Hello, world. My name is Pensée Atef Mohran. I am an English major and this is a final paper I wrote for the Comparative Literature class of Spring 2019
“[We behave like] the Poseidonians in the Tyrrhenian Gulf,
who although of Greek origin, became barbarized as
Tyrrhenians or Romans and changed their speech and the
customs of their ancestors. But they observe one Greek
festival even to this day; during this they gather together
and call up from memory their ancient names and customs,
and then, lamenting loudly to each other and weeping,
they go away.”
—Athenaios, Deipnosophistai, Book 14, 31A (632)
The Homeric hero Odysseus— “the man of twists and turns,” as translated from Greek— remains very much alive in the poetry of C.P. Cavafy because born in Alexandria to Greek parents and having lived in great capitals such as London and Constantinople, Cavafy felt somewhat like an exile in Alexandria (Seferis 88). In the modern Alexandria of Cavafy, the artist could escape realities via readings in history to create an Ithaka of his own. In contemporary Alexandria, however, the artist’s scope of imagination might fail them to escape from the horrid reality of a city that exists no more. This paper aims at drawing a comparison between the 2019 independent short narrative That’s What Happened directed by Mohamed Kassaby, and five of Cavafy’s poems.
There is a gap in time and space between Cavafy and Kassaby, but they both share the same city as a birthplace. Also, to both of them, art is a means of self-expression. The latter is a millennial filmmaker who released his second short narrative film last February as a reaction to the demolition acts that have started in Alexandria three years earlier and continue till today. Various monumental places in Alexandria were taken down. Most notable of which are Al-Salam Theatre in Sidi Gaber,, Youssef Chahine’s house in Chatby, and Al Montaza’s sea cabinets. Al-Salam theatre, for instance, was built in the shape of a snail’s shell in 1954 by the Corniche. It witnessed the performance of plays such as Raya and Sekina (1984) and Shara Mohamed Ali (1944). For over 62 years, it held irreplaceable memories for many generations that grew up watching Adel Imam, Abdel Moneim Madbouly, and Foad El-Mohandes’ live performances until one day in June 2016, the people of Sidi Gaber woke up to the heartbreaking scene of the theatre half-bulldozed. Although it has been demolished for a few years now, people still cherish the theatre as an Alexandrian landmark (Daily News.com).In an interview with Mohamed Kassaby, he mentions that the demolition of Al-Salam theatre, in particular, was an event that touched him immensely. He thought of imitating what Tamer El Said did in his In The Last Days of the City (2016) where the Cairo-born director documented a multi-layered dirge to the way Cairo has irrevocably changed and expressed how the destruction affected his protagonist’s psyche. Kassaby says that this film, which has not yet been released in Egypt, marked a turning point in his life. After watching a TV reportage with a group of people near the theatre expressing their lament for standing helpless while a dear monument turned into dust, his concern turned into perplexed emotions accompanied with many a thought as to what would become of the people who worked in that place; how their lives were then altered, and how he, as a young artist, was supposed to feel towards the City. Perhaps filming is a luxury not all people have in such times, he claims. After all, what he filmed in That’s What Happened was not a documentary per se; it was rather the best of both fiction and documentary. His focal point was how “we, Alexandrians” perceive the city after the havoc, not how it looked before, not how it was romanticized before, but how heartless it became— the widow of the Mediterranean (Kassaby).
In eighteen minutes, Yehia, the main character of the film contemplates the changes that happened in his city, shares his concerns with friends as he tries to reach reconciliation, and keeps weaving his story throughout the process. The film starts with an epigraph by Elif Shafak: “But let us not forget that cities are like human beings. They are born, they go through childhood and adolescence, they grow old, and eventually, they die.” The city is personified as an aging human; in an attempt to foreshadow the death it eventually faces with the passage of time. This much resonates with what Cavafy did with his Alexandria where, in his forty-eighth year he “set[s]out for Ithaka,” reviving its existence in his imagination and personifying her time and again. Reading more into “Ithaka”, Odysseus is reincarnated in Cavafy’s work for the poet’s personal odyssey parallels that of Odysseus where Cavafy embarked on a journey of self-discovery only his was not towards Greece, his fatherland, but rather towards Alexandria, a city he once resented and felt was a “narrow corner” for his body and intellect. Here, one is before an artistic voice that “has spent more than a third of his life trying out forms, styles, eras, which he ultimately rejects” (Seferis 90). Likewise, Kassaby’s Yehia is a young artist experimenting with modes of expression, except that his journey towards Ithaka has just started.
