Under the Salacious Sun - Extra Extra Magazine

AN ORGIASTIC SUNRISE

It is still dark when I step out of my parents’ apartment in Dokki Square, heading east towards the Nile. Another morning during the mid-term holiday in 1989: I am barely fourteen, and I don’t yet know how much of the angst punishing my body is bottled-up desire. No such thing as the internet, yet: reading, playing rock music on cassette tapes, skulking – rolling on the floor of my room in the dark – that is what I do when I stay up all night. But, once the dawn azan signals the advent of day, I’m tearing through the empty streets with the animal purposefulness of someone masturbating, despe-rate for the release of sunlight staining the water as I lean over the railing of the Galaa Bridge – the one connecting my side of the river with Gezira Island, where the neighbourhood of Zamalek, Cairo’s hub of upper-class and Western high life, is located. The effort of the exercise tingles deliciously in my legs and, as I watch the sun come up, I feel a calm pleasure, the life force returning to my veins.

THE PIT

By then, I will have taken a momentary break just before my destination: a brief glimpse into what the logical conclusion of my home-bound anxiety might look like. A roundabout separates my side of the road from the three differently shaped edifices of the Cairo Sheraton on the other side. They sit over the water like a coterie of behemoth tycoons flashing their wealth around amid more modest structures.
On the traffic island, a thick wall overlooks the tunnel that leads into the neighbourhood of Agouza, to the north. I slow down once I’ve crossed the asphalt, drawn towards that wall. The chiaroscuro effect of the tunnel’s lighting makes the spot where the cars dip and disappear look like a bottomless pit. And, compulsively, I find myself leaning over and looking down. No suicidal ideation is involved – it is clear I won’t willingly let any such thing happen – but I find myself staring into the darkness and thinking about falling, diving faster and faster into the black nothingness that reflects my solitude back at me, the silent yearning of my body in an urban space as chaste as it is erotically charged.

VHS FELUCCAS

To pull myself out of that mood and continue with my walk, this time, I think of the singer-actor Simone – perhaps Egypt’s greatest 1990s icon – my celebrity crush at the time. I just saw Khairy Beshara’s 1988 masterpiece, Bitter Day, Sweet Day, on VHS. And, in the scenes where she is being seduced by her cruel brother-in-law (the legendary Nubian singer Mohamed Mounir), with whom she seems truly in love, I relished her coquettish body language, the yearning in her eyes and her enchanting smile. I am still too prudish and timid to fantasise about women’s bodies at this point, but picturing Simone’s facial expressions as she wriggles fish-like in Mounir’s arms while they perform a kind of duet – effortless, understated, utterly convincing – I can already feel the genesis of an erection. In several scenes, Simone appears on a felucca. Now, while I cast a wide net over the horizon, the postcard image of feluccas bobbing quietly on the river feels like a video installation of magic beds where invisible Simone-like creatures are waiting for me to float through the air and land next to them, in another dimension. The tears well up as I look at them.

Born in the Shubra district of Cairo in 1966, Simone Philippe Kamel, mononymously known as Simone, accidentally began her singing career after participating in the Egyptian–Greek Friendship Festival with a Greek song and, from that moment on, countless producers wanted to get their hands on this new ‘Madonna’ lookalike, which later became one of her nicknames in Egypt: ‘Madonna Masr’. Courtesy: egyptianstreets.com

