more European or Levantine than Egyptian. It was said in the nineteenth century, ‘Pour aller en Egypte, sortir d’Alexandrie,’ but the saying is simply a reflection of European myopia.” Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 93, 108; see also 89, 160. See also Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 1, 91–96. According to Ilbert, the foreign colonies constituted 14 percent of Alexandria’s population in 1897 and 17 percent in 1927. Ibid., 419. On Alexandria’s population growth between 1798, the year of the French occupation, and 1882, the beginning of the British occupation, see Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, 1:158–59. For the population growth after the British occupation in 1882—the city’s population having more than doubled between that year and 1927—see Alexandrie 1830–1930, 1:245, 361–62. Ilbert (1:362–63) also demonstrates that the ratio of foreign to indigenous residents was higher in Alexandria than in Cairo. For the composition of the foreign population of Alexandria between 1897 and 1927, see Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, 1:395–96 and 2:761. Reimer’s Colonial Bridgehead and Ilbert’s Alexandrie 1830–1930 are based in the discipline of urban history, and both treat a somewhat earlier period from the one I cover in this book. While the two books deal with colonialism (to rather different effect), neither offers a critique of representation nor focuses on the question of cosmopolitanism per se. For example, in addition to the foregoing quotation from Reimer about “European myopia” concerning Alexandria, which I would have read as a function of the colonial discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, his usage of “cosmopolitan” renders it synonymous with ethnic diversity. See, e.g., Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 3. In the introductory pages to his book, Ilbert openly admits to having considered then abandoned the idea of writing “an ‘essay on cosmopolitanism’”; see Alexandrie 1830–1930, 1:xxx. His book, as well as his essay “A Certain Sense of Citizenship,” speaks to the subject of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, via his discussion of the Municipal Council, adopting an ideological position that I critique later in the introduction. 7. For a bibliography on this scholarship, see Brown and Kime, “A Comprehensive Overview of Cosmopolitan Literature.” 8. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, VI:63; see also the translator’s note on 64. 9. Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City, 64, 144. The expression “un cosmopolitisme négatif” is from Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, as cited on 144. See

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also Appendix H on “Diogenes’ cosmopolitanism,” 141–45. On Diogenes’ statement, see also Nussbaum, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism,” 29. See also Nussbaum’s Foreword to the 1999 edition of Schofield’s Stoic Idea of the City and, on Diogenes, her essay “The Worth of Human Dignity: Two Tensions in Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” esp. 31–35. 10. Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City, 64, 65; see also 66. Schofield is here extrapolating from Cicero’s De natura deorum. 11. Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City, 71–72, 73. 12. Edwards and Woolf, “Cosmopolis: Rome as World City,” 3, 5. 13. Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, 31–33, 36, 38; italics in original. 14. Ibid., 117–18; italics in original. 15. See Rorty, “The Unpatriotic Academy.” Nussbaum’s “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” first published in the Boston Review in 1994, accompanied by twenty-nine replies, was reprinted in the volume For Love of Country?, edited by Cohen, which included a selection of the earlier responses and additional ones; see Cohen, “Editor’s Preface,” viii. I use here the 2002 edition of this book as it includes a new introduction by Nussbaum addressing 9/11. 16. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” 9, 13. 17. Nussbaum, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism,” 29, 28. 18. In terms of teleology, Kant—in his political, as distinct from moral, writings, such as “To Perpetual Peace”—concedes, with some “ambiguity” and “qualification,” the Stoics’ notion of providence, albeit only as “a kind of reassurance to the faint-hearted” in the pursuit of a Stoic-like “moral imperative [of] reverence for humanity.” As for the passions, the Enlightenment philosopher held that peace can be achieved only by dint of “persistent vigilance toward human aggression,” while the classical philosophers believed that the passions are not innate and that “the goal of world citizenship [is linked] to the goal of passional enlightenment.” Nussbaum, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism,” 35–37, 39. 19. Nussbaum, “Introduction: Cosmopolitan Emotions?,” xii, xiii–xiv. This introduction was added to the 2002 reprint of For Love of Country? Nussbaum, however, recommends that Americans take on the “humanitarian relief,” that would fund educational projects and NGOs in countries such as Pakistan (xiii). Despite her laudable motive of promoting a moral empathy with the Other, I cannot agree with Nussbaum’s recommended method, which is not far removed from neocolonial intervention. Tellingly, she makes no mention of U.S. interventions in the Middle East before 2002, such as the Gulf War of 1991. 20. Nussbaum, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism,” 42. 21. Ibid., 34. 22. Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, 119. 23. Ibid., 38; italics in original. 24. Malcomson is tacitly writing against Nussbaum’s citation of Plutarch’s On the Fortunes of Alexander as part of her discussion of classical formulations of cosmopolitanism. See Malcomson, “The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience,” 233; and Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” 6–7.

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25. Malcomson, “The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience,” 237, 238; see also 242. 26. Quotations from Dharwadker, “Introduction,” 3, 2. 27. Breckenridge, Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 2, 3, 5, 6. This volume was first published in Public Culture in 2000. 28. Clifford, Routes, 2, 36; see also 5, 24. 29. Breckenridge, Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 6. I allude here, too, to Clifford, Routes, 5, 35–36, as well as his comments on translation in relation to travel, 11, 35, 39. 30. Clifford, Routes, 34, makes a similar observation. See also his comments on exile, 43–44. 31. Said, Reflections on Exile, 174; see, similarly, 182–83. See also Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul,” on exile and “secular ciriticism” in Said’s work. 32. See Jonsson, “Wisconsin Protests”; Occupy Wall Street’s website, http://occupywallst.org/about/; Goldfarb, “Huge turnout in London for protest against austerity measures”; and Tremlett, “Spain reveals pain over cuts and unemployment,” respectively. See Halim, “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism,” 582. 33. Brennan, At Home in the World, 25. For an earlier intervention on cosmopolitanism by Brennan, see his 1989 “Cosmopolitans and Celebrities.” 34. Brennan, Wars of Position, 219, 231, 220. Brennan mentions the journal Public Culture, albeit not the specific issue I discuss in the foregoing; see 213. 35. Ibid., 223–24; italics in original. 36. Ibid., 222. See also Keith’s “What Went Wrong?,” a review of Brennan’s Wars of Position that designates the argument about “cosmo-theory” as “selective at best,” adducing as counterevidence the volume Cosmopolitics, coedited by Cheah and Robbins, as well as Robbins’s Feeling Global (4–5). 37. See Robbins, “Cosmopolitanism: New and Newer,” which, in the course of reviewing Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, provides an overview of recent trends in scholarship on the subject. Appiah had also argued for the continuity between cosmopolitanism and patriotism in “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” Others who made that argument from different approaches include Varouxakis in “How ‘Cosmopolitan’ Can Patriotism Be?,” and Zubaida in “Cosmopolitanism and the Middle East.” 38. Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanisms,” 3. 39. Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” 260, 250. A version of this essay was first published in 1992 in Social Text. 40. Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanisms,” 2. 41. Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” 259. 42. Robbins, “Cosmopolitanism: New and Newer,” 48, 51, 52, 60. 43. I draw in this portion of the discussion on my 2004 “Alexandria Archive,” 295–96, and on “Cosmopolitanism and (Neo)Colonialism: Alexandrian Rejoinders,” a recorded lecture given at New York University on March 1, 2006; see also Halim, “Latter-day Levantinism,” 1. 44. Wahba, al-Mukhtar, 142; translations mine from the Arabic.

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45. These variants may have something to do with whether French or English is used as the source of the term. 46. See Idris, “Nahwa Masrah Misri,” a series of articles first published in 1964 in al-Katib magazine, as he mentions, reprinted in Idris, al-Farafir, 24; translations mine. The term has been repeatedly deployed since then in literary criticism. See the Egyptian Marxist literary critic al-‘Alim who, in the course of an essay (written in the late 1970s) on the representation of Alexandria in Naguib Mahfouz’s texts, observes that despite the city’s foreign communities, its constituting a Mediterranean crossroads, and its representations in European literature, “it was never, despite its outward appearance, a kuzmubuliti town but was always intimately connected to its broader Egyptian political, social, and cultural reality.” Al-‘Alim, Arbi‘un ‘Aman min al-Naqd al-Tatbiqi, 469; translation mine. The Syrian literary critic Tarabishi refers, in a 1981 study of the symbolism of woman in the Arabic novel, to the elderly Alexandrian Greek pension owner in Mahfouz’s 1967 novel Miramar as the “heiress . . . to the last remnants of Alexandria’s waning kusmubulitiyya.” Tarabishi, Ramziyyat al-Mar’a fi al-Riwaya al‘Arabiyya, 103; translation mine. Two different translations of Edward Said’s Orientalism render the word differently, although both adopt paraphrases rather than transliteration. Abu Dib’s (1981) neologistic translation renders the term as alternatively “al-mada’iniyya” (derived from city, and close to urbaneness) or “al-‘awalimiyya” (roughly, “worldliness”). ‘Inani’s (2006) translation gives the word, in the context of a quotation from Lord Cromer, as “al-muwatana al-‘alamiyya” (“world citizenship”). See Sa‘id, al-Istishraq: al-Ma‘rifa, al-Sulta, al-Insha’, trans. Abu Dib, 17, 31, 69; and Sa‘id, alIstishraq: al-Mafahim al-Gharbiyya li-l-Sharq, trans. ‘Inani, 93. I adapt his transliteration of his surname, which he renders as Enani. 47. On Alexandria, see, for example, Farahat, “Khayalat fi al-Iskandariyya Tufattish ‘an Makaniha” (this by a Lebanese on Alexandria, and the earlier emigration from Lebanon to the Egyptian city) and al-Juwayli, “Riwayat ‘Azazil”; on Beirut, see “Tasawaru Lubnan bila Thaqafat al-Tasamuh wa-lQubul bi-l-Akhar”; on Cairo, see ‘Abd al-Halim and al-Sakit, “‘Taghridat alBaj‘a’ Marthiyya li-l-Qahira al-Kuzmubulitaniyya”; on the Alexandrian filmmaker Youssef Chahine, who died in August 2008, see ‘Asfur, “Hawamish li-lKitaba—al-Haram al-Khamis”; for the term as applied to the Lebanese writer and publisher Mai Ghusub, see Saghiya, “May Ghusub . . . Muwatinat Jami‘ al-Amkina”; on cross-cultural texts and, as spelled in Latin letters in the article, the “cosmopolitan reader,” see Isma‘il, “al-Nass al-‘Abir li-l-Thaqafat”; on music, see the discussion of Tchaikovsky’s cosmopolitan orientation in al-‘Aris, “‘al-Hasna’ al-Na’ima fi al-Ghaba’ li Tishaykufiski: kuzmubulitiyyat al-Ahasis.” 48. For the most clear-cut example of this, see al-Sha‘ir, “al-Rajul Dhu al-Badla al-Bayda’ al-Sharkistin [sic],” the title of which is the Arabic translation of Lucette Lagnado’s memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit. 49. Zubaida, “Cosmopolitanism and the Middle East,” 20, 24, 26. This discussion of Zubaida’s essay is taken from Halim, “The Alexandria Archive,” 304–5. 50. Zubaida, “Cosmopolitanism and the Middle East,” 18, 31, 33.

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51. See the chapter on al-Kharrat in my 2004 “Alexandria Archive,” 294–371. 52. Zubaida, “Cosmopolitanism and the Middle East,” 27, 26. The examples of Cairo’s cosmopolitanism he cites include Taha Husayn’s proposal of a Mediterranean identity for Egypt, the debates about tradition and modernity at the 1932 Congress of Arabic Music, and Fuad I University, which hosted, among others, E. Evans Pritchard’s lectures. 53. See Said, Out of Place; and Wahba, “Cairo Memories.” For a collection of essays on the capital’s cosmopolitanism at the turn of the millennium, see the volume edited by Singerman and Amar, Cairo Cosmopolitan. 54. See, for example, the imaginary dialogues of the dead between Diogenes and Alexander in Lucian of Samosata, Lucian, vol. 7, 13.390–94, pp. 66–73. 55. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, VI: 63 and VI: 41, respectively; quoted from Hicks’s translation. 56. For the first view, see Nussbaum, “The Worth of Human Dignity,” 31–32; for the second, Malcomson, “The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience,” 233, where he is building on Green’s comment in Alexander of Macedon that Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander the Great “represented the active and passive forms of an identical phenomenon,” 123. 57. Plutarch, Moralia, 397–99. 58. As distinct from his Life of Alexander, on which see Plutarch’s Lives, vol. VII, pp. 225–439. For a review of problems with sources on Alexander, see Bosworth’s “Introduction” in Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction. 59. See Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City, Appendix A, “Zeno and Alexander,” 104–11; quotations from 104, 110. See Bosworth, Alexander and the East, 2–5; and “Alexander and the Iranians.” 60. Bosworth, “Alexander and the Iranians,” 208; and Alexander and the East, 3. In “Alexander and the Iranians,” Bosworth provides a cogent, blow-by-blow rebuttal of the policy of fusion, analyzing the evidence for such aspects as Greek-Iranian mixed marriages, the status and position of Iranians in Alexander’s army, and the question of the Macedonian’s adoption of local costumes and garb. 61. Bosworth, Alexander and the East, 5. For a review of recent scholarship on Alexander, see Beard, “Alexander: How Great?” 62. The History of Alexander the Great, 38, 42, 43. 63. Stephens, Seeing Double, 65, 67, 72, 73. 64. Jacob and de Polignac, “The Alexandrian Mirage,” 15. The two authors also compare Alexandria, as “central to the dream of a universal metropolis,” to Rome, 14. 65. Strabo, Geography, 17.I.13; quoted from Jones’s translation. 66. See Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, vol. 1, 97, 212, 215, 218, 225. See also de Polignac, “The Shadow of Alexander.” On the endeavors to locate Alexander’s mausoleum, see Saunders, Alexander’s Tomb. 67. El-Abbadi, The Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria, 98; see also 106. On the library and Alexandrian scholarship, see also Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, vol. 1, 305–35, 447–79; MacLeod, ed., The Library

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of Alexandria; Canfora, The Vanished Library; and the relevant essays in Jacob and de Polignac, Alexandria, Third Century BC. 68. El-Abbadi, The Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria, 107–8. See also Lallot, “Zenodotus, the Editor of Homer”; and Stephens, Seeing Double, 248–52. 69. Quotations from El-Abbadi, The Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria, 116; and Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 452, respectively. 70. Kolbas, Critical Theory and the Literary Canon, 14–15. 71. I reproduce this argument from my 2004 “Alexandria Archive,” 10. Butler, in Return to Alexandria, also makes this point. For the deployment of Alexandria’s Hellenistic heritage in Western museological thought, see Butler, Return to Alexandria, 31–62. On the Graeco-Roman Museum and underwater archaeology in relation to Alexandrian revivalism, see Butler, Return to Alexandria, 157–211. On Alexandrian archaeology, written from the point of view of a French practitioner in the field, see Empereur, Alexandria Rediscovered. On Egyptian archaeological practice, see Halim, “Kamel Abul-Saadat: A Pioneer in Alexandrian Underwater Archaeology,” a profile of the amateur underwater archaeologist, first presented at the International Workshop on Submarine Archaeology and Coastal Management organized by UNESCO and Alexandria University in 1997, an earlier version of which was published in Al-Ahram Weekly in 1997. 72. On the Septuagint, see Le Boulluec, “Alien Wisdom.” 73. Brown, The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 49. The definition refers to the Hellenistic period but is elsewhere extended, among others, to the visual arts of the city during the same period. See Alexandria and Alexandrianism, the proceedings of a symposium organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities that took place in 1993. I refer to Alexandrianism in my 2002 “On Being an Alexandrian,” and draw here on points I made in “The Alexandria Archive,” 16–27. A roundtable at which I presented in 2004—organized by the Alexandria and Mediterranean Research Centre, Bibliotheca Alexandrina— was titled “Alexandrianism in the 21st Century.” For usages of the term “Alexandrianism,” see Ricks, “Cavafy’s Alexandrianism,” esp. 337–42. 74. Quoted in Donato, The Script of Decadence, 1. Donato does not provide a bibliographical reference for this quotation, which is one of the epigraphs of his book. In his introduction to the collection of essays he edited, E. M. Forster, Bloom writes concerning Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide, “he helps teach us that we are all Alexandrians, insofar as we now live in a literary culture,” 6. 75. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 39–40. 76. When Said turns to the Arabic-speaking or older Mediterranean worlds in the same essay, it is to discuss the eleventh-century Andalusian school of linguistics and interpretation, the Zahirites, and he makes no reference to the city again. 77. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 1–30. On the Western canon, see 20–24. 78. Ibid., 31–53; quotation from 39.

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79. Borges, Labyrinths, 51–58; quotation from 51. 80. It is here that Borges makes reference to an Alexandrian figure: “the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.” Borges, Labyrinths, 54. Basilides “was a second-century Alexandrian Gnostic teacher. . . . He and his son . . . are credited with compiling the first full-scale Christian commentary on any of the Gospels (perhaps Luke), the twenty-four-book Exegetica . . . ,” according to Frend, “Basilides,” 356. Another reference to Gnosticism, and hence indirectly to Alexandria, in “The Library of Babel” is where Borges has his librarian comment that “Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi,” 52. Borges’s story “The Immortal,” in the same volume, has Egyptian, Theban, and Alexandrian references; see Labyrinths, 106. Said may possibly be also referring to texts associated with the god Hermes Trismegistus, meaning, “Thrice-greatest Hermes”—“a Greek adaptation of an Egyptian title, Thoth the Very Great.” See Griggs, “Hermes Trismegistus,” 1223–24. 81. My comments on this story set it in dialogue with Said’s Alexandrian reference. For another “Alexandrian” connection that may have underwritten Said’s remark, see Foucault’s reading of Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, in “Fantasia of the Library,” in his Language, CounterMemory, Practice, 87–109. See below. 82. Foucoult quoted in Errera, “The Dream of Alexander and the Literary Myth,” 138 (the quotation originally occurs in Foucault’s article “Le Langage de l’espace,” 378), and Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” in his Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 92. 83. First published in Alexandrie 1860–1960, 154–70. I will be quoting Errera’s article “The Dream of Alexander and the Literary Myth” from the English translation of the volume, Alexandria 1860–1960, 128–43. 84. Errera, “The Dream of Alexander and the Literary Myth,” 131, 138, 139. 85. See Ricks, “Cavafy’s Alexandrianism”; and Golffing, “The Alexandrian Mind,” on Cavafy. 86. For the term cosmopolis as applied to Alexandria, see Anton’s “Alexandria: The History and Legend of a Cosmopolis.” A historical account of Alexandria that conforms to the pattern of the elision of the city from the Arab conquest until Napoleon (the short section on this period is titled “Obscurity and the Rebirth”), Anton’s article posits the multiethnic, multiconfessional “open city” aspect of Hellenistic cities, specifically Alexandria, against the older loyalties to the “polis” based on cultural homogeneity. In linking ancient Alexandria as cosmopolis with the modern city allegedly also as cosmopolis, Anton charts a backdrop of its multiethnic composition and focuses on the Greek community, specifically Cavafy, but overlooks, in addition to the Egyptian population, other communities, such as the SyroLebanese. See also, variously, the historical account in Schindler’s Guide to Alexandria, 34–43, esp. 43; Fraser, “Alexandria from Mohammed Ali

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to Gamal Abdal Nasser”; Marlowe, The Golden Age of Alexandria; Jacob and de Polignac, Alexandrie IIIe siècle av. J.-C; and Ilbert and Yannakakis, Alexandrie 1860–1960. The two latter volumes of essays published by the French house Autrement in its Série Mémoires were sold together in a box at the time of their launching, thus in a sense encapsulating what is constructed as the two “high” moments of Alexandria’s history. (The latter volume, as the title suggests, does not consider Suez the very last gasp of the foreign presence in the city but the early 1960s socialist-inspired state policy of dissolving the private sector and private ownership in certain sections of the economy such as trade, industry, and banking.) Granted, in Alexandrie 1860–1960, attempts have been made to take cognizance of the colonial situation that underpins the presence of the various foreign communities covered in different essays, as well as to make for an Egyptian presence in the form of the filmmaker Youssef Chahine and the novelist al-Kharrat. But these attempts remain vestigial and confined to only a few of the essays. For notable exceptions to the elision of the medieval period, see Décobert and Empereur, eds. Alexandrie médiévale 1; and Décobert, ed. Alexandrie médiévale 2. These two volumes of essays are part of a series now in its fourth installment. 87. Baedeker, ed., Egypt and the Sudan, 15; and Lands of Sunshine, 85; italics added. 88. See Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition. 89. See, for examples, Breccia, Alexandrea ad Aegyptum, which I discuss below. On the usage of the epithet “Alexandria ad Aegyptum” in antiquity, see Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, vol. 1, 107–9; and Stephens, Seeing Double, 13. I borrow the term imaginative geography from Said, Orientalism. Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 2, 698–99, comments on the street names. 90. On La Malinche, see Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, 65–88. Baron, in Egypt as a Woman, 57, notes the Bahiyya trope. On the troping of the East as sensual or feminized, see Said, Orientalism, esp. 6, 186–88, 190, and Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman. I draw on Halim, “Forster in Alexandria,” and “Miramar.” 91. On Alexandria’s personification in antique coinage, see Maritz, “The Face of Alexandria—The Face of Africa?” On the debate about the image of Isis Pharia, patroness of mariners, on Alexandrian coins, see Fragaki, Images antiques d’Alexandrie, 7–8. The female figure bearing the prow of a ship as headgear on a mosaic signed Sophilos in Alexandria’s Graeco-Roman Museum has been speculated to represent the Ptolemaic queen Berenice II. See Guimier-Sorbets, “Mosaics of Alexandria,” 69. Indeed, a delegation of the “city fathers” of Alexandria to the Graeco-Roman Museum had recognized in a female deity an apt emblem linking the historical past of the city to its present and future. See Ilbert, Alexandria 1830–1930, vol. 2, 695. 92. Ippolito, “Paris, 1890: la décadence au miroir alexandrin,” 132, 127; emphasis in original. My translation. I had addressed, in a somewhat different vein, the feminization of Alexandria in Durrell and France in “The City as Feminine Principle.” 93. See Boone, “Vacation Cruises; Or, the Homoerotics of Orientialism.”

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94. See Doty, My Alexandria, esp. the two poems “Days of 1981” and “Chanteuse,” 7–10 and 24–29, respectively. For a nuanced reading of Cavafy’s homoerotic poetry in relation to the Greek Anthology, see Caires, “Originality and Eroticism.” 95. For an incisive critique by an Egyptian Greek of discourses surrounding the departure of Egypt’s Greeks, see Kazamias, “Ptolemy’s Exodus.” I draw on Halim, “On Being an Alexandrian” and “The Alexandria Archive.” 96. Al-Qabbani, Nash’at al-Sihafa al-‘Arabiyya, 13–32; and Yusuf, A‘lam min al-Iskandariyya, 476–79. 97. Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 26–27, 171. For the Greek population in Egypt between 1897 and 1937, see 13. 98. See Colonas, “Présence Grecque et héritage architectural à Alexandrie,” esp. 79–80, 83; quotation from 80. 99. For the resonance of the “Great Idea” (Megali Idea) ideology among Egyptian Greeks, see Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 27–28, 50–53, quotations from 27. See also Reid, Whose Pharaohs?, 150–51 (which also discusses the antiquarian interests of Egyptian Greeks); and Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 2, 609–15. On the Megali Idea in general, see Beaton, An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, 64–127. Beaton writes: “The need to extend the geographical frontiers of the new state had been implicit from the beginning, and it had been during the deliberations on the first constitution, in 1844, that the classic formulation of the Greek irredentist call had first been made. ‘Greece,’ according to this formulation, did not mean only the kingdom of that name, but included all the Greek-speaking communities of the Ottoman Empire as well. The goal of national policy was therefore to ‘redeem’ those Greeks living beyond the confines of the nation state, and in particular to re-establish Constantinople, the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church and once the capital of the Greek-speaking empire of Byzantium, alongside Athens as the twin centres of this wider Hellenism,” 64. See also Papastratis, “From the ‘Great Idea’ to Balkan Union.” 100. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 181, 178. 101. See Empereur, Alexandria Rediscovered, to which I am indebted for the information about Schliemann as well as the information about the earlier history of Alexandrian archaeology cited in this sentence. 102. Two extant monuments (apart from catacombs and a Roman odeon excavated last century) are the misnamed Pompey’s Pillar, dedicated to the emperor Diocletian and the fifteenth-century Qait Bey Fort thought to have been built on the ruins of the Pharos Lighthouse (the minaret of the mosque in the fort would be destroyed during the British bombardment of Alexandria in 1882). As for the two obelisks called Cleopatra’s Needles, these were moved to New York and London in the 1870s. This is not to deny the presence of indigenous studies of ancient Alexandria, of which an example is alFalaki, Risala ‘an al-Iskandariyya al-Qadima. On al-Falaki’s contribution, see Reid, Whose Pharaohs?, 152–53. 103. See Reid, Whose Pharaohs?, 161; see also 159–62. 104. See Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground; Altekamp, “Italian Colonial Architecture in Libya”; and Munzi, “Italian Architecture in Libya.”

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105. Cited from the 1922 English translation by the same title. See Breccia, Alexandrea ad Aegyptum, vii, viii. 106. Ibid., 1–2; italics mine, except from the Latin phrase. 107. Jockey, “Le Musée gréco-romain d’Alexandrie,” 29; see also 26–27. I reproduce from my 2004 “Alexandria Archive” the argument about colonial archaeology, informed by Anderson’s discussion, in relation to Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and adduce Breccia’s book as evidence. Jockey’s 2007 “Le Musée gréco-romain d’Alexandrie” makes a similar argument about cosmopolitanism as articulated by Breccia, albeit without explicit reference to the colonial situation. It discusses the genealogy of the museum in Europe, analyzes the classification of artifacts and commentary on them in the GraecoRoman Museum through Breccia’s Alexandria ad Aegyptum, and quite usefully reflects on the stakes in such terms as Graeco-Roman. 108. Breccia, Alexandria ad Aegyptum, 139, 140. 109. Jockey, “Le Musée gréco-romain d’Alexandrie,” 33. 110. Lazarev, “Italians, Italianity, and Fascism,” 80, 75, 78. See also Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 2, 615–24, esp. 614, 618, 623. 111. Wright, “Preface,” in Twentieth Century Impressions of Egypt, n.p. See also 443–73, 460. For Breccia’s contribution, see 431–32. 112. Twentieth Century Impressions of Egypt, 423–24. 113. Evelyn Baring (Earl of Cromer), Modern Egypt, pt. 2, 568; emphasis added. See also Said, Orientalism, 37. On Cromer’s adducing of the GraecoRoman heritage, see Reid, Whose Pharaohs?, 154–59. 114. Hourani, Arab Seafaring, 55. On Alexandria, which Hourani considers to have experienced “rapid decline” after the Arab conquest, despite the Arabs using it as a naval base, see 59–61. Haas’s “Epilogue,” Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 337–51, presents a somewhat more nuanced account of Arabo-Islamic Alexandria. 115. My emphasis here is on Arabophone Alexandrian production; but I am aware of recent work in European languages on Ottoman Alexandria that has printed archival material. See, e.g., Tuchscherer and Pedani, Alexandrie ottomane 1. I thank Nelly Hanna for her reading of this portion of the text and for alerting me to this reference. 116. Husayn, Mustaqbal al-Thaqafa fi Misr, 20, 19. For recent engagements with Mediterraneanism, see Halim, “Mediterranean Hyphens.” 117. Awad, Dirasat fi al-Hadara, 99, 102. The text I cite here was a paper Awad presented at a conference on the Mediterranean in Greece in 1977, later published in the Ahram the same year. See also 73–104, esp. 92, 94. 118. Al-Shayyal, Tarikh Madinat al-Iskandariyya, n.p. Translation mine. See Salim, Tarikh al-Iskandariyya, 5. Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 22–24, relying on Salim, is more nuanced on the subject of Arabo-Islamic Alexandria than is generally the case in European languages. 119. For biographies of al-‘Abbadi and al-Shayyal, see Yusuf, A‘lam min al-Iskandariyya, 293–95 and 300–305, respectively. I also rely on alShayyal, A‘lam al-Iskandariyya, 8–10. 120. See the governor Hamdi ‘Ashur’s introduction to Tarikh al-Iskandariyya wa Hadaratuha, 6; see also 5.

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121. Even before the 1960s, the Nasser regime had taken measures to assert control over the academy, “but the universities were not willing to toe the line,” and “by the beginning of the 1960s it was clear that intellectuals had not rallied to the support of the revolution to the extent that the regime had hoped.” Along with the promulgation of the Charter, a more pointed call on intellectuals was made in the form of a 1963 Ministry of Culture–sponsored “project to rewrite modern Egyptian history” along socialist lines. But the project “effectively lapsed,” and “university historians as a group were reduced neither to a Procrustean bed nor to a prescribed stereotype.” See Gorman, Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth Century Egypt, 54, 55, 57, 59–60. 122. Lackany, who held several (voluntary) posts in the Alexandria Atelier, issued at his own expense a monograph series called Kurrasat alIskandariyya/Cahiers d’Alexandrie, with works by different authors, in addition to writing Quelques notes de toponymie Alexandrine. As al-Jazayirli recounts in the introduction to Sakandariyyat, after publishing his Dalil Shawari‘ al-Iskandariyya, the governorate pledged its support for his next project, but when it did not come through for financial reasons, Lackany sponsored the project. According to the introduction by al-Jazayirli’s sons to Mawsu‘at al-Jazayirli, the governorate’s withdrawal of support was on account of the 1967 War. The publication of Sakandariyyat illustrates that it was not solely state-sponsored efforts that were at stake but also intellectuals’ own initiatives. Sakandariyyat, it should be added, was the first volume in a planned series published in full, as Mawsu‘at al-Jazayirli, only posthumously in 2011. Lackany’s introduction to al-Jazayirli’s book mentions that al-Jazayirli’s work was noted by the Alexandria radio station that hosted a series on the subject of these eminent Alexandrians. See al-Jazayirli, Sakandariyyat, “taqdim” and “muqaddima,” n.p. Likewise, al-Shayyal, in A‘lam al-Iskandariyya fi al-‘Asr al-Islami, 9, mentions that he had given a series of talks on eminent Alexandrians in the 1950s at the invitation of the Alexandria radio station. It should be added that al-Jazayirli’s al-Iskandariyya fi Fajr al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin was also published in Lackany’s Cahiers d’Alexandrie series. 123. Al-Jazayirli, Sakandariyyat, “muqaddima,” n.p. This was the model suggested to him by a friend who was a state counselor, al-Jazayirli explains. For information on al-Jazayirli’s background and other publications, I have relied on the introduction by his sons to Mawsu‘at al-Jazayirli, 15–18. Another contemporary Alexandrian writer and amateur scholar whom I have not been able to discuss for lack of space is ‘Abd al-‘Alim al-Qabbani, although I cite him in chapter 2. 124. Al-Shayyal, A‘lam al-Iskandariyya, 7–8 and (for his usage of tarjama and sira) 10. Quotations from 7, 11. All quotations from this book are my translation. Whereas the term sira, referring to a premodern biographical (but also covering autobiographical) genre, one that “appears to have carried the connotation of an exemplary life,” remains in use, tarjama, thought to derive from Aramaic, is a term today largely deployed to indicate “translation.” The latter sense existed in the premodern usage, where it also meant a

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“biographical notice,” this being also in use in the modern period, although to a somewhat lesser degree. See Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 38–40, 42–43; quotations from 39, 42. For the components of a tarjama, see 42–43. 125. Yusuf, A‘lam min al-Iskandariyya, 8–9; quotation from 9. On 8, Yusuf refers to biographies of Alexandrians written in different languages, and on 9 he appears to be addressing Arab tarajim specifically. 126. Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 8, 7, 10, 14. See, by contrast, al-Jazayirli, Sakandariyyat, esp. the biography of the unknown hero who was martyred while defending an Alexandrian fort during the British bombardment of 1882, and the author’s citing the recollections of a centenarian relative who witnessed the event. Ibid., 15–19. 127. Al-Shayyal, A‘lam al-Iskandariyya, 105–25; see specifically 107–8, 110–11. 128. Yusuf, A‘lam min al-Iskandariyya, 8–9. For biographical information on Yusuf, I rely on Filastin, Wadi‘ Filastin Yatahaddathu ‘an A‘lam ‘Asrih, vol. 1, 299–305. 129. Yusuf, A‘lam min al-Iskandariyya, 11. 130. Ibid., 331, 499. For Husayn’s comments, see 330, 331. All quotations from this volume are my translation. Nelly Vaucher-Zananiri, as she later came to be known, was the sister of Gaston Zananiri. See Zananiri, Une famille d’Alexandrie, 23; and Entre mer et désert, 28–29. On Jeanne Arcache, see Zananiri, Entre mer et désert, 272. 131. Yusuf, A‘lam min al-Iskandariyya, n.p. 132. Al-Jazayirli, al-Iskandariyya fi Fajr al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin, 54; see also 23, 73, 66–67, 79. 133. Al-Shayyal, A‘lam al-Iskandariyya, 11. 134. See Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, 6–12; quotation from 7. On dar al-islam and the umma, see 6–7 and 10, respectively. 135. Al-Shayyal, A‘lam al-Iskandariyya, 11. 136. Al-Shayyal, Tarikh Madinat al-Iskandariyya, 30; and Salim, Tarikh al-Iskandariyya, 75–87. 137. Salim, Tarikh al-Iskandariyya, 109–13. On the Battle of Dhat alSawari, see also Hourani, Arab Seafaring, 56–59. The importance accorded Alexandria as a naval base would continue under the Abbasids, who would use it to combat rebellions and secessionist movements, the city’s strategic position rendering it a meeting point of contending political trends. Salim, Tarikh al-Iskandariyya, 120–23. Likewise, Ibn Tulun had additional ships built for the navy, and, later on, the Fatimid dynasty created a special administration for the navy to aid them in fighting the Byzantines (158–59, 201– 3). The Ayyubids, particularly under al-Nasir Salah al-Din (Saladin), would further reinforce the navy, although the latter sultans of that dynasty would neglect it (243–45, 276). Under the Mamluk sultan al-Zahir Baybars—who blocked the port of Damietta, Alexandria’s competitor, in response to the threat of attacks by the Franks—the navy was again rebuilt (276–77, 285). 138. On the digging up of the canal in different dynasties, see Salim, Tarikh al-Iskandariyya, 158–59, 213–14, 246, 282–83. On the new canal dug up under the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad b. Qalawun, see

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292–95. For the efforts of a later Mamluk sultan, al-Ashraf Barsbay, to address this problem, see 392–93. 139. Ibid., 203–9, 211–30, 232–63; quotation from 211. 140. Benjamin of Tudela, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, in Adler’s translation, 76; the glosses in parentheses are the translator’s. See Salim, Tarikh al-Iskandariyya, 257–58. 141. Salim, Tarikh al-Iskandariyya, 275–92. 142. Ibid., 301–4. The source Salim cites is al-Maqrizi, 303. See also Bakr, “Mina’ Dimyat,” esp. 56–57, 70–71; and Haridi, al-Jaliyyat fi Madinat alIskandariyya, esp. 19–20, 24. 143. Salim, Tarikh al-Iskandariyya, 309–49. 144. Ibid., 351–78, 383–405. 145. See, for example, al-Tahtawi, Anwar Tawfiq al-Jalil, 156–57. Fraser, in “Alexandria from Mohammed Ali to Gamal Abdal Nasser,” compares Muhammad ‘Ali to Ptolemy I and draws out the Pasha’s Greek connections from Kavalla days later nurtured on Egyptian turf. Of the fact that Michali Tossizza, a friend of Muhammad ‘Ali’s since Kavalla, was appointed the first Greek consul in Egypt, he goes on to comment, “We may compare these early Greeks from Thrace and Epirus with those Macedonians of early Ptolemaic Egypt, who were later swamped by Greeks from all over the Aegean, as again in the 19th century” (66; see also 65). On the Greeks in modern Egypt, see Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt; Politis, L’Hellénisme et l’Égypte moderne; and ‘Ashmawi, al-Yunaniyyun fi Misr 1805–1956. For a critique of the colonial Arab decline and revival thesis in relation to “temporality,” see Massad, Desiring Arabs, esp. 1–50. Several historians have written critiques of the Nahda paradigm as well as studies that undermine its dominance. It is not possible to provide a full bibliography here, but see, inter alia, Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs, esp. 16–19, 23-25, on parallels in other colonial contexts such as India and South East Asia; Piterberg, “The Tropes of Stagnation and Awakening”; and various papers in the volume edited by ‘Abbas, Islah am Tahdith? Misr fi ‘Asr Muhammad ‘Ali. 146. Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism, 178. See also the introduction added to the reprint of the volume on the durability of the traditional Nahda account: “Introduction: Reflections on the Persistence of 1798 as a Watershed in the Writing of Egyptian History,” xi–xli. 147. Ibid., lii, 178, liv. 148. Ibid., 74, 54; see also 58, 71, 60–63, 68, 89–91, 157. 149. Haridi, al-Jaliyyat fi Madinat al-Iskandariyya, 20–21. On Ottoman Alexandria, see also Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 25–50. 150. Haridi, al-Jaliyyat fi Madinat al-Iskandariyya, 71; see also 66, 68. 151. Ibid., 108–9, 43. 152. See Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930; and Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead. 153. Vatikiotis, The History of Egypt, 86. See also Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 37–38. 154. Shalabi, al-Hukm al-Mahalli, 128–33 and Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830– 1930, vol. 2, 647–49, 652–53, passim. 155. Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 3, 9.

