Bidoun current issue on Objects
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ'S WHITE LINEN SUIT
By Anand Balakrishnan
I was in Cairo
"Next thing, you'll probably want to steal this guy's wife," my friend said, way too loudly, waving in the direction of a Sayeedi in the corner of the coffee shop where we sat. "You're like Genghis, but with loafers. You can just throw dollars at them. Or Michael Jackson records." I looked nervously over my shoulder at the Sayeedi, who was wearing a green djellaba. Thankfully, he seemed oblivious to my home-wrecker plan, his eyes glued to the flickering television set. 50 Cent had his shirt off and was bragging about his magic stick. His abs were glistening; they seemed almost extraterrestrial in their beauty. No one in the coffee shop was immune to their strange and terrifying allure.
"This is not the story of 50 Cent as object of the Sayeedi gaze," said my friend, touching my leg just above the knee. "This is the story of what you choose to see when you come toEgypt
"Isn't it better than being really into Umm Kulthum's glasses?" I asked. "OrNasser 's Hawaiian shirts? Or Sadat's car? Or Muhammad Naguib's presidency? Or Souad Hosni's white dress?" Ruby started dancing on the television. "Or Ruby's flared nostrils?" "Her nostrils are beautiful," said the coffee-shop owner. He finished adjusting the coals on our sheesha and blew his nose on the hem of his shirt. "I could write a ghazal about her nostrils."
"We're talking about Ahmed Adaweya's penis," announced my friend.
"Not much to talk about!" Exaggerated laughter. "Now Ruby's nostrils—there's an object worthy of being a subject!" He whistled lasciviously and traced the outlines of the female form as imagined by a horny monk—an infinity of rolling hills.
As he walked away, I tried to explain my idea about Adaweya. Because we spoke in Arabic, I used awkward, muddled phrases, each ending with a questioning lilt: It's about more than the rumored castration? It's about the history of Egyptian pop music? About the shift from classically trained poets and composers to working-class louts? About technology and the cassette tape? About the man who sold a million tapes, even though the government wouldn't allow his songs to be played on the radio? They were too lascivious? An allegory for the swamping of Egyptian nationalism by Saudi oil money?
"It's just so crass," my friend said. "You like Ahmed Adaweya because he's crass. You like him for the same reason you like this coffee shop, because it's crappy." He started pointing: the rickety wooden chairs with torn woven wicker seats, the dented, aluminum-topped tables, the grains of Keda tea floating in tepid water, the blanket of sawdust on the stained tile floor, the giant gap in the coffee-shop owner's top teeth, the subtle stench of garbage wafting in from the side alley, the spidery cracks that spanned the length of the walls, the sharp smell of butane from the gas stove, the single bulb swaying on a thin wire from the sooty ceiling ...
"What's wrong with Umm Kulthum?" he demanded. "What's wrong with being fascinated with Mahfouz or Abd al-Haleem Hafez or Fairuz? Something that requires a mastery of Arabic music or history or the goddamn language?"
"Yeah," said the coffee-shop owner, his jowls quivering with excitement, "and why don't you go to a nicer coffeeshop?"
"I'm leaving," the Sayeedi suddenly announced. He twirled his magnificent mustache, picked up his mysteriously bulky jute bag, and walked out of the coffee shop.
"Where is he going?" I demanded. My friend looked embarrassed. The coffee-shop owner ignored me. Outside, the Sayeedi hailed a minibus and got in, heading off to wherever it is that Sayeedis go. Where do Sayeedis go?Upper Egypt ? Ain Shams? Ezbet el'Nakhl?
But this is not the Sayeedi's story. Nor is it the story of the Sayeedi's mustache, which nonetheless deserves a book-length study of its own. And it is most definitely not the story of Ahmed Adaweya, who is, let's face it, kind of crass. It is, rather, the story of Naguib Mahfouz, who turned out to be worthy of fascination after all.
It turns out that meeting a Nobel laureate is far easier than meeting a washed-up and possibly castrated pop star. The difficult part is figuring out what to wear.
In preparation for my interview with Mahfouz, I turned to the best-dressed man I knew, the owner of the corner store near my apartment. He was an old man, maybe sixty-five years old, and the very picture of worn elegance. He wore a three-piece suit to work every day and had four strands of hair on his head that he combed carefully. He even wore a fez, perched to display the four strands of hair.