FORTY YEARS AGO

Taking in the complex architecture of the Cairo Sheraton, I do not realise this was, in fact, the home of a sophisticated sensual hub some forty v before. As a similarly tumescent teenager in 1950 – when the site of the hotel was a nightclub or ‘cabaret’ named after its owner, the pioneering belly dancer, actor and entrepreneur Badia Masabni – Edward Said came here to see ‘the finest belly-dancer ever,’ as he called her: Tahia Carioca. I might’ve compared the enchantment of Simone’s smile to that of Carioca as he described it, speaking, as it seemed, not just of a performer he admired but of the art of seduction as practised in Cairo in general: ‘I especially recall that once she started dancing, and continuing through the rest of her performance, she had what appeared to be a small self-absorbed smile on her face, her mouth open more than is usual in a smile, as if she was privately contemplating her body, enjoying its movements. Her smile muted whatever tawdry theatricality attached to the scene and to her dance, purifying them by virtue of the concentration bestowed on her innermost and most self-abstracted thoughts.’
Said spoke of how ‘controlled was her quite lengthy immobility as she stood there with an entirely composed look about her … a majestic deliberateness … an immensely exciting – because endlessly deferred – erotic experience … sexuality as a public event, brilliantly planned and executed, yet totally uncon-summated and unrealisable.’ It was something Said associated with the emancipatory rather than sex-work tradition, which, in the overriding, eroto-phobic patriarchy that rules over social life to this day, are readily confused with each other. ‘Tahia belongs, not to the easily identified culture of B-girls and fallen women, but to the world of progressive women skirting or unblocking the social lanes … Tahia saw herself – correctly, I believe – as part of a major cultural renaissance [along with figures including] writers like Naguib Mahfouz, Tawfik al-Hakim, Taha Hussein, singers like Umm Kalthoum and Abdel Wahhab …’

Half a century after her death, Umm Kulthum’s singular voice still echoes through busy streets in Egypt, across time-worn cafes in Iraq, and in millions of homes from Morocco to Oman. ‘As long as people listen to music, there will be Umm Kulthum,’ said Abu Ahmed, the manager of a Cairo cafe named after the Arab world’s most revered singer. Courtesy: al-momitor.com

CELESTIAL OPENERS

If I were to continue with my walk through Cairo – then as now – I might take a left without crossing the Galaa Bridge, entering Agouza, where Koki al-Siyahi (an almost self-parodying name that seems to belong in a 1970s comedy, with the second word, ‘touristic,’ implying ‘smutty’) – perhaps the first bar I went to, a year or two after that walk in Dokki – used to stand on the far side of the road from the Nile, at the other end of the tunnel from the Sheraton. Like many such bars, at least one of which continues to exist deeper in Agouza, Koki al-Siyahi didn’t employ belly dancers but fattahas (fattaha is an exact cognate of ‘opener’): women whose job it is to keep you company at the table, encouraging you to order more and more overpriced alcohol – to ‘open bottles’ – while entertaining you with conversation or, in the case of me and my friends, drinking local Stella beers, presenting you with the stunning prospect of attractive female bodies – celestial forms – as capable of pleasure as your own, perhaps even as open to it: something you had not thought possible. Once I cross the Galaa Bridge, on the other hand, I will have two choices: either keep east towards Tahrir Square and the rest of Khedival Cairo (as Downtown is called, after Khedive Ismail, the mid-19^th century monarch who had it built, modelled on Paris); or turn left into Zamalek, where there are almost as many landmarks.