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156. Ibid.; quotations from 193 and 187, respectively. See also Kitroeff’s The Greeks in Egypt. Forster was to write a satirical sketch about the Bourse, or Stock Exchange, and cotton ginning in Alexandria, “Cotton from the Outside,” reprinted in PP 73–78. 157. See Shalabi, al-Hukm al-Mahalli; Baer, Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt, 198, 200–202; and Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 2, 514–15. 158. See Ilbert, “A Certain Sense of Citizenship,” 30, 31; italics mine. 159. Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 145. 160. Shalabi, al-Hukm al-Mahalli, 61–62. 161. Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 1, 279; my translation. 162. Shalabi, al-Hukm al-Mahalli, esp. 67, 101. I elaborate here on my criticism of the Municipal Council in my 2004 “Alexandria Archive” and my 2006 “Forster in Alexandria.” In The Eastern Mediterranean (2010), which tackles “global radicalism” in Cairo, Alexandria, and Beirut, Khuri-Makdisi also discusses the Municipal Council. She observes that the “issue of cosmopolitanism . . . in cities such as Alexandria is, of course, at the heart of the matter. And yet most discussions of cosmopolitanism that have raged about Alexandria and other Levantine port cities have not specifically addressed the question ‘Whose cosmopolitanism?,’ but have eliminated class as a category of investigation” (161). This is a rather surprising statement in view of the fact that in “The Alexandria Archive,” I had critiqued elitist accounts of, precisely, Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and argued for making class a central category of analysis in addressing it. For example, the second chapter of the present book, which discusses subalternity in colonial Alexandria, is based on the discussion in the dissertation. In “The Alexandria Archive,” too, the fourth chapter, about al-Kharrat, put forward an argument about nonelite, popular, and working class forms of cosmopolitanism as referred to in the present book. 163. Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 1, 287–89, 319–23, 338–39, 342, 354, 378–90, 392, 436–47; and vol. 2, 520–21, 548–50, 567–72, 575–86, 666, passim. Quotations from vol. 1, 289, 293, 294. 164. See Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 2, 572–87, esp. 573 and 577; quotation from 575; and Shalabi, al-Hukm al-Mahalli, 95–167, esp. 97, 100, 141–42, 150–53. 165. Wright, Twentieth Century Impressions of Egypt, 432; emphasis added. Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 1, 281, cites and corroborates Wright’s point. 166. See Liddell, Cavafy: A Critical Biography; Furbank, E. M. Forster; Beauman, Morgan: A Biography; MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell: A Biography. 167. On the politics and expectations circumscribing translation from Arabic, see, among others, Said, “Embargoed Literature.” For discussions related to specific contexts and texts, see Jacquemond, “Translation and Cultural Hegemony: The Case of French-Arabic Translation”; Kilpatrick, “Primary Problems in Translating Contemporary Arabic Novels”; and Kahf,

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“Packaging ‘Huda’: Sha‘rawi’s Memoirs in the United States Reception Environment.” 168. I borrow from Manzalaoui, “Mouths of the Sevenfold Nile,” 135, the categories “sojourner,” “habitant,” and “indigene” but have added that of “traveler” to distinguish visitors from writers who have been employed in the country and hence are closer to sojourners. 169. See Re, “Alexandria Revisited”; Kararah, “Egyptian Literary Images of Alexandria”; Ostle, “Alexandria”; Booth, Bayram al-Tunisi’s Egypt; and the far more embracing representation in the 1996 issue of the Parisbased journal Mediterraneans dedicated to “Alexandria in Egypt” (the title is a riposte to “Alexandrea ad Aegyptum”); see Brown and Davis Taïeb’s “Introduction.” 170. I am reproducing here an argument I made in “The Alexandria Archive,” 19–27, concerning Pinchin, Liddell, and Keeley, before Haag’s book was published later that year. I revisited that argument, this time including Haag’s book, in “Forster in Alexandria,” 271–72. On the “citationary” nature of Western texts about the East, see Said, Orientalism, 176-77. 171. Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 23; and Haag, Alexandria: City of Memory, 9. Both Pinchin and Haag also give that historical narrative a specific, questionable inflection derived from Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide, which is one of the texts they tackle, that I critique on my chapter on the British novelist. Given that Haag’s book covers the same triumvirate that Pinchin’s does, it is surprising that his Alexandria: City of Memory makes no mention of her Alexandria Still among his “Sources, Suggested Reading, and Acknowledgments,” x–xi, although he cites it in some notes. 172. Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 4. 173. Ibid., 4–5; emphasis added. 174. Haag, Alexandria, 14. 175. I borrow the term from Said, Culture and Imperialism. 176. Butler, Return to Alexandria, 12, 274. 177. Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 5. 178. Haag, Alexandria, 11. 179. Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 5. 180. Ibid., 6. 181. The title of this poem is given variously as “Refugees,” by Dalven in CPC, and “Exiles,” by Keeley and Sherrard in CPCCP. Although the time frame of the poem cannot be established, it is clearly set in Arab Alexandria, hence the opening line, “It goes on being Alexandria still,” 188, in the Keeley and Sherrard translation. Keeley suggests that the exile from Constantinople in the poem lived under the reign of Byzantine Emperor Basil I, 867–86; see Keeley, Cavafy’s Alexandria, 3; and Savidis, “Notes to the Poems,” CPCCP 449. 182. As quoted in the translation Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 6, is using. 183. Keeley, Cavafy’s Alexandria, 3, 4. 184. Ibid., 4, 5, 6. 185. Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 33. 186. Liddell, Cavafy, 86.

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187. Ibid., 211. 188. In fact, Liddell cites this phrase from Forster in the “Afterword,” 210. 189. Several decades ago, the idea of relocating the Chatby Cemeteries in Alexandria was mooted, but the project was abandoned; indeed the enclosure wall of the cemeteries has been renovated. 190. Mansel, Levant, 295. 191. Ibid., 275, 287, 294–95. 192. See the Cavafy translations by Mursi, Kavafi Sha‘ir al-Iskandariyya; ‘Atiya, Qasa’id min Kafafis; and al-Siba‘i Ah ya Lawn Bashratin min Yasmin! 193. Mansel, Levant, 133. Mansel is echoing Ilbert, “A Certain Sense of Citizenship,” 21–22. On the Cemetery for Free Thinkers, see, inter alia, Awad, Italy in Alexandria, 148. 194. Haag, Alexandria, 330. Haag’s statement on the cemeteries also contains an allusion to Cavafy in that the last picture in the book is of the poet’s tomb; see 329. 195. Letter to Siegfried Sassoon, dated August 3, 1918, in Forster, Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, vol. 1, 293. See al-Mas‘udi, Muruj al-Dhahab, vol. 2, 101–4. Chahine’s allusion to Fellini has been noted by many, including Jacob and de Polignac, “The Alexandrian Mirage,” 14. For a discussion of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism in Chahine’s semiautobiographical films, including archaeological tropes, haunting and melancholia, on which I draw here, see Halim, “On Being an Alexandrian.” I allude here to Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts and Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.”

1. of greeks, barbarians, philhellenes, hellenophones, and egyptiotes 1. See Politis, L’Hellénisme et l’Égypte moderne: Histoire de l’Hellénisme égyptien de 1798 à 1927, vol. 1, and his L’Hellénisme et l’Égypte moderne: Contribution de l’Hellénisme au développement de l’Égypte moderne, vol.2. For the tripartite categorization of Cavafy’s poetry, see vol. 2, 517–22. All quotations from Politis’s work are in my translation. According to Souloyannis, in his review article “The Greek Community in Modern Egypt,” 55, Politis “served on the diplomatic corps in Egypt, and had the opportunity to consult consular as well as community archives.” For a critique of the ideological orientation of Politis’s book, see Kitroeff’s The Greeks in Egypt, 170–71. This chapter is based, in revised form, on the first chapter of my 2004 doctoral dissertation, “The Alexandria Archive: An Archaeology of Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism,” 35–122. An Arabic translation of the portion of Politis’s book on Cavafy was published in 2011 in the translation by al-Siba‘i of selected works by Cavafy, Ah ya Lawn Bashratin min Yasmin!, 81–90. 2. Chioles, “Introduction,” ix. Auden, in his “Introduction” to CPC, xvii, writes, “Cavafy has three principal concerns: love, art, and politics in the original Greek sense.” See also the translators’ introduction to Cavafy,

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Passions and Ancient Days, trans. Keeley and Savidis, xiii. The translators refer to “an anonymous commentary on his work” by Cavafy, likely the one I cite from the anonymous French article, and the three categories therein. They explain that the poems in the collection Passions and Ancient Days are mainly representative of the categories of erotic and historical poems, hence their choice of title. Pinchin, in the chapter she devotes to Cavafy in Alexandria Still, has a section where she discusses the “Historical Poems,” 40–70, and another where she tackles the “Love Poems,” 70–81. See also Arnold Toynbee’s laudatory letter, dated June 12, 1924, to Forster concerning Cavafy’s poetry, which the novelist had lent the historian as part of his efforts to promote the poet’s work; see KCC, Forster Papers, xviii Cavafy. Part of this letter is reproduced in Forster, Selected Letters of E. M. Forster: 1921–1970, vol.2, 55. Liddell, Cavafy, 174, suggests that it “is not always possible to separate” the poems according to the three categories. Alexiou, in “Eroticism and Poetry,” the focus of the article notwithstanding, insists, with regard to the long-standing categorization of the poems, that “eroticism in Cavafy’s poetry transcends clear critical boundaries,” 49. For an early (1956) refutation of the tripartite categorization, see Dimaras, “Cavafy’s Technique of Inspiration.” 3. Politis, L’Hellénisme et l’Égypte moderne, vol. 2, 520–21. 4. Ibid., 521. 5. Zubaida, “Cosmopolitanism and the Middle East,” 15–16, in his overview of the range of meanings of cosmopolitanism, comments that what is meant when the term is applied to places is not discrete communities living side by side but “styles of life that are deracinated from communities and cultures of origin, from conventional living, from family and home-centredness, and have developed into a culturally promiscuous life, drawing on diverse ideas, traditions and innovations.” 6. Tsirkas, in O Politikos Kavafis, argues against critics’ attributing a Pax Romana/Pax Britannica position to Cavafy. See also Risva, La Pensée politique de Constantin Cavafy, in the chapter “La Pax Britannica,” 89–93, in which she adduces Tsirkas. 7. Cavafy, P 152–53; the review was first published on March 3, 1929. All readings in this book, unless otherwise indicated (as when I mention that the text is written in English), are based on a translation by Eleni Tsaggouri; I should emphasize that—at my behest—these translations were made mainly for content. 8. Quotations from Politis, L’Hellénisme et l’Égypte moderne, vol. 2, 520; see also 525. 9. In the early part of his career, Cavafy’s method of disseminating his work was, in addition to publishing poems in magazines, distributing to friends and literary acquaintances poems printed individually on broadsheets. Cavafy issued two thematically arranged pamphlets or booklets of collections of his poems that he would give out, Poems: 1905–1915 and Poems: 1916–1918. Another mode of distribution, for later poems, was a folder that he put together containing broadsheets and offprints of his poems in chronological arrangement that he circulated. In addition, there were

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poems that Cavafy neither disseminated nor destroyed, referred to as “hidden”; a number of poems he “repudiated” or rejected in later years; and “unfinished” poems. Thus Cavafy’s work was never offered for sale, or even collected as a corpus in definitive form during his lifetime; it was only after his death that his heir and literary executor, Alexander Singopoulos, published a volume of his collected poems (1935), this being referred to as “the canon.” The canonical poems are 154. See Savidis, “Editor’s Introduction to the Notes,” CPCCP 388–89. See also the introduction, by Keeley and Savidis as translators, to Cavafy, Passions and Ancient Days, ix–xi; and Theoharis, BTCT xxix–xxx. Keeley and Savidis speak of Cavafy’s “uncommon aesthetic asceticism”; see Passions and Ancient Days, xi. Jusdanis prefers to read in Cavafy’s methods of disseminating his work “the refusal of unity, the frustration of homogeneity, and the delay of permanence. . . . It would seem that Cavafy was unwilling to submit his poetry to the hazards of public interpretation without his prior intervention”; see The Poetics of Cavafy, 61. Extending Jusdanis’s position, Roilos, in C. P. Cavafy, 150–51, reads these methods as indicative of the Alexandrian Greek’s “deep awareness of the laws of the free market and of the need to transgress them,” “aestheticist manipulation and reaction against established exchange practices [being] closely connected with the diagnosis of the potentially detrimental symptoms of the power over the artists that such practices exert.” But what I wish to stress—particularly with regard to Politis’s commentary—is that during the poet’s lifetime, therefore, his was a corpus in process, one that could not be contained in any comprehensive study or be made the subject of claims that could even purport definitiveness. A note on the dates between parentheses following the titles of poems: when a single date is given, this indicates either that the date of composition is identical to the date of dissemination or that only one date is known, as is the case, according to Keeley, in Cavafy’s later years; see Cavafy’s Alexandria, 155. When two dates are given, the first is that of composition, the second that of dissemination. My three sources for these dates are as follows: primarily, Savidis, “Notes to the Poems,” CPCCP; for texts not in the latter source, I have had recourse to the two chronological tables, of composition and publication, provided by Keeley in Cavafy’s Alexandria, 156–66; for texts not covered by Keeley in these tables, I have used the dates provided by Theoharis in his translation of Cavafy’s poems, BTCT. When the text has been published, I insert after the single date “disseminated” as an umbrella term covering the different methods used by Cavafy for circulating his work. I use “hidden”—in currency among Cavafy scholars, having been adopted by Savidis in Krymmena Poiemata, the title of one of his editions of this category of poems—to indicate poems that Cavafy did not disseminate but did not destroy or repudiate either, possibly because he intended to rework them. I denote the two remaining categories as “repudiated” and “unpublished.” For practical reasons, and with a few exceptions, I have cited Theoharis’s translation consistently. I have, however, consulted many other translations, as referred to in Works Cited, several of which postdate Theoharis’s. Other translations I consulted include those by Haviaras, Barnstone, Chioles, Sachperoglou, Dalven, Kolaitis, Mendelsohn

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and Keeley and Sherrard. Mendelsohn’s The Unfinished Poems notably includes renditions of poems previously unavailable in English. For the reader’s convenience, whenever I quote a poem in the English translation, I give the page numbers in the English translation followed by the corresponding page numbers in the Greek original. For Cavafy’s poems in Greek, I have used Savidis’s editions of the canon, the hidden poems and the repudiated ones, and Lavagnini’s edition of the unfinished poems. Although I consulted Savidis’s earlier edition of the hidden poems, Anekdota Poiemata, I preferred to give references to the later Krymmena Poiemata. Occasional variations in the spelling of Greek names in quoted poems are on account of the different transliteration systems used by the translators. 10. See Liddell, Cavafy, 127–31. The text of the travel diary is printed in P 259–300. Clay, in “The Silence of Hermippos,” 158, comments on this. For Cavafy’s complex positionality, albeit in a slanted account, see Liddell’s Cavafy, from which I draw some of these details. See also Tsirkas’s O Kavafis kai e Epoche tou as well as his O Politikos Kavafis. 11. A comment made in conversation by Cavafy to Tsirkas, quoted by Timos Malanos and cited here from Keeley’s translation in Cavafy’s Alexandria, 109; see also 182. The square brackets are Keeley’s. 12. In the latter poem, these ethnically mixed young men all agree that their wounded friend, Ramon, reminds them of Plato’s Charmides, hence an elevation of homoeroticism that supersedes their varied origins. For the resonance of Platonic philosophy in Cavafy’s poetry, see Roilos, C. P. Cavafy, specifically 79 with reference to “In a Town of Osroini.” Of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Jews in “Alexandrian Kings,” Keeley, Cavafy’s Alexandria, 95, notes that these are “the three principal groups that constitute the city’s cosmopolitan citizenry.” 13. It should be noted that the term barbarian was applied, on occasion, by the Greeks of modern Egypt to Egyptians. Liddell cites a letter from one of Cavafy’s school friends, John Rodocanachi, about the riots in Alexandria in 1882: “‘I cannot help roaring when I imagine you and Michael running away with an umbrella in one hand and a sac in the other and with a couple of hundred barbarians after you.’” See Liddell, Cavafy, 30. 14. Philhellene is a term associated with the Greek war of independence, its main figurehead being Lord Byron. As Leontis defines it, “Philhellenism is non-Greek sympathy for modern Greeks, particularly the Greek cause of emancipation and self-determination. This sympathy derived from a love for the cultural heritage of ancient Hellas, but it should be distinguished from Hellenism, the antiquarian interest in Hellas.” See Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, 8. See also Roessel’s In Byron’s Shadow. My use of the term here, however, following Cavafy (see, his poem “Philhellene,” discussed in this chapter), is not confined to that historical period. In this chapter, when I refer to “Hellenism” in Cavafy, it is in the sense of his self-professed designation “Hellenic,” above; although this risks ascribing him to the category of Western “Hellenism, the antiquarian interest in Hellas” (in Leontis’s words), the other option, Neohellenism, which belongs to the discourse of modern Greek nation building is not altogether appropriate.

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15. See the note on this poem by Theoharis, BTCT 338. Savidis, “Notes to the Poems,” CPCCP 444, states that this poem may have been first written in June 1916. 16. Browning, “Greeks and Others: From Antiquity to the Renaissance,” 258, 259. 17. See Savidis, “Notes to the Poems,” CPCCP 444–45; Keeley, Cavafy’s Alexandria, 147; and Theoharis’s note, BTCT 338. 18. I rely here on Bowersock who—in the course of a discussion of the unfinished poems in From Gibbon to Auden, 163–65—comments on “Agelaus” (a poem steeped in mordant irony which depicts, based on historical sources, an appeal in 217 b.c. for Greek unity, versus the threat from Carthage or Rome, that was to be ignored with tragic consequences). He endorses the argument made by Keeley concerning the implicit irony of “In the Year 200 bc.” For “Agelaus,” see TUP 36 and AP 291–92; for “Nothing about the Lacedaemonians,” see TUP 33 and AP 273–74. 19. Keeley, Cavafy’s Alexandria, 147. 20. See Alexiou, “C. P. Cavafy’s ‘Dangerous’ Drugs,” particularly her section “Truth/Seeming: The Sophist as Craftsman,” 163–68; and, more recently, Roilos, C. P. Cavafy, 142–45. 21. See Theoharis’s notes in BTCT 329, 331, 332. 22. See Savidis, “Notes to the Poems,” CPCCP 448; and Theoharis, BTCT 345–46. 23. See the introduction by Keeley and Savidis to Passions and Ancient Days, xvi. 24. For other Cavafy poems set in Magna Graecia, see “On an Italian Shore” (1925; disseminated), with a comparable theme, “Timolaos the Syracusan” (1894; repudiated), and “The Tarantians Divert Themselves” (1898; repudiated). See BTCT 293–94 and 315, respectively. 25. My discussion of “Coins” and “Philhellene” is revised, like most of this chapter, from my chapter on Cavafy in “The Alexandria Archive” about the binary of Greek and barbarian in relation to an array of intermediate positionalities that make for a continuum of shifting identities. See here “The Alexandria Archive,” 45–48. For another discussion of “Coins,” see Jeffreys, Eastern Questions, 88–90. 26. Roilos, C. P. Cavafy, 184–85. 27. Keeley, Cavafy’s Alexandria, 106. 28. See Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. I draw for this discussion on my 2004 “The Alexandria Archive.” See also McKinsey, Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination, 21–27. 29. Clay, “The Silence of Hermippos,” 171. Mendelsohn, in CP 323, renders the title as “Homecoming.” Another translation of this poem, by Keeley and Sherrard, CPCCP 369, gives the title as “Going Back Home from Greece.” See also in Leontis, Talalay, and Taylor, eds., “ . . . what these Ithakas mean,” 97, Leontis’s autobiographical response to this poem, as a diasporic Greek, which aligns it with transnationalism and implicitly, through personal anecdote, grafts the airplane in place of the ship. Leontis also comments on the note of doubt in the poem about being Greek.

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30. Clay, “The Silence of Hermippos,” 172, 173. 31. Clifford, Routes, 3. 32. Keeley, in Cavafy’s Alexandria, 109, usefully suggests that the poem brings together “the three faces of Hellenism” in Cavafy: “Greeks of the mainland, Hellenes of the diaspora, and ‘Hellenified’ or ‘Philhellenic’ pretenders to Hellenism.” Keeley also cites the monarch of “Philhellene” as an example of the third category. 33. See “A Critical Introduction to Cavafy,” in Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi, 159; see also 160. For the corresponding passages in the original, see Yourcenar, Présentation critique de Constantin Cavafy 1863–1933, 14. A good portion of the material relevant to Cavafy’s attitudes toward Egyptian, Arab, and Oriental themes was not available to Yourcenar, having been published later. 34. Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 70. 35. This being “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.”; see Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 155. 36. Al-Siba‘i, “Kafafis wa Ahmad Rasim,” 132; my translation. Al-Siba‘i translated two volumes of Cavafy’s texts: Qunstantin Kafafi, Qasa’id/ Constantin Cavafy, Poemes; and Ah ya Lawn Bashratin min Yasmin! He won the Cavafy award in 2011. On a selection of translations of Cavafy texts into Arabic, see my review article “Of Infinite Variety.” See Risva, La Pensée politique de Constantin Cavafy, 89–93. 37. The letter, in Greek, together with a French translation, has been reprinted in Cavafy, P 150–51. The Greek text was later reprinted in TP 50; see also the note by the editor, Pieris, 361–62, where he reproduces the poet’s covering letter accompanying the text submitted for publication, in which Cavafy also lauds Rassim. My citation here is based on a translation by Yannis Zikoudis. Some of Rassim’s works were reprinted in 2007, in a volume edited and annotated by Lançon, Le Journal d’un pauvre fonctionnaire et autres textes. On Rassim, see Fenoglio, “Ahmed Rassim: figure exemplaire d’un Égyptien francophone”; Yusuf, A‘lam min al-Iskandariyya, 382–86; and al-Kharrat, “Misriyyun Qalban . . . Frankufuniyyun Qaliban.” 38. For the dates of the first publication of these two books, I have relied on Prokopaki’s chronology of Tsirkas, “On the Trail of Stratis Tsirkas,” 5, 7; the dates are also identical to those given in Liddell’s bibliography, Cavafy, 216. All references to Tsirkas’s O Kavafis kai e Epoche tou and O Politikos Kavafis are based on translations by Yannis Zikoudis. 39. According to Prokopaki, “On the Trail of Stratis Tsirkas,” 6. 40. For the recent interest in Cavafy’s prose texts, see Jeffreys, “Performing in Prose,” and his translations of essays by Cavafy originally written in Greek in Selected Prose Works. 41. In Eastern Questions, 2, 3, 114, Jeffreys, for example, argues that the Alexandrian Greek poet’s Hellenism is “very much indebted to western redactions of Greece” and that he went on to recast the Hellenic world “as the more ecumenical Hellenism of the Diaspora,” by forging an “Orientalizing Hellenism” wherein the Orient “served him as a defining principle, at once a galvanizing threat from without and an exotic stimulus from within.” See specifically his fourth chapter of this book, “Cavafy’s

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Orientalizing Hellenism,” 88–114. For McKinsey, on the other hand, the “model suggested by” Cavafy, Derek Walcott and W. B. Yeats, “as they work both within and against metropolitan and native ideologies, is triadic rather than binary. Neither wholly Anglicized, nor wholly identified with the postcolonial nation as it took shape during their lifetimes, they represent what . . . I label the tertium quid: a ‘third thing’ that frustrates” bipartite “constructions of colonial reality.” See McKinsey, Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination, 11. 42. Said, Orientalism, 2–3; see also 21, and on “imaginative geography,” 49–73. 43. Ibid., 56–57. 44. Ahmad, In Theory, 181, 184; see also 163–68. 45. Ibid., 168, 335. Ahmad adduces the works of Samir Amin and Martin Bernal in this context; see 183, 335. 46. Harrison, “General Introduction,” in Greeks and Barbarians, 3. This also invokes Said’s Orientalism, 1; see also 2. 47. See Hartog, “The Greeks as Egyptologists,” 213–14. 48. See Redfield, “Herodotus the Tourist,” 31–32; and Hartog, “The Greeks as Egyptologists,” 212, 214. 49. Hartog, “The Greeks as Egyptologists,” 214. 50. Ibid., 216, 228. 51. Briant, “History and Ideology: The Greeks and ‘Persian Decadence,’” 193. 52. Ibid., 201; see also 193–96, 207. 53. As quoted in Liddell, Cavafy, 123. 54. Cited in Haas, “Cavafy’s Reading Notes in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall,” 32. See also her Le Problème religieux, 136–37. 55. Haas, “Cavafy’s Reading Notes,” 33. 56. Haas reads Gibbon’s comment about the barbarian queen solely as denying Cleopatra’s Greekness; the suggestion that the designation relates to Orientalism, for which it anachronistically borrows the term barbarian, is mine. See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 1, ch. 3, 86. 57. Haas, “Cavafy’s Reading Notes,” 34. 58. Said, Orientalism, 56. 59. Some of these poems, specifically “The Naval Battle,” have been analyzed by Jeffreys who, taking off from Said, writes that “in Cavafy’s poetry . . . the Persians . . . are depicted as cultured but inferior to the Greeks. Cavafy’s notions are rooted in the ancient Greek presentation of Persia.” See his “Hellenism and Orientalism in the Work of E. M. Forster and Constantine Cavafy” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1999), 178. In my 2004 “The Alexandria Archive,” 60–61, I responded to his argument that Cavafy construes the Persians as barbarians in his poetry by suggesting, as above, that in his prose he attempts to subvert stereotypes about them and by drawing into dialogue Briant’s essay on the subject. Subsequently, in his 2005 book, Eastern Questions, on Cavafy and Forster based on his dissertation, Jeffreys modified his position suggesting that “the eventual ossification of a West-East/Greek-Barbarian cultural divide, and the gradual emergence

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of a strident Greek self-consciousness, were problematic for Cavafy,” 101, and also referenced Briant, 184. 60. Liddell, Cavafy, 208. 61. This essay, written in English, is included in P 167–69. “Mummies,” Cavafy writes, “are discovered in Egypt wearing masks; Diodorus tells the kings of Egypt had the images made of masked lions and wolves. The Egyptian priests whose duty it was to rear sacred animals presented themselves before the people wearing masks representing the priests they tended”; P 168. 62. See Headlam, “Introduction I,” in Herodas, The Mimes and Fragments, ix; and Cunningham, “Introduction,” in Herodas, Mimiambi, 2–3. Headlam suggests that Herodas wrote for Alexandria and sets the ancient author’s writing in the context of Alexandrian literature. An English translation of the mimes is available in The Mimes and Fragments. In the chapter on Cavafy’s reading and working life, Liddell mentions that the poet owned “Headlam’s edition of Theocritus, Bion and Moschus.” See Liddell, Cavafy, 121. My discussion of this poem is reproduced from my “The Alexandria Archive.” 63. Among the critics who have commented on the resonance of the poetry of the Mouseion in Cavafy’s poetry, see Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 12–13, 42. 64. See Theoharis’s note on this poem in BTCT 340. 65. Alexiou, in “C. P. Cavafy’s ‘Dangerous’ Drugs,” 183, commenting on the poem “Kaisarion,” which opens with the speaker consulting a volume of Ptolemaic inscriptions, remarks “what other poet could begin by casting himself in the role of pedantic nitpicker (checking a date) or idle antiquarian (passing the time).” Jusdanis, in a rich discussion of intertextuality in the Alexandrian Greek’s corpus in The Poetics of Cavafy, 135, comments that “Cavafy seems to restore in modern Alexandria a library resembling the renowned house of knowledge erected in the city during the Hellenistic period.” 66. Mime 1 depicts a bawd or, in Cavafy’s description, “a masterfully cunning / lady pimp set on corrupting / a wife who’s faithful! Mitrichi, / however, knows how virtue is protected” (BTCT 206; see KP 35). In the actual text of the mime by Herodas, the bawd tries to convince Mitrichi by arguing that her husband, now in Egypt, must surely be so dazzled by that country that he will have forgotten her: “For it’s five months since Mandris set sail to Egypt, and not a line has he sent you. He has forgotten you and drunk of a new cup. Egypt is the very home of the goddess; for all that exists and is produced in the world is in Egypt: wealth, wrestling grounds, might, peace, renown, shows, philosophers, money, young men, . . . the king a good one, the museum, wine, all good things one can desire, women more in number—I swear by Kore wife of Hades—than the sky boasts of stars, and in charms like the goddesses who went on a time to Paris to have their beauty judged—I pray they may not hear me. Why, then, do you sit idle here?” See Herodas, The Mimes and Fragments, 5. Commenting on this passage from Herodas, one classicist at least has adduced the importance of Egypt (qua Egypt, and as predating Ptolemaic rule), and its wealth reported from

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Homer on, quite apart from the praise Herodas accords to the “political and military might” of “Egypt, [as] the centre of the Ptolemaic empire,” and Alexandria’s Museum, or Mouseion, the very leading site, together with the library, of the scholarship and canon formation of its time; see Cunningham, “Introduction,” in Herodas, Mimiambi, 65–66; quotation from 65. 67. Two versions of this article addressing different audiences, one in English, the other in Greek, were published. For the English version, first published in Rivista Quindicinale, III (1891) 60–61, with notes indicating variants in the Greek, see Fraser “Cavafy and the Elgin Marbles,” 67. 68. Cavafy, P 66–80; quotation from 73. All quotations from this article are based on an unpublished translation by Eleni Tsaggouri. 69. Jusdanis, The Poetics of Cavafy, 139. 70. Jusdanis, The Poetics of Cavafy, 139. The relevant quotes are “Our Parthenon does not have your celestial loftiness / And Time is able to destroy it before you / But if only one column stays standing / And only one stone of it / It will be an altar of spirit”; “And I do not worship the buildings of Cyclops and Titans / As I do the temple of Theseus.” Jusdanis, The Poetics of Cavafy, 139. 71. Regarding specifically the Parthenon and its vesting with sanctity through the ceremony marking its restoration, see Bastéa, The Creation of Modern Athens, 102–3. 72. Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, 9. Likewise, on NeoPharaonism’s belated reappropriations for alternative purposes, see Reid, Whose Pharaohs? For its rudiments, see 50–54. 73. On this point, see, to take but one among many examples, Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 40–43. 74. See Theoharis’s note about this poem in BTCT 343, where he comments that Cavafy had a cat to which he was greatly attached, the death of which caused him much sorrow. 75. See Haas, Le Problème religieux, 353. For “Le Chat,” see Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, vol. 1, 35. See also Cavafy’s early poem “Correspondence According to Baudelaire” (1891; hidden); for readings of Cavafy’s poetics in the context of European modernism, see Jusdanis, The Poetics of Cavafy; and Roilos, C. P. Cavafy. 76. See Haas, Le Problème religieux, 353, 357; and the chapter “Cavafy and Apollonius,” in Bowersock, From Gibbon to Auden, 151–59. Savidis, “Notes to the Poems,” CPCCP 404, speculates that “Ionian” may have first been written in May 1886; it was published in 1896, then rewritten in 1905, and the final version published in 1911. 77. See Herodotus, “Book Two,” in The Histories, trans. Waterfield, 121– 24. Quotation from Hartog, “The Greeks as Egyptologists,” 214. See also Assmann, The Mind of Egypt, 374–75. As Assmann elaborates, 407, sacred animals are part of what he terms ancient Egypt’s “theology of inhabitation” and divine incarnation or embodiment in sacred animals. 78. My discussion of “For Ammonis,” as with the rest of this chapter, is reproduced, with some modifications, from my “The Alexandria Archive”: the argument I make here about the poem and the critical lexicon I use for my analysis of it are taken over from that text.

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79. Although it does not involve an epitaph, in “Myris: Alexandria, a.d. 340” the speaker, a young pagan man, visits the home of his friend Myris, a Christian, who has just died, and feels estranged and alienated by the spectacle of Christian funerary rites and prayers. 80. Alexiou, “C. P. Cavafy’s ‘Dangerous’ Drugs,” 187. In her earlier article “Eroticism and Poetry,” Alexiou also provides a brief discussion of this poem in which she speaks of the request by the speakers for “not just . . . the literary perfection of Greek verse, but . . . a strong injection of Egyptian erotic feeling. . . . implicitly linked . . . also with questions of national and cultural identity,” 63. 81. Alexiou, “C. P. Cavafy’s ‘Dangerous’ Drugs,” 188; emphasis in original. Alexiou is responding to Keeley. For Keeley, “For Ammonis, Who Died at 29, in 610” furnishes one of the most belated points of the unfolding of Cavafy’s mythical Alexandria, the historically earlier manifestation of which is “The Glory of the Ptolemies” (1911; disseminated), whose elements are “hedonism, art, learning, and the celebration of Hellenism, especially the Greek language”; Keeley, Cavafy’s Alexandria, 79. The poem, in Keeley’s reading, attests to the “tenacity and flexibility” of the “participants”—“even if [they] are no longer Greek”—in Cavafy’s Alexandrian way of life despite intolerant regimes, whether pagan or Christian, “until the cataclysmic intrusion of Islam gradually snuffs out all but the few lingering remnants of Hellenic culture that we find in ‘Exiles,’ circa a.d. 870” (181). Keeley’s interpretation leaves out, among other things, the significance of the name Ammonis—as Amun—beyond taking it in as an ethnic marker, and glances away from the cultural trauma underlying the elements he enumerates as they appear in this poem. 82. McKinsey, Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination, 123. After early experiments in European languages, Cavafy wrote in his mother tongue. McKinsey suggests in this context that Cavafy’s “thirty plus years working within the apparatus of the British colonial system—a Levantine Greek wedged between English overlords and the Egyptian rank-and-file— attuned him to the intercultural dynamics of the colonial encounter” (123). McKinsey’s reading is valid; however, it overemphasizes Cavafy’s relationship to the modern Western Metropolis, where I would locate primarily anxieties about the imperial legacy of Hellenism, ones to which he was open as a diasporic subject, seen, for example, in his statements about the Copts fleeing into monasteries in 600. 83. On Heraclius, see Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire 324– 1453, 193–99. Savidis, in “Notes to the Poems,” CPCCP 413, observes that the date in the title of the poem “coincides with the beginning of Mohammed’s career as a prophet.” The Coptic language, which survives only as a liturgical language, underwent a long death, in different contexts of usage, roughly from the ninth century to the thirteenth. On this subject, see MacCoull’s two papers “Three Cultures under Arab Rule: The Fate of Coptic” and “The Strange Death of Coptic Culture” in her Coptic Perspectives on Late Antiquity, 61–70 and 35–45, respectively. See also Bishai, “Coptic Lexical Influence on Egyptian Arabic.” 84. I borrow these terms from Genette, Narrative Discourse, 40.

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85. Per Savidis’s placement in TP1 83–84; Theoharis, whose translation I use here, has also kept the “thematic sequence for the booklets”; BTCT xxx. According to Savidis, “Notes to the Poems,” CPCCP 419, the first draft of this poem may have been written in 1898. 86. See Alexiou, “C. P. Cavafy’s ‘Dangerous’ Drugs,” 185–86. 87. I am indebted to the classicist Stanley Burstein for responding to my query regarding the ethnicity suggested in the name. “Aimilianos,” he maintains, is originally a Roman name, while Monai is not easy to establish, as “it could be from Greek, but two component names are not usually Greek.” E-mail message to author, February 17, 2003. 88. Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 70; and Liddell, Cavafy, 90. 89. Mendelsohn provides translations of some of the variant verses in earlier drafts in his note on this poem; see TUP 100–101. 90. Keeley, Cavafy’s Alexandria, 3. Bowersock, in From Gibbon to Auden, 174, also connects “Of the Sixth or Seventh Century” to “Exiles.” 91. For the entry on Hunayn b. Ishaq, including an autobiographical account attributed to him, see Ibn Abi Usaybi‘a, ‘Uyun al-Anba’ fi Tabaqat al-Atibba’, vol. 1, 184–200; the reference to his having studied Greek in Alexandria occurs on 189. 92. Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 27. On Nomikos, see Liddell, Cavafy, 124, 156, 179. 93. It is worth recalling that from the point of view of Byzantium and the Greek Orthodox Church, which were so significant to Cavafy’s formation, part of the outcome of “the complex processes often lumped together under the heading of ‘The Christianisation of the Roman Empire’” was that “[a]s well as the barbarian Other beyond the borders of the Empire, there was now also an internal Other, or rather several internal Others. . . . [T]he most interesting Others were now members of sectarian Christian groups, who were excluded from the privileges of those whose beliefs had been authorised or confirmed by Church Councils—the ‘true believers’ or Orthodox— and whose very existence was regarded as a threat to the special status of the Empire. Among these sectarians there stood out the Monophysites. In the sixth century, far from being a dissident group within the Church, they became a counter-church, with its own hierarchy and its own theological literature. Its power base lay in Egypt, and to a lesser degree in Syria, both regions of predominantly non-Greek population. Book I, Title 5 of Justinian’s Code contains a long series of enactments limiting the legal rights and the personal freedom of dissident Christians and other internal Others. It is a dismal and depressing reminder of the strength of human intolerance.” See Browning, “Greeks and Others,” 267–68. 94. McKinsey also discusses this poem in the context of what he terms “the metropole of language,” alongside “For Ammonis”; see Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination, 117–18. 95. Liddell, Cavafy, 124–25. 96. As Atiya explains in A History of Eastern Christianity, 76, “Without touching the burning question of the one and the two natures of Our Lord, Monothelete theology dwelt on the oneness of His human and divine wills.”

