Can an Outsider Tell the Story of Post-Revolution Egypt?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/books/review/theburied-peterhessler.html

Version 0 of 1.

THE BURIEDAn Archaeology of the Egyptian RevolutionBy Peter Hessler

The stories of theft, vandalism and lawlessness were rife for an ongoing period of some months following the 18 days that marked the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Tales of cars disappearing from outside buildings; ornate and antique woodwork being pillaged from historic mosques; people waking up to find land designated for farming suddenly turned into construction zones; or heritage sites in ruin. At least one person I know investigated and wrote a book about modern-day tomb-raiders and their pilfering during that time. Otherwise known as the local antiquities mafia, they took advantage of a gaping security vacuum (the police were on the streets erratically, traffic lights flashed orange for days) to raid archaeological digs and their environs in search of Pharaonic treasures, like gold.

I remember, too, reading the New Yorker correspondent Peter Hessler’s “Letter From Abydos: The Buried,” after which his most recent book is named. The Buried — from the Arabic al-madfuna — is an elevated stretch of desert near Abydos, in Upper Egypt, which was used as an ancient cemetery for a period spanning five millenniums. It has subsequently been the site of extensive excavations by teams of archaeologists, starting in the late 1800s and up until today. During the revolution, and immediately following the fall of Egypt’s police forces, al-madfuna was extensively looted. In the 60 days it took for the police to return to patrol the site, Hessler reported, 200 pits were opened. Teams of archaeologists arrived from abroad two years later to trace the thieves’ steps and survey the damage done. Like everyone else, they were grappling with the uprising’s impact on their lives or, in this case, their life’s work.

In his 2013 letter, Hessler provided an account of this mission, retelling it in considerable detail — clues to how walls and tombs were hacked and what that revealed; what garbage and modern-day artifacts, such as cigarette butts and bullets, were left behind — and in his book, he gives this recovery effort new life in a revised and elaborated form. The archaeological saga also offers a structure for the bigger story he wants to tell about Egypt after the revolution. Hessler weaves together material from the dozen or so pieces he wrote for the magazine during his five years in Egypt, navigating among his various “Letters From,” to offer a view of the country that superficially spans his time there, but aspires toward a broader cultural and political history.

The book’s three-part outline (“The President,” “The Coup,” “The President”) is deceptively simple. Hessler is known for his ethnographic-style narratives of people and places; he has often recounted the stories of everyday people (from Uravan, Colo., he wrote of “uranium widows” — women who had lost their husbands from a cancer epidemic stemming from their work in the mines; and from Nucla, Colo., he told about the life of a small-town pharmacist), as well as documenting his own journey alongside. He chronicled his time in Egypt by entering sideways into dominant stories, while also telling of his own experience adapting to the country and being schooled in its culture and customs. A letter about his Arabic lessons is also about politics; another on the garbage collector in his neighborhood (which also happens to be my neighborhood) offers entree into the lives of the local residents through their trash (like Egyptian Viagra).

In the fall of 2011, when protesters returned to Tahrir Square to demonstrate against the transitional rule of the military, Hessler told the story through a mosque — Omar Makram — on the perimeter of the square. It had slowly turned from just a place of prayer to something of a hub — a place for the injured (a medical station was set up inside); a tech point (people could come in to charge their phones); the only open place with public toilets at that time; and as well, something of a bastion of the revolutionary spirit (where leaders dispensed lessons on morality, ethics and more). And in the summer of 2013, following the violent clashes and military crackdown on Islamists after the ouster of the first freely elected post-2011 president, Mohamed Morsi, Hessler captured that moment of immense political and religious divide by analyzing the sermons of three preachers who had to individually negotiate it.

Not everything from his New Yorker pieces makes it into the book, but much seems to, including a recent profile of his translator, Manu, a gay Egyptian man who ends up seeking asylum in Cologne, Germany. The response to that piece from some here in Cairo was vehement — friends who have struggled with similar issues and threats around their sexual identities suggested that it felt facile, scratching the surface of something but not getting to the core of what it means to be gay in Egypt. The difficulty of dealing not just with the state, friends and family, but before all that, of simply coming to terms with oneself, to overcome internalized, culturally indoctrinated homophobia: Hessler didn’t reach that level. The debate about the piece brought back the much-contested profile of Sayyid, the garbage collector, which was denounced by some as exploitive, and sensational for its emphasis on sex.

In some ways, it’s understandable where such criticism and reaction comes from. It is impossible, even after five years, to be of any part of Egypt in the way that a local is. This seems to be what lifelong residents of any place demand when they approach chronicles and depictions of the country and city where they live. But even as one of those lifelong residents, I myself grappled with writing a nonfiction book about Egypt. After some eight or nine drafts, I pronounced it dead and turned to fiction. The challenge, in my case, was that everything felt too close — too personal or intimate either to me, or to people I know. Privacy was an issue — family networks in Egypt are sprawling, and it felt as if every story I wanted to tell might implicate someone related to someone who was a friend or relative of someone near to me. I felt responsible, to people I knew as well as those I didn’t. Across several hundred pages of a manuscript, I hadn’t included a single name.

In reading “The Buried,” which I admit is the kind of book I might have criticized in the past, I find myself changing my mind. What Hessler offers is something that no Egyptian could ever really write, and in that way, he adds alternate dimensions to a story, or the stories, of this place we call home, with all the good intentions of simply his own singular viewpoint and experience.