In the scenes in his room, Yehia alters between reading Syd Field’s book on screenwriting and writing a film script in a background of blue and black lights with anxious hand gestures. The act of reading and writing is interesting because, throughout his life, Cavafy, too consulted volumes of history books only to recreate and integrate stories in his poems. The seemingly impersonal poem “Caesarian” becomes personal and relative in our contemporary times because Cavafy’s “art gave [King Caesarian’s] face an appealing” in such a vulnerable moment in the king’s life.
Then again, Odysseus twisted his Fate many a time. When it was time for the Cyclopes to put an end to his life, the hero used his wit, stopping Time, and defeating Fate when uttering “I am nobody.” Artists, too, pause their Time[s]. On one hand, Cavafy mythologises his Alexandria; an art through which the poet attains a poetic vision that is less cruel to his imagination and his body; recalling history with a touch of human-all-too-human grandeur; rendering the impersonal perspective universal. Kassaby, on the other hand, is overwhelmed by the passage of Time in his Alexandria; the artist’s muse calls upon Yehia: “You still have chances to prove that you are a capable director, Yehia . . . Everything around you is changing; what stood against Time is now demolished, but you are in the same place. You shall rise again; set your soul free. It might find itself again in a different place” (00:54-01:12).
In the scene where Yehia stands in Gleem by the Corniche next to his car, one does not see a seaside at all. In a way, the sea is kept off from the city, and in the background stands the towering San Stefano Mall (01:43-02:12). Historically speaking, the Corniche (a French word which means the waterfront road) was designed by the Italian-Egyptian architect Pietro Avoscani in 1870 to make Alexandria, which is one of the linear cities, extend along the seacoast in keeping with the Hellenistic tradition. In such cities, the main traffic is placed longitudinally as major arteries parallel to the direction of the coast with perpendicular cross secondary roads (Elhamy). After the renovation of Sidi Gaber and the building of the Sidi Gaber Bridge, the city’s Corniche became almost entirely blocked with iron fences. Alexandrians, now, have to pay a considerable sum of money to access the beaches which were once free-entry. This physical transformation the city went through has grown on Yehia’s character and he lets it get under his skin.
While Cavafy reconciles with Alexandria when he becomes of age, in his twenties, Kassaby gives in to the sense of dissociation his generation is entitled to feel— a generation insusceptible of
embracing the change of heart one might feel when enclosed in a physical space; be it one’s room, like in Cavafy’s “Walls,” or one’s birthplace as in “The City.” In “Walls,” the poet’s internal monologue reflects the state of entrapment he experiences when “with no consideration, no pity, no shame,/ they have built walls around [him] thick and high” (1-2). Perhaps a great part of Cavafy’s originality lurks in these condensed lines because what is so personal and cannot escape his room, becomes in a blink of any eye, universal— Walls are not only symbolic of those barriers placed within one’s room but could also be symbolic of these constructed “imperceptibly” along the seashore. While the bulldozers’ sounds are horridly palpable, the sound of building walls was not “noticed,” and is almost non-existent.
In “The City,” Cavafy presents two speakers in an unnamed city. And the question proposed by the first speaker—“How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?/ Wherever I turn, wherever I look,/ I see the black ruins of my life, here,/ where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally” (4-8)— echoes much in the scenes where Yehia takes long walks across the city streets. As Cavafy encapsulates his Alexandria in a specific span of Time, Kassaby experiences the City in an encapsulated span of space; that is, from Yehia’s room to Gleem, to downtown Ramleh Tram Station to the Latin Neighbourhood, to Attaren, to Brazilian Coffee in Salah Salem Street— For him, these are not separate areas; they all are his Alexandria; he roams its streets, shoots film in car-rides much like one wanders from room to room in one’s house (04:27-06:10). Then again, these places have become “black ruins” in his (Yehia) mind’s eye. In one scene he passes by the ruins of a gigantic old building in Fouad Street near the Italian restaurant Chez Gaby. The ruins of the building have arrested the director’s imagination for years, for the once glorious building that stood next to Chez Gaby, has now become a grotesque setting and Alexandrians would just pass it by (Kassaby). Here, one cannot help but wonder who is to blame: the city or the artist? Luckily enough, Cavafy offers an answer when his second speaker replies: “Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this little corner,/ you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world” (15-16). To Cavafy, the fault lies not in the city itself, but in what the speaker has made of his life in it.
Reading more into this scene, one would consider the title of the film That’s What Happened which is inspired from a song with the same title by Sayed Darwish, an Alexandrian songwriter, and composer who was considered the Father of Egyptian popular music. The song tells of a speaker who refuses to be held accountable or blamable for the changes his city went through in the onset of the 1919 revolution against the British occupation. Significantly enough, Kassaby chooses to echo this song while Yehia walks beside the ugly cement remnants of the next-to Chez Gaby building. Yehia passes by the building while the song plays in the background, makes a left to another street as if to say, “You have no right to blame it on me.” Here, the city becomes a metaphor for the captivity of the soul in its own failure.