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Among the reasons for Egyptian Christians’ rejection of the doctrine, “the stronghold of hostility [being] in Alexandria,” that he cites are “suspicion of Greek manoeuvers, the fear of departing from . . . dogmatic theology . . . and the nationalist awareness of the Copts [that] rendered them most reluctant to move from established tradition to meet the imperial authority half-way in matters of faith.” 97. Liddell, in a chapter of Cavafy devoted to his readings and his professional life, mentions that his friend and later Cavafy scholar “Mr. Malanos learned from [‘Etienne Combe, the last European director’ of the Alexandria Municipality Library] that he was continually asking for the historical works of Bouché-Leclerq.” See Liddell, Cavafy, 121. 98. A. Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire des Lagides, vol. 1, “La culture littéraire,” 217–31; concerning Manetho, see 223. Three much later sources published long after Cavafy’s death, which provide discussions of Egyptian literature of the period, whether written in demotic or in Greek, or of Egyptian influences on the literature written in Greek in Alexandria are Stephens, Seeing Double; Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, vol. 1, 675–87; and Bowman, Egypt after the Pharaohs 332 BC–AD 642, 157–64 and 203–33, on Alexandria. For an English translation of the “Hymn to Amun,” as a related example of an anterior Egyptian textuality—although this specific instance is unlikely to have impinged on Cavafy’s poem—see Budge, The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, 219–20. For a review article of scholarship on the Hellenistic period, up to 1997, see Burstein, “The Hellenistic Age.” 99. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7. On Fernando Ortiz’s use of the term in the Cuban context, see Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 244–45; and Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations, 12. 100. Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations, 11. 101. The Cuban poet Nancy Morejon as translated and quoted by Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations, 11–12. Lionnet posits transculturation as a substitute for “terms such as ‘assimilation’ and ‘acculturation’ . . . [that] underscore the relation of subjection that exists between the colonized culture and the hegemonic system,” 10. 102. The line that Theoharis renders as “an Alexandrian is writing for an Alexandrian” is given by Keeley and Sherrard as “ an Alexandrian is writing about an Alexandrian”; by Dalven as “an Alexandrian is writing of an Alexandrian”; and by Yourcenar and Dimaras as “qu’un homme d’Alexandrie parle d’un homme d’Alexandrie.” See The Complete Poems of Cavafy, trans. Dalven, 73; Selected Poems, trans. Keeley and Sherrard, 35; and Yourcenar, Présentation critique de Constantin Cavafy 1863–1933, suivie d’une traduction intégrale de ses poèmes par Marguerite Yourcenar et Constantin Dimaras, 145. Yourcenar and Dimaras, it should be noted, have rendered the name of the dead poet in the poem as “Ammon,” as did Mendelsohn in CP 71. 103. Alexiou, in “C. P. Cavafy’s ‘Dangerous’ Drugs,” 188, comments, “The sexual connotations of poetic creation, already suggested in pernoun (our grief and love can penetrate into a foreign language), are metaphorically

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explicit in the imperative active chyse (pour your Egyptian feeling into the foreign language).” 104. See the note on this poem given by Theoharis, BTCT 351–52. 105. The poem, in fact, opens with words that rejoice in Magna Graecia: “Timolaos is the first musician / in the first city of Sicily. / The Greeks of Our Western Greece, from Neapolis and Marseilles, / from Tarentum, Reggio, and Agrigento, / and from as many other cities on the shores / of Hespria that they crown with Hellenism, / hurry in great numbers to Syracuse, / to hear the glories musician” (BTCT 293; emphasis added). 106. “Return from Greece,” with its diasporic subject, was written in 1914, a year before “For Ammonis, Who Died at 29, in 610.” 107. The later years would also bring the commentary on Cavafy in Politis’s book, which may have been inflected by the poet himself; I shall return to this point. 108. As Haas observes, Savidis has also paired these two poems together as indicative of the opposition between Islam and Christianity in Cavafy, with “Dünya Güzeli” exploring the opposition in a worldly context; see her Le Problème religieux, 313. 109. The proverb should read “Idha kana al-kalam min fidda fa al-sukut min dhahab”; a more accurate translation would be, “If words are [or rather, speech is] made of silver, silence is made of gold.” 110. Haas, Le Problème religieux, 313–14; quotations are my translations. 111. Another instance of Cavafy’s interest in Arabic proverbs is cited by Rassim, in his eulogy, “C. P. Cavafy,” first published in La Semaine égyptienne, July 1, 1933, 9; reprinted in Afieroma K. P. Kavafi, 9; my translation from the French: “Petrides also tells me: One day I read to Cavafy the following Arab proverb that I had just found in a literary journal: ‘The eagle lays three eggs. Of the three, it abandons one and sits on the other two. Of the little ones that hatch, it feeds only one. Poet, follow the eagle’s example, and if you have written three poems, have the courage to destroy two.’ Cavafy then stroked his chest voluptuously and said: ‘How I understand the eagle! I understand this proverb. I like this proverb, and I feel it.’” I have been unable to locate this “proverb,” but the anecdote furnishes a nice contrast to Cavafy’s response to the one that inspired “Word and Silence.” 112. Al-Juhayman, al-Amthal al-Sha‘biyya fi Qalb Jazirat al-‘Arab, vol. 1, 40–41. 113. Qur’an 96:1–2, 4–5; translation mine. 114. See Nelson’s The Art of Reciting the Qur’ān, esp. 1–13. 115. See Gardet, “Dhikr,” 223–27. See also my discussion of al-Busiri in chapter 2. 116. Kehagiogoulou, in “Modern Greek Orientalism: A Preliminary Survey of Literary Responses to the Arab World,” 87, touches briefly on

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Cavafy’s Middle Eastern subjects but suggests that “one could hardly speak of any systematic ‘Orientalism’ by Cavafy, at least as regards the modern Arab world.” 117. I thank John Chioles who, having read an earlier version of this chapter, urged me to take into account the fact that Cavafy repudiated this poem. Tsirkas, in O Kavafis kai e Epoche tou, 212, speculates whether this poem may have something to do with press laws and clampdowns on journalism first under Khedive Tewfik during the ‘Urabi uprising, then by the British occupation. In O Politikos Kavafis, 83, Tsirkas also adduces this poem as one of several pieces of evidence of Cavafy’s empathic attitude to things Egyptian and his attentiveness to Egyptian folklore. Although I detect that attitude elsewhere in Cavafy’s work, I would say that Tsirkas in this instance misses the religious dimension of the poem in favor of the political interpretation. 118. See Theoharis’s note on the poem in BTCT 339. 119. Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman, 111. In my “Alexandria Archive,” 90, I cited Kahf in discussing the Orientalist harem trope at stake in this poem. 120. On Cavafy’s maternal family’s “almost aristocratic” Phanariot background, see Liddell, Cavafy, 19–20; quotation from 20. For Cavafy’s sojourn in Turkey, see the same source, 33–48. References to Islam in Cavafy’s work that I am aware of, other than the ones I discuss above, include the essay “Romaic Folk-lore of Enchanted Animals,” in English. Here Cavafy compares the reverence of “country-folk in Greece” for the snake with “Mohamet’s followers whom the prophet advised ‘to be slow to kill a house serpent’”; P 171. The essay “Masks,” too, describes ancient and modern Arabs’ fondness for masquerade. Whereas the “folkloric” contexts of these discussions may suggest a “denial of coevalness” (to borrow Johannes Fabian’s term) by Cavafy to Islam, he does at least in “Masks” suggest that “the word mask is of Arabic derivation, ‘mascara’ in the language of the Coran, meaning a joke, and being the original of the Italian word ‘maschera,’” hence entertaining the possibility of influences by Arab culture on Europe; see P 167. See Fabian, Time and the Other. On Cavafy’s poetry on Byzantine themes, see also Ekdawi, “Cavafy’s Byzantium”; and Hirst, “Two Cheers for Byzantium.” 121. See Savidis’s note on this in KP 178 and Theoharis’s in BTCT 346. 122. See al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer, 171; see also 169–70. 123. Ibid., 172–79. On Mustafa Kamil’s role, see al-Rafi‘i, Mustafa Kamil, 199–239. A more recent source on Dinshiwai that, among other things, assembles much of the written and oral literature on the subject, is al-Masadi’s Dinshiwai. 124. Other discussions of this poem include Keeley’s comment in a footnote to his chapter on the manifestations of “The Sensual City” in Cavafy’s oeuvre, which construes this and the poem “Sham El-Nessim” as the only two exceptions to the general pattern of exclusively erotic focus in the Alexandrian Greek’s poetry about modern cities, in contradistinction to Hellenistic poems; see Cavafy’s Alexandria, 177. Haas touches on this poem in a broader discussion of martyrdom by stating that here and in two other poems the execution of a young man takes place in a political, rather than in

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a religious, context, where a latent sensuality is present, although she elsewhere also remarks on the Christian mother-son aspect of the poem; see her Le Problème religieux, 174–75, 384. As for Pinchin, in the course of a discussion of how Cavafy, Forster, and Durrell react, or do not, to the colonial situation in Egypt, she mentions this poem as the only example of Cavafy’s concern with the contemporary problems of Egypt; see Alexandria Still, 155. By contrast, Spanaki, who, although her discussion of this poem is short, usefully provides her reading in the context of representations of colonialism in Egypt and Cyprus; see her article “Egypt and Cyprus: Representations of Colonialism in Cavafy, Pierides, Roufos, and Durrell,” 111–26. 125. Liddell, Cavafy, 91. 126. Ibid., 92, 93; emphasis added. 127. Cavafy’s phrase is quoted by Tsirkas, from Michalis Peridis’s work, in O Politikos Kavafis, 92; and O Kavafis kai e Epoche tou, 345. I thank Martin McKinsey who on reading an earlier version of my discussion first drew my attention to Liddell’s mistranslation. Subsequently, I checked Liddell’s translation against the original with Yannis Zikoudis, who consulted the relevant entries in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 118 and 1104, and suggested the above translation as more accurate. 128. For Liddell’s mention of Pea, whom he says Cavafy gave his poems to in 1912, see Cavafy, 162. I reproduce the point I am making here regarding Pea from my “The Alexandria Archive.” For a discussion of Pea in relation to Alexandria, in the context of the literature produced by Alexandrian Italians, see Re, “Alexandria Revisited: Colonialism and the Egyptian Works of Enrico Pea and Giuseppe Ungaretti,” 180. Pea gives an account of the anarchist circles of Alexandria in his memoir Vita in Egitto, available in an Arabic translation by ‘Umar under the title al-Haya fi Misr. 129. Tsirkas, O Politikos Kavafis, 82. 130. See al-Masdi, Dinshiwai, 108–9; and Cachia, Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern Egypt, 249–53. See also Cachia’s note on this ballad, 247. 131. Tsirkas, O Politikos Kavafis, 79, 82–83. See also my later discussion of al-Naqqash’s comments on this poem. 132. See Theoharis’s note in BTCT 340–41. 133. Tsirkas, O Politikos Kavafis, 86–87. 134. See Liddell, Cavafy, 90. For the date as given by Savidis, Cavafy’s editor, see KP 177. 135. Tsirkas, O Politikos Kavafis, 85–86, makes the same point. 136. Liddell, Cavafy, 92. 137. Al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer, 173. 138. Liddell, Cavafy, 92. Indeed, Tsirkas, O Politikos Kavafis, 89, remarks on the overlap in origin between Egyptian ballads and Greek folklore. Spanaki, in “Egypt and Cyprus: Representations of Colonialism in Cavafy, Pierides, Roufos, and Durrell,” likewise suggests that “Cavafy . . . alludes to the Orthodox hymnography of the holy week for lamenting the death of a young person,” though she also adds, “but he also seems to have provided us with an example of poetic reaction to a stressful event, an act of violence carried out by colonial forces, forces represented as masculine authorities,” 113.

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139. See Yahya Haqqi’s introduction to his uncle Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s ‘Adhra’ Dinshiwai, which also cites the novelist’s recollections. 140. See the 1979 translation of Cavafy’s poems by Youssef, Wada‘an li-lIskandariyya allati Tafqiduha. For an interview with Youssef that probes his engagement with Cavafy, as well as with things Greek, see Halim, “Exploring the Alleyways.” The Egyptian litterateur Ibrahim Mansur had published a translation in the same year of commentary by Keeley on Cavafy’s poems together with some nine poems that he rendered into Arabic. See Keeley, “Kunstantin B. Kavafis. Sha‘ir al-Iskandariyya al-Kabir.” 141. See Ibrahim’s translation, Qustantin Kafafis: Qasa’id; and ‘Atiya’s, Diwan Kavafis Sha‘ir al-Iskandariyya, which went into several reprints and different editions, including the 2005 Qasa’id min Kafafis. 142. Haqqi, Unshuda li-l-Basata, 71–72; my translation. Al-Kharrat’s Unshuda li-l-Kathafa tacitly responds to Haqqi’s book. 143. Dawud, Matar Khafif fi al-Kharij, n.p. I quote Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” Blake: The Complete Poems, 589. 144. Liddell, Cavafy, 90; and Mursi’s translation of Cavafy, Kavafi Sha‘ir al-Iskandariyya, 65. For Mursi’s translation of the poem, see 66–67. In Mursi’s view, the texts that evince Cavafy’s sympathy with Egypt are “Sham El-Nessim,” “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.,” and the note on Ibrahim al-Wardani. Mursi’s translation, as he explains, is based on Dalven’s. He also includes a translation of Auden’s introduction to the Dalven translation. His “Cavafy Suite” was exhibited in Cairo in the early 1990s. 145. See Sallam’s translation of this poem in Cavafy, al-A‘mal al-Shi‘riyya al-Kamila, 413–14. Surprisingly, Sallam merely speculates in his note on the poem whether the date in the title alludes to the Dinshiwai incident; see 637. For an instance, albeit in a fictional text, of Egyptian colloquial usage in lamentation in the Dinshiwai incident at the hanging of one of the men, see Haqqi, ‘Azra’ Dinshiwai, 76. Sallam, it should be added, translated Jusdanis’s The Poetics of Cavafy under the title Shi‘riyyat Kafafi. 146. For this article, titled “Sha‘ir Yunani Iskandari” (An Alexandrian Greek Poet), see al-‘Aqqad, Bayn al-Kutub wa-l-Nas, 547–53; quotations from 549, 551. See also al-Naqqash, Thalathun ‘Aman ma‘ al-Shi‘r, 263–64. Al-‘Aqqad refers to the publication in English translation of Cavafy’s “diwan,” meaning the canon, that year, hence likely the Mavrogordato translation of 1951. He also speaks of anecdotes about Cavafy’s skills as a raconteur relayed to him by the poet’s friends. Al-‘Aqqad, Bayn al-Kutub wa-l-Nas, 548. For alNaqqash’s other essay on Cavafy and Egyptian poetry, see in Thalathun ‘Aman ma‘ al-Shi‘r the essay “Bayn Kafafi wa Amal Dunqul,” 235–45. Al-Naqqash’s essay on Dunqul addresses his poem “Kalimat Sabartakus al-Akhira” (The Last Words of Spartacos) and Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians.” For the relevant poem, see Dunqul, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 73–78. 147. Al-Naqqash, Thalathun ‘Aman ma‘ al-Shi‘r, 264, 267, 265. Al-Naqqash, like Mursi and Sallam, translates the poem in its entirety into classical Arabic. 148. See ‘Abd al-Sabur, al-A‘mal al-Kamila. Hayati fi al-Shi‘r. Al-Dawawin al-Shi‘riyya, 195–98. The poem was first printed in ‘Abd al-Sabur’s collection

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al-Nas fi Biladi, first published in 1957. Cavafy’s “hidden” poem “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” was printed in the 1968 Savidis edition of unpublished poems, Krymmena Poiemata 1877?–1923, 91. Is it possible that the poem had been printed or cited previously, and in a language accessible to ‘Abd al-Sabur? Of the four men hanged, it was Zahran, the subject of ‘Abd al-Sabur’s poem, rather than Yusuf Silim Hasan as in Cavafy’s poem, whom the villagers composed poems about. See al-Masadi, Dinshiwai, 110–11, for two poems in colloquial Arabic composed in Dinshiwai about Zahran. Al-Masadi asked the villagers why Zahran has become the hero of these poems and was told that he was known for his strength, gallantry, and opposition to oppression (108). One of the mawwals recorded by Cachia, Popular Narrative Ballads, 250–253, refers to Zahran. While both ‘Abd al-Sabur and Cavafy appear to have drawn their inspiration from popular poetry on Dinshiwai, each gleaned a different aspect. 149. ‘Abd al-Sabur, al-A‘mal al-Kamila. Hayati fi al-Shi‘r. Al-Dawawin al-Shi‘riyya, 32–35; quotation from 33. 150. ‘Abd al-Sabur, ‘Ala Masharif al-Khamsin, 8–10. For the dates of composition of “Ithaca,” I rely on Savidis, “Notes to the Poems,” CPCCP 405, where he says that Cavafy had written a rather different version of the poem, titled “Second Coming,” in 1894, and the final version dates to 1910. 151. ‘Abd al-Sabur, Hayati fi al-Shi‘r, 131. 152. I have preferred to use Dalven’s translation here as the one by Theoharis mistransliterates into English words taken from Arabic and transliterated in Greek in Cavafy’s poem; for example, the Alexandrian neighborhood “Qabbari” is rendered as “Khambari.” See BTCT 288. Mursi, in Kavafi Sha‘ir al-Iskandariyya, 65, rightly describes this poem as “naïve.” 153. Tsirkas, O Kavafis kai e Epoche tou, 216; and Theoharis, BTCT 351, make the same remark. 154. Tsirkas, O Kavafis kai e Epoche tou, 217. See also his O Politikos Kavafis, 83, where he adduces Cavafy’s use of Arabic in this poem and the figure of the singer to demonstrate the poet’s empathy with Egypt and interest in Egyptian folklore. 155. Kolaitis provides glosses on “Misr” and “moghanny,” as he transliterates them, from Greek into English; see URP 97. 156. Cavafy, Passions and Ancient Days, trans. Keeley and Savidis, xxiii. 157. See Liddell, Cavafy, 25–26. 158. Beaton, An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, 296, 298. 159. For the relevant pages in Beaton, An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, see 296–368. 160. See Theoharis, BTCT 341. 161. Beaton, An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, 341. Beaton is here bringing out similarities between Cavafy and the poet Karyotakis. 162. Ibid., 340. 163. See Theoharis’s comments on this poem in BTCT 340–41. Compare the linguistic exercise in “To Jerusalem” against “Taken,” as Theoharis renders the title, or “‘S took,” as Kolaitis gives it (1921; hidden). 164. Beaton, in An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, 296–368, provides a modified take on the designation of “diglossia” as applied to the

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katharevousa/demotic situation in Greece; I am using the term for the specific purposes of “To Jerusalem.” 165. Ibid., 340–41; quotation from 340. 166. Ibid., 341. 167. Seferis, On the Greek Style, 152. 168. See my chapter on al-Kharrat in “The Alexandria Archive,” 294–371. 169. Liddell, Cavafy, 126. 170. See “Nous n’osons plus chanter les roses,” from a poem by the Parnassian poet René-François-Armand (1892; hidden), in BTCT 201 and Theoharis’s note, BTCT 339. 171. See Liddell, Cavafy, 127–31; quotations from 130. Again, Liddell is citing El-Kayar’s comments in a veiled attack on Tsirkas’s argument concerning Cavafy’s anti-imperial stance. Liddell gives the name of Cavafy’s colleague as Ibrahim el Kayar; I have opted for giving his surname as “El-Kayar.” 172. Tsirkas, O Politikos Kavafis, 79. 173. See Shawqi, Masra‘ Kilyubatra, and, for his poem on Dinshiwai, his Al-Shawqiyyat, 301. Shawqi’s corpus of poems bespeaks a Neo-Pharaonist infusion: to take but a few examples, see his poem about the Sphinx; his poems about Tutankhamen, the discovery of whose tomb was pivotal to a certain stage in both Egyptomania and Neo-Pharaonism; and his poem on Mahmud Mukhtar’s statue Egypt Awakening, a key icon of Pharaonic revivalism by Egyptians. Shawqi, Shawqiyyat: “Abu al-Hawl” (The Sphinx), 142– 53; “Tut ‘Ankh Amun” (Tutankhamun), 169–77; “Tut ‘Ankh Amun wa-lBarlaman” (Tutankhamun and the Parliament), 259–61; “Tut ‘Ankh Amun wa Hadarat ‘Asrihi” (Tutankhamun and the Civilization of His Day), 184– 88; and “Timthal Nahdat Misr” (The Statue of Egypt Awakening), 599–601. He also wrote occassional poetry on topics relating to Alexandria; see, for example, in Shawqiyyat, “Qasr al-Muntaza” (Montaza Palace), 1034–35, and “Iskandariyya An an Tattajadadi (“Alexandria, It Is Time You Revived), 377–78. Shawqi’s year of birth is variously given as 1868, 1869, and 1870; I have preferred to follow the date given in Dayf’s monograph, Shawqi, 9. 174. See Cavafy, P 154–55. All citations from this essay—first published on November 30, 1930—are from an unpublished translation made at my behest by Eleni Tsaggouri. Tsirkas, in O Politikos Kavafis, 71, also refers to this article in the course of making the argument that Cavafy had a strong affinity with Egypt. The quoted phrase “alternative strategies” is adapted from the title of a chapter in Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 170–78, that discusses a discursive shift and redrawn policies among Egyptian Greeks toward Egypt in response to growing nationalism in the country, such as including Arabic material in the curricula. 175. See the somewhat anecdotal book written by one of Cavafy’s acquaintances who was later to translate him, Kolaitis, Cavafy as I Knew Him, 27. 176. Alfano, La Lanterne sourde, 19; translation mine. 177. Ibid., 56, 59–61. 178. This handwritten letter is reproduced in Alfano, La Lanterne, 118. 179. In the note to his English translation of the essay, Jeffreys gives the date as 1929; see SPW 155. Pieris, the editor of the Ta Peza, in which this

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article was first published, dates it to 1929 on the basis of external evidence. See Cavafy, TP 386, according to a translation of the note by Yannis Zikoudis. However, given that the entire essay concerns the mission of Lanterne sourde, it seems more likely that this is the enclosure that Cavafy refers to in his letter to Vanderborght of December 13, 1928. Elsewhere, Alfano maintains that Cavafy sent a “Message à La Lanterne sourde,” though she gives no date or further information; see La Lanterne, 61. 180. See Rassim, “C. P. Cavafy,” first published in La Semaine égyptienne, July 1, 1933, 9; reprinted in Afieroma K. P. Kavafi, 9. See al-Siba‘i’s translation of selected works by Cavafy, Ah ya Lawn Bashratin min Yasmin!, 97–99. 181. Zananiri, “C. P. Cavafy.” See also Zananiri, Entre mer et désert, 237–45, and “Alexandrie, au reflet de la mémoire,” 261. On Zananiri, see Halim, “In the Absence of Regret.” See also Liddell, Cavafy, 127, 181, 211. Zananiri, Entre mer et désert, 245, claims that the editor of the Semaine égyptienne received complaints from some female readers about the special issue devoted to Cavafy. I allude to Zananiri, L’Esprit Alexandrin. 182. For discussions of literary Neohellenism’s hostility to Cavafy, see Gourgouris, Dream Nation, 215–21, on the Nobel laureate George Seferis’s antagonism to the Alexandrian Greek’s poetics; and Jusdanis, in the concluding pages of The Poetics of Cavafy, 176–79, where he brings out the ambivalence of neo-Hellenes to Cavafy’s poetry, given that—unlike their literary production centered on issues of nationalism—the diasporic Alexandrian Greek made art itself the object of his investigation and could exercise the freedom to enter into dialogue with Western modernism. For different Greek critical discourses about Cavafy, see Lambropoulos, Literature as National Institution, 182–208. Zananiri, in Entre mer et désert, 245, states that there were complaints in official circles in Athens about a lecture he gave on Cavafy at the invitation of the Greek-Egyptian Association after the poet’s death. 183. On “métissage,” see Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations, 4–5. This is an extension of Lionnet’s reappropriation, in Autobiographical Voices, 1–18, 26, 29, of “métissage.” On the Third Space, see Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 19–39, esp. 34–39.

2. of hellenized cosmopolitanism and colonial subalternit y 1. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, Polycrates’ Ring, 22: “His standard was India, and Egypt—the ‘semi-East’ or ‘pseudo-East’—struck him as a parody of it.” This chapter reproduces, with modifications and revisions, the chapter on E. M. Forster in my dissertation “The Alexandria Archive,” filed in March 2004. Two new books—Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide and Pharos and Pharillon, edited by Allott, and Haag’s Alexandria: City of Memory—were published that year. Allott published for the first time several, albeit not all, of the texts I had worked on in the Modern Archive Center at King’s College, Cambridge, and cited in my dissertation. However, the critical positions taken by Allott and Haag did not supersede

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my arguments about Forster in “The Alexandria Archive” or give me cause to modify them here. The latter part of the present chapter reproduces, with revisions, portions of my 2006 article published in Hawwa, “Forster in Alexandria: Gender and Genre in Narrating Colonial Cosmopolitanism.” 2. Letter to Syed Ross Masood, dated December 29, 1915, printed in Forster, Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, 1879–1920, vol. 1, 233. 3. Cited in Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, Polycrates’ Ring, 28. 4. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Alexandria: A History and a Guide are from the 1986 Haag edition, which reproduces the first, 1922 edition of the guidebook. 5. Most of the articles published by Forster in Egypt that were not included in Pharos and Pharillon were later reprinted in Forster, The Uncollected Egyptian Essays of E. M. Forster. Two of the essays in Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon, “Between the Sun and the Moon” and “The Poetry of C.P. Cavafy,” have been translated into Arabic. See the anthology compiled by Sartorius, al-Iskandariyya Sarab (originally published in German in 2001 under the title Alexandria: Fata Morgana and translated into Arabic by Yuwakim), 95–102. The anthology also contains an extract from the “History” section of Forster’s Alexandria on “Ptolemaic Culture.” See Sartorius, al-Iskandariyya Sarab, 229–47. 6. For Forster’s partial handwritten notes on “Notes on Egypt,” see “The Government of Egypt,” KCC, ii/2. The published pamphlet that contains his “Notes on Egypt,” The Government of Egypt: Recommendations by a Committee of the International Section of the Labour Research Department, with Notes on Egypt by E. M. Forster, is undated, nor is it clear, based on external evidence, when this text may have been published. In a letter dated November 10, 1920, Forster refers to it as having been read by others; see Forster, Selected Letters, vol. 1, 317. The editors of this volume date the text to 1921; see 313. Within the text Forster speaks of “the time of writing” being “June, 1920”; see “NE” 6. Allott, who edited the Abinger Edition of Alexandria: A History and a Guide and Pharos and Pharillon, dates it to 1920; see 360. 7. Several of Forster’s letters from Egypt have not yet been published. 8. Morey’s “Postcolonial Forster,” despite its title, does not deal with Egypt in Forster but provides, instead, a critical review of postcolonial criticism of his Passage to India. 9. This is more fully spelled out in the introduction Forster was to write for the 1961 reprint of the book. See AHG xxii. 10. See Cury, Alexandria: How to See it, 11–31; Budge, Cook’s Handbook for Egypt, 121–25; and Baedeker, ed., Egypt and the Sudan, 12–15. 11. The remaining two sections cover the environs of Alexandria to the East (Montazah, Aboukir, Edku, and Rosetta) and the West (the desert with Bedouin settlements and the monasteries). 12. See The Lands of Sunshine, 83–84; and Baedeker, ed., Egypt and the Sudan, 9–11. On these “predecessor” guidebooks, particularly Baedeker, which Forster used when in Egypt, see “The Alexandria Archive,” 135–36, 182, 206. Compare Forster’s choice to make the Place Muhammad ‘Ali the focal point to the section on Alexandria in The Lands of Sunshine and the

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1914 Baedeker: in both cases, the entry begins with practical details about “Arrival,” landing, the sanitary inspection, the customhouse examination, various remarks on the crowd in the port, advice about how to avoid being cheated, followed by hotel listings, and so on. Nor, it should be noted, is Forster’s focal point the seafront with its picturesque drive, although it should be noted that the Corniche did not exist at the time of the writing of the book, the only extant part of it at the time being the New Quays. While the Sa‘d Zaghlul Square was yet to come into being, the adjoining Gare de Ramleh, the tram terminus, did exist, albeit in different guise, at the time and was integral to some of the expedition and tram routes in Forster’s book but less spectacular than the square. See also Haag’s note on this in AHG 249. Ilbert makes a similar point regarding the Place Muhammad ‘Ali, rather than the port, as the focal point in Alexandria; see his “A Certain Sense of Citizenship,” 19. 13. Awad, “The Metamorphoses of Mansheyah,” 42–47; see specifically 43. See also Ilbert, Alexandria 1830–1930, vol. 1, 166. 14. Awad, “The Metamorphoses of Mansheyah,” 45; see also 46. And see Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 67–76. 15. Awad and Pallini, “The Italianisation of Alexandria,” 92–93. With the British bombardment of Alexandria and subsequent riots in 1882, only two buildings in the square survived the devastation—the Bourse and St. Mark’s Cathedral (in the adjoining buildings belonging to which Forster first stayed on arrival in the city)—as well as the equestrian statue of Muhammad ‘Ali. A new generation of buildings was to be constructed, thanks in large measure to indemnities that the Egyptian government was forced to pay. As for the Turkish Town, buildings damaged in 1882 were replaced by new ones in the same style, albeit with some adaptation. See Awad, “The Metamorphoses of Mansheyah,” 50–51; and Ilbert, Alexandria 1830–1930, vol. 1, 164–65. 16. See Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 64–69, on the similar if later process in Cairo of sanitizing, reordering, policing, and disciplining attendant on the colonial politics of the new state. Re, in “Alexandria Revisited,” 171, comments on this. For a similarly partially achieved colonial approach in Algiers, see Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations, esp. 11–57. 17. Awad, “The Metamorphoses of Mansheyah,” 45. 18. Ilbert, Alexandria 1830–1930, vol. 1, 163–66, 175–77, 341, 457–71, esp. 464–65, 469; and vol. 2, 544, esp. 549, 552. On the southern quarters, including shantytowns and informal housing, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, see also vol. 1, 340, 388–93, 459, and vol. 2, 521, 547–50, passim. On some of these neighborhoods in the Ottoman period, see Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 30–36, and in the mid-nineteenth century, 96–103. 19. Al-Jazayirli, al-Iskandariyya fi Fajr al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin, 72-3; quotation from 73. See also 38–40. The paintings of Mahmud Sa‘id (1897–1964) who was born in Bahari, are notably inspired by features of the area and its lifestyles—fishermen, sea storms, women in traditional black wraps; indeed his work gave pictorial expression to a perceived type of Alexandrian beauty, customarily referred to as “Girls of Bahari,” this being the title of one of his

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paintings. On Sa‘id, see Karnouk’s Modern Egyptian Art, 18–25; and Yusuf, A‘lam Min al-Iskandariyya, 398–404. For a relevant folkloric song, see the one that inspired the title of al-Kharrat’s Ya Banat Iskindiriyya (translated as Girls of Alexandria). A good portion of the work of the Alexandrian poet and critic al-Qabbani is inspired by this area where he grew up. Needless to say, some of the creative engagements I cite here postdate the publication of Forster’s Alexandria; they do, however, betoken the heritage associated with the area that I refer to above. 20. On Borchgrevink, see the editors’ note in Selected Letters, vol. 1, 236. See Jondet’s Les Ports submergés de l’Ancienne Ile de Pharos and Atlas historique de la ville et des ports d’Alexandrie which inspired Ungaretti’s Il Porto Sepolto (The Buried Harbour). 21. I have opted for spelling El-Adl’s name the way it appears on his calling card. A cryptic reference to El-Adl, after his death, is in Forster’s dedication, in ancient Greek, of Pharos and Pharillon to Hermes using his epithet. In a 1943 broadcast titled “Some Books: Islam Today; Lord David Cecil on Thomas Hardy,” Forster observed, “I can’t pronounce the word ‘Islam’ without emotion, partly because two of my best friends were Moslems and both are dead”; see CC 271–72. In addition to El-Adl, Forster would have been referring to Syed Ross Masood. 22. Flaubert, Voyage en Égypte, 43. 23. On Cialente, see Re, “Painting, Politics and Eroticism in Fausta Cialente’s Egyptian Narratives.” 24. See my discussion of Forster’s review of Leeder’s Modern Sons of the Pharaohs in chapter 3, on Durrell. 25. On the literary resonances between Cavafy and Forster, specifically the former’s influence on the latter, see Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 83, 101, 103, 104, 109, 121, and esp. 125. 26. Forster dwells on the contributions of key figures such as Callimachus, Apollonius, and Theocritus and draws out the features of the Alexandrian school (“decorative method, mythological allusiveness, and the theme of love,” as well as a partiality for shorter, more compact genres [AHG 32–38; quotation from 33]). Forster also dwells on the canon-forming scholarship— the work of codifying, amending, and interpretation of the Library’s collections—whereby it was “in the Mouseion at Alexandria [that] Greece first became aware of her heritage” (AHG 38). He barely evinces any interest in ethnicity or even background in the Alexandrian institutions, at no point entertaining the question what if any Egyptian scholarship went into the output of the Mouseion and what relation that institution had to the Egyptian population in the city and beyond. Granted, Forster makes no claims to having worked on primary sources for what was essentially a guidebook, and it may be anachronistic to expect him to bring to bear on his “History” the attention to ethnicity and class that has come to shape a much later generation of Alexandrian scholarship. However, the key secondary source that he acknowledges having used for the period (“Authorities,” AHG xxix), A. Bouché-Leclercq’s Histoire des Lagides, does make mention of the Egyptian historian Manetho who worked at Alexandria. “In what concerns Egypt,

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although the archives of the Pharaonic period have not been collected and transcribed, they must have been scrutinized by Manethon of Sebennytos who extracted from them a whole encyclopedia of the past [antiquités] of the Egyptians”: Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire des Lagides, vol. 1, 223; translation mine. Indeed, Bouché-Leclercq conjoins Manetho with another figure of the indigene writing his history in a different kingdom that had been part of Alexander’s empire: the sentence about Manetho goes on to explain that his endeavor was “more or less at the same time that Bérose, for his part, unveiled, at the instigation of Antiochos I, the arcana of the Chaldean civilization and history” (vol. 1, 223). For an assessment of Manetho’s historiography and its impact on subsequent authors, see Burstein, “Images of Egypt in Greek Historiography,” 599–601. 27. Hashem, “Aspects of Alexandria: The Relevance of E. M. Forster’s Liberal Humanism.” Her reading, furthermore, inscribes the entire book in the framework of liberal humanism. 28. Medalie, E. M. Forster’s Modernism, 32. 29. Ibid., 35. 30. Ibid., 1, 3. 31. Ibid., 9, 3. Medalie does not discuss Forster’s Alexandrian texts. He touches on Alexandria, once, in the context of A Passage to India, where he adduces the novelist’s discussion of Neoplatonism in “The Spiritual City” 132. He takes stock of the essay about Cavafy in Pharos and Pharillon where the praise that the novelist gives the poet’s sentences is seen by the critic as a reflection of Forster’s own writing (138), and—this point being the closest to my argument—of Forster’s description of Clement of Alexandria in the same Alexandrian volume as “a portrait of an idyllic city during an idyllic time. The ingredients of the idyll, as Forster conceives of them, are deeply suggestive: in particular, the notion that the passing of time does not threaten the city in any way, for [as in Forster’s description of Clement’s Alexandria] it ‘had never been young and hoped never to grow old’; and that the idyll is characterized by ‘conciliation’. These are precisely the virtues which Forster does not find in the early twentieth century, and it is their loss which his modernism directly or indirectly addresses” (197). 32. The phrase “objective correlative” is of course borrowed from T. S. Eliot. 33. Forster, “Unfinished Short Story,” in Arctic Summer and Other Fiction, 216–25. According to the editor of the volume, Forster first published his account of the airplane flight in an article titled “Higher Aspects,” in the Egyptian Mail on May 5, 1918, then again, with modifications, under the title “A First Flight” in the National Review in March 1919. The short story can be tentatively dated to 1919 or 1920; see Heine’s “Editor’s Introduction,” xxv–xxvi. 34. Liddell was to use Eliot’s phrase, itself adapted from Baudelaire, as the title of his novel about a fictionalized Alexandria, centering on the figure of a fictionalized Cavafy: Unreal City. 35. See “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 415–16, in Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel.

