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Alexandria in the rain is melancholic – as good as a poem by the Egyptian poet, Konstantin Cavafy . His poems of lost passion, Alexandria’s ancient past and its gods befit the moody, subdued Alexandria that I can see from the eleventh floor of my apartment.
Cavafy, was born in Alexandria and spent most of his life here until his death in 1933. His parents were Greek and he was a true son of what was then, a cosmopolitan city. Cavafy was a man obsessed with the transitory nature of beauty and happiness and like his friend, Durrell, saw Alexandria as a City of Memory.
As I climb the two flights of marble stairs to his apartments thick wooden main door, I can hear a voice reciting Ithaca – the poem that Jackie Onassis requested to be read at her funeral. The voice – American and recorded hangs eerily in the stairwell. When I step into the museum I am greeted by the lines ….. To arrive there is your final destination /but do not rush the voyage in the least/Better it lasted for many years/and once you are old cast anchor on the side… Shivers ran down my back.
The hall is long and gloomy. Furniture meant to replicate the original is dowdy. A brass bed catches the light from an open window, a replica of his desk stands in a dark corner. I sit at it and stare across the black stained floors towards the hall and imagine Cavafy returning home from a liaison with a beautiful young man, closing the door behind him with a sigh, and standing by the window.
The paintings on the walls, many of them by Cavafy himself, are unremarkable. Books from his library are scattered throughout the rooms, while Cavafy looks down owlishly on visitors from portraits revealing his angular nose and round glasses.
Just as much else has disappeared from Alexandria, the hospital and brothel are now replaced by a garage and a store. Only the nearby Elite bar remains from a number of taverns where Cavafy sought his illicit liasons with young men.The rest are gone, along with the cosmopolitan community and its tolerance. In Cavafy’s era, the city was a mix of Greek, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Maltese, Jews and the British and other nationalities adding to the majority Arab-Egyptian population, all lured by trade in cotton and wheat.
Alexandria was once a place where women strolled in sun dresses, not headscarves and jelabayas, and where religion was a matter of personal choice, not political campaigning.The foreigners left after the ousting of the monarchy in 1952, and the rise of Arab nationalism. Cavafy’s cosmopolitan Alexandria disappeared.
In the past two decades, the emergence of Islam as a prime source of identity among many Egyptians made Cavafy’s sensuous subject matter unfashionable. Alexandria is a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood – Egypt’s biggest opposition party and majority winner of the Lower House of the new Egyptian Parliament. The Brotherhood wants Egypt ruled under Islamic law. Sobhi Saleh, a Muslim Brotherhood member of parliament says Islamic law precludes publishing Cavafy’s poetry. |
| The Italian cemetry, Alexandria |
Beautifully penned Christine, vivid, enchanting and soulful.
Excellent, Chris. You described it exactly as I imagined it happening. What a tragedy. We need to fight for tolerance and freedom, not succumb to new era Salem Witch-hunts. What a ghastly thought that in modern day Egypt a man like Cavafy would have been shunned, and his work silenced. It is all getting far too much like Germany in the 1930s…too many good people silenced, or not daring to speak.