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 Acknowledgments xi study circle ‘Anthropological readings in our contemporary world’ at Bibliotheca Alexandrina (2014–17). These events and the feedback we received at them have been extremely helpful in shaping our argument in this book. The original chapter drafts were written over an extended period of time, and many of them have been previously published in different form. Chapter 1, ‘Why write, and why not stop?’ was written in 2019 and 2020 and has not been pub- lished elsewhere. Chapter 2, ‘Infrastructures of imagination’, and Chapter 3, ‘The writing of lives’, include passages from a working paper written in 2015 (Schielke and Shehata 2016) and an essay from 2020 (Shehata 2020), but those passages have been heavily revised, rearranged, and expanded for this book. Chapter 4, ‘Can poetry change the world?’ was written in 2013–14 and published in Arabic and English in 2014 and 2016 (Schielke 2014, 2016b).