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36. See note 31, on Medalie, above. See also Pinchin’s brief comments, in Alexandria Still, 146, on the resonance of the “Spiritual City” (she mentions Clement of Alexandria) in A Passage to India; on 136 she also touches on the link between Neoplatonism and Forster’s Indian work. See also Bloom, Introduction to E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, 5: “In some curious sense, Forster’s India is Alexandrian, and his vision of Hinduism is Plotinian.” See also 6–7. 37. “It adapted from Philo his doctrine of the Logos, and identified the Logos with Christ. It shared with Gnosticism the desire for knowledge of God, while declaring that such knowledge need not be esoteric” (AHG 77). See also the essay “Clement of Alexandria” in PP 37–42, esp. the corresponding passage on 38. 38. Medalie, E. M. Forster’s Modernism, 35. 39. Compare this against the short and sober commentary on the same account given in Butcher’s The Story of the Church of Egypt, vol. 1, 140–41, a source that Forster mentions among the “Authorities” in Alexandria as “full of information, but uncritical and diffuse”; see xxix. There is no trace of satire or racism in the paragraph or so that Butcher devotes to this incident; after giving a brief summary of the anecdote, she says, “Whether the story is true or not, there is no doubt that Athanasius was from boyhood a favourite protegé of Alexander” (141). 40. See Butcher, The Story of the Church of Egypt, vol. 1, 303; see also Spanel, “Timothy II Aelurus”; and Frend, “Timothy Salofaciolus.” Jeffreys, in Eastern Questions, 78, comments that Forster depicts St. Athansius and his cohort as destroying Alexandria but fails to note that the novelist’s negative depiction increases when it comes to the post-Chalcedonian period. 41. See al-Mas‘udi, Muruj al-Dhahab, vol. 2, 36. See also Atiya, “Saint Mark.” 42. See Meyerhof, “Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad,” which I read in the Arabic translation by ‘Abd al-Rahman Badawi, under the title “Min alIskandariyya ila Baghdad,” in the collection of essays by Orientalist scholars on the transmission of Greek knowledge into Arabic that he edited, titled al-Turath al-Yunani fi al-Hadara al-Islamiyya. For another article by Meyerhof on a related subject, see “La fin de l’école d’Alexandrie.” In dwelling on Greek-into-Arabic in this section, it is, clearly and specifically, part of my response to Forster’s Hellenizing cosmopolitanism; it should be noted here that the translation movement centered in Baghdad also involved, no less signally, the translation of Persian and Sanskrit texts, among those written in several languages, into Arabic, Bayt al-Hikma itself being largely staffed by Iranians. On this, see Gutas, “Bayt al-ikma,” an article that also offers correctives to Meyerhof’s contributions on the subject. For two less sanguine views of the Arab reception of Greek heritage, see Badawi and El-Abbadi. In his introduction to al-Turath al-Yunani, ta’-ya, Badawi remarks, among other things, that the “Islamic spirit” (he refers to traditionalists) was inimical to the “Greek Spirit” in its more scientific manifestations, its acceptance of Neoplatonism (as distinct from classical sources such as Aristotle) being part and parcel of its tendency to

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accept those aspects that are already hybridized with Eastern influences. El-Abbadi, “Epilogue: From Alexandria to Baghdad,” in The Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria, 187,189, maintains that “another far-reaching influence [at a later date, in the Middle Ages] was the adoption by the Arabs of a certain Alexandrian method of research which . . . eventually proved fatal,” this being an approach of posing problems and proposing solutions that became ossified in the later history of Alexandrian scholarship the “adoption of [which] reveals that among medieval Arab scholars, with a very few exceptions, there was a general lack of a genuine critical attitude.” Badawi has several other publications in Arabic on AraboIslamic thought, comprising Greek-into-Arabic. See his La Transmission de la philosophie grecque au monde arabe. For more a recent overview of this Arabo-Islamic philosophical tradition, see Diagne, Comment philosopher en islam?, esp. 33–66. 43. Walzer, Greek into Arabic, 1. 44. Ibid., 2. 45. On Umayyad period translations, see Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 20–27; and El-Abbadi, The life and fate of the ancient library of Alexandria, 181–82. 46. See Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 20–24. 47. Walzer, Greek into Arabic, 7. 48. Ibid., 9. 49. Ibid. 50. See Walzer, Greek into Arabic, 35. 51. Ibid., 13; see also on this point 12. 52. Ibid., 12–13; quotation from al-Kindi cited on 12. 53. Zubaida, “Cosmopolitanism and the Middle East,” 20. 54. See Rosenthal’s essay on al-Shaykh Yunani, reprinted in his Greek Philosophy in the Arab World, III, 461–92; quotation from 473. 55. See Rosenthal’s essay, “Plotinus in Islam: The Power of Anonymity,” reprinted in Greek Philosophy in the Arab World, IV, 445–46. 56. Rosenthal, Greek Philosophy in the Arab World, IV, 437. 57. Ibid., 446. On the transmission of classical learning by the Arabs to Europe, see Badawi, Dawr al-‘Arab fi Takwin al-Fikr al-Urubbi; see also his La Transmission de la philosophie grecque, esp. 46–59 on Plotinus. 58. In his discussion of al-Shaykh al-Yunani, for example, Rosenthal, writing in the 1950s, demonstrates that this figure has been known to Western scholars, including Ernest Renan, for a century; for this and a number of other nineteenth-century secondary sources, see Rosenthal, Greek Philosophy in the Arab World, III, 461–62. Gutas, in Greek Thought, Arabic Culture xiii, dates the emergence of the modern field to 1830. 59. Baedeker, ed., Egypt and the Sudan, lxxx–lxxxi, xc, xci. The section on Islam is written by C. H. Becker. 60. Pinchin, in Alexandria Still, 135–36, simply reiterates unquestioningly Forster’s comments about Islam and Egyptian Christianity. In the introductory chapter of her book, she more or less reproduces Forster’s historiography with regard to the medieval, Islamic period. Ibid., 21–24. Like Forster,

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she interrupts her chronological narrative to provide an account of what she calls the “Spiritual City,” 17–21, which ends with a new rubric on “The Moslem Conquest.” In “The Spiritual City,” Pinchin does provide a slightly less damning portrait of Athanasius, but then in “The Moslem Conquest,” she, like Forster as well as Durrell, says that “for more than a thousand years Alexandria languished, a colorless town” (23). Haag, in his notes to Forster’s Alexandria, only mentions an allusion in The Alexandria Quartet to a quotation from Forster that occurs toward the end of the account of the Arab conquest. See AHG 248. See also the Arabic translation, by Bayyumi, of Forster’s book, al-Iskandariyya: Tarikh wa Dalil, 121–22, where the translator fails to provide a note on the novelist’s misconceptions about Islam, although he elsewhere makes some valuable points. 61. Forster does cross-reference his remarks about Islam in “The Spiritual City” part of the “History” to a (single) given mosque in the “Guide,” namely, the Terbana Mosque and an inscription from the Qur’an in it (see AHG 84, 136). In using “flânerie” I loosely invoke Benjamin’s deployment of the term in Charles Baudelaire and other writings. 62. It appears that the mosque was renovated around that time. See alShayyal, A‘lam al-Iskandariyya, 212. The date al-Shayyal gives is 1775. The mosque as it now stands was designed by Mario Rossi, who worked for the waqf (endowments) administration, and built by Yahya Qadri of the same administration. The project, begun in the 1920s, was completed about a decade later. See Awad, Italy in Alexandria, 186, passim; and Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 2, 537–38. On the municipal design of the Square of the Mosques at different stages, see ibid., 526–28. 63. See Forster’s letter, dated February 14, 1919, sent to G. H. Ludolf (who was to be the dedicatee of the first edition of Alexandria), requesting information about an Alexandrian mosque, KCC, xviii Ludolf. 64. In Enlightenment in the Colony, 124, Mufti persuasively argues that the “preference for ‘Muslims’” in A Passage to India “is . . . a preference for a non-national orientation to culture and history, a positing of the Muslim as stumbling block to a distinctly national modernity. . . . Secular nationalism . . . is identified here as the claim and culture of the (Hindu) majority, to which the Muslims can be drawn only temporarily.” 65. Forster, letter to his mother, Alice Clara Forster, dated February 20, 1917, KCC, xviii ACF/EMF. See, by contrast, his laudatory comments about time spent in the Cairene Mosque of Amr: “As I looked, there came over me an unusual sensation of peace and well being, and I was interested to read afterwards that a thirteenth century traveller had experienced the same sensation in the same sport,” CC 272. Forster then goes on to remark that the “emotion” Islam evokes in him is one “of its dignity and its peace” rather than anything related to its doctrines, history, and art. 66. On Alexandria’s, and Egypt’s, Andalusian and Maghrebi connection, see ‘Abd al-Hamid, “al-Athar al-Maghribi wa-l-Andalusi fi al-Mujtama‘ al-Sakandari fi al-‘Asur al-Islamiyya al-Wusta”; al-Biyali, “Madrasat Misr al-Diniyya wa-Silatuha bi-l-Andalus hatta Awakhir al-Qarn al-Thalith alHijri”; and Hanafi, al-Maghariba wa-l-Andalusiyyun fi Misr al-Islamiyya,

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esp. vol. 2, 129–358. The influx of Andalusians into Egypt, it should also be added, was not without religious (Shi‘i-Sunni) and ideological implications. See, for example, Leiser, “Muslims from al-Andalus,” 158, who points out that Andalusians in the madrasas “strengthened a conservative element.” For residents of Alexandria originally from the Maghreb in the Ottoman period, see Haridi, al-Jaliyyat fi Madinat al-Iskandariyya, 187–208; and Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 37–38. 67. In using “internationalism,” I borrow Cornell’s usage in his designation of “t.arīqa” as “associated with institutional Sufism and denot[ing] an ‘internationalized’ network” tawa’if “within a single, eponymously named tradition.” Cornell suggests that the internationalism of the Sufi orders was an Eastern innovation, one that remained for long without parallel in the insular Sufism of Morocco, until the al-Shadhiliya. See Cornell, Realm of the Saint, 144–51; quotation from 145. 68. The founder of the order, Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali b. ‘Abdallah b. ‘Abd alJabbar al-Sharif al-Zarwili al-Shadhili, born (1196/1197) either in Ghimara or in Shadhila, “the ethnic al-Zarwīlī [in any case] suggest[ing] a Moroccan origin,” attended lectures on mysticism in Fas, Morocco, traveled to Tunisia to teach Sufi doctrines, and thence fled persecution to Alexandria—seeking “through a wandering life of meditation constant union with the divinity, eternal ecstasy.” See the article on “al-Shādhilī,” by Cour; quotations from 246 and 247. The “ultimate aim of al-Shādhilī was, as with other s.ūfıs, al-fanā’ [the annihilation or dissolution of the human will into God’s will], and the method pursued was the usual one of religious exercises called awrād and adhkār. Formulae, as usual, were selected and their repetition a stated number of times enjoined.” See the article on “Shādhilīya” by Margoliouth; quotation from 247. 69. See, variously, Yusuf, A‘lam min al-Iskandariyya, 148–53, 190–92; al-Shayyal, A‘lam al-Iskandariyya, 49–100, 161–90; al-Jazayirli, Mawsu‘at al-Jazayirli, vol. 2, 573–85; and Lackany, Quelque Notes de Toponymie Alexandrine, 28–29. 70. See the biography of Abu al-‘Abbas al-Mursi in al-Shayyal’s A‘lam al-Iskanadariyya, 192–212. On the mosque, see 212. See also Mubarak, alKhitat al-Tawfiqiyya, 188–89. 71. Cornell, Realm of the Saint, 151–53. According to Cornell, it was to be a century before the influence of the Egyptian branch of Shadhiliya reached its counterpart in the West. 72. See Basset, “al-Būs.īrī”; al-Qabbani, al-Busiri. 73. Dajanī-Shakeel, “Some Comments on Two Poems,” 28. On al-Busiri’s poem in relation to that canon see ibid. and Lubis, Qas. īdas in Honor of the Prophet, 12–22. 74. Ibid., 27. Al-Qabbani also goes over the same historical contextualizing in al-Busiri, 9–59. 75. Dajanī-Shakeel, “Some Comments on Two Poems,” 34. 76. Al-Busiri, Diwan al-Busiri, 238–49; translation mine from 241, with some overlap with al-Būs.īrī, “The ‘Burda’: El-Būs.īrī’s Poem of the Mantle,” trans. Redhouse, in Arabian Poetry for English Readers, 327–28.

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77. Dajanī-Shakeel, “Some Comments on Two Poems,” 30. See also ‘Uthman, Sharh al-Burda li-l-Busiri, 54–55; and al-Kilani’s introduction to al-Busiri, Diwan al-Busiri, 30–31. 78. Dajanī-Shakeel, “Some Comments on Two Poems,” 30. 79. For this poem, see Shawqi, al-Shawqiyyat, 212–28, and the editor’s note, 212. 80. Al-Qabbani, al-Busiri, 3–5. 81. On the Qasba in Algiers in the decolonization war, see Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule, 38, 47–49; quotation from the Algerian sociologist Djaffar Lesbet as cited in Urban Forms, 28. The role of the Qasba in anticolonial resistance is of course memorably represented in Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers. On the political role of this area in Alexandria, see al-Rafi‘i, Thawrat 1919, 144–45; and Booth, Bayram al-Tunisi’s Egypt, 33–38. In rejecting the pronounced North African urban binary, I am in agreement with Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 1, 182–83, 218–20; and vol. 2, 526. 82. This is “From the Square to the Rue Rosette.” Kum al-Dikka is a stone’s throw from the last one of the “Chief points of interest,” the GraecoRoman Museum, separated from it as it is by the Rue Rosette. See AHG 109–33. 83. On al-Tunisi, see al-Qabbani, Mahmud Bayram al-Tunisi 1893–1961, esp., concerning Alexandria, 7–21; and Booth, Bayram al-Tunisi’s Egypt, 33–35. A more recent book on al-Tunisi is Bayram al-Tunisi fi Dhikrah. On Darwish, see Yusuf, A‘lam Min al-Iskandariyya, 433–39. On al-Nadim, see Yusuf, A‘lam Min al-Iskandariyya, 236–49. On al-Nadim’s house in Kafr ‘Ashri, see Halim, “Reflections on a Fractured Edifice.” For a collection of articles and research papers on al-Nadim, see Sallam et al., ‘Abdallah al-Nadim. 84. A few of the following verses from al-Tunisi’s poem read, “And whenever I sit I watch my pocket / for fear of thieves and of the Municipal Council / [ . . . ] O radish vendor, you who sell at a millieme a piece, / how much goes to your children, how much to the Municipal Council?” Translation mine from al-Tunisi, al-‘Amal al-Kamila li-Bayram al-Tunisi, vol. 4, 38–39; extracted and adapted from my translation of this poem in “An Alexandrian Anthology.” 85. On al-Busiri’s attitudes toward Christians and Jews, see Kilani’s introduction to al-Busiri, Diwan al-Busiri, esp. 9. For a strongly critical biography of al-Busiri and aspects of some of his poems that betray a lack of spirituality, albeit not tackling the treatment of Copts and Jews in his poetry, see al-Jazayirli, Mawsu‘at al-Jazayirli, vol. 2, 548–63. Al-Jazayirli speculates that al-Busiri is not buried in the mosque that bears his name in Alexandria. Ibid., 561–62. 86. Forster says of France’s Thaïs that it “pictures life in the 4th cent. A.D.; the details are both vivid and accurate, and build up a perfect work of art”; see “Authorities,” AHG xxx. 87. White, Tropics of Discourse, 83; emphasis in original. 88. Ibid., 60–61, 85, 84; see also 83–84, 96–97.

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89. In the “Guide” section, writing about the lighthouse, Forster does quote an excerpt from a poem by “El Deraoui,” 147–48. One of the two epigraphs to Alexandria comes from an Arabo-Islamic historian, Ibn Duqmaq. The section “Authorities” is rounded off with a quotation from a poem by “Gelal ed Din ben Mokram”—about the Alexandrians’ alleged lack of hospitality—which Forster sets up as a foil to his expressions of gratitude for the kindness he has received in the city; see AHG xxxii. See also AHG 201–3 for Forster’s brief notes on Rosetta’s mosques. In his essay “The Mosque,” Forster cites the description of a Cairene mosque given by a thirteenth-century Tunisian traveler but does not mention his name; see AH 276. 90. See Thiersch, Pharos, 37–64; and in Sayf al-Din’s Arabic translation, Farus, 55–90. Forster, in his historical overview of the lighthouse, in the “Guide” section (AHG 147–50), draws on Thiersch’s quotations from the Arab authors, but unlike the German scholar he does not name any of them. 91. For a study that “defines and analyzes the genre of city tragedy which flourished in the late Renaissance (1560–1660), using examples from the theaters of France, Spain, and England,” see King, “City Tragedy: Civic Adversity on the Renaissance Stage in France, Spain, and England”; quotation from x. 92. See my “The City as Feminine Principle.” On the personification, rather than the feminization, of the city the guidebook, see also Hashem, “Aspects of Alexandria,” 161–62. 93. White, The Content of the Form, 180–81. On Gibbon, see also White’s comment in Tropics of Discourse that the “mythic element in [historians’] work is recognizable in those historical accounts, such as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, which continue to be honored as classics long after the ‘facts’ contained in them have been refined beyond recognition by subsequent research” (58). 94. See White, Metahistory, 45–80. White comments that Gibbon’s “account of the transition from what he regarded as the happiest time for man prior to his own age is not a Tragic account, but rather the greatest achievement of sustained Irony in the history of historical literature” (55). 95. Forster, “Gibbon and His Autobiography,” first published in 1942, reprinted in Forster, TCD 169–73; quotations from 170. For another article by Forster on Gibbon, see “Captain Edward Gibbon,” first published in 1931, reprinted in Forster, AH 218–25. See Haas on Cavafy’s comments on Gibbon’s style in “Cavafy’s Reading Notes in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.” In Eastern Questions, 78, Jeffreys notes that “the biting sarcasm and dismissive tone of many of the essays in Pharos and Pharillon. . . . would have troubled Cavafy, whose view of late antique and Byzantine culture was, in fact, a repudiation of Gibbon.” See also ibid., 98. He contrasts Forster’s treatment of St. Athanasius in Pharos, over which “the specter of Gibbon hovers,” to a Cavafy poem about St. Athanasius (78); see also 79–80. 96. Forster in a letter to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, dated May 5, 1917, in Selected Letters, vol. 1, 251. The chapters of The History of the Decline and

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Fall that Forster mentions as part of the “Authorities” are 21 and 47, but the resonance of Gibbon’s account in other chapters can be heard in Alexandria. 97. Forster is indebted to Gibbon on Arian versus Athanasius (see AHG 52-54 and Decline and Fall, vol. 1, chap. 21, 779-816, passim), although he is less sympathetic to Athanasius than the Enlightenment historian, on Neoplatonism, among the Jews and the Christians, and on the controversies about the Trinity and the nature of Christ, in relation to different sects (see AHG 64-83 and The History of the Decline and Fall, vol. 1, chap. 21, 771788, passim, and, esp. on the “Oriental Sects,” vol. 2, chap. 47, 979-1002). Forster’s depiction of Egyptian Monasticism—an “ignorant monasticism in Egypt,” the monks being a “wild black army,” an “army of monks” (AHG 79, 56, 55)—echoes Gibbon’s “deserts of Thebaïs” inhabited by “a race of wild, yet submissive fanatics” and “wild beasts of the desert,” Decline and Fall, vol. 1, chap. 21, 812, and vol. 2, chap. 47, 944. More broadly, see the congruity between Forster’s statement concerning “early orthodoxy” as “the work of Greek scholars who . . . imparted into [Christianity] doctrines taught by Paganism” before it “harden[ed]” (AHG 79), partly because of Egyptian monasticism, and Gibbon’s “deduc[ing] the progress of reason and faith, of error and passion, from the school of Plato to the decline and fall of the empire,” Decline and Fall, vol. 1, chap. 21, 771. See also Decline and Fall, vol. 1, chap. 15, 508, where Gibbon, somewhat qualifying others’ claims that early Christianity consisted in “the dregs of the populace” and the uneducated, adduces Clement of Alexandria, with his Greek learning, and Origen—who feature prominently in Forster’s “Spiritual City.” See also vol. 2, chap. 37, where Gibbon tracks the spread of Monasticism from “Egypt, the fruitful parent of superstition,” 413. 98. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 3, chap. 50, 151. Gibbon praises the independence and freedom of the Arabs, 158–62, and their literary achievements, 164-65, despite referring to them as “Barbarians,” 165, 167, and to the Prophet Muhammad as “an illiterate Barbarian,” 175; asserts that “the base and plebian origin of Mahomet is an unskilful calumny of the Christians,” 172; asses the Prophet Muhammad as “endowed with a pious and contemplative disposition” whose transformation from “the humble preacher into the leader of armies . . . must have . . . gradually stained” his character, 212, 213. Gibbon exonerates the Arabs of the charge of burning the Library of Alexandria, chap. 51, 284-86, as Forster does (see AHG 62). The two instances in which Forster rejects the designation of the Arabs as barbarians are: “Amr and his Arabs were not fanatics or barbarians” and “The Arabs were anything but barbarians; their own great city of Cairo is sufficient answer to that charge” (AHG 84, 86). Usage of barbarian aside, Forster, like Gibbon, signals the Arabs’ role in a pattern of decline and ambivalently admires them. On Gibbon’s deployment of barbarian in relation to his revisionist construal of “stadial theory,” see Womersley’s introduction, Decline and Fall, vol. 1, xlviii-lxx, esp. xlvii, liv. Gibbon’s narrative spans centuries after the advent of Islam; I elicit only the overlap in the two accounts. 99. This expression is in fact the title of one of White’s chapters in Tropics of Discourse, 81–101.

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100. White, Tropics of Discourse, 99, 118. 101. See also, with reference to the successful British campaign against the French in 1801, “we had accomplished our aim, and had no reason to remain in the country any longer; we left it to our allies the Turks,” AHG 93; emphasis added. 102. Quotation from Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 1, 227, who questions the credibility of British official accounts of the damage done to the city. See also Ilbert’s “Bombardement et incendie.” See Tsirkas, O Kavafis kai e Epoche tou, 112. Liddell, Cavafy, 31, in the course of drawing on Tsirkas, whom he nevertheless accuses of exaggeration, similarly criticizes Forster but also designates Forster’s account as “untendentious,” 29. 103. Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 139–40; see also 155–57. In his notes updating Alexandria, Haag provides a footnote to the concluding section of Forster’s history, which ends with the British bombardment of the city in 1882, where he cites Forster’s “Notes on Egypt” and gives an update on Egypt’s history since then. See AHG 249–54. Shaheen, in his discussion of the novelist’s Egyptian writings in E. M. Forster and the Politics of Imperialism, focuses on “Notes on Egypt” and elicits its anti-imperial stance, and also comments on the novelist’s friendship with El-Adl: see 58–72. Rodenbeck, while not making any mention of the issues and problems I outline in my discussion of Alexandria, suggests that Forster “was already anti-imperialist before he even went to Egypt” but locates his motive for making a public, printed anti-imperial statement in his relationship with El-Adl. See his “Forster in Egypt,” 109. See also Haag, Alexandria: City of Memory, 101. 104. I draw here on Grewal’s discussion in Home and Harem, 85–108, which applies to Forster, although she does not discuss his guidebook; quotations from 108–9, 111. 105. In Maurice, 224, Forster has Maurice’s former schoolmaster, Mr. Ducie, wax, with much dramatic irony, to the protagonist and his workingclass lover, Alec, about the suggestiveness of some of the British Museum’s contents and the awkwardness of dealing with the issues they raised in young boys’ minds. 106. Grewal, Home and Harem, 94–95, 92, 93, 96. See also Behdad, Belated Travelers, 39–47. 107. See Baedeker, ed., Egypt and the Sudan, xxiv, xxv. Apart from Forster’s possible sentiment that such practical tips belonged in the more commercial versions of the guidebook genre that it ill-befitted him to reproduce, their absence indicates an addressee who is not (solely) a tourist but quite likely (also) a sojourner. On guidebooks to Egypt, see Reid, Whose Pharaohs?, esp. 69–73. 108. Forster in a letter to his mother, Alice Clara Forster, dated January 15, 1919; KCC, xviii ACF/EMF. Baedeker, ed., Egypt and the Sudan, does not seem to contain this sentence, but it does urge that “ladies travelling alone should not attempt to penetrate into these stifling recesses” of the Great Pyramid, 129. 109. For the use of “he,” see, for example, AHG 115.

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110. Forster has an extended diary entry, written on returning to England, about his visits to “Genenah.” See the entry of February 4, 1920, in Forster, The Journals and Diaries of E. M. Forster, 58–59. 111. Spear, “‘A Man Worthy of Such a City,’” 174. Spear is not tackling this particular instance; however, as other examples I cite in the foregoing suggest, Forster’s use of personal pronouns often accedes to an English, imperial male subject. 112. See Forster’s accounts of these lectures in letters to him mother, Alice Clara Forster, dated March 7, 1916, and April 13, 1917; KCC, xviii ACF/ EMF. On these lectures, see also Furbank, E. M. Forster, vol. 2, 34; and Spear, “‘A Man Worthy of Such a City,’” 174. Forster kept a journal of sorts, “Incidents of War” (first published in 2008), in which he logged anecdotes and speech fragments culled from his contact with soldiers; see CC 188–97. 113. Forster’s 1956 lecture “The Lost Guide,” 351–59. “I worked well[,] . . . then a rift [between Forster and his publisher] appeared, and as the war wore on, and no proofs came, the rift widened. It had always been our plan to get the Guide out at once while Alexandria was full of British Troops, many of whom seemed to have nothing to do, and we thought of the soldiers walking about singly or in groups with the convenient little volume in their hands, or getting it up beforehand as they rested on their beds in the convalescent camps. Mr Adamson [Forster’s alias for the publisher, whose real name was Mr. Mann] liked the prospect—he was by no means devoid of imagination—but he did nothing to promote it.” And of the second edition, “The second edition had indeed a less amateurish air. But the date on which it appeared was inauspicious: 1938: the second world war was imminent. The hope that British soldiers would buy it in large quantities was again unfulfilled, I don’t think many copies were printed.” “LG” 357, 358. 114. Briggs, Through Egypt in War-Time, 5. “The ancient Hippodrome was quite near the present Sporting Club, which is thus very appropriately situated. Just at the end of Mustapha Camp, between the barracks and the sea, was a Roman camp or fortress, and beyond this lay Augustus Caesar’s new suburb of Nicopolis, extending inland from Stanley Bay” (20). Forster was to write a favorable review of Briggs’s book; see his “Two Egypts.” 115. See Pinchin’s Alexandria Still and Haag’s Alexandria: City of Memory. 116. Roessel, “Live Orientals and Dead Greeks,” 56–57, 58. 117. Roessel, “Live Orientals and Dead Greeks.” Roessel’s article contrasts Forster’s complete lack of sympathy with Neohellenes’ hopes to reclaim Constantinople and his campaigning on behalf of the Turks in the context of the Chanak crisis with his receptivity to the pan-Islamist Khilafat movement in India: “Forster did not come round enough to consider their [the Alexandrian Greeks’] ‘Hellenic and Byzantine dreams’ anything but warped, even though the Muslim dreams of the Pan-Islamists at Aligarh were no less so,” 55. Jeffreys, in Eastern Questions, 86, cites Roessell as part of his argument concerning Forster’s lack of tact in soliciting Toynbee’s help. On the depiction in Alexandria of Hypatia’s murder as signaling the passing of Greek culture in Alexandria which would have been unacceptable

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to Cavafy, see 81. Jeffreys reiterates this in the introduction to The ForsterCavafy Letters, 11–15, 17–18. 118. See Forster, “The Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy,” TCD 246–50. I discuss the shift in Forster’s reading of Cavafy, as seen in this article, in “The Alexandria Archive,” 188. 119. See Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” 3–32; quotations from 5, 12, 13; emphasis in original. See also her “Can the Subaltern Speak,” in Colonial and Post-Colonial Theory, 66–111. 120. See the letters copied out at the end of “Mohammed El-Adl,” KCC, xi/10.1, now published at the end of “Memoir: Mohammed El Adl” in the volume cited above edited by Allott. In a letter from Forster to his future biographer, P. N. Furbank, dated July 16, 1958, the novelist writes, “I want to tell you of a strong experience or rather re-experience that I have just had. I am destroying or rearranging letters, and came across those from Mohammed el Adl—I may not have mentioned his name to you, he was a tram-conductor whom I met in Alex[andria] 1917–1919, and again saw in 1922, soon before his death. I assumed the letters would be nothing much, but gave a glance before destroying them and was amazed—all the things I most adore glimmering in them. . . . (Something like 100 letters)”; see Forster, Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, 1921–70, vol. 2, 271. See the miscellaneous items relating to El-Adl in KCC, xi/10.2. 121. For references to El-Adl’s room, see, for example, Forster, Selected Letters, vol. 1, 261, 263. 122. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, Polycrates’ Ring, 39. 123. Forster, in a letter to Florence Barger dated July 18, 1917, in Selected Letters, vol. 1, 263. 124. Forster, in a letter to Barger dated September 13, 1917, in Selected Letters, vol. 1, 271. 125. The question to what extent Forster and Cavafy spoke candidly about their sexuality, let alone whether the English novelist would have shared with the Alexandrian Greek poet his experience with El-Adl, is intriguing. One only catches a glimpse in a letter Forster sent Cavafy on July 1, 1917, in response to comments that the poet had made to their mutual friend and Cavafy translator, George Valassopoulo, about “depravity.” Forster adds, presumably with El-Adl in mind, “Of late I have been happier than usual myself, and have accepted my good luck with thankfulness and without reservation.” See Selected Letters, vol. 1, 259. On Cavafy’s sexuality, see the chapter in Liddell’s Cavafy titled “The Cavafy of the Letter ‘T,’” 62–77. 126. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, Polycrates’ Ring, 124. 127. Forster in a letter to Barger dated April 9, 1918, KCC, xviii Barger, F/EMF. 128. See Forster’s letter to his mother, Alice Clara Forster, dated March 4, 1917, KCC, xviii ACF/EMF. 129. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, Polycrates’ Ring (1914–1970), vol. 2, 39. 130. See, among others, Forster’s letter to Barger dated November 10, 1917, KCC, xviii Barger, F/EMF.

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131. Forster, letter to Barger dating to c. 1918, KCC, xviii Barger, F/EMF. 132. Forster, letter to Barger dated August 2, 1917, KCC, xviii Barger, F/ EMF. 133. Much later, when Forster wrote the last paragraph of A Passage to India, the colonial divisiveness wrought on space would be transferred from the sphere of culture, the city, and, within it, that most constructed of cultural spheres, the museum, to nature itself: “But the horses didn’t want it— they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single-file; the temples, the tank, the jail . . . ” See Forster, A Passage to India, 312. 134. For an insightful discussion of the paradoxes of Forster’s friendships with and homoerotic longings for Eastern men, in Egypt and in India, as they come to inform his Passage to India, see Bharucha’s “Forster’s Friends.” Bharucha makes similar points about Forster’s relationship with El-Adl on 113–14. On Forster’s homosexuality as it comes to inflect his writing, see Lane, “Forsterian Sexuality”; and the chapter titled “Against ‘Effeminancy’: The Sexual Predicament of E. M. Forster’s fiction” in Bristow, Effeminate England, 55–99. 135. See Forster, “MMA” 333. Haag also comments on this in Alexandria: City of Memory, 92. 136. Bharucha, “Forster’s Friends,” 113. 137. Hayes, in Queer Nations, esp. 41–44 on Jean Genet, critiques the homophobia of reductive commentaries on homoerotic cross-racial encounters in colonial/neocolonial contexts, while Boone, in “Vacation Cruises,” adopts the diametrically opposite position of reading such encounters as part of the “homoerotics of Orientalism.” See, similarly, Massad, Desiring Arabs. 138. See Forster’s letters to Florence Barger in Selected Letters, vol. 1, 272, 275. 139. Ibid., 275. 140. Letter from Forster to Barger dated only 1918, KCC, xviii Barger, F/EMF. 141. For this episode, see El-Adl’s letters dated September 23 and 26, 1919, as well as those dated October 3 and November 4 of the same year, among the letters copied out at the end of “MMA” 341–44. Furbank, in E. M. Forster: A Life, Polycrates’ Ring, 59–63, provides an account of this episode. 142. El-Adl, in a letter to Forster dated November 4, 1919, in “MMA” 344. See also his letter of October 3, 1919, in “MMA” 343. 143. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, Polycrates’ Ring, 63. 144. On the account Forster received directly from a friend in India of the Amritsar massacre, see Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, Polycrates’ Ring, 60–62. The nationalist leader Sa‘d Zaghlul held a variety of ministerial posts, later culminating in the post of prime minister. In 1918 he organized a delegation (wafd) to travel to the Versailles Peace Conference in January of the following year but was denied permission to attend. With the movement of the wafd gathering force, the British eventually, in March 1919, exiled Zaghlul and other nationalists to Malta, which sparked the

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nationwide demonstrations and strikes that month. Released a few months later, the nationalist leaders were permitted to go to Paris to plead the case for Egypt’s independence, but this failed. Having succeeded in the campaign to have the Milner Mission—sent by Britain to investigate the political situation and make recommendations—boycott, and rallying opposition against the moderate prime minister and his negotiations with the British, Zaghlul was again deported, first to Aden, then the Seychelles. But the agitation and opposition in Egypt was such that Britain was forced to declare the end of the Protectorate and the independence of the country in 1922, despite reserving conditions that would, in effect, keep Egypt from full independence for three more decades. Among the photographs in the Forster archive in King’s College, Cambridge, is one of Zaghlul onboard a ship, inscribed by the novelist “Zagloul on a British Warship, with Guard (From ‘Times’) /192–,” presumably taken on the occasion of one of his deportations. KCC, 27/327, sleeve 130. 145. The text of this letter is also printed in its entirety in Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, Polycrates’ Ring, 57–58. 146. Forster, in a letter to Florence Barger, in Selected Letters, vol. 1, 318. On the possible influence of El-Adl on this text, see Halim, “The Alexandria Archive,” 194, 197, 198–99. Allott, editor of Alexandria: A History and a Guide and Pharos and Pharillon, also speculates about the possible influence of El-Adl on Forster’s views in this text; see 365–56. For the context, see Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, Polycrates’ Ring, 62. 147. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, Polycrates’ Ring, 62. 148. See “A Musician in Egypt,” cited above. 149. There is, however, an “update” in a reference to the year 1922 in the text; AHG 136. 150. See, for example, the section on the Graeco-Roman Museum, with additions to the collection that had come from new excavations having been incorporated, as well as the revised section on the Libyan Desert, Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1938 ed.), 98–113, 179–97. The phrase about the Greeks being the only community that contributes modern culture to Alexandria is omitted, and a note is appended to Cavafy’s “The God Abandons Antony” mentioning the poet’s passing and the publication of the first complete volume of his poetry, 89. Cavafy was the dedicatee of the second edition. 151. In “Old Wine in a New Bottle,” a review of the 1961 edition of Alexandria, Tracy compiles a list of the corrections made in the 1938 edition—including a modification of the assertion that medieval Alexandria was insignificant—and laments the reprint of the 1922 edition later. But even in the 1938 edition these changes did not alter the paradigm of historiography of the book. Forster himself summed up the changes more accurately and also brought out the intended readership of the second edition, in a talk he gave: “Friends of mine, chiefly English and American, got to work, and thoroughly revised the ‘Guide’ part. The ‘History’ part was left as it was. And they saw to its publication—by the original publishers in Cherif Pacha Street, and got the Royal Archaeological Society of Alexandria to sponsor

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the project and the Alexandria Municipality and the Tourist Bureau to give subsidies. They made new maps, they contributed photographs. The second edition had indeed a less amateurish air.” See “LG” 358. 152. See Forster’s letter to Brinton dated March 24, 1936, where he affirms that “all changes should be factual and not containing any expressions of opinion,” goes on to admit that “one big mistake in the historical part of the book: medieval Alexandria was more important than I knew,” and suggests that he might “redraft a paragraph.” PNF. I refer to this correspondence in my “Alexandria Archive,” vii, 203, 217. See also Haag’s Alexandria: City of Memory, 121–23, on Forster’s refusal to revise his comments on the Arab period. 153. Indeed, there is a reversion, as in his 1956 lecture that I cite above, to his construction of the cosmopolitan city as sealed off from his insights into the colonial city. 154. Pinchin, in Alexandria Still, 155. 155. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. 156. See Penfold, “The Perfect Guide,” 4. 157. See, for example, the 1966 essay on Alexandria, “A Day Is Hardly Enough,” by Morris in Among the Cities, 15–21, which echoes Forster’s account and indeed refers to his guidebook, 17. See also Mannin’s 1964 Aspects of Egypt: Some Travels in the United Arab Republic, 165, where she cites Forster’s comments about the Arab conquest, albeit modifying them mildly by making mention of the “fine mosques” and the citadel. By contrast, Nelson’s Your Guide to Egypt, published in the same year, focuses in its coverage of the Arabo-Islamic period in Alexandria on natural catastrophes (earthquakes and a tidal wave) and makes no explicit reference to Arabs’ neglect of the city, 134. These two guidebooks derive their interest from the fact that they were published during the Nasser period.

3. uncanny hybridit y into neocolonialism 1. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 98. In the original: “la paresse de la bourgeoisie nationale, . . . son indigence, . . . la formation profondément cosmopolite de son esprit,” Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, 109. 2. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 100–101. 3. Nkrumah, Neo-colonialism, 35, 253. 4. On Naipaul, see Nixon, London Calling, esp. 137–43, the section “MiddleClass ‘Mimicry’ and Neocolonialism,” on the writer’s pronouncements complicit with a neocolonial position—by dint of designating the Third World’s problems as resultant from “mimicry” and an elision of economic dependency—one that the critic contrasts to the near-contemporary statements by Fanon decrying the mimicry of the native bourgeoisie as amenable to neocolonialism. Among the critics of neocolonialism that Nixon draws on here is Nkrumah. My argument about neocolonialism in the Quartet is taken over from my “Alexandria Archive,” 218–93, before I became aware of Nixon’s book, which has informed the framing of the discussion presented here. On Rhys, see, among others, Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” On Pea, see Re,

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“Alexandria Revisited,” esp. 174–83. The broader argument driving Re’s discussion of Pea and Giuseppe Ungaretti in this article is precisely to question the assumption she locates in postcolonial criticism (she dialogues with Said’s work) that “the ‘non-native’ art that comes out of or is produced in . . . the colony [is] necessarily complicit with imperialist oppression,” 166. 5. See al-Kharrat’s potent deployment of place-names in a lengthy lyrical “pastiche” passage in his novel Ya Banat Iskindiriyya, 81–82; for the corresponding passage in the English translation, see Girls of Alexandria, 73–74. I analyze this passage in “The Alexandria Archive,” 336–39. In the following chapter, I discuss the deployment of place-names in Bernard de Zogheb’s work. 6. “The triumphs of polity, the resources of tact, the warmth, the patience. . . . Killing love by taking things easy . . . sleeping out a chagrin. . . . This was Alexandria, the unconsciously poetical mother-city exemplified in the names and faces which made up her history. Listen. Tony Umbada, Baldassaro Trivizani, Claude Amaril, Paul Capodistria, Dmitri Randidi, Onouphrios Papas, Count Banbula, Jacques de Guéry, Athena Trasha, Djamboulat Bey, Delphine de Francueil, General Cervoni, Ahmed Hassan Pacha, Pizzo di Borgo, Pierre Balbz, Gaston Phipps, Haddad Fahmy Amin, Mehmet Adm, Wilmot Pierrefeu, Toto de Brunel, Colonel Neguib, Dante Borromeo, Benedict Dangeau, Pia dei Tolomei, Gilda Ambron. . . . The poetry and history of commerce, the rhyme-scheme of the Levant which had swallowed Venice and Genoa” (B 45–46; see also, for an almost identical list, B 218). 7. Compare this against the similar passage in Atiyah, An Arab Tells His Story, 51–52: “Out in the streets, in the tramcars, in the shops, in the cafés, you heard four or five languages spoken simultaneously—exclamations, greetings, sentences, half-sentences in Arabic, English, French, Italian and Greek crowded in upon your ears in a veritable Tower-of-Babel jumble, and you heard the newspaper boys, dirty but attractive small Egyptian boys, shouting lustily: ‘Echo . . . Echo . . . Egyptian Gazette . . . Bourse Egyptienne, Bourse . . . Wadinnil . . . Ahram . . . Messagero Egyzziano . . . ’” 8. I invoke Bhabha; see below. Herbrechter, Lawrence Durrell, 266, comments on Durrell’s dual position as a writer “involved in British colonial politics.” His analysis of the conspiracy in the Quartet (260–75), however, is questionable: he refers to Nessim’s “cause for an independent Palestine” (rather than establishing a Zionist state) and speaks of “the end of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism” conjoined with “a politics of ethnic cleansing.” Ibid., 267, 274. 9. For more on this, see Kaczvinsky, “When Was Darley in Alexandria? A Chronology for The Alexandria Quartet.” 10. I also comment on this in “The City as Feminine Principle,” 62. 11. For details on Durrell’s departure from Corfu, see MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, 227–37; for the connection between the Greek island framing of the Quartet and Cyprus, see 385. 12. The dates for Durrell’s Cairo and Alexandria sojourns, which I give above, come from the “Chronology” MacNiven gives at the beginning of Lawrence Durrell, xiii. There is, however, some uncertainty about the length of time Durrell spent living in Alexandria. Alan G. Thomas, editor of Durrell’s Spirit of Place, explains in the note prefacing the section of the novelist’s letters

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from Egypt and writings about the country, “In 1944 he was posted, as Press Attaché, to Alexandria,” 69, a statement that seems to find corroboration in the dates of Durrell’s own letters from the city. I have preferred to use the dates given in MacNiven’s text as it is more recent. For the novelist’s Egyptian sojourn, see MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, 232–305. For a selection of this group’s texts, see the anthology compiled by Fedden, Durrell et al., Personal Landscape: An Anthology of Exile, esp. Fedden’s “Introduction: An Anatomy of Exile,” 7–15. The two book-length critical discussions of Personal Landscape published in the West are Bowen, “Many Histories Deep”: The Personal Landscape Poets in Egypt, 1940–45; and Bolton, Personal Landscapes: British Poets in Egypt during the Second World War. 13. Fedden, “Introduction: An Anatomy of Exile,” in Personal Landscape: An Anthology of Exile, 8, 9. Fedden taught at Cairo University; for the social atmosphere of the times, as well as the difference between Personal Landscape, which looked toward Greece, and another Cairo-based wartime publication, Salamander, which “looked towards France,” see Cooper, Cairo in the War 1939–1945, 152 passim. See also Fedden’s Egypt: Land of the Valley. 14. Fedden, “Introduction: An Anatomy of Exile,” 9–10. I draw for these comments on the chapter on Durrell in my “Alexandria Archive,” 220. Diboll’s 2004 book, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet in Its Egyptian Contexts, which I became aware of after filing my dissertation, also refers to this; see 243–45. 15. Fedden, “Introduction: An Anatomy of Exile,” 10, 11. 16. Ibid., 11. 17. On these two texts, see Halim, “On Being an Alexandrian” and “Alexandria Re-inscribed.” Al-‘Aris, Youssef Chahine, 164, compares Iskindiriyya . . . Lih? and The Alexandria Quartet. 18. Forster’s two Alexandrian books were cited by the Personal Landscape group; apart from Durrell’s use of Forster, Liddell, later to write Cavafy’s biography, draws on both Alexandria and Pharos and Pharillon in an essay titled “Cavafy,” included in Personal Landscape, 100–107; see the note on Forster, 102. 19. Fedden, “Introduction: An Anatomy of Exile,” 14. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 14. 22. Bowen, in “Many Histories Deep,” also discusses the place of Greece in the texts of the Personal Landscape group. See also Butler, Return to Alexandria, 60–61. 23. Durrell and Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, 187. 24. Durrell, Collected Poems, 72. 25. Ibid., 73. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. The “Epilogue in Alexandria,” in Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell, 142, closely echoes the poem. See also Herbrechter, Lawrence Durrell, 258. 28. Lyons and Antrim, “The First of the New Romantics,” 107. According to the editor’s head note, this interview with Durrell took place in 1970 and was first published in 1971.