Then a voiceover of an elderly man appears in the following scene. Kassaby mentions this man was one of Al-Salam interviewees who expressed how they felt about demolishing ancient buildings in Alexandria almost two years earlier: “The city has dramatically changed to the worse. The landscape is totally ruined. Villas, which were like palaces are destroyed just for the sake of constructing an ugly concrete building. There is absolutely no architectural taste at all” (06:12-06:44). The focus then shifts to Yehia who shares his own recollections with his friend Hatem:
I am starting to hate my presence here (this world), especially in Alexandria. I am scared to visit certain places least I recall a certain memory or meet certain people. . . Does this only have to do with Alexandria? Or is it rather related to one’s connection with the physical space of the city? And if I travelled to another place, would I face the same problem? If I travel and come back, will the memories be erased or grow more vivid? . . . The reason that makes me want to leave is the same reason why I want to stay; I have experienced everything here (06:50-08:21).In a sense, Yehia is stuck in a state of existential ennui. The more he ventures on psychological odysseys to escape memory the more it haunts him. That ties with the fact that the moments of relief in this film are very rare. In the car-ride scene of Yehia among giggling friends, the audience is before a different side of his character— He is outgoing, funny but only with a glimpse of melancholy.
Kassaby reminisces over the artistic scene Alexandria was renowned for. Alexandria was not only a port center for trade but also a melting pot for cultural integration between foreigners and Egyptians. A fact that made it possible for numerous facets of art to prosper on its soil: “The first private Arabic press was established in Alexandria by the Shawam (el Kawkab el Sharqi 1873)” (bibalex.org). The theatre was non-existent till Syrian community arrived in the city— an event that encouraged Alexandrians like Sayed Darwish, Bairam el Tonsi and Sheikh Salama Hegazi to join, establishing the Arabic Lyrical Theatre. This shared space and fluidity of innovative culture gave way to the art of cinema to prosper with the Lumière Brothers’ Cinematographe, and later with the cinema of Youssef Chahine, who was originally from Lebanon (bibalex). Kassaby is inspired by Chahine’s life and the fact that he, too, lived in Alexandria. But he maintains that the city no longer taps artistic potentials in cinema or in theatre. One walks in Chatby in front of Bairam el Tonsi theatre to find the Rakouda building, which is said to be the dwelling-house of Chahine in his early years, demolished. Perhaps erasing memories is Time’s doing, for the bulldozing of buildings marks a fresh start for another building to appear. Only in Alexandria’s case do independent artists travel to Cairo, seeking a range of opportunities their city lacks in the field of cinema where they are unable to find fresh starts. Kassaby claims that, yes, Cairo has become the new cosmopolitan city which is fast-paced in comparison to the forgotten Alexandria. And yes, his generation is burdened with the history their city once had— a history that has become stagnant. But, despite all this, he could never force himself to find his artistic voice in Cairo. Not that he holds animosity towards it, but because he owes it to Alexandria that he could dare have a unique voice, in the first place.
In a sense, Cairo, to Kassaby and other young artists in Alexandria is the Sousa of Cavafy’s character in “The Satrapy.” The poet presents a character that does leave home, looking for prosperity in the court of the Persian King Artaxerxes, but once there, he discovers that his heart’s desire was, after all, present among the things he grew up with: “Your soul seeks other things, weeps for other things;/ the praise of the public and the Sophists,/ the hard-won and inestimable Well Done;/ the Agora, the Theatre, and the Laurels” (15-18). To establish this notion of leaving home and forgetting what one really was or ever wanted, it might be safe to claim that Cavafy and Kassaby unite to weep and lament the forgotten past of their Alexandrias. Their personal voices intersect through art to resonate with the modern-time Alexandrian mode of life. Alexandrians have become much like the Poseidonians in Cavafy’s “Poseidonians.” With the epigraph the poet provides for his poem, he establishes the metaphor of barbaric Poseidonians. One mentions the word “barbaric” cautiously because in this context it does not refer to them being aggressive or devoid of tolerance, but rather devoid of an identity. The Poseidonians were once of Greek origin, but they “forgot the Greek language/after so many centuries of mingling/with Tyrrhenians, Latins, and other foreigners” (1-3). The only thing they made sure not to overlook was that one melancholy festival where they gather and lament their long-gone “Greek language” (1). This awareness that their identity stands on shaky grounds results in a melancholy elegy where, like the once-Greek Poseidonians, Alexandrians stand “cut off so disastrously from the [Alexandrian] way of life” (16).