He was very pleased that I was to meet Naguib Mahfouz. It was extremely important for a foreigner like me to meet someone like that. "There is no one alive inEgypt Egypt to you, so you can explain it to America
He paused. "Of course, you've already read his books."
"Of course." Like everyone else, I had started and almost finished The Cairo Trilogy.
"Then you know that Ustez Mahfouz can describe anything." He looked around his store, at the artfully arranged pyramid of toilet paper, at the dark wood floor and polished glass surfaces. He was rightfully proud of his store. Though he sold the same Lux soap as every other store inCairo 
"Next thing, you'll probably want to steal this guy's wife," my friend said, way too loudly, waving in the direction of a Sayeedi in the corner of the coffee shop where we sat. "You're like Genghis, but with loafers. You can just throw dollars at them. Or Michael Jackson records." I looked nervously over my shoulder at the Sayeedi, who was wearing a green djellaba. Thankfully, he seemed oblivious to my home-wrecker plan, his eyes glued to the flickering television set. 50 Cent had his shirt off and was bragging about his magic stick. His abs were glistening; they seemed almost extraterrestrial in their beauty. No one in the coffee shop was immune to their strange and terrifying allure.
"This is not the story of 50 Cent as object of the Sayeedi gaze," said my friend, touching my leg just above the knee. "This is the story of what you choose to see when you come to
"Isn't it better than being really into Umm Kulthum's glasses?" I asked. "Or
"We're talking about Ahmed Adaweya's penis," announced my friend.
"Not much to talk about!" Exaggerated laughter. "Now Ruby's nostrils—there's an object worthy of being a subject!" He whistled lasciviously and traced the outlines of the female form as imagined by a horny monk—an infinity of rolling hills.
As he walked away, I tried to explain my idea about Adaweya. Because we spoke in Arabic, I used awkward, muddled phrases, each ending with a questioning lilt: It's about more than the rumored castration? It's about the history of Egyptian pop music? About the shift from classically trained poets and composers to working-class louts? About technology and the cassette tape? About the man who sold a million tapes, even though the government wouldn't allow his songs to be played on the radio? They were too lascivious? An allegory for the swamping of Egyptian nationalism by Saudi oil money?
"It's just so crass," my friend said. "You like Ahmed Adaweya because he's crass. You like him for the same reason you like this coffee shop, because it's crappy." He started pointing: the rickety wooden chairs with torn woven wicker seats, the dented, aluminum-topped tables, the grains of Keda tea floating in tepid water, the blanket of sawdust on the stained tile floor, the giant gap in the coffee-shop owner's top teeth, the subtle stench of garbage wafting in from the side alley, the spidery cracks that spanned the length of the walls, the sharp smell of butane from the gas stove, the single bulb swaying on a thin wire from the sooty ceiling ...
"What's wrong with Umm Kulthum?" he demanded. "What's wrong with being fascinated with Mahfouz or Abd al-Haleem Hafez or Fairuz? Something that requires a mastery of Arabic music or history or the goddamn language?"
"Yeah," said the coffee-shop owner, his jowls quivering with excitement, "and why don't you go to a nicer coffeeshop?"
"I'm leaving," the Sayeedi suddenly announced. He twirled his magnificent mustache, picked up his mysteriously bulky jute bag, and walked out of the coffee shop.
"Where is he going?" I demanded. My friend looked embarrassed. The coffee-shop owner ignored me. Outside, the Sayeedi hailed a minibus and got in, heading off to wherever it is that Sayeedis go. Where do Sayeedis go?
But this is not the Sayeedi's story. Nor is it the story of the Sayeedi's mustache, which nonetheless deserves a book-length study of its own. And it is most definitely not the story of Ahmed Adaweya, who is, let's face it, kind of crass. It is, rather, the story of Naguib Mahfouz, who turned out to be worthy of fascination after all.
It turns out that meeting a Nobel laureate is far easier than meeting a washed-up and possibly castrated pop star. The difficult part is figuring out what to wear.
In preparation for my interview with Mahfouz, I turned to the best-dressed man I knew, the owner of the corner store near my apartment. He was an old man, maybe sixty-five years old, and the very picture of worn elegance. He wore a three-piece suit to work every day and had four strands of hair on his head that he combed carefully. He even wore a fez, perched to display the four strands of hair.