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29. Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 5–6, 168, 169, 171, 172, 74, 176–77, 183– 94, 197, 19, 200, 202–7. “Durrell’s real debt is to Forster’s Cavafian vision”; 171. But she also notes differences between Cavafy and Durrell. Prior to Pinchin’s study, Katope’s 1969 article, “Cavafy and Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet,” had also presented painstaking commentary on the quotations from and allusions to the Alexandrian Greek poet in that text. For a study that nuances this “influence” account somewhat, see Hirst’s “‘The Old Poet of the City.’” 30. See Pierce, “The ‘one book there, a Plutarch,’” 79–92. 31. See Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 187–91. Hirst, in “‘The Old Poet of the City,’” 75, also comments on this. 32. On the many materializations of Antony and Cleopatra in the Quartet, see Peirce, “‘One other gaudy night,’” 101–16, as well as Pinchin, Alexandria Still, 170–74, and her article “Durrell’s Fatal Cleopatra,” 229–36. 33. See, for example, Darley and Capodistria’s conversation in the Cervonis’s library with its many manuscripts, among them the Cavafy ones, in Balthazar, 207–9. 34. Among them are Justine, the first novel that is supposed to have been written by the character Darley, the “interlinear” to Justine, being comments by Balthazar on the Justine manuscript which constitute the pretext for Balthazar, Arnauti’s amply quoted novel Moeurs, Justine and Nessim’s respective diaries (the former, in fact, later to turns out to be discarded notes for Arnauti’s novel), and Pursewarden’s trilogy, God Is a Humorist. See Kellman, “Sailing to Alexandria.” See also Zahlan’s notion of “palimpsest” as narrative technique in “City as Carnival, Narrative as Palimpsest in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet.” 35. The shifting, layered unfolding of motives in the Quartet has been likened to an archaeological excavation: “The whole of The Alexandria Quartet is an archaeological excavation of motives, in which it is difficult to get down to the layer below without destroying the layer we are at, and in which the very bottom layer is perhaps never reached at all,” writes Fraser in Lawrence Durrell: A Study, 121. 36. See, for example, Kehagiogoulou, “Modern Greek Orientalism.” 37. Much of the criticism of Durrell’s attitude toward Greeks centers on his sojourn in Cyprus and his Bitter Lemons. See Roessel, “‘Something to Stand the Government in Good Stead’: Lawrence Durrell and the Cyprus Review”; Calotychos, “‘Lawrence Durrell, the Bitterest Lemon?’: Cyps and Brits Loving Each Other to Death in Cyprus, 1953–57.” 38. Manzalaoui, “Curate’s Egg,” 252. 39. Ibid., 257. 40. I discuss Durrell’s possibly deliberate restructuring of the cityscape with reference to the feminization of Alexandria in my 1992 MA thesis “The City as Feminine Principle,” 35–38. The urban planning of modern Alexandria, although it does not follow that of the ancient city, except in the case of a few main streets, is not very different from the grille plan. 41. In Durrell’s substituting for the equestrian statue of Muhammad ‘Ali, the so-called founder of modern Egypt and “reviver” of Alexandria, the

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Soma of Alexander the Great, itself of unknown location, there is an ironical, if coincidental, parallel to the historiographical emplotment that aligns the modern Albanian ruler with the Macedonian world conqueror. 42. See Forster, “The Foundation Plan” in AHG 10–12; he does not use the term grille-plan but nevertheless describes planning of the city along Greek lines. 43. McPherson, Moulids of Egypt (Egyptian Saints-Days). 44. Manzalaoui, “Curate’s Egg,” 254. For the relevant episode, see Clea 149. For Durrell’s meeting with McPherson in Cairo, and the similarities between the author of Moulids of Egypt and Joshua Scobie in the Quartet, see MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, 254–55. 45. See Godshalk, “Some Sources of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet,” 361– 74; MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, 391–92; and Bowen, “Many Histories Deep,” 165–67. 46. The 1969 film adaptation, Justine, directed by Cukor, indulges in eclectic Orientalist elements, including footage of Egyptian archaeological sites, such as temples and the Sphinx, and presents stock “native street scenes” (as in Durrell’s “native quarter”) that were apparently filmed in Tunisia. These, together with the implausible (for an Egyptian context) traditional garb, the fragments of Arabic speech either mispronounced or rendered in a North African accent, as well as the belly-dancing scenes, lend the film the visual simulacral quality of a Hollywood blueprint of the Orient. Although it carries the title of the first volume, the film—“Based on ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ by Lawrence Durrell,” as the credits read—abridges and redacts the entire Quartet, taking the license of adaption to edit out significant portions of the narrative. 47. See, for example, Massoud’s comparative study “Mahfuz’s Miramar: A Foil to Durrell’s Quartet,” where she argues that the Quartet is to be read as a comedy, in contrast to Miramar, which is to be read as a tragedy, and brings out the ramifications of these contrasts. 48. See the chapter “After the Fact” in Bowen’s “Many Histories Deep,” 162–85. Bowen has analyzed the Orientalist intertextuality in the Quartet at some length, and hence, in terms of Mountolive and Pursewarden, I prefer to look at the aesthetic aspect of their descriptions. Where I discuss an Orientalist source is in Durrell’s borrowings from S. H. Leeder’s Modern Sons of the Pharaohs. I refer in this sentence to Said, Orientalism, 23, 176-77. 49. Manzalaoui, “Curate’s Egg,” 254. 50. In what follows, I draw on both Said’s study of Orientalism and Bhabha’s argument about “mimicry” and “menace.” 51. There are also some scenes that take place on the North Coast, in Burg al-‘Arab, as well as brief references to Darley’s spell teaching in Upper Egypt. 52. The references to these calendars occur mostly in the context of Scobie’s posthumous transmutation into a saint shared by Copts and Muslims; see Clea. But here, too, Durrell misunderstands the workings of the lunar calendar; see, on this point, Manzalaoui, “Curate’s Egg,” 256. See also my discussion of Mountolive’s visit to the “Arab quarter,” below.

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53. The few exceptions are Scobie who, although an Englishman, lives on Tatwig Street, probably on that side of it quite close to Anfushi, the “native quarter,” and Justine who grew up in Attarine but whose childhood memories are channeled through her first husband, the French novelist Arnauti. The carnival, unlike the mulid into which European characters occasionally stray despite its being an indigenous Coptic or Muslim event, is deliberately marked as a Western, elite festival—“The carnival in Alexandria is a purely social affair—having no calendar relationship to the other religious festivals of the city. I suppose it must have been instituted by the three or four great Catholic families in the place—perhaps vicariously they enjoyed through it a sense of identity with the other side of the Mediterranean. . . . The disguise gives them [the carnival-goers] all a gloomy fanatical uniformity of outline which startles the white-robed Egyptians and fills them with alarm” (B 188). 54. Sobhy, “The Fabulator’s Perspective on Egypt,” 88. Sobhy’s reading of the Quartet’s Alexandria, including the feminization, is framed by Said’s Orientalism. 55. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 3; see also 4–8. 56. Herbrechter, Lawrence Durrell, 265–66. Herbrechter covers a few of the examples I provide, above, of the apparently dual structure of the city. On the Fanonian compartmentalized structure of space in the Quartet, see also Bowen, “Many Histories Deep,” 167–69. 57. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 225, 234. 58. Ibid., 235. 59. Ibid. Freud’s description of this agency, “which has the function of observing and criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship within the mind, and which we become aware of as our ‘conscience’” (235), corresponds to the superego, as the editor of the volume points out (236). 60. Ibid., 241, 236. 61. There is also the whole—much satirized—attempt by Justine’s first husband to analyze her and have her receive treatment—for the “check” caused by her rape as a child. 62. For a study that takes Durrell at his word regarding his narrative experimentation with Einstein’s relativity theory, see Vipond, “Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet,” 54–68. I tend to agree with Manzalaoui that the experiment with relativity does not work; see his “Curate’s Egg,” 251–52. 63. Pecora, Households of the Soul, 54. 64. Pinchin, in Alexandria Still, 172, makes this suggestion: “these dreams may have been fictitious, created to fool Darley, but they help to set the tone of a novel in which one constantly feels the weight and mythic grandeur of history behind the acts of ordinary men.” I am not sure I agree that the dreams are fictitious. In the omnisciently narrated Mountolive, we are told that Nessim, in his anxiety about the ramifications of his underground political activities, “was possessed, assailed by the dreams of his childhood, erupting now without reason or consequence, almost taking over his waking life. He consulted Balthazar, but was of course unable to let him share the true preoccupations which burdened him, so that his wily friend suggested that he should record the dreams whenever possible on paper, and this was done” (M 219). Presumably these are the notes that Nessim gives to Darley

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at the beginning of Justine (16), as distinct from the bound volume of notes discarded from Arnauti’s novel that Justine had given Darley as her diary (M 207–8). 65. I offer a Jungian reading of the Quartet, focused on Clea, in “The City as Feminine Principle.” See also Sobhy, “The Fabulator’s Perspective.” 66. The phrase seems to be borrowed from Forster, AHG 5. 67. Pinchin, in Alexandria Still, 171, reads here in the dreams “echoes of [Forster’s essay in Pharos and Pharillon] ‘The Return from Siwa.’” 68. The scenes where Nessim goes to meet Justine and Balthazar in the Museum depict colonnades and arches, indicating that this is more likely to be the ancient Mouseion; however, earlier in Justine, 101, mention was made of a nocturnal Cabal meeting in the Graeco-Roman Museum. Durrell may well be merging the two spaces in keeping with the surrealistic quality of Nessim’s “historical dreams.” 69. See Fabian, Time and the Other. 70. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 241. 71. In a letter to Henry Miller from Alexandria in 1945, Durrell writes of a Cabala group and a Mr. Baltazian who, needless to say, may well have gone into the making of Balthazar. See Durrell and Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, 201. 72. On Gnosticism in Durrell, see Herbrechter, Lawrence Durrell, and Sobhy, “Lawrence Durrell’s Heraldic Universe.” 73. For a valorizing reading of Balthazar’s role in the Quartet, see Hawthorne, “The Alexandria Quartet: The Homosexual as Teacher/Guide.” 74. The description of the vagueness of Scobie’s manservant who now tends the shrine, and how he has altogether forgotten who the Englishman really was, is a representative instance of the mockery with which Durrell treats popular syncretism in the Quartet. 75. See Halim, “The Alexandria Archive,” 305–33, 338–39, 357. 76. Pinchin, “Durrell’s Fatal Cleopatra,” 232, 231, 234. 77. Boone, “Mappings of Male Desire in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet,” 77, 80. Concerning the feminization of Alexandria in the Quartet and more generally representations of the city, see Halim, “The City as Feminine Principle,” “The Alexandria Archive,” and “Forster in Alexandria.” 78. Adam, “Alexandria and after—Lawrence Durrell in Egypt,” 497. Emphasis added. 79. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. I cite Cromer and adduce Bhabha to make these points about Levantinism with relevance to Alexandria in the chapter on Durrell in my “Alexandria Archive”; see specifically 237–42, 288. In “Latter-day Levantinism,” I revisit the subject at length. See also Hochberg, In Spite of Partition, 44–72. Her book and Ammiel Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs have deployed “Levantinism” to address Arab-Jewish issues. 80. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. 81. Quotation from Macaulay in Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 87. 82. Ibid. 83. Evelyn Baring (Earl of Cromer), Modern Egypt, pt. 2, 228. 84. Ibid., 239.

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85. Ibid., 228, 239, 244. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., 216. 88. Ibid., 218. 89. Ibid., 218–19. 90. Ibid., 219. 91. Ibid., 128, 246–47, 249. 92. I rely here on Oppenheim, “Levantine,” 1098–99; quotation from 1099. For an Italian etymology of the word, see the title essay in Lewis’s From Babel to Dragomans, 25. Despite ideological issues with this essay, its discussions of etymology and the dragoman figure are useful. 93. See Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 25–30. 94. For a critique of Durrell’s take on “Levantinism,” see Manzalaoui, “Curate’s Egg,” 258–59. Manzalaoui, however, fails to note that the category “Levantine,” in the hands of writers like Durrell, speaks to the issue of mimicry and menace. 95. Darley, in any case, reiterates Forster’s historiographical paradigm when he speaks of “the Hellenistic capital of the bankers and cotton-visionaries—all those European bagmen whose enterprise had re-ignited and ratified Alexander’s dream of conquest after the centuries of dust and silence which Amr had imposed upon it” (C 34). 96. Said, Orientalism, 49–73. 97. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 91. 98. Herbrechter, in Lawrence Durrell, 269–70, albeit not tackling this passage, makes the same point about the cosmopolitanism of Durrell’s Alexandria being confined to the privileged classes as indicated by the elision of the cosmopolitanism of underprivileged quarters, which he sees as a function of Durrell’s exilic and colonial identification with “Europhile” Alexandrians. 99. See on this point, Bowen, “Many Histories Deep,” 164; and Zahlan, “City as Carnival, Narrative as Palimpsest,” 45. 100. While it is possible to read The Alexandria Quartet as a thriller or spy novel, I am not aware of any critical studies that situate it in this genre. Two studies that deal with Egypt as the setting of pulp fiction and thrillers, neither of which, unfortunately, tackles the Quartet, are Simon, The Middle East in Crime Fiction; and El Wakil, “Egypt in American and British Popular Fiction.” 101. It is during a vacation in that most metropolitan of European cities, Paris, replete with gallery visits, that Mountolive introduces his Coptic friend to Pursewarden, then on his way to Egypt. Pursewarden also at one point fulfills the commission by Nessim’s mother, Leila, to write an epitaph for an uncle of hers who, she says, “was a great lover of England and the English language which he knew almost better than his own,” and who, “in his will [has] left instructions that an epitaph in English should be placed upon his tomb, in prose or verse, and if possible original” (M 169). 102. See Zahlan, “The Destruction of the Imperial Self in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet,” 3–12. Zahlan analyzes the genealogies of these and other Englishmen in the Quartet.

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103. Said, Orientalism, 78–79; quotation from 78. 104. Ibid., 22. I reproduce portions from my 2004 discussion of Durrell in Halim, “The Alexandria Archive,” 255. Diboll, also in 2004, adduces Said in discussing Mountolive; see Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet in Its Egyptian Contexts, 174 passim. 105. Said, Orientalism, 23. 106. See Halim, “The Alexandria Archive,” 253, 256. 107. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 92. 108. See, for example: “graceful Nessim and his mother were familiars of spirit, belonging to the same intense world of intelligence and sensibility. . . . His English and French were perfect, impeccable as his manners, graceful and strong as his physique” (M 22). 109. “He did, of course, meet both the brothers on the evening of that first day, for Nessim appeared in the afternoon from Alexandria and Mountolive instantly recognized in him a person of his own kind, a person whose life was a code. They responded to each other nervously, like a concord in music” (M 26). 110. It will be years later that Leila will confess to him in a letter her apprehensions in that respect: “‘It was a shock, I mean, to suddenly see Nessim’s naked body floating in the mirror, the slender white back so like yours and the loins. I sat down and, to my surprise, burst into tears, because I wondered suddenly whether my attachment for you wasn’t lodged here somewhere among the feeble incestuous desires of the inner heart’” (M 52). 111. In “City as Carnival, Narrative as Palimpsest,” 39, Zahlan also argues for reading Mountolive and Nessim as doubles, although the emphasis of her argument is different. Pinchin, in “Durrell’s Fatal Cleopatra,” 234, notes that “Leila has incestuous links to Nessim and Narouz” and speaks of “Mountolive and Nessim, his true double.” 112. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 235. 113. Ibid., 226. 114. Pinchin, in Alexandria Still, 174, comments that “Cleopatra was, for Durrell, the blackness that consumes, the earth, Alexandria, Justine— the feminine principle with which the artist must contend—and reality, the alternatively passive and treacherous queen each Antony must love and fight to the death.” 115. Bowen, “Many Histories Deep,” 176, 177. In his discussion of this episode which takes Mountolive from his encounter with Leila to the “Arab quarter” and the child brothel, 176–78, Bowen enumerates other Orientalists who sought to “penetrate Oriental space in disguise,” to which “list” Mountolive “adds his name,” 176. 116. On the uncanny in relation to the notion of “survivals,” as premised in Freud on ontogenesis recapitulating phylogenisis, see Pecora, Households of the Soul, 53. 117. For a brief overview of the stereotype of cannibalism, see Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 58–59. 118. Bowen, in “Many Histories Deep,” 178, also dwells on the unmasking of Mountolive as a stripping of his identity.

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119. Ibid., 167, 17. 120. Zahlan, “City as Carnival, Narrative as Palimpsest,” 35, 39. 121. Ibid., 44–45. See also Lewis, “Lawrence Durrell and the Postcolonial Context,” which reads the Quartet as “compatible with a postcolonial point of view”; 33. See, similarly, Diboll, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet in Its Egyptian Contexts, 293–336. 122. Quotations from Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” 104; and McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism,’” 89, respectively. 123. Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” 111–12; and McClintock, “The Angel of Progress,” 97. 124. Bowen, in “Many Histories Deep,” 173, comments that Pursewarden’s recipe for using the “foreign communities” as a “fifth column” and setting up Jewry as “the power behind the scenes” is underwritten by an “assumption [that] is patently neocolonial.” He nevertheless locates in the Quartet the beginnings of postcolonial discourse. Bolton, in Personal Landscapes, makes a bid, via Bhabha’s notion of the “Third Space,” for reclaiming the British poet-exiles in Egypt, including Durrell, as postcolonial figures; see esp. xv–xvi. 125. In his letter to Mountolive pleading on behalf of Nessim, Pursewarden writes, “Have I explained that one of the major characteristics of Egyptian nationalism is the gradually growing envy and hate of the ‘foreigners’—the half-million or so of non-Muslims here? And that the moment full Egyptian sovereignty was declared the Moslems started in to bully and expropriate them? The brains of Egypt, as you know, is its foreign community. . . . The Armenians, Copts, Jews—they are all feeling the sharpening edge of this hate” (M 107; emphasis added). 126. MacNiven, in Lawrence Durrell, 391, cites among a list of books Durrell had with him while writing the Quartet, this and two other books by S. H. Leeder. On Durrell’s use of Leeder’s book as a source, see also Godshalk, “Some Sources of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet,” 370–71. Godshalk brings out Durrell’s indebtedness to Leeder in his description of the Hosnanis’ country house and lifestyle, as well as in the sketches of Nessim’s wedding and Narouz’s funeral; the critic does not, however, tackle Durrell’s weaving of the Coptic plot through exaggeration of the community’s grievances that Leeder cites in his dated book. 127. Leeder’s book is in some sense a riposte to Lane’s denigration of the Copts: “Lane’s ignorance of the Copts, and the injustice of his characterisation, based on very slight evidence, may be put down to the secretive cunning of those Copts with whom he had dealings. While the Moslems gave Lane some confidence (although I feel perfectly sure they never were in doubt that it was an Englishman in native guise who was taking such an abnormal interest in them), he only succeeded in gaining anything like familiar speech with one Copt—a mean soul, whose abuse of his fellow-Christians carries the bitterness of its injustice to this day. A great deal of the morbid prejudice against the Copts which marks the attitude of many Englishmen in Egypt of to-day takes its rise from Lane’s work, to which all inquiries about the Egyptian people are referred.” See Leeder, Modern Sons of the Pharaohs, 306.

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128. See, for example, Modern Sons of the Pharaohs, 309, where Leeder chastises certain English authors for putting out the idea that the Egyptian Christians are “‘the most civilised of the natives,’” which exacerbates tensions between Muslims and Copts for which the British policy, in his view, is responsible. Ironically, Durrell, despite quarrying much material from Leeder, would also treat the Copts in his novel as more “civilised” than the Muslims. 129. See Leeder, Modern Sons of the Pharaohs, vii–ix. 130. Forster, “Modern Sons of the Pharaohs,” first published in the Egyptian Mail on August 18, 1918; reprinted in Forster, UEE 75–77; quotation from 76. 131. The two chapters from Leeder’s book used by Durrell are “Does the Ancient Race of the Pharaohs still survive in Egypt?” and “The Egyptian Christians and British Rule.” The relevant pages in Mountolive are 39–45; passages in these pages paraphrase or reproduce passages in Leeder’s Modern Sons of the Pharaohs, 305–6, 309, 311–12, 318, 333–36. 132. The passage is taken over, with some stylistic editing, from Leeder, Modern Sons of the Pharaohs, 336. Durrell may have put in the reference to the book and “the words of an Englishman” (M 43) in tacit acknowledgment of a source he has used. But it is nevertheless interesting to note that whereas the passage in Leeder’s book begins, “The Copts declare that whereas when the British took control . . . ,” in Durrell the passage begins with “When the British took control . . . ” M 43. It is ironical that whereas Leeder resorts to the authority of “native informants,” as it were, when addressing an English public on the issue, Durrell has a Copt recite, to an English guest, the very same passage, from which the voice of fellow Copts has been removed— to clinch his point on the authority of an English author. Durrell also has Mountolive, in an echo of Leeder, implicitly question Lane, his authority on Egypt. 133. Leeder, Modern Sons of the Pharaohs, 309. 134. The date of Mountolive’s first visit to Egypt is not given in Mountolive, but it is safe to assume that the gap between it and his return as ambassador of Britain to Egypt after 1936, given too his many postings in the interim, would be roughly about two decades. In a conversation in Mountolive concerning the havoc created by the replacement of the High Commission with the embassy after the signing of the treaty, the time in which the action is taking place is said to be about one year and a half after the signing of the treaty, hence late 1937 (see M 90). 135. Carter, The Copts in Egyptian Politics, 61. “The Coptic role in the revolution was highly visible and substantial, and Copts were involved in all its facets: demonstrations, strikes, propaganda, terrorism, organisation and policy-making,” 62. 136. Behrens-Abouseif, “The Political Situation of the Copts, 1798– 1923,” 199. 137. Carter, The Copts in Egyptian Politics, 72. 138. Behrens-Abouseif, “British Occupation of Egypt,” 421–22. 139. Carter, The Copts in Egyptian Politics, 73.

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140. Ibid., 73–74. 141. Ibid., 74–75. 142. See Carter, The Copts in Egyptian Politics, 76. 143. Herbrechter, in Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity, 267, touches on the British policy of divide and rule. 144. Diboll, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet in Its Egyptian Contexts, 164. 145. Ibid., 190. 146. Ibid., 191. See also 190. 147. Ibid., 321, 329, 327. See also 322. 148. See Leeder, Modern Sons of the Pharaohs, 312: “A common nickname for the Copts by the Moslems is ‘gins Pharoony,’ from genus Pharaonicus— used by men to their fellow-countrymen, who themselves boast of being Arabs and sons of Arabs.” 149. MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, xiv. 150. See Durrell’s letter to Miller sent from Nicosia in summer 1956, where he informs him that he has just finished a novel titled Justine in Durrell and Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, 303–4. 151. See the chapter about Durrell in Cyprus in MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, 385–442; quotation from 410. 152. Roessel, “‘Something to Stand the Government in Good Stead,’” 38, 41, 42, 43. 153. MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, 423. I have not been able to find further references about this Cypriot-Zionist connection. Having given a presentation at the Seventh International Lawrence Durrell Conference, organized by the International Lawrence Durrell Society at Avignon, France, in 1992, I, as well as David Roessel, critiqued the politics of Durrell’s representation of both Copts and Muslims in the Quartet, including the “conspiracy” plot. 154. Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, 19–20. Gaston Zananiri, a Greek Catholic on his father’s side—his mother, of Jewish freethinking background, converted to Christianity—wrote about Semitism and moved in Zionist circles in Egypt and Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century, an aspect that merits analysis elsewhere. See Zananiri, “Communication sur le Sémitisme” and Entre mer et désert, 185–209. Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 2, 702, cites the connection between Zananiri and Zionism and relates this context to the conspiracy in Durrell’s Quartet, esp. Nessim. Ilbert rejects any historical basis to a Coptic involvement. Haag, Alexandria, 255-56, suggests that Balthazar is modeled on Zananiri. Elliott Colla, e-mail message to author, December 3, 2007, sees the conspiracy in terms of the Lavon affair. 155. Durrell, “Coptic Poem,” in Personal Landscape, 82–83. Fathi, in a review article about Alexandrian literature, comments on the racism in this poem as indicative of Durrell’s dissimulation in the Quartet and makes mention of Coptic anti-Zionist stances; see “al-Mashhad al-Sakandari fi ‘Uyun Urubbiyya,” 6. Manzalaoui, in “Curate’s Egg,” 258, astutely remarks, “No one before Mr. Durrell had thought of the grotesque notion of a Copt who thinks that the creation of Israel is a boon to Middle Eastern Christians. Is Mr. Durrell not aware of the large number of Christians among the million

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Arab refugees? I suspect so, since ‘Egyptian’ and ‘Arab’ in his vocabulary, apparently exclude ‘Christian.’” 156. Bowker, in Through the Dark Labyrinth, 313, indicates that Durrell was unsatisfied with the way the film company kept changing the script. The film adaptation, Judith (also known as Conflict), is even more pronouncedly propagandist. It opens not with Judith being smuggled into Palestine but with a discussion among Zionists about how to get hold of Gustav Schiller, not on account of his Nazi history, but to prevent him from aiding Arabs with tanks in their cause against the Zionists, this being the reason Judith is summoned to Palestine. There are scenes supposedly set in Damascus, the hunt for Schiller having been transposed there from Cairo in Durrell’s story. We hardly see any Palestinians, except as silhouettes, in Palestinian headgear, in scenes of combat. There is thus no representation of Palestinians. Zionist propaganda is seen in such statements as, “Beyond that hill is the Syrian border. Sometimes they fire at us just to annoy us, sometimes they mean business” (Aaron Stein, played by Peter Finch, to Judith) and, on the declaration of the state of Israel, “Here we are, one small nation with a small, ill-equipped army surrounded by six nations with six armies, all very well-equipped” (an army man to his team). Among the plot details altered in the film version—which carries the credit line “From a story by Lawrence Durrell”—are details concerning the hunt for Judith’s husband and the circumstances of her obtaining information about his whereabouts, her relationship with Major Lawton in the Durrell story being edited out in the film where he gives her the file as a gift. 157. Durrell, “Judith,” April 2, 1966, 77. 158. Ibid., March 19, 1966, 84; March 26, 1966, 64. 159. MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, 540. 160. Bowen, “Many Histories Deep,” 180. 161. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell, 125. 162. In one instance at least in Mountolive (1958), which is supposed to be set in the late 1930s, on the eve of World War II, the narrator, speaking of Memlik’s house, remarks, “Today in the fifties the house Memlik Pasha has become famous in the remotest capitals of the world chiefly because the distinctive architecture of the Banks which bear their founder’s name” (M 253)—a reference to the time of writing, which would further encourage readers to project the events onto Egypt after decolonization. 163. Much has been written on various aspects of this issue; in this limited space, references that can be cited on earlier stages of the issue are Atia, “The Cold Shoulder”; and Langohr, “Frosty Reception for US Religious Freedom Commission in Egypt.” On the visit, in January 2010, of members of the USCIRF to Egypt to investigate, among other things, the attack on a church in Naja Hammadi on the eve of Coptic Orthodox Christmas, see ‘Ali, “Lajnat al-Hurriyyat al-Diniyya Tabhath Idkhal Misr ila Qa’imat alDuwal allati Tafrid Qiyudan ‘ala al-Aqalliyyat.’” Concerning the refusal by the late pope and patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Shenouda III, of a request for a meeting with members of the USCIRF, see Bayyumi, “al-Baba Shinuda Yasta‘id li-l-Safar ila Amrika.” See also United States Commission on International Religious Freedom: Annual Report 2010, 227–40.

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164. Among the many manifestations of interfaith solidarity during the 25 January Revolution were the Muslim-Christian simultaneous prayers for the martyrs, the Christians forming a cordon with their bodies around Muslims at prayer, and vice versa, and the slogans pairing names from the two religious communities. I adapt here some sentences from my contribution to the “Writers in the Revolution” Ahram Online series.

4. “polypolis” and levantine camp 1. De Zogheb, diary, entry of November 3, 1957, in English. CEAlex. This chapter is a revised version of an article titled “Latter-day Levantinism, or ‘Polypolis’ in the Libretti of Bernard de Zogheb,” published in California Italian Studies. The article was published in mid-February 2010, and it was a few months afterward, I believe, that two books addressing, in rather different ways, the Levant were published: Khuri-Makdisi’s The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism and Mansel’s Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean. I have not altered any part of this chapter in response to these two books. In revising the article “Latter-day Levantinism” for this chapter, I have elaborated and modified certain points, in part to reflect additional material I obtained pertaining to Bernard de Zogheb in the James Merrill papers archived in the Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections. 2. The only example of the usage of the adjective “lifantini” in Arabic that I know of is by Idris, who associates it with fraudulence; see his “Nahwa Masrah Misri,” in al-Farafir, 23. In a collection of essays on Egypt and the Mediterranean in the modern period, one historian uses the geographic label “bilad al-lifant,” meaning the countries of the Levant, which he glosses as an English word that covers Egypt. See Bakr, “Mina’ Dimyat wa Dawruhu fi al-‘Ilaqat al-Tujariyya bayn Misr wa-Bilad al-Lifant Khilal al-Qarn alThamin ‘Ashr” (The Damietta Port and Its Role in Commercial Relations between Egypt and the Levant Countries in the Eighteenth Century), esp. 58. Indeed, a review of Mansel’s book translates the “Levant” of his title as “Sharq,” meaning “East,” the title of the article itself offering a gloss translatable as “East Mediterranean.” See Bitar, “Baha’ al-Sharq al-Mutawassiti wa Kawarithuhu.” 3. For the outlines of Bernard de Zogheb’s life, I have drawn extensively on my profile of the librettist, “Bernard de Zogheb: Waiting for the Zervudachis,” published in Al-Ahram Weekly in 1996. A slightly abridged version of this article was reprinted under the same title in Mediterraneans, also in 1996. All subsequent references to the article will be to the Ahram Weekly version. See also Halim, “Against the Dying of the Light,” an obituary for the librettist. For material that was not included in the profile, I also draw on my recorded interviews with de Zogheb in spring 1996. Prior to writing the profile, I had interviewed de Zogheb in the first of a series of articles I wrote between 1995 to 1998 in Al-Ahram Weekly in an effort to save from demolition the mansion formerly owned by an Italian Jewish family, the Ambrons, in Alexandria, the top story of which Durrell had lived in, and a small villa

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in the garden, originally built as an atelier for Amelia Ambron, in which the Egyptian artist Effat Nagui resided for the last thirty years of her life. In the course of investigating the cultural and architectural history associated with the houses as well as Durrell’s residence in Alexandria (including material on the Alexandrian artist Clea Badaro, one of the sources for the Clea of The Alexandria Quartet, and interviews with Paul Gotch, Durrell’s roommate in the Alexandria years, and with the novelist’s Alexandrian second wife, Eve Durrell), I had interviewed de Zogheb about the Ambrons— including their daughter Gilda (mentioned twice in the Quartet, as I noted) and son Emilio, both artists—and also published a reproduction of a portrait by Amelia Ambron of Princess Emina Halim that was part of the librettist’s collection. See, for examples of this series of articles, Halim, “Raising the Roof” (1995) and “A Poet in the Turret, Serpents in the Garden” (1998). It was subsequently that Haag wrote about this material in his Alexandria: City of Memory in the course of discussing Durrell’s time in Alexandria. On the Zogheb’s origins, I have also referred to The Zoghebs: An Alexandrian Saga, which assembles three main texts: “Alexandria Memories,” by Patrice de Zogheb; “The Zogheb Saga,” a memoir by Janie Sinano Horwitz translated from the French by Carole Escoffey; and “From Abukir to Alamein,” an extended letter by Christian Ayoub Sinano to his friend Pierre Riches. See specifically “Alexandria Memories,” 16–17; and “From Abukir to Alamein,” 121. I obtained a copy of the unpublished French original of Horwitz’s memoir, “La Saga Zogheb,” from Stéphane Olry. For convenience, subsequent citations from Horwitz will be to the text as published in The Zoghebs. On the Debbanés, see Dahir, al-Hijra al-Lubnaniyya ila Misr, 351, 378–79; Ayoub Sinano, “Levant,” 109; and Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 1, 81, 83, 97, 117, 270, 418; as well as the obituary of a scholar from the family by C. S., “Max Debbane (1893–1965).” I also thank Christine Ayoub for providing me with a copy of the Bacos family tree. It should be clear that any biographical material on de Zogheb that I cite is primarily for the puposes of dicussing the texts of this unkown writer. I have refrained from citing material in de Zogheb’s correspondence with Merrill in WU pertaining to his private life and to his relationship to his immediate family that does not contribute to understanding his work. 4. On the Zoghebs’ title, see Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb”; and Ayoub Sinano, “Levant,” 109. Concerning the librettist’s family’s loss of fortune, I rely on Olry, in interview, Paris, January 10, 2009; see also Halim, “Against the Dying of the Light,” based on interviews with the librettist in 1996. For revues by Georges de Zogheb, see Lumbroso and de Zogheb, De Revue en Revue, presented in Alexandria on September 25, 1915. SO. Two other typescripts of libretti were in the Georges de Zogheb revues folder currently in SO collection, neither of which has a title or dramatis personae page, though both carry notes in Bernard de Zogheb’s handwriting, suggesting that one was held in Alexandria, possibly in the 1950s, while the other may have been performed in the late 1940s or early 1950s, no venue given. The collection of Jacky Lumbroso Nimr—Mario Lumbroso’s daughter and a close friend of Bernard de Zogheb’s—includes a program for a revue titled Galette et

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Gratin, performed in Alexandria on November 24, 1917, in which Georges de Zogheb doubled in several roles, and a libretto titled La Revue des Astres, authored by “XYZ,” carrying the handwritten note “Chez Mme Isabelle Michala par Ziquet [Georges de Zogheb] et les Lumbroso.” JLN. 5. See de Zogheb’s comments on his art in Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb.” The CEAlex collection contains two of de Zogheb’s list books, one dating roughly from 1943 to 1973, the other from around 1982 to 1998. In his diary of 1957, at the end of each month he draws a list of readings and films and plays watched. CEAlex. On his art teacher, Andrée Sasson, see the note by de Zogheb quoted in Boulad-Ayoub’s coauthored “Préface” to her husband’s posthumously published book, Ayoub Sinano’s Piera de Pola, 9. Sasson had given these lessons to de Zogheb and his childhood friend, the artist Adrien de Menasce (1925–95), the dedicatee of Le Sorelle with whom the librettist had initially started composing lyrical repartees before writing his first operetta. See Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb.” In his diary of 1954, entry of February 17, de Zogheb says he spent the afternoon at the opening of an exhibition at the Atelier in which he, Sasson, and de Menasce participated. CEAlex. According to the biographical note on de Zogheb in the catalogue for his exhibition, “Il Mediterraneo di Bernard de Zogheb” (Italian Cultural Institute in Alexandria, March 19 to 27, 1997), he also studied art at Saint Martins in London. SO. On the profit he made from posters and cards, see, for example, de Zogheb, diary, entry of February 20, 1954, and diary, entries of March 11 and July 10 and 11, 1958. CEAlex. Also, de Zogheb to Ayoub Sinano, November 10 [1948?]. CA. 6. The SO collection includes four photocopied texts, all in French and by-lined by de Zogheb. Of these articles, all undated and with no note on place of publication, two mention the Réforme in the text. Like “Voyage à travers le temps . . . ,” “A qui rêvent les jeunes filles,” another “reportage photographique et fantaisiste de Bernard de Zogheb,” which refers to La Réforme Illustrée in the text, follows the collage-sketch format to represent what each young woman would have liked to be—a tigress, a model, a surgeon, an opera singer, Venus, etc. “Recueilli dans un vieil album,” referring to La Réforme Illustrée, is a series of anonymous photographs of young girls with the dare that if the reader cannot identify at least five, he is not “un Alexandrin mondain” (Alexandrian socialite). “Vernissage” is undated and there is no reference in the text to the publication. However, de Zogheb’s 1954 diary has several entries where he talks about this feature article; see entries of December 2, 3, and 4. CEAlex. For a book commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of La Réforme, see Le Livre d’Or du journal la Réforme 1895– 1945, ed. Adm and Avellino. For an article on this volume, see Tadié, “La Vie culturelle francophone à Alexandrie (1895–1950) d’après La Réforme.” The Syro-Lebanese count Aziz de Saab had bought the newspaper in 1923 according to his daughter, a friend of de Zogheb’s, then launched the Sunday edition of the newspaper, La Réforme Illustrée. Lucette de Saab, interview with the author, Alexandria, November 8, 2008. 7. As quoted by his friend Pierre Riches who oversaw the publication of the Italian edition of Le Sorelle Brontë (1968) and has since tried without