A DETOUR SOUTH: ADAWEYA

But I am still thinking about belly dancers, and in my mind – to a famous tune by Ahmed Adaweya – I’m retracing my steps back west, past my parents’ house, then south towards the Pyramids Road. There, Cabaret Arizona used to dominate the nightclub scene in this part of the city, minutes away from the Giza Plateau further south. There are nightclubs here still, and some of them still feature belly dancing, but they are a far cry from the idea of the Pyramids Road – almost synonymous with ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ – that I grew up with.
Starting in 1975, with the Lebanese Civil War making ‘the Paris of the East’ – as Beirut was called – inaccessible, these cabarets featured not only bacchanalias centred on drunken men with money literally throwing banknotes at scantily dressed belly dancers, often as beautiful as they were skilful but – more importantly for me – a new genre of folk-inspired urban music known as shabi. Adaweya, who died only this year, was the most prominent performer of such songs. And his career took off when important musical figures – notably the legendary singer Abdel Halim Hafez – heard him sing alongside Oriental dancers at the Arizona. He would remain at the forefront of the genre and the whole entertainment industry till the day of my walk to Galaa Bridge, in 1989.
That year, back at the Marriott Hotel in Zamalek, a Kuwaiti prince named Talal bin Nasser (he would later be executed for drug dealing in Kuwait) – upset by Adaweya’s apparent intrusion on his harem – spiked Adaweya’s drink with a speedball. The rumour spread that he’d had a Swiss surgeon expertly castrate the singer, though it is now established that the overdose simply induced a stroke. Adaweya was in a coma for a long time, and he emerged partly paralysed but functional. He released a new track as late as 2018, appearing in the music video alongside the then-rising Ukrainian Oriental dancer Alla Kushnir. Wherever it is heard – or remembered, as now – Adaweya’s unique hoarse voice evokes an uninhibited, lovesick Cairo of the body – a place pulsing with erotic give-and-take.
Providing a kind of soundtrack to the very experience of homegrown desire for some two decades all across the city, Adaweya weathered not only the storms of left-wing then fundamentalist prudishness but also, crucially, in a public sphere where there can be no worse insult to a man, the claim of his own alleged unmanning.

PHALLUS

As I cross the Galaa Bridge, I notice the Cairo Tower, a phallic symbol if ever there was one – and still the highest edifice on Gezira Island – jutting past the water, to my left. The story has it that, when CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt gave the revolutionary Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser three million dollars to persuade him to discontinue his support for the Algerian Revolution and other African independence movements, back in 1956, Nasser used the money to construct what would be the tallest structure in all of Africa, visible from the American Embassy across the Nile in Garden City, as a kind of enormous middle finger to ‘the forces of imperialism.’
Heading into Downtown, after crossing the breadth of the island, I pass both pairs of stone lions flanking the entrance and the exit of Kasr al-Nil Bridge, which goes over the other side of the water, to step into Tahrir Square. A tall ancient Egyptian obelisk now stands at the centre of the traffic circle there, another middle finger whose implicit target is not the forces of imperialism but people who had been hopeful about regime change, back in 2011. The obelisk is jokingly compared not to a penis but a khazouq or stake – the kind that goes up someone’s anus to torture or kill them: a ubiquitous idiom for ‘being shafted’ – since, by the time it went up, the space that had hosted the biggest, most successful protest since 1919 was already off limits to groups of any size. The January Revolution, as that protest was called, had achieved very little beyond making things more difficult for more people.
I remember how, while political forces bickered and clashed over who was the more chaste, the more pious, the less permissive of sexual freedom, on TV male leaders were praised for their über-masculine virility – for having, as it were, the bigger, stronger member – sometimes in language that would not be acceptable in any other context. Phallic power was thus identified with the right to rule and represent the nation. Maybe this obelisk, epitomising the current order, is exactly as it should be?

INVISIBLE ORGIES I

Still, it is hard to believe this closely observed, tightly regulated space is the same Elysian bedlam where I spent most of my time for at least two weeks at the start of 2011, participating along with thousands, if not millions – most of them younger than me – in the occupation of the city centre. This occupation eventually managed to bring down Egypt’s longest-serving president, Hosni Mubarak, though that gave way to such chaos and confusion that within two and a half years the political status quo had been reinstated.
But I’m not thinking about any of this as I walk around Tahrir. I am remembering, rather, the intense (if totally suppressed) sexual energy of those gatherings. I was there and I can vouch for the libido in the air – in the throes of danger and heroism, love stories kept springing up: you would see couples on the fringes and the frontiers of the sit-in, never quite embracing but often holding hands with such passion you could tell they were desperate to – but because chivalry and piety were crucial to the middle-class utopia that emerged as a result of the occupation (and those could so easily turn into sexism and bigotry), libido within the protest itself tended to express itself only in sublimated forms.