In his last encounter with Hatem, Yehia is before another way to look at the vanishing Alexandria when Hatem, originally born in Nubia, presents a counter unromanticised argument:
You always perceive the city as an abstract “thing.” I never considered it so. It is simply a place I was born in. . . . I believe that a city is just the place where we live. . . You tell me, “I love Alexandria;” I do not understand what it means to love a place; to love a city. . . You should just keep expressing yourself; do more of the things that made you love photography in the first place. . . You loved filming not for the sake of being the greatest director, but because you like to express yourself through visuals. . . When talked about the city, I kept telling you that I hated fake things. I do not like it when reality is faked (11:51-13:17).To Hatem, the good and bad memories one creates in this city can be easily created elsewhere; it is not the place that nourishes memories, it is rather the person who chooses a certain place to call home for their memories. He thinks it better for Yehia to get back to the essence of his art and to ignore the romanticised rhetoric which haunts him whenever he visits a place he once shot in.
Yehia then takes the tram to his home. In this ride, he listens to a voice note sent by one of his friends— a scene which complements the previous one:
You know when you feel locked in your room? I entered my room, and I closed the door. But I am locked inside. I want to escape this by any means— [in a space] where there is no consciousness. . . I will grab a piece of paper, a pen, and start writing. [Only then] You’ll create a new cycle of life, extend yourself in stories and characters; create a self-image. Your physical body is there, but your soul is not; it is undergoing a process of rebirth. This is exactly what Kafka did. This is what all artists do (13:42-14:48).Yehia’s friend here suggests an escapist method via which the artist can enjoy solace where he creates an imagined city away from the one with a blocked Sea; echoing, again, a line in Cavafy’s “Walls:” “And now I sit here feeling hopeless./I can't think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind -/because I had so much to do outside” (3-5). Ironically enough, as Kafka’s Gregor Samsa of The Metamorphosis chooses to hide in his room away from the daunting father-figure behind its walls, Kassaby’s Yehia, and the speaker in Cavafy’s “Walls” both enter their rooms involuntarily in a scene where the City’s iron-fenced walls become more horrid to their imagination than the image of a fictional father-figure.
In the final scene, an ascending sound of footsteps escalates. The two friends: Hatem and Yehia, walk down a road together, their footsteps become the scene’s focal concern; it is symbolic that they shall keep journeying each with his version of the same city (16:17-16:25). But, Kassaby’s Alexandria is not the one with the dusk across the Mediterranean in the final scene to which his main character recites a poem; it is rather the one that appears in a brief glimpse, almost only for 6 seconds (04:22-04:28). It has become a box that contains valuable cars covered with dust and is misplaced in the middle of a crowded scope with towering concrete buildings—a place which not all Alexandrians would notice in crowdedness let alone amid the overwhelming passage of Time.
In conclusion, even if Ithaka was “poor,” it still provided Odysseus with the momentum for the wonderful journey back home. But, to Cavafy and Kassaby, Ithaka was already a rich land, but they are not Odysseuses in search of homes; they are rather Poseidonians remembering how it feels to belong to a home with “customs and names.” And their remembrance “festival”, dependent on memory and nostalgia, is expressed through art; thus, it is both transitory and permanent: They mourn the memory of their Ithakas loudly in film and poetry then go away, but the festival itself transcends time only because their Alexandrias shall be remembered as long as the City breathes.
Works Cited
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< http://cavafis.compupress.gr/kave_33.htm.> Accessed 26 April 2019.
Cavafy. “Ithaka” Ithaka: A Tribute to C.P Cavafy
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Cavafy. “Poseidonians.” Ithaka: A Tribute to C.P Cavafy
<,http://cavafis.compupress.gr/kave_43.htm> Accessed 26 April 2019.
Cavafy. “Satrapy” Ithaka: A Tribute to C.P Cavafy
< http://cavafis.compupress.gr/kave_35.htm.> Accessed 26 April 2019.
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Elhamy, Mohamed. “Improvement of Road Layout and Safety in an Urban Environment: Towards
a Pedestrian-Friendly Street Corniche of Alexendria as a Case Study.” vol. 1, no. 4, 2012, Abstarct. 1 Dec. 2012.
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2046043016301356.> Accessed 26April 2019.
Kassaby, Mohamed. Director. That's What Happened. Private Video on Vimeo,
<https://vimeo.com/320516819.> Accessed 26 April 2019.
Kassaby, Mohamed. Personal Interview. 26 April. 2019.
Seferis, George, and Susan Matthias. “Cavafy's Ithaka.” Conjunctions, no. 31, 1998, pp. 88–93.
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“The Birth of the Seventh Art in Alexandria” Alex Cinema, Bibliotheca Alexandrina –Alex Med,
2006,
< http://www.bibalex.org/AlexCinema/historical/background.html.>
Excellent analysis. Brilliant of you to bring these two artists together.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your kind words:)
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