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success to publish the rest of the libretti in Italy. Riches, interview with the author, New York, January 5, 2009. 8. Olry, interview with the author, Paris, January 10, 2009. 9. De Zogheb, “On Swearing,” unpublished essay, copy obtained by the author from the librettist in 1996. See also Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb.” For a reference work on the Syro-Lebanese in Egypt, see Dahir, al-Hijra alLubnaniyya ila Misr: “Hijrat al-Shawam.” For biographies of members of the Lebanese community in the country, see Yuwakim, Zilal al-Arz fi Wadi al-Nil: Lubnaniyyun fi Misr. 10. See Myers-Scotton, Duelling Languages, 3. 11. Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb.” De Zogheb had worked as a civilian in the Royal Air Force in Alexandria during World War II. 12. De Zogheb, diary, entry of March 27, 1958. CEAlex. On that usage of “les Arabes,” see Halim, “On Being an Alexandrian,” where the point is made in a broader discussion of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism in relation to the Alexandrian filmmaker Chahine, likewise originally of Syro-Lebanese origin, whose work, in Arabic, thematically overlaps with and in some ways makes a nice contrast to de Zogheb’s, for example, in the quick satirical cameo of two Levantine ladies knitting on the beach, one of whom turns to the other and says, “Les Arabes à coté rient comme s’ils étaient chez eux,” in the film Iskindiriyya . . . Lih? (Alexandria . . . Why? 1978). In the course of a study of de Zogheb’s 1954 diary, Gogny, in “Les notables alexandrins, 1924–1970: Des héritiers sans héritage,” 105, also speaks of the servants as “that other” who is “outside the field of representation.” 13. Bernard de Zogheb, diary, entries of September 26 and October 22, 1954. CEAlex. 14. Ibid., October 5 and 31. 15. De Zogheb, diary, entry of July 20, 1958. CEAlex. See also de Zogheb’s 1956 diary, esp. the entry of November 17 where he writes regarding the repercussions of the Suez War, “The Egyptians are getting their revenge on the French, english [sic] & especially the local Jews.” CEAlex. De Zogheb’s use of “colony,” a term that, as Ilbert has observed, designated nationality, in contradistinction to “community,” which referred to religion, to describe the various European ethnicities is indicative. See Ilbert, “A Certain Sense of Citizenship,” 25; and Alexandrie 1830–1930, 417–22, passim. 16. See, for example, de Zogheb to Ayoub Sinano, undated but postmarked in Paris on October 4, 1961. CA. It should be added that de Zogheb had considered settling in Athens and that financial reasons played into his decision to move back to Egypt. De Zogheb, in interview with the author, 1996, and various letters in his correspondence with Merrill. WU. 17. According to Jean-Yves Empereur, director of the Centre d’Études Alexandrines, it was de Zogheb’s wish expressed shortly before his passing in 1999 that his diaries and papers be preserved in CEAlex, to be made accessible to researchers. In my recorded interviews with de Zogheb in 1996, he had spoken of how friends of his had advised him that “When I died I should leave [the diaries] to the state or some library and not destroy” them, because they are “a record of everything that happened.” De Zogheb, in a letter to

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Merrill dated November 25, 1988, approves his letters being archived in Washington University Library. 18. Olry commenting on these locutions in interview with the author, Paris, January 10, 2009. 19. Jacky Lumbroso Nimr, e-mail communication with the author, October 1, 2009. 20. D. A. Miller, quoted in Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 67. 21. Massad, Desiring Arabs, 5, 15. 22. On the possible editing of his diaries, see de Zogheb, diary of 1957, entry of August 30, where he says he has finished copying his diary of 1944 and plans to copy the 1945 one. See also de Zogheb’s diary, entry of May 26, 1958. CEAlex. Gogny, in “Les notables alexandrins,” 99, remarks that there is hardly any introspection in the diaries. But for her, there has been no profound change in the diaries over the years; 97. 23. For references to gay and lesbian acquaintances, see de Zogheb, diary, entries of January 19, April 15, and June 3, 1958. CEAlex. 24. De Zogheb, diary, entry of March 1, 1972. CEAlex. A scrapbook the librettist kept in later years contains suggestive images and a Newsweek article about gays in Russia; see Seibert, “Another Kind of Glasnost.” De Zogheb, scrapbook. SO. 25. De Zogheb to Merrill, dated only August 29 but likely to have been written around 1970, and de Zogheb to Merrill, October 25, 1994. WU. The librettist’s letters to Merrill, it should be emphasized, contained explicit references to gays and to his own sexual preferences. 26. See, for example, the account of his 1962 trip to Spain, which has references to beat culture and a citation from “a nice beatnik poem by someone called Lawrence Ferlinghetti.” Account enclosed in a letter to Ayoub Sinano, undated but postmarked, in Paris, November 6, 1962. CA. 27. Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb.” De Zogheb attended the premieres of the two Little Players productions of his libretti. Phaedra was adapted from Racine and written with five personae in mind in keeping with the number of puppets. For the recording and image of the record sleeve of “Pheadra,” see Halim, “Latter-day Levantinism.” Merrill had offered de Zogheb a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation to write more operettas. On the Little Players team, Francis J. Peschka and W. Gordon Murdock, see O’Connor, “TV: Hand-Puppet Theater on Cable.” 28. I checked my translation of this libretto with Jennifer Newman. This libretto articulates an association between the all-male company of sailors and homosexuality. De Zogheb himself was wont to wear a sailor’s suit. See Halim, “Against the Dying of the Light”; and Terni, Suite Alessandrina, 55. There are too many references to his wearing a sailor’s suit in the librettist’s diaries to be listed. De Zogheb speaks in a letter to Merrill of an erotic association relevant to my reading. Bernard de Zogheb to James Merrill, WU. The letter is undated but is likely to have been written sometime after 1970, the date of “Stoningtonia,” which is mentioned. On Merrill and Jackson in Stonington, see Lurie’s memoir, Familiar Spirits. Merrill, in his introduction to Phaedra as printed for the Little Players’ performance, acknowledges the

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allusion to himself and his partner in “Stoningtonia,” which he describes as being “about friends in Connecticut.” See Phaedra, JH, 2. 29. See Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb.” Other publications by Ayoub Sinano include the novel Artagal, the short story collection preceded by poems, Pola de Péra suivi de Proses pour Pola, translated into English by Burnett under the title Pola de Pera, and the posthumously published Piera de Pola. 30. Liddell, Unreal City, 187. Liddell’s Unreal City unfolds over a few months, between autumn and spring, at the end of World War II, while events in Ayoub Sinano’s Artagal largely unfold in the 1940s during and after World War II. For Liddell’s earlier mentorlike role with Ayoub Sinano, see the earlier part of the correspondence between the two writers. CA. The same correspondence in later years indicates that Ayoub Sinano gave Liddell valuable information about Alexandria when he was writing Cavafy. 31. Ayoub Sinano, Artagal, 138; my translation. See also 9–10. 32. Ayoub Sinano, Artagal, 82–83; my translation. 33. Ayoub Sinano, Artagal, 201; my translation. In what appears to be a disclaimer, Liddell attempts to distance his Caesarea from the Palestinian one: he has a character ask Eugenides if he would consider going with him to Palestine at Christmas. See Liddell, Unreal City, 128. By contrast, Ayoub Sinano sets some of the key scenes in Nablos, “the ancient Neapolis, close relative of Caesarea . . . Conquered by Tyr and Sidon,” Artagal, 55. 34. Another text relevant here is “Une famille Levantine avant 1850,” an article Ayoub Sinano published in 1964, a few years after returning from France, and settling back in Alexandria, the subject of which is Bayle St. John’s 1850 account of a sojourn in Alexandria, Two Years’ Residence in a Levantine Family. After an overview interspersed with genealogical observations concerning descendants of the family the Englishman describes, Ayoub Sinano remarks that “St. John evinces no tenderness towards the Levantines whom he repeatedly treats of as a degenerate race.” Ayoub Sinano must have found St. John’s prejudices particularly close to the bone: in the last line of the lecture he reveals that he is descended from a member of the extended family that St. John depicts—although he expresses gratitude for the preservation in Two Years’ Residence of a letter written by his great-grandfather, many of Alexandria’s vestiges and documents having perished in the British bombardment of the city in 1882. Ayoub Sinano, “Une famille Levantine avant 1850,” 30, my translation; see also 24. The librettist received a copy of this article and wrote to Ayoub Sinano “pour dire Merci, Grazie, Katarkherak.” De Zogheb to Ayoub Sinano, Paris, undated, but postmarked 27 March 1964. See St. John’s Two Years’ Residence in a Levantine Family. 35. Ayoub Sinano, “Levant,” 108. All translations from this text are mine. 36. Ibid. 37. Bourdieu, Distinction, 169–226. 38. Ayoub Sinano was to acknowledge, tacitly, such elisions; see his “From Abu Kir to Alamein,” 128. 39. De Zogheb to Merrill, undated letter. WU. The letter—typed on Associated Press letterhead and starting with “Mie cari, Without a minute’s loss I reply . . . ”—would have been sent at the end of 1962 or in early 1963 as

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it addresses final revisions to Le Sorelle’s first (1963) edition, which Merrill was editing. According to Ayoub Sinano’s daughter Christine, “Habalily’s wedding” is about Lily Haba, or “Habalily,” the daughter of Horus Haba, a wealthy Copt from Upper Egypt. On the eve of her wedding, amid all the excitement, Habalily has a dream in which she “sees her betrothed, naked, advancing towards the bridal bed. Was it shock, excitement, suicide? It’s not made clear, but the story ends with one of Habalily’s younger sisters coming to wake her up the morning of her wedding day and, rushing out of the room, saying: ‘Habalily is dead.’” See Ayoub, “Foreword,” xxiv. In the note by the librettist quoted in Boulad-Ayoub’s portion of the “Préface” to Ayoub Sinano’s Piera de Pola, 9, de Zogheb explains that this “belle composition” is lost. Ayoub Sinano had given him his copy—“some fifteen of handwritten pages decorated with pressed flamboyant flowers”—which remained in a suitcase full of books and documents that the librettist had left in his Paris studio, which he was subletting, and that he was later unable to retrieve. 40. De Zogheb to Merrill, letter sent from Alexandria dated only “11 17 Nov.,” likely 1963 or 1964, since it refers to the launch of the illustrated edition of Ayoub Sinano’s Pola de Péra, WU. The phrase “Che citta e quella?” is auto-referential: it is Emiglia Brontë’s question on arrival in Brussels in Le Sorelle. See SB 12. For a similar expression of the librettist’s sentiment about Lebanon, see de Zogheb to Merrill, letter dated only “16 August,” WU. 41. Boulad-Ayoub, “Préface,” Piera de Pola, 14; my translation. The text in question, according to Boulad-Ayoub, is an unpublished short story. 42. In a biographical vein, I would note that de Zogheb did have homoerotic relations with working-class men. I thank Benedict Anderson for urging me to rethink the question of class in relation to de Zogheb’s sexuality. 43. De Zogheb to Merrill. WU. This letter is undated but was almost certainly sent on November 6, 1962, from Paris (it is written on Associated Press letterhead), given that the librettist refers to having sent it that day in a letter to Ayoub Sinano, undated but postmarked November 6, 1962. CA. On de Zogheb’s and de Menasce’s composing arias together, see Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb.” 44. According to a letter to the librettist from his mother, Mary de Zogheb, dated March 1963 (day illegible), in “Bernard de Zogheb’s Journal, 1962–1969,” a scrapbook of responses to Le Sorelle, including letters and reviews. WU. This journal also contains an unsigned letter by Ayoub Sinano (as identified in a note by the librettist) stating that “of course the opera should be dedicated to Ad[rien] but there ought to have been some reference to Annetta somewhere,” and adding that he would address this in the introduction he was planning to write. WU. On Anetta as Tabby’s original, see de Zogheb to Merrill, dated April 11, 1990 or 1991 (last digit of year not fully legible). WU. 45. Boulad-Ayoub, “Préface,” Piera de Pola, 13; my translation. 46. I refer variously to: a collection of semiprecious stones and fossils de Zogheb kept in his Alexandria apartment; a framed photograph of the thenPrince Farouk, later to become the last king of Egypt, looking up from his desk at the moment when he was informed that his father King Fuad had

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died; a framed collection of butterflies; and the librettist’s paintings on bits of marble shored up from the sea in Greece, including one that carried a miniature representation of the Battle of Navarino. Most of these are mentioned in Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb.” 47. In a letter to Merrill, dated only January 14 (but likely written in the late 1960s or early 1970s). WU. There are several other instances of the word camp in his correspondence with Merrill. I have so far not seen instances of de Zogheb using this word to describe his libretti. That de Zogheb was attuned to exemplars of camp is evidenced, among other things, in his libretto “Salome,” adapted from Oscar Wilde. 48. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in A Susan Sontag Reader, 117. 49. Ibid., 109. Sontag also observes that “Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical,” 107. 50. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 118. 51. See Brett, Wood, and Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. I refer here specifically to Brett’s essay “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet,” 9–26. 52. Brett and Wood, “Lesbian and Gay Music,” in Queering the Pitch, 351–89; quotations from 359 and 356. This essay was added to the second edition. 53. Ibid., 355. 54. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 107. 55. It was James Merrill who first commented, apropos of de Zogheb’s use of tunes from popular songs, “even where the melody is unknown, the song’s title may provide a suggestive rubric.” See Merrill, “Foreword,” SB n.p. 56. See Merrill, “Foreword,” SB n.p.; and the short introduction, anonymous but reproducing some of the points in the American poet’s “Foreword” to the 1963 edition of Le Sorelle Brontë, in the Milan (1968) edition, 7. This libretto was reprinted in Italy in 1968 according to the copyright page, though it is sometimes given as 1969. The American poet’s “Foreword” was later reprinted in Merrill, Recitative, 166–68. 57. I borrow “contact zone” from Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 8, who herself borrows “contact” from linguists who apply it to the pidgins that come into being when speakers of different languages “need to communicate” during transactions. See al-Tahtawi, Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Talkhis Bariz, 97; my translation. Likewise, al-Tahtawi’s translator into English, Newman, identifies this as “Lingua Franca”; see al-Tahtawi, An Imam in Paris, 131. On lingua franca usage in Alexandria generally, see also Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 1, 135, 467, 469; and by a sector of the Italian colony, vol. 2, 617. On “Franquette,” see Horwitz, “The Zogheb Saga,” 48–49. For a source on Italian words in Arabic, see Spiro, Note on the Italian Words in the Modern Spoken Arabic of Egypt. On lingua franca, see Kahane and Tietze, The Lingua Franca in the Levant, and Whinnom, “Lingua Franca: Historical Problems.” 58. See al-Nadim, al-Tankit wa-l-Tabkit, esp. 19–21, 201–7. See also 7–8, as well as the note on 22 of the study that precedes it by ‘Abd al-Mun‘in Ibrahim.

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59. De Zogheb, list notebook, c. 1982–98. CEAlex. 60. See also the playful panegyric de Zogheb wrote, in the pidginized colloquial Arabic of a foreigner, to his Alexandrian friend Josephine Wissa, “Poem to Josephine,” dated December 1982: “Iza t’rouh fil Midan Attarine / Fen fi koulou el setat el Helwine / —ou Kaman fil Manchia / Mafiche zai Hiya— / El Helwa Madame Josephine. . . . ” De Zogheb, list notebook, c. 1982–98. CEAlex. 61. Lang, “The Literary Settings of Lingua Franca (1300–1830),” 66. On survivals of lingua franca in theater circles in England, see Hancock, “Remnants of the Lingua Franca in Britain.” 62. De Zogheb, introducing his performance of “La Vita Alessandrina” in a recording made in 1998 by Stéphane Olry and Jan Vromman. The recording accompanies my 2010 article, “Latter-day Levantinism.” So far I have found only one instance in which de Zogheb used “Lingua Franca” to describe the language of his libretti. In a letter to Merrill dated May 4, 1982, he recounts that on a visit to Alexandria the previous month, he gave a performance of Le Sorelle but “only two people . . . really understood & appreciated my lingua franca.” WU. After writing several libretti, de Zogheb considered writing “an opera in Alexandrian French,” which would have been “about a Levantine family.” This was when he composed the song that would eventually be put in the mouths of the Alexandrian hostesses in Il Canale, which I quote later. See de Zogheb to Merrill, undated, starting with the words “Dear Dzimmy, I arrive Thursday evening . . . ” WU. Based on internal evidence, it would have been sent from Paris in the 1960s. 63. On the Italian population, see Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 1, 395; and vol. 2, 615–24. On Italians in Alexandrian archaeology and as directors of the city’s Graeco-Roman Museum, see Reid, Whose Pharaohs?, 151–52, 161. For a general article on the community, see Lazarev, “Italians, Italianity and Fascism.” On Italian literature in Egypt, see Re, “Alexandria Revisited: Colonialism and the Egyptian Works of Enrico Pea and Giuseppe Ungaretti,” and “Painting, Politics and Eroticism in Fausta Cialente’s Egyptian Narratives.” On Italian architects in Egypt, see several essays in Le Caire-Alexandrie. Architectures européennes 1850–1950, including Awad and Pallini, “The Italianisation of Alexandria: An Analogy of Practice,” 89–104. See also Awad, Italy in Alexandria. 64. Sadgrove, The Egyptian Theatre in the Nineteenth Century 1799– 1882, 2. 65. Ibid., 3; on the audiences, see 33, 37. 66. Ibid., 37, 40. See also the text of the “Regolamenti Teatrali,” 169–70. On seasonal Italian theatrical journals in nineteenth-century Alexandria, see 73–74. 67. Ibid., 44. 68. Ibid., 64; and Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, 53–56. Al-Naqqash was the nephew of the playwright Marun al-Naqqash, credited with having authored one of the first “modern” (meaning, European-inspired) Arabic plays. 69. I invoke Said’s strategy, in Culture and Imperialism, of “contrapuntal reading.” For an article that responds to Said’s critique of Verdi’s Aida in

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Culture and Imperialism, 111–32, see Guarracino, “Verdi’s Aida across the Mediterranean (and Beyond).” 70. Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, 31–32. See also Sadgrove, The Egyptian Theatre, 89–90. 71. Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, 31. See also Sadgrove, The Egyptian Theatre, 91. 72. Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, 52. On shadow theater’s influence on Sannu‘, see al-Ra‘i, Masrah al-Sha‘b, 215–35. 73. See Sannu‘, “Bursat Misr” and “al-Amira al-Iskandaraniyya,” 1–33 and 133–71, respectively. 74. Sadgrove, The Egyptian Theatre, 118. 75. See Jean-Athos, “Le Théâtre Alhambra,” 333. 76. Terni, “Un demi siècle de musique à Alexandrie,” 340. 77. As he himself acknowledges in the introductory words to his performance of “La Vita” recorded by Olry and Vromman. Quotation from de Zogheb in a recorded interview with the author, March 1996. 78. Bernard de Zogheb, diary, entry of February 6, 1957. CEAlex. 79. For one concert conducted by Piero Guarino that de Zogheb attended, see the librettist’s diary, entry of August 12, 1954. CEAlex. There are too many references to Guarino, as well as his wife, Fay, and Paolo Terni in the diaries to be cited individually. Suffice it to say that in 1957, de Zogheb helped Laura Terni with preparations for her brother Paolo’s return from Italy, frequently saw Paolo while he was in Alexandria, and then stayed with him in Rome. De Zogheb, diary of 1957, entries of August 6–16 (pasted into the entry of August 15 is a press cutting in French, clearly from La Réforme, by de Zogheb, giving an account of a Réforme gala attended by the two Ternis), and, for the Rome entries, October 31 to November 4. CEAlex. Guarino is one of the names in “Il Canale” in the lovers’ duet that I quote later in this chapter. 80. See de Zogheb’s list, from 1951 to 1982, giving venues, of “My Solo Performances of Le Sorelle Brontë,” list notebook, c. 1982–98. CEAlex. Both Guarino and Terni attended performances de Zogheb gave at other friends’ homes according to the same list. 81. Terni, Suite Alessandrina, 56. 82. Ibid., 58, in English in the original, and 57. 83. De Zogheb provides the date of composition on the title page of each libretto in the Jack Hagstrom “Opere” notebook. This handwritten manuscript, which was given by the librettist to Hagstrom in 1996, comprises the first nine libretti. As he indicates on the title page, this is the second of two notebook manuscripts of de Zogheb’s “Opere.” The “Opere” manuscript given the number 1, which was a gift from de Zogheb to Merrill and is in the WU collection, comprises only the first seven libretti. This handwritten manuscript also carries illustrations, albeit somewhat different from the ones in the Hagstrom “Opere” notebook. In a letter to Merrill dated October 16, 1986, de Zogheb mentions these two numbered “Opere” notebooks. WU. De Zogheb later sent Merrill typed versions of “Il Ultimo Giorno di Pompeii,” and “Salome” (the latter in a version abridged for the Little Players), also in

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WU. The Merrill papers at WU also include a typed copy of “Byrone”: it is untitled and missing the dramatis personae page, hence identified in WU by the first words in the manuscript, “Nella casa.” The WU Merrill papers also contain a typed, untitled fragment of “Phaedra,” identified in the catalogue as “Non so cosa.” The same collection also contains an early handwritten draft of Act I, Scenes 1 and 2, of “La Vita Alessandrina.” WU’s Merrill papers include a typed copy of “Vacanze a Parigi,” as adapted by the Little Players for their performance, the Little Players’ Phaedra printed libretto introduced by Merrill, and a handwritten copy of “Le Sorelle Brontë.” The SO collection also contains a typescript of “Le Vacanze a Parigi” as part of “Montage,” a Little Players’ program. Another typescript of “Le Vacanze,” as part of “The Trip,” a Little Players’ program, is in PU. There are minor variations between the two “Opere” notebooks; since the one in Hagstrom’s collection is more complete and was given to him after the passing of Merrill, I take it to be more up to date and have therefore preferred to cite from it. I checked the copy of “Malmulla ou Il Canale” that I had obtained from the librettist in 1996 against the one in the Hagstrom “Opere” notebook, and they appear to be identical, hence all quotations from the first nine libretti are from that notebook, with the exception of Le Sorelle Brontë which I cite from the American first edition, unless otherwise indicated. As for “La Vita Alessandrina,” only an early fragment of which is in WU and which is not in the Hagstrom “Opere” notebook, I have relied on the copy I obtained from de Zogheb in 1996. This is typed and does not carry an illustration. Another copy of “La Vita” is in SO; I checked my copy against this and they are identical. Both OJH and “La Vita” carry page numbers inserted by the librettist. It should be emphasized that handwritten first nine libretti in OJH, although mostly legible, occasionally present difficulties; I have sough to check illegible words against other copies of the same libretti. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from “Il Canale” are by Jennifer Newman. All translations from the rest of the libretti are by me. It is quite likely that “La Vita Alessandrina” was composed in the early to mid-1990s. De Zogheb mentioned, in my recorded interviews with him in 1996, that he had first started adapting Cavafy poems into pidgin Italian and setting them to music when he was approached to submit something to a sixtieth birthday gift book for Merrill with contributions by his friends. He also mentions this genesis in a letter to Merrill dated September 27, 1993; WU. The book is McClatchy et al., For James Merrill: A Birthday Tribute. De Zogheb contributed to this volume “Two Adaptations of Constantine Cavafy Poems Translated into (bad) Italian and Adapted to Popular Songs”: “Muri,” set to the tune of “Yesterday,” and “Preghiera,” set to the tune of “Morning Has Broken”; n.p. These would be integrated, with a few changes, into “La Vita Alessandrina.” In letters he sent Merrill in the early 1990s, de Zogheb refers to writing this libretto. For example, his letter to Merrill dated February 11, 1993, quotes part of Anoleri’s aria from Act I, Scene 1, and the following one to the same correspondent dated March 10, 1993, refers to his singing Act I, Scene 2, to a friend. In a letter to Merrill dated February 22, 1994, the librettist describes an earlier version of a scene in which Cavafy recounts to

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Marinetti and Ungaretti an adventure he has had, to the tune of “Mack the Knife.” WU. His last mention of “La Vita” to Merrill would seem to be in a letter dated January 12, 1995, in which he refers to writing the death scene of Cavafy’s mother in Act II, Scene 3. WU. It would seem that it was after the American poet’s death that de Zogheb completed this libretto, which is dedicated to the memory of Merrill and Robert Liddell, the former having died in 1995, the latter in 1992. Indeed, the fragment of “La Vita” that he had sent Merrill, in WU, is already dedicated to Liddell. About two decades before his death, the librettist referred in his letters to the possibility of writing “Electra,” but there is no trace of a libretto by that title or even any indication that he wrote some part of it. References to “Electra” come in his letters to Merrill sent from Morocco in the 1970s; for example, one dated only “Tuesday 20th February” that starts with “Sitting at my typewriter.” WU. In the recording of “La Vita” by Olry and Vromman, de Zogheb goes over part of this history. In the same recording, made in 1998, a year before he died, he mentions that he wrote ten libretti. But since most of the libretti have not been published, it is not inconceivable that an unknown one, begun after that recording was made, may come to light. 84. The quoted words, from Anna’s and Emiglia’s speeches respectively mean, “Let’s go quickly / while it’s still daytime” and “on the moor.” 85. The librettist provides a footnote explaining the French origin of the expression. De Zogheb was acquainted with Lewis Carroll’s work from an early age. His childhood sketchbook has a drawing of “Queen Alice.” SO. He later alludes to Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There in his 1972 diary, entry of March 21, when, getting ready to fly to Morocco and anxious that his luggage may be overweight, he notes that “I shall be wearing 3 pairs of trousers, and 3 sweaters and a raincoat and shall look like Twiddledum and Twiddledee [sic] in the Tenniel illustrations in Alice!” The librettist was also familiar with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which he mentions reading in the entry of July 26 in his 1957 diary. CEAlex. In a letter to Merrill dated June 3, 1969, de Zogheb speaks of the “James Joycish . . . implications” of a phrase in “Phaedra” and observes that “Milanese intellectuals” have compared him to the Irish writer. WU. 86. The Italian translation of this title is Cime tempestose. MyersScotton, in Duelling Languages, provides an extensive discussion of grammatical procedures in code-switching. My use of “pidgin” and “pidginization”—for the purposes of discussing the aesthetics of the libretti in service of the broader theme of a camped up Levantinism—would be construed by a linguist as loose; Myers-Scotton, for example, hypothesizes about the role of code-switching in the development of pidgins and creoles as distinct phenomena, see 226–27. 87. Badawi and Hinds’s Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic, 69, confirms that the word derives from the Italian brillante. Birlanti and Birlanta were used in Egypt in the past as a woman’s first name. It may be suggested that this was a typo on de Zogheb’s part; he was no doubt aware of the Italian form of the word: in “Le Vacanze”—written in 1962 and hence earlier than “Il Canale” (1965–70)—the Levantina is described as wearing too many “brillainte.”

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But, given that the image used by Madame Marigoula Pacha exists in Egyptian Arabic, it would be subliminally informed by the word’s usage in that language. Properly speaking, there are no foreignisms in the libretti’s hybrid language, but I use the word as shorthand for non-Italian elements. 88. De Zogheb to Ayoub Sinano, undated but postmarked November 6, 1962. CA. 89. De Zogheb to Merrill, undated but, based on external evidence, almost certainly sent on November 6, 1962. WU. 90. Merrill, “Foreword,” SB n.p. 91. It is only in the late, typed “La Vita Alessandrina” that de Zogheb has inserted footnotes. The published versions, both the American and the Italian, of Le Sorelle carry footnotes, these having been inserted by Merrill at the suggestion of de Zogheb. See de Zogheb to Merrill, undated letter (opening with “Mie cari, Without a minute’s loss”), likely to have been sent at the end of 1962 or in early 1963. WU. 92. SB 19. See also Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb.” 93. Her words are: “Leave, go, go, go, go, Thackeray / I don’t need you any, any, any more / Nor you, Mr. MacMillion / Nor you, Mr. Dickens / I’ll make my billion / I won’t count my chickens!” 94. Her words, in Newman’s translation, read: “My dear little Albertin’ / Albertin’ Albertin’— / I’m here to chat / Here I am.” 95. On Farfallina Piha, see OJH 27: “UNA GROSSA EBREA VENEZIANA.” The librettist had mentioned Piha as one of his invented characters in the society columns he wrote for La Réforme Illustrée; see Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb.” La Vita’s muse Anoleri is modeled, on a request for a role, on Anne O’Leary, then director of the American Cultural Centre in Alexandria. See Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb”; and de Zogheb to Merrill, dated February 11, 1993. WU. The libretto “La Cava delle Antiquita,” dedicated to Tony Parigory, is set in Athens to which de Zogheb’s old collaborator from Réforme days had relocated, and is likely inspired by Prigory’s profession there as antique dealer. In addition to having a character called Tony who owns the “Cava,” it also has two Alexandrian women characters, la Lupa and la Kiki. For information concerning Tony Parigory, I am indebted to Lucette de Saab, Alexandria, November 8, 2008. Merrill thanks “Mr. Tony Parigory of Athens” for help with the preparation of the libretto for publication in his “Foreword” to Le Sorelle, n.p. 96. The Italian edition of Le Sorelle, 25, follows suit. Merrill had shared his concern about the risk of libel with de Zogheb in an undated letter, likely sent in late 1962 or early 1963. WU. De Zogheb approved the decision in an undated letter that starts with “Mie cari, Without a minute’s loss . . . ” WU. 97. De Zogheb, OJH 12. Information on the Stagnis obtained from Jacky Lumbroso Nimr, in interview with the author, Paris, January 14, 2009. De Leo, in “Rediscovering Le Sorelle Brontë,” 246, observes in an endnote, “The presence of Rosa and Giovanni . . . is a device to introduce some Egyptian features in the work.” This article, while it refers to the libretto’s “blend of many regional dialects . . . definitely not for the purist,” 241, does

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not otherwise address the language, its focus being the changes introduced to the Brontës’ lives. 98. De Zogheb to Merrill, June 3, 1969. WU. The librettist mentions a specific Alexandrian Greek society woman as being very similar to his Phaedra. 99. De Zogheb, diary, entry of June 30, 1958. CEAlex. Pierre Riches, in interview with the author, New York, January 5, 2009. Riches alludes to the inclusion of this detail in Le Sorelle in a memoir by a relation of his, Alhadeff’s The Sun at Midday, 65. 100. See, for example, the letters by Fay Guarino and Marcel Salinas in “Bernard de Zogheb’s Journal, 1962–1969.” WU. 101. For example, Mario Colucci was a close Alexandrian Italian friend of the librettist’s whom I met in London, to which he had relocated, in 1997. Avellino was de Zogheb’s boss at La Réforme. Molly Tuby, an Alexandrian friend of the librettist’s who had moved to London, is often referred to in his diaries and letters; “Malmulla” was her diminutive. One of her ancestresses had been a mistress of Khedive Ismail’s, hence the dedication, and the character “La Malmulla,” according to de Zogheb in interview with the author, Alexandria, spring 1996. See also de Zogheb to Merrill, dated only May 17, the year being almost certainly 1970. WU. Additional information about the Alexandrian contemporaries of the librettist’s cited in the duet obtained from Lucette de Saab. 102. Lumbroso Nimr, in interview with the author, Paris, January 14, 2009. 103. De Zogheb, diary, entries of April 29 and 30, 1972. CEA. Significantly, the two arias in question are “L’alakerda est de Gerda . . . ” from “Il Canale” and “E ben, Prout! . . . ” by the Levantina from “Le Vacanze,” ones that I read as theme tunes of Levantinism in its historically waxing and waning phases. 104. “Stoningtonia” is dedicated to Americans, “Salome” to the librettist’s American fans, and Phaedra to the Little Players team and the puppets. In an interview with me in 1996, de Zogheb mentioned that he had written an English version of “Phaedra,” since lost, for American consumption, and that Merrill had considered the text less successful. I have now ascertained that a copy of the English version is in the Washington University Merrill papers. For the Italian original of “Phaedra,” de Zogheb had mostly chosen American songs, to ensure that they would be recognizable to Merrill. De Zogheb to Merrill, undated (except for the phrase “Ascension Thursday”), but likely dating from 1969, since the librettist remarks that he has just finished writing “Phaedra.” 105. Merrill, “Foreword,” SB n.p. 106. See Liddell, Cavafy, dedication, n.p.; and, concerning Ayoub Sinano, “Acknowledgements,” n.p., as well as 23 and 51. For the review of Liddell’s Cavafy, see “Unreal Citizen,” in Merrill, Recitative, 96–108. 107. Olry, interview with the author, Paris, January 10, 2009, referring specifically to de Zogheb’s crossword puzzle book–diaries, an aspect of his production I was unable to deal with here for lack of space. On the

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connections between the Cavafys and the Zoghebs, see Liddell, Cavafy, 22, 27, 102. 108. De Zogheb, “La Vita Alessandrina,” translated from the title page. All translations from this libretto are my own. 109. See Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb.” Several members of the Zervudachi family are also frequently referred to in de Zogheb’s diaries. The librettist is playing off Liddell’s discussion of the Cavafys’ status vis-à-vis the Zervudachis’ in Cavafy, 41–42, 111–12. 110. I cite the titles of most of these poems as rendered by Theoharis in BTCT. Apart from “Waiting for the Barbarians,” which provides the frame, Cavafy poems that he recites in “La Vita,” with a good measure of adaptation, include “Candles,” “Prayer,” “Thermopylae,” “As Long as You Can,” “The Tobacco Shop Window,” “The Windows,” “The God Abandons Antony,” “Ithaca,” “Walls,” “The City,” and “The Next Table.” Other poems may be alluded to in the text. It would be interesting to establish the language from which de Zogheb was translating Cavafy’s poems. 111. See Liddell, Cavafy, 191–92; quotation from 191. 112. “Cavafy ridi con qualche amertuma”; and, from Cavafy’s speech: “Le mamme son terribile, ce son che sono vere castatrices.” VAHH 6. 113. See Forster, “Pericles in Paradise,” and “To See a Sinadono Again.” KCC. 114. The asterisks refer to footnotes explaining that these are tram stations. De Zogheb had first composed Forster’s words—“Rama Dam Dam, tre uomi nel tram, / Mohamed, Mustapha, e Abdel Salam”—for his and Ayoub Sinano’s daughter Christine’s amusement, in English, before deciding to put an Italian version of them into the English novelist’s mouth in “La Vita.” As he explains in a letter to Merrill dated March 10, 1992, where he speaks of the month of Ramadan, “I myself was prompted to recite the following parody of a familiar nursery rhyme— ‘Ram a dam-dam three men on the tram, Moustapha, Mohamed, and AbdelSalam—’” WU. 115. The quoted phrase is from Nora, “Between Memory and History”; see my comments in the introduction to this book. See also my comments on the subject in the preceding chapter and in “The Alexandria Archive,” 224, 336–39. Compare this, for example, against the following passage from Atiyah’s An Arab Tells His Story, 52: “Before we went to the school we took the tramway to the end of Ramleh, a beautiful run parallel to the sea, and alongside sumptuous (a little too sumptuous) houses, and trim (a little too trim) gardens; and I noticed the names of the stations—Camp Caesar, Ibrahimieh, Cleopatra, Mustapha Pasha, Carlton, Bulkeley, Saba Pasha, Glymenopoulo, Bacos, Gianaclis, St George, Sidi Bishr, Victoria—a Roman Caesar, an ancient Graeco-Egyptian Queen, a modern Egyptian warrior, two English gentlemen, two Egyptian Pashas, three Greek gentlemen, a British saint, an Egyptian saint, and an English Queen, who gave her name to the station through the school that was built there in 1907.” See also the remarkably similar passage in Yannakakis, “Farewell Alexandria,”

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111: “And what could be more cosmopolitan than the names of the stations spaced out along to the terminus at Victoria? A clashing mixture of Arabic names, souvenirs of history, foreign business families and European bathing resorts: Mazarita, Shatby, Camp de César (pronounced in the Italian way: Campo Cesare) . . . What other town can offer such a motley parade of sights and symbols? What other town can boast such a bewildering roll call of names?” See also Aciman, Out of Egypt, 245. In addition to the most obvious examples of scholarship on the subject by al-Jazayirli and Lackany as cited in the introduction, see also al-Shindi, “Mudhakkirat ‘an al-Iskandariyya.” For urban nomenclature as part of Nora’s “lieux de mémoire” project in the context of France, see Milo, “Street Names,” 363–89. 116. On “palaver,” see Hancock, “Remnants of the Lingua Franca in Britain,” 36. Pring, The Pocket Oxford Greek Dictionary, 154, glosses “poustis” as “sodomite.” De Zogheb ends a poem titled “Lament of the Naxian Fisherman” with: “Metaxas, the malaka poustis!” See his list notebook, c. 1982–98. CEAlex. 117. My translation, adapted from a quotation in Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb.” The names of dramatis personae in quotations from “Il Canale” were in block letters in the original manuscript. 118. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 110–11. 119. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. On Alexandria’s carnival, see Boddy, From the Egyptian Ramleh, 285: “At Carnival time, young Italians, &c., go to and fro in fantastic costumes, but the Arabs are so accustomed to these vagaries that they take but little notice.” See also Dr. Ralph, “Sa Majesté Carnaval.” For references thereto in texts by the de Zogheb family, see: de Zogheb, “Alexandria Memories,” 36; and XYZ, La Revue des Astres, 5. Carnival in Alexandria comprised, in addition to masquerades, dramatic and operatic performances. 120. The Story “L’Antinoüs du Modern’ Bar,” in Ayoub Sinano, Pola de Péra suivi de Proses Pour Pola (1964), 47–54, about a handsome young man who is bought by an unknown male aristocrat, would seem to carry allusions to Cavafy’s poems in modern contexts. Indeed, Cavafy is mentioned in the story “Catherine d’Attarine ou La Dernière Fête,” 56. The story’s theme of political intrigue undertaken by a society lady against the backdrop of a fancy dress ball is reminiscent of the Cervoni ball in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and indeed Catherine d’Attarine may be a throwback to the British novelist’s Justine. The text foregrounds the tradition in which it frames Pola by invoking a set of figures associated with the hetaera/courtesan/odalisque trope in the final tale, “Mort et Apothéose de Pola,” including Cleopatra, Salome, Laïs, Matahari and Ninon de Lenclos. See Ayoub Sinano, Pola de Péra (1964), 151. One of de Zogheb’s photograph albums in CEAlex shows a picture of himself with Claude Vincendon as children on a beach in Alexandria. The librettist’s notes indicate that he hosted Eve Durrell at a party at his place in Alexandria on January 16, 1999, probably her visit to Alexandria during which a photograph in one of the librettist’s albums, showing him reading the coffee dregs with Eve Durrell, was taken. See de Zogheb, list notebook, c. 1982–98. CEAlex. De Zogheb had read the

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four volumes of The Alexandria Quartet in summer 1961. See de Zogheb, list notebook, c. 1943–73. CEAlex. 121. Ayoub Sinano, Pola de Péra, 10. This poem, in Merrill’s English translation, is reproduced in Pola de Pera, trans. Maud Burnett, n.p. 122. See Ayoub Sinano, Pola de Péra printed in Alexandria. GB. The image is reproduced in Halim, “Latter-day Levantism.” The text was given to Beraud by the librettist. According to Josiane Boulad-Ayoub, the writer’s widow, this pamphlet was printed about a year before the Paris publication of Pola de Péra. De Zogheb also wrote a poem in French entitled “‘Lines Inspired by Pola de Pera.’” List notebook, c. 1982–98. CEAlex. 123. In Italian in the original. De Zogheb, “Il Canale,” OJH, 111. The librettist turns Mme Marigoula Pacha, Pola’s cousin in Pola de Péra, into her aunt. 124. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 109. 125. See Alloula, The Colonial Harem, 103, 5; first published in French in 1981. 126. For the background, see de Zogheb’s comments in Halim, “Bernard de Zogheb.” 127. Germaine had been the wife of de Zogheb’s childhood friend Johnny Nahman. After separating from him, her companion was the French artist Philippe (Ylipe) Labarthe. De Zogheb’s letters to Merrill contain several references to Germaine Nahman as the original of the Levantina, as well as to Ylipe. In a letter dated only “11 Giugnio,” apparently, sent from Paris in the 1960s, de Zogheb writes, “Do you know, Germaine has never even heard [‘Le Vacanze’]—and she the Levantina isterica.” WU. In two letters he sent Merrill in the late 1980s, de Zogheb seems to be deliberately documenting this history. In a letter dated October 16, 1986, he writes concerning Johnny, “it is after all (but correct me if I’m wrong—I’d always been told this) because he and Germaine were singing snatches of ‘Le Sorelle’ on a Nile trip, that you first heard about ME and expressed the wish that we should one day meet— and it was Germaine, la Levantina isterica, who after all introduced us to one another.” WU. See also de Zogheb to Merrill, dated December 17, 1988. WU. Merrill had also been friends with Ayoub Sinano and used to visit him in Alexandria before he moved to Montreal; see Boulad-Ayoub, “Préface,” 15. Indeed, Ayoub Sinano, Liddell, and the Nahmans had urged de Zogheb to meet the American author. See de Zogheb to Ayoub Sinano, undated but postmarked in Paris on October 18, 1961. CA. 128. OJH 83; my translation. These details are omitted in the Little Players’ typescript of Le Vacanze. The two American tourists are reduced to one (renamed Dzonny), a change made to reduce the dramatis personae to five, in keeping with the number of puppets. The “Putana” is given the name Angele, the spelling and grammar are somewhat “tidied up,” and the stage directions are compacted (e.g., the description of the décor of the Ladies at the beginning of Scene III is omitted). Little Players’ libretto for “Le Vacanze a Parigi.” SO. In a letter to Ayoub Sinano dated only March 10 (presumably of 1969), de Zogheb gives an account of the premiere of the Little Players’ performance of this operetta: “La sale etait pleine a craquer à ma premiere