He was very pleased that I was to meet Naguib Mahfouz. It was extremely important for a foreigner like me to meet someone like that. "There is no one alive in
He paused. "Of course, you've already read his books."
"Of course." Like everyone else, I had started and almost finished The Cairo Trilogy.
"Then you know that Ustez Mahfouz can describe anything." He looked around his store, at the artfully arranged pyramid of toilet paper, at the dark wood floor and polished glass surfaces. He was rightfully proud of his store. Though he sold the same Lux soap as every other store in
THE HEADLACE OF XERXES
By Tom Morton
On a wall in the ruins of Persepolis , Iran , there is a relief sculpture of Xerxes the Great, king of the Persian Empire from 485 to 465 BC. Sitting straight-backed on a throne with his bare feet resting on a dainty stool (the better not to touch the humdrum earth), he wears long, pleated robes and holds a lotus flower, symbol of his eternal dominance, in his left hand. Beneath his crown froths a fulsome head of hair, and from his chin juts a great crocheted beard, as long and as thick as his upper arm. Half-god, half-barroom bruiser, this Xerxes seems more than capable of keeping most of the known world under his thumb.
Fast-forward to 2007 and the release of Zach Snyder's 300. Based on a 1998 Frank Miller comic book of the same name, the film recounts the tale of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, in which three hundred Spartan warriors held off a vast Persian invasion force (Herodotus reports an improbable and improbably specific 5,283,220 men) for three days in a famous last stand that gave the united Greek city-states time to assemble a fleet that would banish Xerxes's troops from Greece forever. Snyder, however, evokes Thermopylae as a metaphor for present-day tensions between the West and Islam, and more particularly between America and Iran something not lost on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose blustery spokesman, Gholamhossein Elham, described the film as an act of "cultural and psychological warfare." And yet, while there is much that is politically suspect about 300, this CGI-heavy, nu-metal-sound-tracked adolescent power fantasy fails in its mission to equate the Spartan king Leonidas's band of outnumbered brothers with George W. Bush's military-industrial machine.
In his essay "The True Hollywood Left," Slavoj Zizek asks whether the Spartans "with their discipline and spirit of sacrifice [are] not much closer to something like the Taliban defending Afghanistan against the US occupation (or, as a matter of fact, the elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard ready to sacrifice itself in the case of an American invasion?)." Well, perhaps. But what's most interesting about 300 is not that the supposed heroes, with their ripped abs, rubber briefs, and taste for infanticide, are so unappealing; rather, it's that the villain is so unintentionally attractive. Elsewhere in his essay, Zizek describes Snyder's depiction of the Persian court as "a kind of multicultural different-lifestyles paradise [where] everyone participates in orgies[:] different races, lesbians and gays, cripples etc." At its center stands Xerxes the Great. But this Xerxes is not the Achaemenid alpha male of thePersepolis Middle America 's every subterranean fear and desire brought to burnished, glittering life. His unstable ethnicity flickers between southern European, sub-Saharan African, Arab, and Persian. He's a poster boy for miscegenation, containing within himself a genetic trace of every subject race in his continent-spanning empire. Standing some eight feet tall, he is possessed of a Brad Pitt-in-Fight Club (1999) musculature and a rumbling voice to rival Barry White's. Yet despite these signifiers of heterosexual hypermasculinity, he has a certain joyfully swishy quality, taking languorous sniffs of Leonidas's scalp when they meet to parley, wearing clear lip gloss, and dressing like the sartorial stepchild of Liberace and Dhalsim from Street Fighter II (1991). (In a recent South Park spoof of 300, Xerxes is depicted as an Iranian club owner who attempts to buy up an American lesbian bar named "Les Bos" and refurbish it with "blue carpets and gold curtain rods," only to fall in love with one of the protesting customers and reveal himself to be a drag king. Try applying your postcolonial queer theory to that.)
The only facial hair Snyder's Xerxes seems to possess is his exquisitely plucked eyebrows. Chains snake across his bald pate, and his smooth cheeks and chin are pierced with rings that glisten and shiver with every grimace or sigh. If these historically anomalous accessories are intended to suggest that the king is an S&M enthusiast, they also, in their asymmetric, almost haphazard, distribution, hint at another sexual peccadillo what the American porn industry charmingly terms "getting a facial," which is to say kneeling down before a masturbating man so that he might ejaculate on one's face. (Significantly, "facial" scenes are often filmed from the standing perspective, allowing the viewer to fantasize that it is he who is, um, delivering the goods.)
