Shared Margins: An Ethnography with Writers in Alexandria after the Revolution

288 Pages·2021·4.053 MB·English

by  Samuli Schielke, Mukhtar Saad Shehata

Shared Margins
ZMO-Studien
Studien des Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
Herausgegeben von
Ulrike Freitag
Band 41
Samuli Schielke and Mukhtar Saad Shehata
Shared Margins
An Ethnography with Writers in Alexandria
after the Revolution
This publication was supported by the Leibniz Open Access Monograph Publishing Fund.
ISBN 978-3-11-072677-0
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-072630-5
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-072636-7
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/ 9783110726305

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For details go to
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021937483
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2021 Samuli Schielke and Mukhtar Saad Shehata
Cover image: Eman Salah writing in her notebook. Photo by Samuli Schielke, Alexandria, 2015.
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
www.degruyter.com
To Mahmoud Abu Rageh (1971–2018)

Contents
Acknowledgments  ix
On names, pronouns, and spelling  xiii
List of illustrations  xiv
Introduction: Where is literature? Samuli Schielke   1
Where is literature?   2
Anecdotal evidence   5
Outline of chapters   11
Part I. About writing Samuli Schielke, Mukhtar Saad Shehata 
1 Why write, and why not stop?  15
An urge to express   16
‘Something that has me in it’   21
Why not stop?   27
A winding path through milieus   31
2 Infrastructures of imagination   39
The formation of scenes   43
A provincial setting   48
The Writers’ Union   51
Mukhtabar al-Sardiyat   54
El Cabina   56
Fabrica   60
Lines of division   63
Milieus at intersection   71
Openings and closures   73
3 The writing of lives   77
Materialities of marginality   79
The symposium as life   84
Being Abdelfattah Morsi   91
How to become a writer in many difficult steps   96
Holding the microphone   101
‘I hate reality’   105
‘It’s a piece of me’   107
Outsides of power   111
viii   Contents
Part II. Writing about Samuli Schielke
4 Can poetry change the world?   117
Reading Amal Dunqul in 2011   119
The question must be posed in a different way   124
A discussion with poets, where an answer begins to take shape   128
Consequences   133
5 Where is Alexandria?   139
The Chinese Housing   139
Cyprus   143
Ghurbal   149
Abu Kharouf   154
The house of Cavafy   156
The East of the City   157
The Chinese Housing, once more   163
6 Writing on walls   171
Walls, writings, cities   172
Struggles and genres, alterations and transformations   176
Poetry of open-air and virtual walls   196
Speaking out loud and remaining invisible   201
7 Is prose poetry a conspiracy against the Noble Qurʾan?   203
A short genealogy of genres and struggles   204
A bubble of world literature   208
‘More dangerous than those who call for unbelief’   213
A postmodern heresy   221
8 The search for a clear vision   229
Struggle   229
Silence  235 
Comeback   237
Principled poetics of uncertainty   241
A romantic common ground   243
Afterword: On exiles and alternatives Samuli Schielke, Mukhtar Saad Shehata 
 249
Bibliography   259
Acknowledgments
This book is the outcome of a long and collaborative effort over a period of more
than ten years. So many people and institutions have generously hosted us and
given their time and energy to share their experiences with us, to give us ideas,
critique, feedback, and support, that we can only mention some of them here.
The greatest thanks go to those whose names or pseudonyms appear in the
book. We do not repeat them here one by one, hopeful that book itself may be the
best form of recognition for them. In addition to those who are mentioned in this
book by name or pseudonym, we thank the following persons for their support,
hospitality, friendship, ideas, critical feedback, and suggestions in the course
of the research, writing, and publication: al-Hajj Abduh Shehata, Adam Reed,
Alexandra Schindler, Alia Mosallam, Alice Elliot, Amany Maher, Amr Khairy,
André Chappate, Aymon Kreil, Bassem Abu Gweily, Belal Fadl, Bettina Gräf, Carl
Rommel, Charis Boutieri, Dalia Farouq, Darci Sprengel, Denise Dias Barros, Dina
Wahba, Florian Kohstall, Heike Liebau, Heimo Lattner, Henri Onodera, Howeida
Saleh, Huda Bakour, Iskander Abdallah, Jakob Lindfors, Jennifer Peterson,
Jessica Winegar, Karin Ahlberg, Kevin Eisenstadt, Khaled Fahmy, Laura Menin,
Lubna Abdallah, Maged Makram, Mahfouz Agh Adnan, Mahmoud Barakat,
Mahrous Shehata, Mamoun Azmi, Muhammad Saad Shehata, Mustafa Wafi, Nael
Eltoukhy, Nayera Abdel Rahman, Norman Saadi Nikro, Paola Abenante, Paolo
Gaibazzi, Pascale Ghazaleh, Rania Gheath, Rania Sultan, Rebecca Skreslet Her-