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(27 personnes) et j’ai été acclamé par tout le monde et ai passé une heure a signer des programmes et sabler du champagne apres le spectacle. Au fait, ce n’est pas, d’apres moi, tellement MON opera, qui est responsable pour le succes de cette premiere—c’est également le jeu de Frank Peschka, le puppeteer, qui est extraordinaire. Non seulement fait-il bouger les marionnettes, mais, c’est lui qui fait les cinq voix. Ma préférée etait ‘la grossa putana’ jouée par Mademoiselle Garonce, brillemment [. . .] Quant a la Levantina isterica—(interpretée par Elsie Lump . . . elle etait excellent dans sa chanson ‘E ben’ Prout—Io ritorno a Beyrouth’ qu’elle chantait avec un accent de nannie anglaise cockney . . . ” Reproduced verbatim. CA. 129. OJH 84; in Italian in the original. 130. This moment in “Le Vacanze” is reminiscent of the cry of “Look, a negro!” that Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks, 109–14, construes as constitutive. De Zogheb was familiar with Nancy Mitford’s oft-quoted distinction between the U and the non-U which he cites in his list notebook. CEAlex. 131. I refer here to the illustration in the “Opere” in the Jack Hagstrom collection, reproduced in Halim, “Latter-day Levantinism.” The “Opere” collection in the Merrill papers at the University of Washington has a different second illustration for this libretto, showing only the seated Mme Lavabo and the Levantina standing close to her, arm outstretched as she gesticulates agitatedly. See OWU 86. 132. House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 1. See also Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 42–48, 53–57. I should emphasize that, with the exception of his diary of 1960, which is badly damaged, I was unable to access de Zogheb’s diaries dating from the 1960s during several visits to CEAlex. My sources on his time in Paris are his letters to Ayoub Sinano and to Merrill. 133. Needless to say, I am punning on Flaubert’s oft-quoted statement about Madame Bovary. 134. This was the argument I made in “Latter-day Levantinism”; material I accessed later from WU corroborates it. While composing “Il Canale,” de Zogheb admitted that he was “stuck with [it], probably because I find it a boring subject.” De Zogheb to Merrill, dated only “Ascension Thursday.” In Morocco in the 1970s, although he would go on to write two more libretti, he admitted to Merrill that he was not writing on account of “lack of time and inspiration” and that he was also “made lazy by the fact” that he was no longer in need of a grant from the Ingram-Merrill Foundation. De Zogheb to Merrill, dated only June 23. WU. He also repeatedly comments on his limited repertoire of songs that he therefore reuses. De Zogheb to Merrill, dated only Friday 12; written during the composition of “Il Canale,” hence between 1965 and 1970. WU. There are hints that in later years, de Zogheb developed a vestigial, inchoate interest in Arabness. In a letter to Merrill dated only 26 June, apparently sent from France in the 1960s, he speaks of an Irish friend married to a Lebanese man who “has thrown herself, heart & soul . . . into the Arab cause. . . . I myself have the same ideas, but more mitigated.” WU. He adds that he has been collecting clothes to be donated to “the Jordanian refugees” but wants to ascertain that they will not go “to Nasser to pay for

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more guns.” WU. On an Egyptian card, dated only November 4, addressed to a Mr Ivry, de Zogheb remarks ironically on Alexandrian streets being renamed after “heros [sic] of the wars with Israel (never knew there were so many)” and comments that the street he had lived on, Avenue de Belgique, had been renamed Avenue Patrice Lumumba, “that Congolese hothead who was eaten by compatriots in the sixties.” WU. 135. For the scholar, one of the risks is that texts that pull in a different direction from the drift of the argument might later come to light. 136. Olry, in interview with the author, Paris, January 10, 2009. 137. Said, Orientalism, 14. 138. I invoke Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms.” In addition to Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, there are several other frameworks that de Zogheb’s corpus of libretti has much to say to: queer studies; Italian studies; musicology; and literary adaptation/author-based approaches (for “Byrone,” “Phaedra,” “Salome” and “La Vita”).

epilogue /prologue 1. For the controversy itself, see the series of weekly columns in Al-Ahram by poet Ahmad ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti Hijazi (February–March 2000) devoted to the subject, in which he also published letters concerning the project. See also my 2002 articles “In the Limelight,” “Mohamed Awad: In medias res,” and “Consuming Cosmopolitanism,” as well as the conclusion to my 2004 “Alexandria Archive,” 375–77. I reproduce some arguments and sentences from these texts here. I also addressed the revivalism in Alexandria in the 1998 article, “Dance to the Music of Time.” See also Butler, Return to Alexandria, esp. 220–39. 2. My translation from a letter written by a number of Alexandrians to Hijazi and published in his column “Hadhihi al-Munaqasha ma Ma‘naha?” 3. See the letter by Muhiba ‘Abd al-Salam printed in “Khitam wa Ta‘qibat.” 4. See the letter printed in Hijazi, “al-Iskandar lahu al-Haqq fi al-Iskandariyya,” and that in Hijazi, “Khitam wa Ta‘qibat.” 5. See the letter by Muhiba ‘Abd al-Salam printed in Hijazi, “Khitam wa Ta‘qibat.” 6. These points were made by Hijazi in “al-Iskandar lahu al-Haqq fi alIskandariyya” and “Wa-l-Misriyyun Banu Athina!” 7. See Hijazi, “al-Iskandar lahu al-Haqq fi al-Iskandariyya.” 8. Hijazi, “al-Iskandariyya Ta‘ud ila al-Bahr.” 9. Hijazi, “Wa-l-Misriyyun Banu Athina!” Quite apart from the paradigm of arching-over-and-bracketing-out that I have been tackling in this study, I would mention that the connection that Hijazi is making between Alexander and Muhammad ‘Ali has been anticipated in a similar comparison, this time between the “founder of modern Egypt” and Ptolemy I, made by Fraser in “Alexandria from Mohammed Ali to Gamal Abdal Nasser”; see esp. 65. See also Hijazi, “Sura li-l-Iskandar” and “al-Iskandariyya Ta‘ud ila al-Bahr.”

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10. Hijazi, “Wa-l-Misriyyun Banu Athina!” 11. Hijazi, “al-Iskandariyya Mariyya wa Turabuha Za‘faran” and “Khitam wa Ta‘qibat.” 12. See specifically Hijazi, “al-Iskandar lahu al-Haqq fi al-Iskandariyya.” 13. The quoted words, in my translation, are from a letter sent to Hijazi by Mahir Shafiq Farid, a professor of English literature at Cairo University. See “Ayna Yaqif al-Iskandar?” 14. Haag, in his epilogue to Alexandria, 330, represents the debate as a “row,” which he sums up, albeit without providing references, as follows: “Some objected to the statue being raised in such a prominent position near the Gate of the Sun, while others objected to it being raised at all, saying that the founder of Iskandariya, as the city is called in Arabic, was a foreigner and did not belong.” This quotation occurs on the final page of the book where he observes that Alexandria’s cosmopolites have mostly moved elsewhere, “leaving a new people to inhabit the carcass of others’ lives.” 15. In the wake of the revolution that began on January 25, 2011, the piazza in front of the Bibliotheca became the site of demonstrations calling, among other things, for former president Mubarak to be put on trial. The administration and policies of the Bibliotheca itself became the subject of repeated strikes and sit-ins by many of its employees after the revolution. Some of the key demands were more transparent policies and investigating the allegations of graft concerning the deposed president’s wife Suzanne Mubarak’s involvement in the institution. 16. I draw here on a presentation I gave at the 2001 Modern Language Association convention titled “Cosmopolitan Alexandria and Postcolonial Melancholia: The Case of Youssef Chahine”; a published version of that paper, “On Being an Alexandrian”; on “The Alexandria Archive,” 12, 305, 340–44; and my 2006 article, “Forster in Alexandria,” 243, 271. I also wrote about Aciman, focusing on his account of his years at Victoria College in Alexandria, in the 2002 “Victoria into Victory,” 214–17, 228. For another discussion of the nostalgia for Alexandria in memoirs, see Mabro, “Nostalgic Literature on Alexandria,” where he observes that in their memoirs Alexandrians who left in early youth “tried to take advantage of the mystique created by Durrell and Constantine Cavafy,” 240. I made similar points in “On Being an Alexandrian,” published in Al-Ahram Weekly in April 2002. Having used the term postcolonial melancholia in the 2001 presentation—building initially on Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”—my thinking on the subject was further informed by Eng and Kazanjian, “Introduction: Mourning Remains”; and Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia. 17. Zananiri, Une famille d’Alexandrie, 4. One of the earliest Alexandrian memoirs to adumbrate the post-Suez turn that I analyze is the 1960 Cocktails and Camels by Jacqueline Carol (pseudonym of Jacqueline Klat Cooper). The 2008 Bibliotheca Alexandrina reprint of that volume unjustifiably omits the last two chapters, “The Muddled East Merry-Go-Round” and “Speak to Me of Suez.” While the unsigned editor’s foreword states that this is an “edited and condensed” version and alludes to its being a period piece, the

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foreword itself reflects the standard historiography of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism as attenuated post-Suez. 18. Aciman, False Papers, 5. 19. For this route of landmarks revisited, see Alhadeff, The Sun at Midday, 10–11, 56–59, 217–19; and Aciman, False Papers, 10–12, 15–19. In fact, Aciman comments ironically on this route that émigré Alexandrians follow when revisiting the city; 3. 20. Alhadeff, The Sun at Midday, 150. 21. See Aciman, Out of Egypt, 3–39, on the uncle; and his False Papers, 53, 59, on the writer’s brother. On Aciman’s years at Victoria College in Alexandria, see Halim, “Victoria into Victory,” 214–17; and on his fictionalized portrait of the distant relative, see Raafat, “Aciman Encore: Out of Egypt.” 22. I borrow the term from Bourdieu, Distinction. 23. Alhadeff—although she makes sure to bring out a grandfather’s social connections with the royal family, to trace the genealogy of the other side of the family leading back to the first Baron de Menasce, and to quote an authority on Egyptian Jewry (Gudrun Kramer’s The Jews in Modern Egypt) to the effect that both sides of her family were among the most prominent in the community—at least evinces some dismay at the snobbery of a relative who implies that her family is inferior to his, and waxes ironic about the aristocracy that makes Alexandria’s “Atmosphere” with its obliviousness to the exploitation and social inequities of that society. See Alhadeff, The Sun at Midday, 37–38, 52, 157, 172, 167–68. 24. Montesini, My Life and Other Misdemeanours, 3. McGinness, in “Montesini’s Revenge,” says that he “consulted two eminent authorieties on Byzantium and the Ottoman empire, John Julius Norwich and Philip Mansel, and both state that neither the Venetians nor the Ottomans conferred titles such as [Montesini’s].” 25. See Montesini, My Life and Other Misdemeanours, 109, on his linguistic and cultural distinction at school in Australia; 190, on Alexandrian Greeks now settled in Athens inveighing on the subject of local Greeks’ relative lack of cultivation; and 195, on how Alexandrian émigrés “with their multilingual background” easily obtain employment in airlines. See also Thompson, Losing Alexandria, 156, on school in Australia where her French was admired by a teacher. 26. See Thompson, Losing Alexandria, 141; Montesini, My Life and Other Misdemeanours, 62; and Alhadeff, The Sun at Midday, 17, respectively. 27. Aciman, Out of Egypt, 221; and Alhadeff, The Sun at Midday, 16, respectively. See also Thompson, Losing Alexandria, 62–72, for a conversation with a relative that contains some code-switching. 28. So endemic is the memoirists’ obliviousness to all writers other than the three canonical ones that one is startled to see the opening lines of Mahfouz’s Miramar cited by Thompson in Losing Alexandria, 26. 29. Aciman, False Papers, 3–4, 10; see also 13. 30. Ibid., 21. 31. See, for allusions to or quotations from Cavafy, Thompson, Losing Alexandria, 23, 33, 106. “As Cavafy says, the city will follow you,” 247.

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32. Alhadeff, The Sun at Midday, 167, 66, 64; quotation from 66. 33. Thompson, Losing Alexandria, n.p. Among other texts Thompson credits is Aciman’s Out of Egypt, evidence of the intertextuality between the different Alexandrian memoirists. 34. Thompson mentions that her father frequented the Muhammad ‘Ali Club of which Forster was a member, and that while it was years after leaving Alexandria that she was introduced to Cavafy’s work by her friends the Australian novelist Patrick White and his Greek Egyptian partner, Manoli Lascaris, the latter recalled seeing the poet shabbily dressed at his errands. See Thompson, Losing Alexandria, 129, 223; see also 106–16. 35. Ibid., 18, 291, emphasis in original; see also 17, 19. 36. Ibid., 52, 40; see also 17, 32, 84–86, 88–95, 248. 37. Thompson, Losing Alexandria, 36; Alhadeff, The Sun at Midday, 169; and Montesini, My Life and Other Misdemeanours, 7, 8. For the quotation from Cromer, see Liddell, Cavafy, 29. 38. Montesini, My Life and Other Misdemeanours, 5, in the course of a historical overview of Alexandria, touches, in a tone free of rancor, on the Arab conquest, then continues, “We leave Alexandria for six or seven hundred years and we return in 1798 with Napoleon Bonaparte . . . [who] was the new synthesiser, the new Alexander . . . bringing the doctrine of the Enlightenment and modern France.” As such, he is dovetailing, in a pattern familiar elsewhere, not least in Forster’s guidebook (see AHG 90, 91), the two conquerors as bearers of synthesis (read: cosmopolitanism)—of the Macedonian he likewise remarks, “Alexander, the synthesiser of cultures and ultimate rich tourist” (4). Aciman, in “Pensione Eolo,” one of the essays collected in his False Papers, 141, writes, “I find it in the history of my own city, Alexandria, which after being an international commercial center in antiquity was conquered by the Arabs, to become an international city fifteen hundred years later under Western rule, only to return to the Arabs.” The implication is that being an Arab city necessarily disqualifies Alexandria from being an “international” (read: cosmopolitan) city. 39. Thompson, Losing Alexandria, 298–99. The italics in the original denote a phrase cited from another source. 40. Aciman, False Papers, 8. I borrow “denial of coevalness” from Fabian, Time and the Other. 41. Thompson, Losing Alexandria, 297; see also 299. 42. For an instance of the commodification of Alexandria’s “cosmopolitanism,” see Awad and Hamouda, eds., A Taste of Alexandria: A Cosmopolitan Flavor. For the uncritical reception of Western literary scholarship on the city, see ‘Imara’s “al-Iskandariyya Madinat al-Dhikrayat,” a review of Haag’s Alexandria; the (somewhat inaccurate) translation of Elon’s rather uncritical review of the same book, although he faults Haag for a lack of interest in non-Europeans in the city, originally published in the New York Review of Books, “‘Indama Kanat al-Iskandariyya ‘Urubbiyya’”; and the fact that the American University in Cairo Press reprinted Pinchin’s Alexandria Still in 1989 and published, simultaneously with Yale University Press, Haag’s Alexandria, in both cases without revision. In “Alexandria,” Anis criticizes

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“Egyptian intellectuals” for “lamenting the ‘disappearance’ of Durrell’s cosmopolitan Alexandria, which never existed in the first place.” For examples of Egyptian English-language literary criticism dealing with the canonical writers, see Massoud, “Mahfuz’s Miramar: A Foil to Durrell’s Quartet”; El-Sadda, “Egypt as Metaphor”; Hashem, “Aspects of Alexandria”; and Sobhi, “The Fabulator’s Perspective on Egypt.” For examples of criticism written in Arabic that deals with or touches on the Quartet or other texts about the city in European languages, see al-‘Alim, Arbi‘un ‘Aman Min alNaqd al-Tatbiqi; and Fathi, al-‘Alam al-Riwa’i ‘Inda Najib Mahfuz. 43. See Khalid and Rashad, “al-Shari‘ al-Kabir,” specifically 16, 18, 52. A dossier in the same issue of the journal Amkenah, in which this article was published also bears as its title the Arabic translation of the title of Forster’s guidebook, al-Iskandariyya: Tarikh wa Dalil. 44. Jayyusi, e-mail communication, January 18, 2011. The publisher of Justine and Balthazar in Jayyusi’s translations is the Beirut-based Dar alTali‘a. For more information concerning the history of the translation of the Quartet into Arabic, see the novelist Yusuf al-Qa‘id’s essay, printed at the end of the 1992 translation of the first volume by Labib, “‘An al-Riwayat alMudhisha,” 275. 45. Labib, interview with the author, Cairo, January 28, 2007, and October 9, 2012. See Labib’s 1969 translation, Justin, published by Dar alMa‘arif. According to Labib, his translation of Justine was commissioned in 1966 by the Cairene publishing house Dar al-Ma‘arif, which published it in 1969. The fact that Labib did not publish the three remaining volumes until 1992 was for lack of a contract for translating them, al-Qa‘id having secured him the contract with Dar Su‘ad al-Sabbah that printed his translation of the Quartet in its entirety in 1992. His translation of the Quartet was reprinted in its entirety by Dar al-Shuruq in 2009. Labib also speculates that the reason Jayyusi did not translate the later volumes of the Quartet is that they broach tricky issues. 46. Jayyusi, “Tamhid” (Preface), Justin, 7–8. 47. Labib, interview with the author, Cairo, January 28, 2007. The phrase about Durrell’s racism was in English; the rest of the quotations are my translation. 48. Ilbert, “International Waters,” 10. See also Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830– 1930, vol. 2, 728. 49. I reproduce here points I made in “Miramar: A Pension at the Intersection of Competing Discourses.” 50. Mahfouz, Miramar, trans. Moussa-Mahmoud, 3. 51. See also Massoud, “Mahfuz’s Miramar: A Foil to Durrell’s Quartet,” specifically 91; and Fathi, al-‘Alam al-Riwa’i ‘Inda Najib Mahfuz, 124, 134– 38. For another discussion of Miramar, see also Kararah, “Egyptian Literary Images of Alexandria.” 52. Mahfouz, Miramar, 8; translation modified. 53. Ibid. 54. See Halim, “The Alexandria Archive,” 301–2, 312–13, 345–46. See also Halim, “Edwar El-Kharrat: Mikhail and the Dragon”; and on Ibrahim

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Abdel Meguid’s No One Sleeps in Alexandria, “Alexandria Re-inscribed.” For two other Alexandrian novels by Abdel Meguid, see Bayt al-Yasmin and Tuyur al-‘Anbar, the latter translated into English under the title Birds of Amber. As part of my effort to bring attention to Egyptian literature on Alexandria, I had compiled and translated a number of Egyptian poems on the city: see “An Alexandrian Anthology.” 55. Halim, “The Face of Memory.” Al-Kharrat asserted, among other things, that he had started writing about the city before reading the Quartet, and before Durrell wrote it. I allude to my 1992 “The City as Feminine Principle,” a comparative study of Durrell, al-Kharrat, and France. See also my 1996 profile of the novelist, “Edwar El-Kharrat: Mikhail and the Dragon.” 56. See Halim, “The Alexandria Archive,” 294–371. 57. I had discussed this essay in my 2004 dissertation, “The Alexandria Archive,” 331–34. Portions of al-Kharrat’s essay had been printed in 1994 in his essay “Iskandariyyati . . . madinat al-za‘faran,” in his Iskandariyyati: Madinati al-Qudsiyya al-Hushiyya. 58. See al-Kharrat, Unshuda li-l-Kathafa, 191–221. The writer cites laudatory essays and reviews about his work: see 204, 205, 216; reproduces lengthy passages from his Alexandrian texts: see 95, 217–18; and favorably compares his work with other writers: 214, 215. All translations from this text are mine. 59. Ibid., 191. Al-Kharrat cites the quotation from Foucault about Alexandria being the birthplace of Western culture (see my discussion of Errera in the introduction to this study), and comments that likewise the city made a significant contribution to Islamic culture; see 211. 60. Ibid., 191–92. 61. Ibid., 208. 62. Although al-Kharrat tackles Cavafy in his essay, he does not note how both the poet and the Greek community of modern Alexandria were used to connect the city to the capital of the Ptolemies. If al-Kharrat does not trace the full historiographical aspect of the paradigm, he does speak of “the forgotten centuries of Islamic culture” and observes, on a literary level, that “those writers who were fascinated with the Hellenic dimension of Alexandria tend to ignore or overlook its Arabo-Islamic one.” Al-Kharrat, Unshuda li-l-Kathafa, 211. The essay responds to partial aspects of that paradigm in different ways. 63. Al-Kharrat, Unshuda li-l-Kathafa, 202–3. 64. Instead of translating the note by Cavafy from Arabic, I have reproduced above the translation as given in an English translation, Cavafy’s Selected Prose Works. 65. Al-Kharrat, Unshuda li-l-Kathafa, 196. For lack of space, I have been unable to bring into this discussion another Alexandrian writer, Muhammad Hafiz Rajab (a translation of a short story of whose I published in Mediterraneans 8–9 [Fall 1996]), whom I hope to revisit in a future text. 66. To the best of my knowledge, no Arabic translation of Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon in its entirety has yet been published. For some of the translations of Cavafy published before 1994, see my article “Of Infinite Variety.” 67. See al-‘Aqqad, Bayn al-Kutub wa-l-Nas, 548.

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68. In his interview with Imam, “Tariq Imam: al-Shakk Miftah al-Riwa’i,” ‘Abd al-Latif broaches the influence of Latin American literature, especially Borges, on al-Haya al-Thaniya. Imam admits the influence, particularly of a concept of history, but suggests that “Borges went much further than I did: he writes a history that never existed except in his imagination; it’s total illusion.” For a comparative discussion of Borges and Cavafy, see Barnstone, “Real and Imaginary History in Borges and Cavafy,” which also touches on biographical parallels. All quotations from Imam’s al-Haya al-Thaniya are my translation, except in cases where I cite a quotation from Cavafy as given in an English translation, in which case parenthetical reference is made to both the translation and the corresponding page in the novel. I should add that Imam’s novel was published while I was finalizing this book; I hope to devote a fuller discussion to it in another forum. 69. The references on the poet Imam cites in his acknowledgments at the end of the novel include the Cavafy translations by Sallam and ‘Atiya, as well as al-Duwayk’s somewhat amateur monograph, Kafafi . . . al-Sha‘ir wa-l-Madina (Cavafy: The Poet and the City). He also refers to Bayyumi’s translation of Forster’s Alexandria. On Alexander and Rika Singopoulos, see Liddell, Cavafy, 156, 164, 167–68, 171–72, 188, 191, 204–5. On Cavafy using Alexander as his mouthpiece for self-legitimating statements on his work, see 164, 167–68. Rika Singopoulos had interviewed Forster for a local Greek newspaper during his visit to Alexandria in 1929. See Abdel Moneim and Spear, eds., Forster in Egypt. 70. See Alexiou, “C. P. Cavafy’s ‘Dangerous’ Drugs”; and Jusdanis, The Poetics of Cavafy, translated into Arabic under the title Shi‘riyyat Kafafi. It is unlikely that Imam is aware of Jusdanis’s book, which does not figure in his acknowledgments. 71. See Barthes, “The Death of the Author”; and Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 113–38. 72. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 39–40; see also Orientalism, 176–77. 73. Keeley, “Biographical Note,” CPCCP 458. 74. There are no direct references to or mentions of The Alexandria Quartet in al-Haya al-Thaniya, nor is it included in Imam’s list of references consulted. However, it seems to me that, at least, Durrell’s introduction to Forster’s Alexandria and Haag’s references to the Quartet at the end of the guidebook resonate in Imam’s novel. Haag’s Alexandria has not been translated into Arabic; in any case, it is not inconceivable that Imam is familiar with the two reviews of that book by ‘Imara and Elon previously cited. 75. As quoted in ‘Abd al-Latif, “Tariq Imam: al-Shakk Miftah al-Riwa’i.” 76. For example, “looking out of her window, she reflects that . . . half of her is in light, the other half in darkness, precisely like her city” (HTQK 90). 77. Writing about al-Madina in “Cultural Politics,” Said also notes the “partly homoerotic, partly not” friendships between ‘Ali and his peers. Said only briefly touches on the film’s engagement with Cavafy. I differ with Said, however, on his reading of the film which insists that the film is not solely “explicable in socio-economic or ethnographic terms of the sort that would take such things as globalisation and the Third World into account,” despite acknowledging these aspects, and that its “appeal and the level of its

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aesthetic existence assume a much larger and more universal audience as well as a far greater ambition and reach.” While not contesting the film’s widereaching aesthetic appeal, I would argue that its sociopolitical Arab concerns and foregrounding of the impact on Egypt, as a “Third World” country, of globalization should not be sidelined. In terms of al-Madina’s engagement with Cavafy, one could plausibly speculate that the choice of the poet may also be informed by the homoerotic undertones of the film, drawing in a diffuse, nonmarked fashion on poems from the Cavafy corpus other than “The City.” The spelling of names of the actors mostly follows the transliteration given in the film credits. It should be clear that my discussion of the film primarily addresses its relationship to Cavafy’s “The City.” 78. Here and in the next quotation from Cavafy’s “The City,” I have preferred to reproduce the English rendition of the verses as given in the Theoharis translation rather than in the film subtitles. Ellipses indicate verses from the original not reproduced in the epigraph. The Arabic rendition of these verses on the screen is given in prose rather than verse form. All other quotations from this film are my translation. In addition to Roschdy’s flight from Paris to Cairo being another enactment of the dilemma in Cavafy’s “The City,” there is a prosaic near-paraphrase of the poem in the reflections by one of ‘Ali’s group of friends when he returns to Egypt. Fox (played by Sarry El-Naggar) reflects that “real travel is the travel of the mind. An airplane only transports you from one prison to the other” (AM; emphasis added). 79. There are several examples that suggest that ‘Ali recovers his memory of his old vocation. He shows Nadia the picture of an elderly man (an unsuccessful but fully committed theater actor he had been friends with before leaving for France) and grows tearful when she identifies the actor and informs him that he has died. When ‘Ali stands up to his father, who had been against his taking up a career in acting and is hoping that amnesia has blotted out that wish, he says, “An actor is an actor” (AM). And, in the confrontation with his resentful peer toward the end of the film, ‘Ali remarks that the only thing he remembers is that he is an actor. 80. On Nasrallah’s years in Beirut, see the director’s recollections in interview with Elwan in “Bahjat an Tahki Afradan.” 81. Nasrallah, interview with the author, November 6, 2011. The scenario is cowritten by Nasrallah, Nasir ‘Abd al-Rahman, and Claire Denis. 82. El Batout, interview with the author, Cairo, October 10, 2011. The quoted portions of the interview were in English. Information on El Batout’s biography based on the interview. See also Carr, “Reel Independence.” 83. El Batout’s documentary on the same subject was selected as a finalist for the 2003 Rory Peck Sony International Impact Award. 84. El Batout, interview with the author, Cairo, October 10, 2011. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Ithaki are my translation. In transliterating characters’ and actors’ names, I have opted for the way they are given in the film credits and/or on the film blog, http://ithakifilm.blogspot. com/, albeit with minor alterations.

Notes

403

85. According to the director, the reason there is no version of Ithaki that carries these lines, as well the English dedication at the end, in Arabic is that he could not afford it at the time. El Batout, e-mail communication, March 15, 2012. 86. My translation here overlaps somewhat with the film’s English subtitles. 87. See Mauss, The Gift, esp. 40, 82–83. 88. On the journal Meena, as well as Amkenah, see my 2006 article “Cosmopolitanism Redrawn.” See the independently published, occasional journal Amkenah, which focuses on the cultures and poetics of place, and which, starting in 1999, has now published more than ten issues. The present author has published two articles in Amkenah and a literary translation in Meena. A novel I hope to discuss in a future study is Mus‘ad’s Ithaka which dialogues with Cavafy’s poem by that title.

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wor ks ci t ed

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index

al-‘Abbadi, ‘Abd al-Hamid, 29 El-Abbadi, Mostafa, 17, 318n67, 319n69, 353n42 ‘Abdallah, Ahmad, 311 ‘Abd al-Latif, Ahmad, 401n68 ‘Abd al-Sabur, Salah, 108–9 Abu al-‘Abbas al Mursi Mosque, 146, 150 Abu Dib, Kamal, 317n46 Abu al-Tahir b. ‘Awf, 31, 32 acculturation, 91–92. See also transculturation Aciman, André, 274, 276, 278, 396n16 ‘Adhra’ Dinshiwai (The Virgin of Dinshiwai, Haqqi), 104 El-Adl, Mohamed, 127, 128, 131, 173, 256, 350n21 Aeschylus, 72, 75 Afro-Asian movement, 9 “Agelaus” (Cavafy), 62 Ahmad, Aijaz, 72 Aida (Verdi), 243, 244, 259, 385n69 “Aimilianos Monai, Alexandrian, 628– 655 A.D.” (Cavafy), 88, 90 Al-Ahram Weekly, 377n3 A‘lam al-Iskandariyya fi al-‘Asr al-Islami (al-Shayyal), 31, 32 ‘Ala Masharif al-Khamsin (On the Eve of Turning Fifty, ‘Abd al-Sabur), 108–9 al-Amira al-Iskandaraniyya (The Alexandrian Princess, Sannu‘), 243 al-Amthal al-Sha‘biyya fi Qalb Jazirat al-‘Arab (Folk Proverbs in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Juhayman), 96 Alexander the Great, 7, 14–17, 21, 52, 61, 271–72 Alexander Romance (anonymous), 15, 16 Alexandrea ad Aegyptum (Breccia), 25, 39

“Alexandria” (Durrell), 186 Alexandria: City of Memory (Haag), 45 “Alexandria: The Capital of Memory” (Aciman), 276 Alexandria: A History and A Guide (Forster), 45, 50, 54, 120–23, 130– 31, 158–64, 169–70, 279 Alexandrianism, 18–20, 44, 288–89, 292, 319n73, 319n76 Alexandria Quartet (Durrell), 54, 179, 180, 181, 183–91, 212–25, 279 Alexandria Still (Pinchin), 44, 45, 353n60 Alexandria University, 27, 29, 274 Alexandrie 1830–1930 (Ilbert), 41, 42, 314n6, 321n86 Alexiou, Margaret, 86, 87, 330n2, 336n65, 338n80, 340n103 Alfano, Mélanie, 115 Algerians, 124–25, 147, 268, 356n81 Alhadeff, Gini, 274, 276–77, 397n23 alienation, 184 al-‘Alim, Mahmud Amin, 317n46 Alloula, Malek, 264 Ambron, Amelia, 378n3 Ambron, Gilda, 378n3 American ethnocentrism, 6 Amitiés belgo-égyptiennes, 115 “An Anatomy of Exile” (Fedden), 184, 202 Anderson, Benedict, 23–24 Anglicisms, 249 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1936), 40, 176, 204, 206, 208, 216–17, 220 animalism, 83, 211 animistic mental activities, 197 Anis, Mona, 398n42 antiessentialism, 227 anti-Orientalism, 69–75 anti-Semitism, 220 Anton, John P., 320n86

448 Antony, 74, 187, 210 Aphrodite (Louÿs), 21 Apollonius, 350n26 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 316n37 al-‘Aqqad, ‘Abbas Mahmud, 107, 115 Arabic language, 19, 28–29, 279 Arabo-Islamic Alexandria: Cavafy on, 88–89, 90; and cosmopolitanism, 22; and decline thesis, 27–39; and Eurocentric colonial discourse, 20, 27; Forster on, 88–89, 154–58; in relation to modern nationalism, 34 Arab Spring (2011), 9, 272, 396n15 An Arab Tells His Story (Atiyah), 365n7, 391n115 Arcache, Jeanne, 33 Archaeological Society of Alexandria, 176 archaeology: archaeological irredentism, 25; and cosmopolitanism, 23–24, 46; and Neo-Pharaonism, 81; removal of artifacts from Egypt, 79, 163, 322n102 architectural styles, 23 Arianism, 138 aristocracy, 239 L’Aristocratica Alessandrina (Sannu‘), 243 Aristotle, 16, 142, 143 Artagal (Ayoub Sinano), 233–34, 235, 382n30 Art Deco, 23 Association de la Jeunesse Juive Egyptienne, 217 At Home in the World (Brennan), 9 Atiya, Aziz S., 339n96 ‘Atiya, Na‘im, 104 Atiyah, Edward, 365n7, 391n115 Attic dialect, 111 Auden, W. H., 56 Auerbach, Erich, 8 Awad, Louis, 28, 139 Ayoub Sinano, Christian, 233–38, 248, 261–62, 378n3, 382n30, 382n34, 392n120 Ayyubid dynasty, 36, 325n137 The Bacchae (Euripides), 72 Badaro, Clea, 378n3 Badawi, Abdurrahman, 142, 352n42 Baedeker, Karl, 124, 145, 161, 348n12 Baghdad, 12, 142–45 Bahari, 125, 349n19 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 249 Balfour Declaration, 293 Balthazar (Durrell), 183, 205, 279, 367n34

Index Bandung, 9 barbarian “Other”: Cavafy on, 58–60, 62; hybridization into, 64; Muslims as, 51, 53–55, 97; and Orientalism, 69–75; Persians as, 73–76, 335n59 Barger, Florence, 169, 171 Baring, Evelyn. See Cromer, Lord bastardies, 126–31 Bastéa, Eleni, 81 bathos, 254 El Batout, Ibrahim, 305–11, 402n84 “The Battle of Magnesia” (Cavafy), 62 Baudelaire, Charles, 83 Bayram al-Tunisi, Mahmud, 152 Bayt al-Hikma (Baghdad), 142 Beaton, Roderick, 111, 322n99, 345n164 Behdad, Ali, 313n4, 359n106 Bell, Gertrude, 126 Bellini, Vincenzo, 242 Beloved (Morrison), 290 Benjamin of Tudela, 36 Benjamin, Walter, 354n61 “Between Memory and History” (Nora), 391n115 Bhabha, Homi, 66, 200, 203, 204, 208 Bharucha, Rustom, 170 Bible, 7, 22 Bibliotheca Alexandrina (ancient and modern), 17–27, 28, 46, 271, 272, 396n15 biographical dictionaries genre, 30 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 296, 394n130 Blake, William, 105 Bloom, Harold, 18 Bolton, Jonathan, 373n124 “Book of the Dead” (Durrell), 186 Boone, Joseph, 199 Borchgrevink, Aida, 127 Borges, Jorge Luis, 18, 320n80, 401n68 Bosworth, A. B., 15, 318n60 Bouché-Leclerq, A., 91, 350n26 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (Molière), 242 Bowen, Roger, 212, 368n48, 372n115, 373n124 Bowersock, G. W., 333n18 Bowker, Gordon, 376n156 Breccia, Evaristo, 25, 27 Brennan, Timothy, 9, 10 Brett, Philip, 240 Briant, Pierre, 73–74, 76 Briggs, Martin S., 162 Brinton, Jasper Yeates, 176 British Museum, 160, 161, 164 Buddhism, 145 “al-Burda” (al-Busiri), 148

Index Bursat Misr (The Cairo Stock Exchange, Sannu‘), 243 Burstein, Stanley, 339n87 al-Busiri, 146, 147, 148, 153, 356n85 Busiri Mosque, 146, 149–50, 153 Butcher, E. L., 352n39 Butler, Beverly, 46 “Byrone” (de Zogheb), 245, 250 Byzantine artifacts, 79 Byzantine Church, 93 Byzantium, 90 Cabalistic group, 197 Cachia, Pierre, 102 Cairo University, 274 Callimachus, 350n26 Calotychos, Vangelis, 367n37 camp parodies, 239–40, 264–70 Capitulations system, 39, 40, 175 Carol, Jacqueline. See Cooper, Jacqueline Klat Carroll, Lewis, 388n85 “The Cat” (Cavafy), 82–83, 93 “La Cava delle Antiquita” (de Zogheb), 245 Cavafy, C. P., 56–119; and Alexandrianism, 19; in Arabic, 104–9; on colonialism, 99–110; and cosmopolitanism, 21–22; in de Zogheb’s works, 253–55, 256–57; and Durrell’s Hellenism, 186–87; and Egyptiote–Egyptian continuum, 113–19; in El Batout’s work, 305–11; exile themes of, 185, 238; Forster’s acquaintance with, 127, 130, 164; Forster’s views compared with, 164–67; “hidden” poems of, 105–6, 119, 345n148; homosexuality of, 169, 361n125; in Imam’s work, 284–94; on Islam, 94–98, 342n120; language choice, 110–13, 246; literary criticism of, 43–53; in Nasrallah’s work, 299–305; on Neohellenism and Neo-Pharaonism, 76–83; on Orientalism and anti-Orientalism, 69–75, 94–98, 118; on Persians as barbarians, 75–76; publishing of works, 330n9; in relation to Hellenism and Philhellenism, 57–58, 59, 60–69, 131; on transculturation, 84–93. See also specific works Cavafy: A Critical Biography (Liddell), 44, 253 “Cavafy and Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet” (Katope), 367n29