In a movie that seeks to portray the Persian king as effeminate a move beloved of Western Orientalists since Herodotus's Polymnia reading these baubles as blobs of semen seems oddly reasonable and becomes even more so when we consider the role proskynesis, or ritual prostration, plays in this tale. Snyder's 300 is all about not kneeling before a king only slaves and traitors do so, here and the implication is that by wearing these gilded sperm proxies, Xerxes is demonstrating that he bends the knee to a higher power. If Snyder is using this device to contrast masculine, rationalist, straight (ha!)Sparta with feminine, mystic, polymorphously perverse Persia
In the concluding battle scene in 300, Leonidas, the sole remaining Spartan, hurls a spear at Xerxes in a final act of defiance. The historical Xerxes did not die atThermopylae , of course, so Snyder has the spear glance his cheek, ripping out several of his ringlike facial piercings in a slo-mo spurt of blood. Some critics have interpreted this as the moment when the Persian king becomes aware of his mortality, the freedom-loving Spartan having divested him, albeit briefly, of the metaphoric ties that bind him to the idea that he is a living god. Me, I just think he looks disappointed. This Xerxes knows just what to do with a Spartan's spear, but it's not blood he had hoped to be wiping from his chin.
Fast-forward to 2007 and the release of Zach Snyder's 300. Based on a 1998 Frank Miller comic book of the same name, the film recounts the tale of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, in which three hundred Spartan warriors held off a vast Persian invasion force (Herodotus reports an improbable and improbably specific 5,283,220 men) for three days in a famous last stand that gave the united Greek city-states time to assemble a fleet that would banish Xerxes's troops from Greece forever. Snyder, however, evokes Thermopylae as a metaphor for present-day tensions between the West and Islam, and more particularly between America and Iran something not lost on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose blustery spokesman, Gholamhossein Elham, described the film as an act of "cultural and psychological warfare." And yet, while there is much that is politically suspect about 300, this CGI-heavy, nu-metal-sound-tracked adolescent power fantasy fails in its mission to equate the Spartan king Leonidas's band of outnumbered brothers with George W. Bush's military-industrial machine.
In his essay "The True Hollywood Left," Slavoj Zizek asks whether the Spartans "with their discipline and spirit of sacrifice [are] not much closer to something like the Taliban defending Afghanistan against the US occupation (or, as a matter of fact, the elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard ready to sacrifice itself in the case of an American invasion?)." Well, perhaps. But what's most interesting about 300 is not that the supposed heroes, with their ripped abs, rubber briefs, and taste for infanticide, are so unappealing; rather, it's that the villain is so unintentionally attractive. Elsewhere in his essay, Zizek describes Snyder's depiction of the Persian court as "a kind of multicultural different-lifestyles paradise [where] everyone participates in orgies[:] different races, lesbians and gays, cripples etc." At its center stands Xerxes the Great. But this Xerxes is not the Achaemenid alpha male of the
The only facial hair Snyder's Xerxes seems to possess is his exquisitely plucked eyebrows. Chains snake across his bald pate, and his smooth cheeks and chin are pierced with rings that glisten and shiver with every grimace or sigh. If these historically anomalous accessories are intended to suggest that the king is an S&M enthusiast, they also, in their asymmetric, almost haphazard, distribution, hint at another sexual peccadillo what the American porn industry charmingly terms "getting a facial," which is to say kneeling down before a masturbating man so that he might ejaculate on one's face. (Significantly, "facial" scenes are often filmed from the standing perspective, allowing the viewer to fantasize that it is he who is, um, delivering the goods.)
In a movie that seeks to portray the Persian king as effeminate a move beloved of Western Orientalists since Herodotus's Polymnia reading these baubles as blobs of semen seems oddly reasonable and becomes even more so when we consider the role proskynesis, or ritual prostration, plays in this tale. Snyder's 300 is all about not kneeling before a king only slaves and traitors do so, here and the implication is that by wearing these gilded sperm proxies, Xerxes is demonstrating that he bends the knee to a higher power. If Snyder is using this device to contrast masculine, rationalist, straight (ha!)
In the concluding battle scene in 300, Leonidas, the sole remaining Spartan, hurls a spear at Xerxes in a final act of defiance. The historical Xerxes did not die at
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