A STURGES-LIKE SELF-PORTRAIT

As I pass Mohamed Mahmoud Street now, I notice the walls of the American University in Cairo (AUC) campus. Some of the graffiti commemorating the martyrs – that is, casualties of clashes with the police – is still there. I glance at it, lost in fantasies of revolutionary copulation in the empty streets of a city on the cusp of regime change. And as I do, I remember how, while protests turned into pure rioting fetishism in the wake of Mubarak’s ouster – unreasonable, obsessive, suicidal – the nineteen-year-old AUC student Aliaa Magda Elmahdy took a different, more interesting approach to pushing back against ‘violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment, and hypocrisy,’ as her blogger site, Diary of a Rebel, announced. She posted a nude picture of herself. While – in the bright colours of horror and violence – her male counterparts let their bodies be savaged, caged or extinguished in pursuit of vague and irrational objectives like ‘retribution for our slain brothers’ and ‘dying on our own terms,’ Aliaa displayed her own nubile body in black and white, perfectly composed and pristine, but ultimately much more threatening than any number of Molotov cocktails.
The Egyptian-American actor Amanda Banoub would say Aliaa showed ‘genuine purity and modesty without a single layer of clothing,’ but – recalling the work of Jock Sturges – the image is all the more alluring for its paradoxical innocence. Like so much of Cairo’s contorted sexuality, it is disruptive as well as seductive, almost kinky. Politically, I’ve always thought that, by purposefully undressing, this woman exposed not so much the hypocrisy of the culture at large but the revolution’s own failure to acknowledge the body as an instrument of desire, or desire as an instrument of liberation. When Aliaa was mobbed on showing up to a protest right here, before death threats, legal action and physical assaults drove her out of the country altogether – she was granted asylum in Sweden – the protesters she saw as her comrades did not defend her. They publicly disowned and discredited her intervention; in fact, reiterating their loyalty to the conservative status quo.

INVISIBLE ORGIES II

Walking past Mohamed Mahmoud, I could head towards the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ around Talaat Harb Square, formed by Café Riche and the Zahret al-Bostan coffee house just off the square itself, the Greek Club and the Atelier du Caire on Mohamed Bassiouni Street, and the Grillon and Estoril bars on Kasr al-Nil Street. Here, the messy personal lives of writers and artists – now played out, soap opera-style, on Facebook – unfold. But, thinking of Aliaa still, I step into Tahrir Street instead.
I’m going to make a journey I’m sure she used to make, at least sometimes. For her and other AUC students – children of the bourgeoisie – it would’ve been a gesture of rebellion and class defiance, if nothing else, to take that same walk to El Horreya Café in Bab al-Louq (its name translates to ‘Freedom’), where all the many diverse, seemingly incompatible cultures and lifestyles of Cairo come into erotically charged contact: working-class drinkers with sober chess players; drug dealers with homeless junkies, khertis (that is, young male hustlers who specialise in befriending Westerners and often double as male prostitutes) with respectable civil servants from ‘the city’s bottom,’ as the newspapers used to call rough neighbourhoods; rebellious teen-agers from bourgeois families who live in Zamalek or Maadi with Western academics, backpackers, adventurers; middle-class patrons of traditional coffee houses with intellectual refugees from Bermuda (the latter also seen at the smaller Al-Nadwa al-Thaqafiya – meaning ‘The Cultural Seminar’ – a coffee house just round the corner) …
Here is a gathering place for the entire urban community, more or less. A vast, wood-and-glass space that has existed since 1936, this is the only traditional coffee house I know of licensed to serve alcohol in Cairo (and one of an increasing number that host as many women as men). As is the case at virtually any venue in the country (except perhaps for upscale bars and nightclubs), you won’t see public displays of affection at El Horreya. But, once you have settled down with a beer glass and a plate of termes, if you listen to the drunken conversations, the laughter, the confessions, if you observe the body language of two – sometimes more – people who have just met, one leaning over the other or passing a drink with a look, a smile, a sigh, you’ll realise there were whole orgies going on under the surface, orgies of voyeurism–exhibitionism across social frontiers, orgies of kink, of more-than-sexual schemes, but also orgies of innocent seeking. Even now, but especially before the time of Tinder (and Grindr, which is unsafe in Egypt anyway), countless couples will have met here, countless variously successful encounters will have taken place, together with countless fantasies – wet dreams.