449 Cavafy’s Alexandria (Keeley), 44, 62, 334n32 Cemetery for Free Thinkers, 52 censorship, 176 Chahine, Youssef, 53, 289, 305, 321n86, 329n195 Charalampopoulos, Stelios, 113–14 “Le Chat” (Baudelaire), 83 Chatby Cemeteries, 52 Chiara di Rosembergh (Ricci), 242 Chioles, John, 56, 342n117 Christianity: and Arabo-Islamic period, 156; and Cavafy’s Islam/ Christianity binary, 95–96, 98; Christianization of Egypt, 87; and colonialism, 101–2; and Enlightenment, 133; Forster on, 140; and Hellenism, 184; imagery of, 102, 137–38; and Levantinism, 236; and neocolonialism, 215, 225; and Sufism, 153, 356n85; and syncretism, 136–38. See also Coptic Christianity Cialente, Fausta, 128, 244 “The City” (Cavafy), 196, 276, 302, 402n78 City of Saffron (al-Kharrat). See Turabuha Za‘faran Classical revivalism, 82 Clay, Diskin, 67 Clea (Durrell), 183 Clement of Alexandria, 136, 138, 139–40 Cleopatra, 21, 74, 187, 210 Cleopatra’s Needles, 163, 322n102 Clifford, James, 8 Cocktails and Camels (Carol), 396n17 code-switching, 230–31, 241, 249, 275 Cohen, Eve, 261 “Coins” (Cavafy), 64–65 Colla, Elliot, 375n154 collective unconscious, 34, 195 Colonas, Vassilis, 23 Colonial Bridgehead (Reimer), 40, 130, 314n6, 323n118, 326n149, 349n14 Colonial Harem (Alloula), 264 colonialism: British, 3, 41; Cavafy on, 72, 99–110; and cosmopolitanism, 13–14, 39–43; Forster on, 121, 158–64; and Philhellenism, 60; subalternities of, 167–78. See also Levantinism Colucci, Mario, 390n101 Common Dialect, 111 consular courts, 40 Cooper, Jacqueline Klat (aka Jacqueline Carol), 396n17

450 Coptic Christianity: and decline of Alexandria, 139–40; Durrell on, 214–15, 219, 220; Forster on, 132, 165; and Islam, 215–16; language of, 86, 338n83; and neocolonialism, 225; religious festivals of, 190; and syncretism, 138; and transculturation, 84–85, 93 “Coptic Poem” (Durrell), 220 cosmopolis, 4, 17 cosmopolitanism: defining, 11–14, 330n5; Forster’s use of term, 137 Cosmopolitanism (Appiah), 316n37 “Cosmopolitanism Redrawn” (Halim), 403n88 cosmo-theory, 10, 316n36 Council of Chalcedon, 90, 91 counterculture, 232 courtesan trope, 262–63 C. P. Cavafy (Roilos), 331n9 “C. P. Cavafy’s ‘Dangerous’ Drugs” (Alexiou), 336n65, 338n80, 340n103 Creation of Modern Athens (Bastéa), 81 Cromer, Lord (Evelyn Baring), 27, 99, 200–201 Cukor, George, 368n46 cultural diversity, 12; and AraboIslamic Alexandria, 35; and cosmopolitanism, 3–11, 12; Forster on, 126–31; Hellenistic conceptions of, 57–58; and Philhellenism, 68. See also ethnic diversity cultural mobility, 234 Cyprus, 218–19 Cyrus, 74 Dante, 72 Dar al-Ma‘arif (publisher), 399nn44–45 Dar al-Shuruq, 399n45 Darius, 74 Dar Su‘ad al-Sabbah, 399n45 Darwish, Sayyid. See Sayyid Darwish Dawud, Ibrahim, 105 Dayan, Moshe, 222 decline thesis, 20, 27–39, 73–74 decolonization, 29, 214, 273. See also neocolonialism; postcolonialism Derrida, Jacques, 86 Diboll, Michael, 216, 217 Dictionnaire du Snobisme (Ayoub Sinano). See “Levant” diglossia, 112, 345n164 Dinshiwai incident (1906), 99–100, 101–3, 108, 344n144, 346n173 Diogenes the Cynic, 4, 14 Dissemination (Derrida), 86

Index divine providence, 4, 315n18 Donato, Eugenio, 319n74 Donizetti, Gaetano, 242 Doty, Mark, 21 doubling theme, 191–94, 209 dream interpretation, 193 Duelling Languages (Myers-Scotton), 388n86 Duhamel, Georges, 115 “Dünya Güzeli” (Cavafy), 93, 97, 98, 101, 118 Durrell, Eve, 392n120 Durrell, Lawrence, 179–225; on Arabo-Islamic Alexandria, 88–89; de Zogheb’s connections to, 261; on feminizing irrationality of exemplars, 21, 196–200; on Hellenism, 183–91; on Levantinism, 200–212; literary criticism of, 43–53; neocolonialism in, 212–25; on Orientalism, 183– 91, 277, 283; on “uncanny” city, 191–96. See also specific works “Durrell’s Fatal Cleopatra” (Pinchin), 199 Eco, Umberto, 289 Egypt and the Sudan: Handbook for Travellers (Baedeker), 124, 145 Egypt Inter-Mission Council, 216 Egyptiote–Egyptian continuum, 113–19 Einstein, Albert, 193–94 Elgin marbles, 78 Eliot, T. S., 109, 135 L’Elisir d’Amore (Donizetti), 242 elites: acculturation of, 92; and colonial subalternity, 173; and cosmopolitanism, 180; ethnic diversity among, 233; and Hellenism, 12; as Levantine, 184, 227, 237; and Municipal Council, 41, 42; and religious festivals, 369n53 empathy, 101, 170 Empereur, Jean-Yves, 319n71, 322n101, 380n17 emplotment, 154–58 “The End of Antony” (Cavafy), 74–75 Enlightenment, 4, 133–36 Enlightenment in the Colony (Mufti), 354n64 Enneads (Plotinus), 137, 144 “Epitaph of Antiochus, King of Kommagini” (Cavafy), 63, 64 “Eroticism and Poetry” (Alexiou), 330n2, 338n80 Errera, Eglal, 19

Index Escoffey, Carole, 378n3 esotericism, 95 essentialism, 167, 227 ethnic diversity: in Cavafy’s poetry, 59; and cosmopolitanism, 2; and ethnic chauvinism, 179; and Levantinism, 234, 252, 258; and Philhellenism, 68; and transculturation, 84–85, 87. See also cultural diversity ethnocentrism, 3, 6, 272 ethnolinguistic nationalism, 33 Euclid, 186 Euripides, 72 Eurocentric colonial discourse, 3, 20, 43–53, 277–78 European residents in Alexandria, 2 “Exiles” (Cavafy), 89, 90, 106, 166 exile trope, 8, 48, 185, 186 exodus trope, 22 False Papers (Aciman), 274 fanaticism, 272 Fanon, Frantz, 179, 180, 296, 394n130 Farouk (king), 29, 223, 307, 383n46 Fathi, Ibrahim, 375n155 Fedden, Robin, 184–85, 202 Fellini, Federico, 329n195 feminization: of Alexandria, 20–21, 187, 281, 297, 367n40; of irrationality of exemplars, 196– 200; of music, 240 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 381n26 festivals, religious, 190, 369n53 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 246, 388n85 Flaubert, Gustave, 2, 127, 199, 262 Les Fleurs du mal (Baudelaire), 83 “For Ammonis: Who Died at 29, in 610” (Cavafy), 82, 84–93, 110, 117–19, 166, 338n81 Forster, E. M., 120–78; on AraboIslamic Alexandria, 88–89, 154–58; on bastardies and taxonomies, 126–31; on Cavafy, 59; Cavafy’s views compared with, 164–67; on colonial cosmopolitanism, 158–64; on colonial subalternity, 167–78; on Copts, 139–40; in de Zogheb’s works, 254, 256; and Durrell’s Hellenism, 186–87; and El-Adl, 167–72; on foreign residents in Alexandria, 175; on Hellenism, 163–64; homosexuality of, 361n125, 362n134; on Islam, 140–41, 175–76; literary criticism of, 43–53; on Modern Sons of the Pharaohs, 214; on Neoplatonism, 142–45; and post-Enlightenment

451 legacy, 131–36; on “Spiritual City,” 136–38, 197; on Sufism, 145–54. See also specific works Foucault, Michel, 18, 19, 400n59 foundation myths, 271 France, Anatole, 21, 154 Fraser, G. S., 224, 326n145 Fraser, P. M., 17 Freud, Sigmund, 191–92, 193, 194, 210, 369n59 From Gibbon to Auden (Bowersock), 333n18 “From the School of the Renowned Philosopher” (Cavafy), 109 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN, Algeria), 268 Furbank, P. N., 174, 361n120 Furness, Robert Allason, 169 Genet, Jean, 362n137 geopolitics, 3–11 Ghali, Butrus, 99, 100, 103 Ghislanzoni, Antonio, 243 Gibbon, Edward, 74, 154–58, 357nn93– 94, 358nn97–98 Girls of Alexandria (al-Kharrat). See Ya Banat Iskindiriyya “The Glory of the Ptolemies” (Cavafy), 75 Gnosticism, 197, 320n80 “The God Abandons Antony” (Forster), 130, 164, 166, 294, 297 Godshalk, William Leigh, 373n126 Gotch, Paul, 378n3 governance, 81 Graeco-Roman Museum, 24–26, 79, 161, 187, 195, 276 Gran, Peter, 38 Greek Orthodox Church, 142, 339n93 Greeks: in diaspora, 68; and Eurocentric narrative, 23; language, 64–65, 86, 90, 101; and Orientalism, 69–75. See also Hellenism; specific individuals The Greeks in Egypt (Kitroeff), 329n1 Grewal, Inderpal, 160 Guarino, Piero, 244, 245, 386n79 guidebook genre, 26, 120, 122, 158, 160, 177–78, 282 Gutas, Dimitri, 142 Haag, Michael, 45–47, 296, 328n171, 354n60, 359n103, 378n3, 396n14 Haas, Diana, 74, 75, 95, 341n108, 357n95 “Habalily’s wedding” (Ayoub Sinano), 237 Hagstrom, Jack, 386–87n83, 394n131 Hajj (pilgrimage), 147

452 Halim, Hala, 313n1, 377n1, 380n12, 385n62, 394n131, 394n134, 396n16, 403n88 Hanna, Nelly, 323n115, 326n145 Haqqi, Mahmud Tahir, 104 Haqqi, Yahya, 104–5 Haridi, Salah, 38, 39 Hartog, François, 73 Hashem, Malak, 133–34 “Hassan Abu Ali Saraq el Meeza” (Hassan Abu Ali stole the goat, song), 188 Hawi (film), 311 al-Haya al-Thaniya li-Qustantin Kafafis (The Second Life of Constantine Cavafy, Imam), 284–94 Hayati fi al-Shi‘r (My Life in Poetry, ‘Abd al-Sabur), 108 Hellenism: of Cavafy, 57–58, 60–69, 131; citizen vs. xenos in, 62; and Eurocentric colonial discourse, 16–17, 20; Forster on, 163–64, 166–67 Heraclius (emperor), 88, 91 Herbrechter, Stefan, 191, 371n98 Herodas, 77, 336–37n66 Herodotus, 73, 76, 83 heteroglossia, 112 “hidden” poems, 105, 119, 345n148 Hijazi, Ahmad ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti, 395n1, 395n9 Hinduism, 147 Histoire des Lagides (Bouché-Leclerq), 91, 350n26 Histoire universelle (Ségur), 76 “History and Ideology: The Greeks and Persian ‘Decadence’” (Briant), 73–74 A History of Eastern Christianity (Atiya), 339n96 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), 74–75, 156–58 Homer, 17, 131 homoeroticism: in Cavafy, 65, 85, 86, 92; in de Zogheb, 54–55, 227, 232, 254–55, 256–57; in Durrell, 199; in Forster, 167–72; and Orientalism, 21 homophobia, 198–99, 362n137 homosexuality: of Cavafy, 169, 361n125; of de Zogheb, 230–33, 383n42; of Forster, 361n125, 362n134 Horwitz, Janie Sinano, 378n3 Hourani, George, 27 Howards End (Forster), 134 Hugo, Victor, 72

Index humanism, 72, 134, 167, 197 Hunayn b. Ishaq, 89, 142 Husayn, Taha, 27, 33, 318n52 Hypatia, 21, 164, 165 Ibn Battuta, 35, 147 Ibn Jubayr, 147 Ibn Rushd, 143 Ibn Tulun Mosque, 147 Ibrahim, Hafiz, 115 Ibrahim, Hamdi, 104 “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent” (Kant), 4–5, 6 identity: de Zogheb’s cultural identification, 230–33; and foundation myths, 271; in Hellenism, 62; and Levantinism, 203, 226, 237; queer, 240; and transculturation, 84–85 Idris, Yusuf, 12 Ilbert, Robert, 40–41, 42, 314n6, 375n154 “imaginative geography,” 20, 72, 203 Imam, Tariq, 284–94, 401n69 immortality, 192 imperialism, 160, 180. See also colonialism “In a Large Greek Colony” (Cavafy), 62 intercultural dialogue, 12, 377n164 internationalism, 9, 355n67 International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 55 “In the Month of Athyr” (Cavafy), 77 “Ionian” (Cavafy), 83 Ippolito, Christophe, 321n92 irony, 62 al-Iskandariyya fi Fajr al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin (Alexandria at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, al-Jazayirli), 33–34, 125 Iskindiriyya Kaman wa Kaman (Alexandria Again and Forever, Chahine), 53, 289 Iskindiriyya . . . Lih (Alexandria . . . Why?, Chahine), 185 Islam: and American ethnocentrism, 6; as barbarian “Other,” 51, 97; Cavafy on, 342n120; and colonialism, 13, 102; and Copts, 215–16; cosmopolitan attitudes of philosophers, 143; Durrell on, 190; Forster on, 132, 140–41, 175–76; and Hellenism, 184; and Levantinism, 236; mysticism, 145–54; and Orientalism, 94–98; religious festivals of, 190. See also Sufism

Index The Islamic Roots of Capitalism (Gran), 38 Ismail (Khedive), 242, 263, 390n101 Israel, 219, 221–22, 293. See also Zionism “Ithaca” (Cavafy), 109 Ithaki (film), 305–11, 403n85 Jackson, David, 233, 264, 265 Jacobites, 142 Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, 279–80 al-Jazayirli, Yusuf Fahmi, 29–30, 31, 33–34, 125, 324n122 Jeffreys, Peter, 334n41, 335n59, 357n95 Jondet, Gaston, 127 Jones, William, 206 Joyce, James, 246, 388n85 Judaism: Durrell on, 220; and Levantinism, 236; and library of Alexandria, 18; and Sufism, 153, 356n85; and syncretism, 136–37. See also Zionism “Judith” (Durrell), 221 Judith (film), 376n156 al-Juhayman, ‘Abd al-Karim, 96 Jung, Carl, 193, 195 Jusdanis, Gregory, 80, 336n65, 347n182 Justine (Durrell), 183, 192, 219, 276, 279, 291, 367n34, 368n46 Kahf, Mohja, 98 “Kaisarion” (Cavafy), 62, 112, 286 Kamil, Mustafa, 99 Kant, Immanuel, 4–5, 6, 315n18 Kararah, Azza, 313n5, 328n169, 399n51 O Kavafis kai e Epoche tou (Tsirkas), 70 Katope, Christopher G., 367n29 El-Kayar, Ibrahim, 113 Kazamias, Alexander, 322n95 Keeley, Edmund, 44, 48–49, 56, 62, 110–11, 331n9, 334n32, 338n81 Keith, Joseph, 316n36 Key to Modern Poetry (Durrell), 192, 193 al-Kharrat, Edwar, 13–14, 19, 46, 198, 282–83, 321n86, 365n5, 400n55, 400n59, 400n62 Khuri-Makdisi, Ilham, 327n162 al-Kindi, 143 Kitroeff, Alexander, 23, 89, 329n1 Kolaitis, Memas, 110 Kum al-Dikka, 152 kuzmubulitaniyya, 11, 12 La Ahad Yanam fi al-Iskandariyya (No One Sleeps in Alexandria, Abdel Meguid), 185, 282

453 Labarthe, Philippe, 393n127 Labib, Fakhri, 279, 280, 399n45 Lackany, Radames, 29, 30, 324n122 The Lands of Sunshine: A Practical Guide to Egypt and the Sudan (Whitehead-Morris), 124 Lane, Edward, 188, 207, 214, 373n127 language: Arabic, 19, 28–29, 279; Cavafy’s use of, 110–13, 246; and code-switching, 230–31; Coptic, 86, 338n83; de Zogheb’s use of, 230–33, 241–45; diglossia, 112, 345n164; diversity of, 59, 86; Greek, 64–65, 86, 90, 101; heteroglossia, 112; hybridization of, 181–82; linguistic dialogism, 249; polyglossia, 2, 241; and psychoanalysis, 192–93; puns, 245– 50. See also pidginization Lanterne sourde, 115 Lascaris, Manoli, 398n34 “Latter-day Levantinism” (Halim), 377n1, 385n62, 394n131, 394n134 “Lavon affair” (1954), 219, 220 Lawrence Durrell (Herbrechter), 371n98 League of Nations, 174, 216 Leeder, S. H., 214, 215, 218, 373nn126– 27, 374nn131–32 Leontis, Artemis, 82, 332n14, 333n29 Lepsius, Richard, 81 “Levant” (Ayoub Sinano), 233, 235–36, 237 Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (Mansel), 45 Levantinism: Ayoub Sinano’s conception of, 233–36; and camp parodies, 239; Cromer on, 201–2; de Zogheb on, 53–55, 226, 250–64; Durrell on, 185–86, 200–212; etymology of term, 202; and Eurocentric colonial discourse, 3; Fedden’s use of term, 184, 185; and Municipal Council, 41, 42; queering of, 236–41 L’Hellenisme et l’Égypte moderne (Politis), 56, 58 Lhote, André, 228 library of Alexandria. See Bibliotheca Alexandrina “The Library of Babel” (Borges), 18 Liddell, Robert, 44, 50, 76, 100–101, 103–4, 233, 239, 253, 340n97, 382n30, 382n33, 388n83 lingua franca, 241, 242 Lionnet, Françoise, 92, 340n101 loanwords, 245–46, 248

454 Losing Alexandria (Thompson), 274 “The Lost Guide” (Forster), 360n113 Louÿs, Pierre, 21 Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti), 242 Macaulay, Thomas B., 200 MacNiven, Ian, 218–19, 222 Madama Butterfly (Puccini), 244, 262 al-Madina (film), 299–305, 401–2n77 madrasas, 32 Mahfouz, Naguib, 1, 55, 280–81, 297, 317n46 Mahmudiyya Canal, 39, 282 Malcomson, Scott, 7, 315n24 “Malmulla ou Il Canale” (de Zogheb), 237, 245–48, 250–52, 258–62, 264, 387n83, 394n134 Mamluks, 36–37 al-Ma’mun (caliph), 142 Mann, Daniel, 221 Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (Lane), 207 Mannheim, Karl, 13 Mansel, Philip, 45, 51, 397n24 Manshiyah Square, 124 Mansur, Ibrahim, 344n140 Manzalaoui, Mahmoud, 44, 188, 189 “Mappings of Male Desire in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet” (Boone), 199 al-Maqrizi (Makrizi), 156 Marcus Aurelius, 5, 6 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 254 Marx, Karl, 72 al-Masadi, Muhammad, 102 “Masks” (Cavafy), 77, 83 Masood, Syed Ross, 350n21 Maspero, Gaston, 26 Masra‘ Kilyubatra (Death of Cleopatra, Shawqi), 114 Massad, Joseph, 231–32, 326n145, 362n137, 381n21. al-Mas‘udi, 52, 140 Matar Khafif fi al-Kharij (A Light Drizzle Outside, Dawud), 105 Maurice (Forster), 161 Mauss, Marcel, 310 McClintock, Anne, 213 McKinsey, Martin, 87, 335n41, 338n82 McPherson, J. W., 188 Medalie, David, 134, 351n31 Mediterraneanism, 27 Meguid, Ibrahim Abdel, 46, 185, 282 Melas, Natalie, 313n1 memory studies, 31 Menasce, Adrien de, 238, 379n5 Mendelsohn, Daniel, 332n9

Index Merrill, James, 231–33, 236–37, 248, 252–53, 264–66, 388n83 Messageries d’Orient (Vanderborght), 115 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 143 Meyerhof, Max, 142 Microphone (film), 311 Miller, Henry, 185 mimiambi, 77–78 “The Mimiambi of Herodas” (Cavafy), 77, 79, 82, 93, 166 mimicry, 191–94, 200, 204, 236, 364n1 minorities, 224–25. See also racism “Minute” (Macaulay), 200 Miramar (Mahfouz), 280–81 miscegenation, 127 misogyny, 199 Mitford, Nancy, 394n130 Mixed Courts, 39–40 moderation, 80 modernism, 194–96 Modern Sons of the Pharaohs (Leeder), 214 Molière, 242 monasticism, 139 Monophysism, 138, 339n93 Monotheletism, 91, 138 Montesini, Lorenzo, 273, 275, 278, 398n38 Montreux Convention (1937), 40, 176 Morejon, Nancy, 340n101 Morrison, Toni, 290 mosques, 146–47, 155–56 Moulids of Egypt (McPherson), 188 Mountolive (Durrell), 183, 189, 224, 279, 369n64, 374n134, 376n162 mourning trope, 52 Mouseion, 20, 21, 91 Mubarak, Hosni, 225, 396n15 Mufti, Aamir, 316n31, 354n64 Muhammad ‘Ali, 25, 37–38, 40, 124, 146, 154, 163, 215, 242, 272 Muhammad ‘Ali Club, 398n34 multiculturalism, 5, 10. See also cultural diversity Municipal Council (Alexandria), 40–41, 42, 152, 327n162 Mursi, Ahmad, 105–6, 344n144 al-Mursi, Abu al-‘Abbas, 146–48, 153 Mus‘ad, Ra’uf, 403n88 music, 93, 240 “A Musician in Egypt” (Forster), 128, 130, 164 Muslim Brotherhood, 51 Muslims. See Islam al-Mu‘tasim (caliph), 142 Mutran, Khalil, 113, 115 My Alexandria (Doty), 21

Index “My Alexandria, the Meeting Place of Cultures” (al-Kharrat), 282 Myers-Scotton, Scott, 388n86 My Life and Other Misdemeanors (Montesini), 273, 275 “Myris: Alexandria, A.D. 340” (Cavafy), 85 mysticism, 83, 145–54 mythology, 16, 271–72 al-Nadim, ‘Abdallah, 152, 241 Nagui, Effat, 378n3 Nahda narrative, 37, 38, 326n145 Nahman, Germaine, 265–66, 393n127 Nahman, Johnny, 393n127 Naipaul, V. S., 180 The Name of the Rose (Eco), 289 Napoleon, 37, 154, 164 al-Naqqash, Raja’, 107, 108 al-Naqqash, Salim, 243 al-Nasir Muhammad b. Qalawun, 36, 325n137 Nasrallah, Yousry, 299–305, 402n80 Nasser, Gamal Abd al-, 29, 33, 281, 324n121 nationalist movements, 3–11, 22, 40, 173–74, 213–14 National Organization of Cypriot Fighters, 218–19 national sovereignty, 9 “The Naval Battle” (Cavafy), 75, 335n59 Nayt, Karma, 306, 307 Nectanebo, 15 neoclassicism, 23, 160 neocolonialism, 179, 212–25, 364n1 Neohellenism, 72, 76–83, 114, 165, 332n14, 347n182 neologisms, 4, 246 Neo-Pharaonism, 24, 76–83, 114, 346n173 Neoplatonism, 28, 133, 136–38, 141– 45, 351n31, 352n42 Nestorians, 142 Newman, Jennifer, 381n28, 387n83 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 264 The Night Fernando Pessoa Met Constantine Cavafy (film), 113–14 Nimr, Jacky Lumbroso, 231, 252, 378n3 Nkrumah, Kwame, 179, 364n1 nonaligned movement, 9 No One Sleeps in Alexandria (Abdel Meguid), 46 Nora, Pierre, 31, 391n115 Norwich, John Julius, 397n24 “Notes on Camp” (Sontag), 239

455 “Notes on Egypt” (Forster), 177, 178, 293, 294 “Notes on Poetics and Ethics” (Cavafy). See “Twenty-Seven Notes on Poetics and Ethics” “Nothing about the Lacedaemonians” (Cavafy), 62 Nussbaum, Martha, 5, 6, 315n19 Odyssey (Homer), 131 “Of the Sixth or Seventh Century” (Cavafy), 89 okelles, 124–25 “An Old Man” (Cavafy), 109 Olry, Stéphane, 242, 253, 385n62, 390n107 “On being an Alexandrian” (Halim), 313n1, 380n12, 396n16 “One Night” (Cavafy), 295 “One of Their Gods” (Cavafy), 83 On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander (Plutarch), 14–15, 315n24 ontogeny, 194 “Operation Susannah” (1954), 219, 220 “Opere” notebooks, 386n83, 394n131 Orientalism: of Cavafy, 69–75, 118; of de Zogheb, 258–59, 261, 262; of Durrell, 183–91, 277, 283; of Forster, 160; and homoeroticism, 21; and Islam, 94–98; and Levantinism, 236; and neocolonialism, 214; of Stratigis, 82; temporal dimension of, 72 Origen, 139 Orthodox Church, 142, 339n93 Ortiz, Fernando, 91 Ottomans, 38–39 “Our Museum” (Cavafy), 79 Out of Egypt (Aciman), 274 Paganism, 138, 139 Palestinians, 221–22 pan-Arabism, 13, 360n117 Parigory, Tony, 389n95 A Passage to India (Forster), 121, 134, 147, 160, 170, 177, 178 pathos, 254 patriotism, 5, 10–11 “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” (Nussbaum), 5 Pea, Enrico, 101, 180 Pecora, Vincent, 194 La Pensée politique de Constantin Cavafy (Risva), 70 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 244 “Persian Manners” (Cavafy), 75

456 Persians, 73–74, 75–76, 335n59 The Persians (Aeschylus), 72, 75 Personal Landscape: An Anthology of Exile (Fedden), 184, 373n124 “Phaedra” (de Zogheb), 232, 245, 390n104 Pharaonic revivalism, 24. See also Neo-Pharaonism Pharos and Pharillon (Forster), 54, 120– 21, 130, 139, 154, 165, 166–67 Pharos, Antike, Islam und Occident (Thiersch), 156 “Philhellene” (Cavafy), 65 Philhellenism, 60–69, 184, 187, 332n14 Philo, 136, 352n37 philosophy, 136–38 phylogeny, 194 pidginization, 182, 241–50, 275, 388n86 Pierre I de Lusignan, 37 Pinchin, Jane Lagoudis, 44–45, 47, 49, 56, 70, 199, 328n171, 330n2, 343n124, 353n60, 369n64 Place Muhammad ‘Ali, 124, 188, 348n12 place names, 29–30, 181–82, 391n115 Plato, 142 Plotinus, 137, 142, 144, 196 Plutarch, 14–15, 61, 76, 315n24 Poems: 1905–1915 (Cavafy), 330n9 Poems: 1916–1918 (Cavafy), 330n9 “The Poetry of Mr. Stratigis” (Cavafy), 79–80, 118 Pola de Péra (Ayoub Sinano), 238, 261, 392n120 O Politikos Kavafis (Tsirkas), 70 Politis, Athanase G., 56–57, 58, 63, 118, 329n1 polyglossia, 2, 241 polypolis, 233–36 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 356n81. Poole, Sophia, 2 populism, 30 portmanteau words, 246, 258 “Poseidonians” (Cavafy), 63, 64, 65, 75 postcolonialism, 13–14, 181, 213, 222, 373n124 postcolonial melancholia, 273, 275, 396n16 Pratt, Mary Louise, 91 “A Prince from Western Libya” (Cavafy), 90 Le Problème religieux dans l’oeuvre de Cavafy (Haas), 95 propaganda, 218–19, 220–21 proper names, 65, 181–82, 391n115 proverbs, 341n111

Index providence, 4, 315n18 pseudo-orientalism, 188 psychoanalysis, 192–93 Ptolemies, 7, 17, 20, 58, 133 Public Culture on cosmopolitanism, 7, 9 Puccini, Giacomo, 244 puns, 245–50 I Puritani di Scozia (Bellini), 242 al-Qabbani, ‘Abd al-‘Alim, 150 Qadri, Yahya, 354n62 al-Qahira (film), 305 Qait Bey Fort, 152–53, 159, 160, 322n102 Qasba, 356n81 “Qasida Misriyya wa Sha‘ir Yunani” (An Egyptian Poem and a Greek Poet, al-Naqqash), 107 Qasr al-Nil Bridge, 307 queer identity. See homosexuality Qur’an, 96, 149 race memory, 196 racial hybridization, 127 racism, 204, 267–69, 280, 299, 375n155 radicalism, 9, 327n162 Rajab, Muhammad Hafiz, 400n65 Rank, Otto, 192 Rassim, Ahmed, 70, 117 rationalism, 7, 133, 136 Re, Lucia, 328n169, 343n128, 350n23 Redfield, James, 73 Reid, Donald, 24 Reimer, Michael, 40, 130, 314n6 relativity theory, 193–94, 280 religion: chauvinism, 179, 272; festivals, 190, 369n53; Forster on, 136–38; historical transformations effected by, 90; interfaith relations, 12, 377n164; and Levantinism, 236; and syncretism, 197–98. See also specific religions and sects Renan, Ernest, 353n58 “Return from Greece” (Cavafy), 66–67, 71, 82, 93, 118, 166, 238 Return to Alexandria (Butler), 46, 319n71, 328n176, 366n22, 395n1 “Le rêve d’Alexandre ou le mythe littéraire” (Errera), 19 Rhakotis, 131–32, 152 Rhys, Jean, 181 Ricci, L., 242 Riches, Pierre, 378n3, 379–80n7, 390n99 Risva, Marina, 70 Robbins, Bruce, 10–11 Rodenbeck, John, 359n103

Index Rodocanachi, John, 332n13 Roessel, David, 218, 360n117 Roilos, Panagiotis, 65, 331n9 Rorty, Richard, 5 Rosenthal, Franz, 142, 144, 353n58 Rossi, Mario, 354n62 Royal Archaeological Society of Alexandria, 363–64n151 Saab, Aziz de, 379n6 Saab, Lucette de, 379n6 Sa‘d Zaghlul Square, 349n12 Said, Edward: on Alexandrianism, 292, 319n76; on al-Madina, 401n77; on culture, 14, 270; on exile trope, 8; on “imaginative geography,” 72; on Orientalism, 97, 189, 199, 206, 207, 317n46; on textual analysis, 18; on Verdi’s Aida, 385n69 Sa‘id, Mahmud, 349n19 St. Athanasius, 139, 357n95 St. Augustine, 142 St. John, Bayle, 382n34 al-Sakandari, Ahmad Ibn ‘Ata’ Allah, 148 Sakandariyyat (al-Jazayirli), 29–30, 31, 324n122 Salah al-Din, Al-Nasir (Saladin), 32, 325n137 Salim, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, 28, 35, 36 Sallam, Rif‘at, 105, 106–7 “Salome” (Cavafy), 245, 285 Sannu‘, Ya‘qub (James), 243–44 Sasson, Andrée, 379n5 Savidis, George, 56, 110–11 Sayyid Darwish, 152, 244 Schindler’s List (film), 300 Schliemann, Heinrich, 24 Schofield, Malcolm, 4, 15 science, 133 secularism, 12, 18, 52, 133, 134, 138 Seeing Double (Stephens), 16 Seferis, George, 112, 185, 347n182 Ségur, Comte de, 76 Seleucid dynasty, 57 self-actualization, 227, 275 self-legitimization, 239 self-perception, 81 Selim, Joseph Housein, 99 Septuagint, 7, 18, 19, 20 La servante maîtresse (Pergolesi), 244 al-Shadhili, Abu al-Hasan, 147, 355n68 Shalabi, Hilmi, 41–42 “Sham El-Nessim” (Cavafy), 76–77, 109–10, 342n124

457 “Shanq Zahran” (The Hanging of Zahran, ‘Abd al-Sabur), 108, 109, 345n148 al-Shatibi, Abu ‘Abdallah, 147–48 Shawqi, Ahmad, 113, 114, 115, 149, 346n173 al-Shayyal, Jamal al-Din, 28, 30, 32, 34–35, 354n62 Shenouda III, 376n163 Shereen, Faiza, 313n1 Shi‘ism, 147 “The Ships” (Cavafy), 294 Shohat, Ella, 213 Shumayyil, Rashid, 23 al-Siba‘i, Bashir, 69, 70, 71 Silim, Yusuf Husayn, 99, 345n148 Simmel, Georg, 135 Singopoulos, Alexander, 284–94 Sobhy, Soad, 190, 369n54, 370n65. Sontag, Susan, 239 Le Sorelle Brontë (de Zogheb), 54–55, 232, 236–41, 244–46, 248–51, 253 Spear, Hilda D., 360n111 “The Spiritual City” (Forster), 123, 136–38, 197, 351n31 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 167 Starr, Deborah, 313n1 Stephens, Susan, 16 stereotypes, 73–74 Stoicism, 4, 5, 14–15, 315n18 “Stoningtonia” (de Zogheb), 232–33, 245, 390n104 The Story of the Church of Egypt (Butcher), 352n39 Strabo, 17 strategic use of positivist essentialism, 167 Stratigis, 79–80, 81, 82, 93 subalternity, 167–78 Suez Crisis (1956), 22, 33, 219, 380n15 Sufism, 12, 141, 145–54, 308, 356n85 Suite Alessandrina (Terni), 245 The Sun at Midday (Alhadeff), 274 superstition, 198–99 syncretism, 14, 136–38, 197–98 Syrians, 64, 69, 201 Tagore, Rabindranath, 115 al-Tahtawi, Rifa‘a Rafi‘, 241 Takla, Silim and Bishara, 23 Teatro Rossini, 244 Terni, Enrico, 127, 128, 244, 245 Terni, Laura, 386n79 Terni, Paolo, 386n79 Thaïs (France), 21, 154–55 Théâtre Alhambra, 244 Théâtre Muhammad ‘Ali, 244

458 Théâtre Zizinia, 244 Theocritus, 350n26 Theoharis, Theoharis Constantine, 112, 340n102 “Theophilos Palaiologos” (Cavafy), 286 Thiersch, Hermann, 156 Thomas, Alan G., 365n12 Thompson, Victoria, 274, 278–79, 398n34 Through Egypt in War-Time (Briggs), 162 Through the Dark Labyrinth (Bowker), 376n156 Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (Carroll), 388n85 Thucydides, 76 “Timolaos the Syracusan” (Cavafy), 92–93 “Timothy the Cat and Timothy Whitebonnet” (Forster), 140 “The Tobacco Shop Window” (Cavafy), 256 “To Jerusalem” (Cavafy), 102, 112 tolerance, 12 “To Perpetual Peace” (Kant), 5, 6 Tossizza, Michali, 326n145 Toynbee, Arnold, 56, 164, 330n2 Tracy, Robert, 363n151 transculturation, 84–93, 116, 136–38 transliteration, 12, 65, 94 transnationalism, 3, 8 travel writing, 158. See also guidebook genre Trollope, Anthony, 217 Tsaggouri, Eleni, 330n7, 337n68, 346n174 Tsirkas, Stratis, 70, 100, 102–3, 159, 342n117 Tuby, Molly, 252, 390n101 Turabuha Za‘faran (al-Kharrat), 46, 282 Turkish Town, 124, 146, 152, 190, 349n15 al-Turtushi, Abu Bakr, 147 Twentieth Century Impressions of Egypt (guidebook), 26, 43 “27 June 1906, 2 P.M.” (Cavafy), 99–100, 106–7, 118, 166, 345n148 “Twenty-Seven Notes on Poetics and Ethics” (Cavafy), 286, 291–92 Two Years’ Residence in a Levantine Family (St. John), 382n34 Tzalas, Harry, 1 ‘Ubaid, Makram, 216 “Il Ultimo Giorno di Pompeii” (de Zogheb), 244, 245

Index Umm Kulthum, 149 “The ‘Uncanny’” (Freud), 191, 212 The Unfinished Poems (Mendelsohn), 332n9 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 254 Unreal City (Liddell), 233, 382n30 “Unshuda li-l-Basata” (Haqqi), 104–5 ‘Urabi, Ahmad, 40 urban revivalism, 46 U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), 224– 25, 376n163 “Le Vacanze a Parigi” (de Zogheb), 232, 245, 246, 264–67, 269–70 Valassopoulo, George, 361n125 Valentinus, 197 Vanderborght, Paul, 115 Verdi, Giuseppe, 243, 244, 259, 262– 63, 385n69 Victoria College, 397n21 Victorianism, 232 Vincendon, Claude, 261, 276, 392n120 “La Vita Alessandrina” (de Zogheb), 54–55, 229, 232, 242, 245, 246, 250, 253 “Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad” (Meyerhof), 142 Vromman, Jan, 242, 385n62 Wada‘an li-l-Iskandariyya allati Tafqiduha (Youssef), 344n140 Wafd, 217 Wahba, Magdi, 14 “Waiting for the Barbarians” (Cavafy), 108, 254 Walcott, Derek, 335n41 “The Walls” (Cavafy), 303 Walzer, Richard, 142, 143 al-Wardani, Ibrahim, 100, 101, 103 Wars of Position (Brennan), 9 The Waste Land (Eliot), 109, 135 “What I Believe” (Forster), 157 White, Hayden, 155, 157, 357nn93–94 White, Patrick, 398n34 Whitehead-Morris (publisher), 124 Wilde, Oscar, 261 “The Windows” (Cavafy), 302 Wolseley, Lord, 159 Wood, Elizabeth, 240 Woolf, Leonard, 174 “Word and Silence” (Cavafy), 93, 94, 96–98, 101–2, 118–19, 166 World War II, 185 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 179, 180

Index xenophobia, 268 Ya Banat Iskindiriyya (al-Kharrat), 46, 282, 365n5 Yeats, W. B., 335n41 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 69, 70 Your Guide to Egypt (Nelson), 364n157 Youssef, Saadi, 104, 344n140 Yusuf, Niqula, 30, 32–33, 148 Zaghlul, Sa‘d, 52, 172, 362n144 al-Zahir Baybars, 36, 325n137 Zahlan, Anne Ricketson, 212 Zananiri, Gaston, 117, 273, 375n154 Zananiri, Nelly, 33 Zenodotus of Ephesus, 17 Zikoudis, Yannis, 334nn37–38, 343n127, 347n179

459 Zionism, 11, 204, 213–14, 217, 219, 221–22, 293, 375n154 Zogheb, Bernard de, 226–70; coordinates for reading of, 230– 33; death of, 229; education of, 228; homosexuality of, 230–33, 383n42; language choice, 112, 241–50; on Levantinism, 53–55, 250–64; pidginization techniques of, 245–50; political limitations of, 264–70; queering of Levantinism by, 236–41; and Sinano’s “polypolis,” 233–36, 264–70. See also specific works Zogheb, Georges de, 228–29, 379n5 Zogheb, Mary de, 227 Zogheb, Patrice de, 378n3 Zubaida, Sami, 12–13, 14, 57, 330n5