nandez, Richard Jacquemond, Sameh El Halawany, Senni Jyrkiäinen, Sertaç Seh-
likoğlu, Shady Basyouni, Sonja Hegasy, Teresa Pepe, Ulrike Freitag, Waleed Alaa
Eldin, Yahia Shawkat, Youssef El Chazli, Zizo Khadr, and Zuzanna Olszewska.
Our apologies to all those we have inadvertently omitted.
We owe additional thanks to all those who in various ways have hosted us in
their spaces or who have organised projects with us: Abdalla Daif, Abdelrehim
Youssef, Ahmed Saleh, Ahmed Salem, Aliaa ElGready, Alshimaa Hamed, Ashraf
Dossouki Ali, Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė, Kamal Aly Mahdi, Martin Holbraad, Mounir
Oteiba, Muhammad AlAraby, Lubna Abdalla, Omaima Shafy, and Stéphane
Bauer. A special recognition is due to Abeer Hosni who during our fieldwork pro-
vided us with crucially important logistic support and critical feedback. We thank
and remember Samuli’s late spouse, Daniela Swarowsky, who also co-organised
collaborative events in Alexandria in 2011–12 for the ‘In Search of Europe?’ exhi-
bition and never stopped questioning the project to make it better. Last but not
least, thanks are due from Samuli to Asmaa Essakouti, and from Mukhtar to Iman
El Nemr, for emotional and intellectual inspiration and companionship.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Mahmoud Abu Rageh, a wonder-
ful and extraordinary thinker, storyteller, and historian of his native quarter of
Open Access. © 2021 Samuli Schielke, Mukhtar Saad Shehata, published by De Gruy ter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/9783110726305-201
x   Acknowledgments
Nazla. He was among the people who gave the original inspiration for the writing
of this book, and he is dearly missed.
Several institutions have hosted us in the course of this project: Leibniz-Zen-
trum Moderner Orient has been Samuli’s extremely supportive employer through-
out the project, with funding provided by the German Federal Ministry of Research
and Education. At the ZMO, Samuli’s work and ideas were shaped by discussions
with colleagues in the In Search of Europe research project (2010–14) and the
Trajectories of Lives and Knowledge thematic unit (2014–19). The Berlin Graduate
School Muslim Cultural Societies was Samuli’s employer for one year from 2016
to 2017, and for eight months from 2018 to 2019 Samuli was employed part-time
in the Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics (CARP) project at
University College London funded by the European Research Council. Mukhtar’s
graduate studies at the State University of Bahia were enabled by a scholarship
by Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos Africanos, Povos Indígenas e Cul-
turas Negras. The Alexandria branch of the Egyptian Writers’ Union, El Behna
Wekala, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Café al-Bawwabin, Fabrica, Gudran Asso-
ciation, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, and Studio El-Madina have welcomed
us at various times for fieldwork, collaborative projects, and writing retreats. We
are furthermore indebted to the numerous participants in events we attended and
co-organised at these and other venues, and who provided us with valuable feed-
back and ideas.
Parts of this book and ideas that contributed to its shaping have been pre-
sented in different states of incompleteness at a number of lectures and con-
ferences: Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (2011), General Public artspace
(2011), University of North Carolina Charlotte (2011), Free University of Berlin
(2012), Cairo University (2012), German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Cairo
(2012), Sabanci University (2012), University of Oslo (2013), Northwestern Univer-
sity (2013), Annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (2012,
2013); ‘In Search of Europe?’ exhibition in Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien
(2013–14), World Congress of Middle East Studies (2014), Biannual meeting of
German Anthropological Society (2015), Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (2015,
2016), El Cabina cultural space (2016), Leipzig University (2017), University of
Heidelberg (2017), Jesuit Cultural Centre in Alexandria (2017), Bibliotheca Alex-
andrina (2017), Cambridge University (2018), Nonreligion+Secularity Research
Network biannual conference (2018), Fluminense Federal University (2018),
Conference of the Brazilian Association of Historians (2018), Czech Academy of
Sciences (2019), CEDEJ, Cairo (2019), Alexandria Branch of the Egyptian Writers’
Union (2019), and University of Amsterdam (2019). Some of the ideas presented
in this book have also been shaped in courses taught by Samuli Schielke in Visual
and Media Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin (2010–20), and in the