GAY SPIRITS

Alternatively, rather than crossing Kasr al-Nil Bridge, once I’ve walked past the Opera House on Gezira Island, I could take a left and find myself on the street where the entrance to the Gezira Club faces the back of the Marriott Hotel, in the heart of Zamalek. If I keep to the bank of the Nile, I will eventually pass the spot where The Queen Boat – a floating nightclub of the 1990s – used to be moored, opposite the other side of the Marriott. When, in May 2001, three months before 9/11, the Queen Boat was raided by police, many in Cairo had not realised this was the country’s most happening gay spot. Of the fifty-two gay men arrested, humiliated and exposed in the media, two received heavy prison sentences for ‘contempt of religion’ right away. The rest were tried and retried. By 2003, twenty-one of them were given a three-year prison sentence for ‘habitual debauchery’ (no law specifically punishes homosexuality in Egypt), and twenty-nine were acquitted.
The Queen Boat incident marked the end of a particular margin of freedom long tolerated by the powers that be, despite the ultra-conservative tide rising for at least three decades. Yet, as I gaze over the water now, the ghosts of Egypt’s exiled and silenced queens are calling out to me – not tortured or ashamed, paradoxically, but ecstatic – assuring me that, along with other forms of erotic contact, their brand of self-expression continues to take place all across the city, however much more cautiously.

RIVER-BOUND PDA

Walking on, via a little bridge, I take the inevitable left into 26 July Street. Through Aziz Abaza, then Hassan Sabri, I might eventually arrive at the eastern end of Abu al-Feda Road, overlooking the Nile. No public displays of affection happen at Al Horreya Café, it’s true, but here, as at several spots by the water (al-Rawda Island in Manial, or University Bridge, connecting Dokki to Manial), pedestrian couples, the women sometimes in hijab, can be seen walking, standing, sitting on fences, often intertwined. A hand on a face, hips grinding against each other, stray whispers – electric … And east of Cairo proper, in cars parked – sometimes with the blinkers flashing – at the construction sites or outside sparsely populated residential compounds in the numbered ‘set-tlements’ known collectively as Tagamu, passionate lovemaking is taking place. Half-undressed young bodies in contorted positions pant for dear life as they give in to their risky ecstasies – all the more life-affirming for being forbidden.

COUPLES AND CUBBELZ

But I end up slipping into Al-Sayed al-Bakry Street, parallel to 26 July, instead. First, I pass the once-hip bar Deals. Showing up there without a female companion, I would be turned away at the door with the word ‘cubbelz,’ the Egyptian mispronunciation of ‘couples’ – the policy of not letting in unaccompanied young men who might be on the lookout for a woman or a fight. But it’s further down this little street that I’m heading, to L’Aubergine, my milieu’s most happening night spot throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
It would’ve been 1999 or 2000. Some five years before, as a virgin high schooler, I had attempted to get in on the boyfriend–girlfriend game being played at my private school, only to be summarily rejected by my classmate S. Now I am with my first-ever serious girlfriend, N – the sophisticated, stunning companion I’ve fantasised about all my life – on the upper floor of L’Aubergine, completely lost in a slightly drunken, perfectly ecstatic kiss to the sound of rock music. I remember the taste of beer and tobacco mixed with expensive lipstick and the scent of her skin. I remember the tingling in my extremities, the same as, yet so utterly different from, that I used to feel on arriving at the Galaa Bridge at sunrise. I remember feeling like I was both in Cairo and outside it, in a place that was my city but where I could kiss my girlfriend in public without consequences. I remember feeling like I owned the world. Then I looked up, and who should I find myself making eye contact with – who should have been watching me kiss N with an expression I can only describe as envious – except S?

25 Cairo: Under the Salacious Sun

by Youssef Rakha