Where did the title come from?
While I was writing the book I thought the title was something I could decide on later. But in effect I realized that I would only know what the book was about when I knew what the title was. And the title is The Cairo House because the novel, for me, is not just about Gihan, or even just about her clan, but about an entire era of Egyptian twentieth-century history that witnessed the rise of the Pashas, party politics, revolution and counter-revolution. The history and fate of the house reflect this pivotal era that spanned a century and came to an end with the passing away of the last Pasha, my uncle, on the eve of the twenty-first century.
The real Cairo house, my family’s residence in Garden City, inspired the title, and the novel. It is still in the family, although unoccupied since my late uncle’s death at the age of ninety; as such it is the only one still owned by the original owners in what is known as Embassy Row in Cairo. The Serageldin house acquired particular historical significance on account of its association with the political fortunes not just of the family but of the Wafd party, of which my uncle was the leader, both before and after the revolution. But in other ways it is emblematic of the many grand houses built for Egyptian families in Cairo around the turn of the century, all of which have progressively and inevitably been turned into foreign embassies or museums, as the last generation of occupants passed away and their heirs were dispersed.
What do you think will happen to the house now?
Ideally, it would be turned into a museum or cultural centre. I hate the thought that it will go out of the family, but one consolation is that whoever buys the house will have to preserve its historic character; it has been declared part of Egypt’s national heritage.
Since The Cairo House draws heavily on your personal history, why did you choose to write a novel, not a memoir?
It is often said that a memoir is fiction in disguise and a novel is fact masquerading as fiction. For me, at least, I could not have written as freely without the fig leaf of fiction; I would have felt far too inhibited by concern for family members and friends, given the personal and political sensitivity of much of the material. Moreover a memoir would have made for a less interesting narrative. Fiction allows one the licence to conflate two aunts into ‘Tante Zohra’, for instance; to incorporate historical material seamlessly; and best of all, to explore the ‘path not taken’ at a crucial juncture in the story. But even as a novel The Cairo House has been read as a roman-à-clef by Egyptian readers, and a far more accessible key than I realized, at that. And that has brought controversy.
What kind of controversy?
Well, the story of the Revolution had never been told from the point of view of the class victimized by its regime, and some diehard Nasserites, in particular, took umbrage against what they considered revisionist history. But I had never intended to write an overtly political work; the book was simply based on my life, and my life was inevitably caught in the slipstream of history. I had anticipated the political fall-out to some extent, but I was blindsided by the controversy on religious issues. Some Muslim readers expressed concern about depictions of the Feast of the Sacrifice and the citation of verses from the Quran. Although entirely inoffensive in my intention and in context, a few readers felt that such passages might be misunderstood by non-Muslims. This, it is worth noting, was when the American edition appeared several months before September 11. Today, the reluctance to contribute to anti-Islamic prejudice is likely to weigh on writers of Middle Eastern heritage in an unprecedented manner.
You write in English. Is that out of choice or necessity?
I grew up trilingual, but my schooling has mostly been in English, and I have lived in England or the States more or less continuously since the age of twenty, so English is now my dominant language of written expression. But that choice is significant in positioning me on this side rather than the other of the cultural divide between the old country and the new, and in defining my ‘ideal reader’. Language is also an entire codification of culture and, for me, I admit that Arabic carries certain cultural inhibitions. I was asked once after a talk I gave in London if I could have written the book in Arabic. And I answered that I could have written it in Arabic, but I couldn’t have thought it in Arabic. It would have been a very different book if I had. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be translated into Arabic successfully by someone else; indeed, chapters of it have been.
But regardless of the language, the ‘hyphenated’ writer brings a unique perspective to literature: that of the insider/outsider. It is the ability to see with bifocal vision, to be at home in more than one culture while continuing to observe them all with an outsider’s fresh eye.
Some of this material previously appeared in Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing, Praeger Press.
LIFE AT A GLANCE
Samia Serageldin was born in Cairo, Egypt, around the time of the 1952 Revolution. At the age of twenty she married and left for England where she studied for her Master’s in Politics at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. In 1980 she emigrated to the United States, and has lived in Michigan, Massachusetts and North Carolina. Over the years she has worked as an interpreter for an international organization, a professor of French and of Arabic, a freelance writer and a hook columnist. All of these – not coincidentally, she realizes – are occupations connected to words and language in one form or another. The Cairo House is her first novel her short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. She has also published essays on women’s issues and Islam. In the past few years she has been in regular demand as a public speaker on current events in various academic and church forums. She has two grown sons on two different continents and family on a third, perfect excuses for dividing her time between Chapel Hill, London and Cairo.
A FEW FAVOURITE READS
Coleman Barks’s translation of Rumi’s poetry, Birdsong
Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
A WRITING LIFE
When?
Whenever the inspiration hits, even in the middle of the night.
Where?
At my desk, distracted by squirrels and red cardinals hopping about on the tree outside my window.
Why?
To leave a footprint of one’s passage through this world.
Pen or computer?
Computer.
Silence or music?
Music.
What started me writing was…
Realizing the world I remembered would soon be gone with the wind.
I start…
By working out scenes and even entire chapters in my head.
I finish…
With an overwhelming desire to go out and be sociable again.
Do you have any writing rituals?
I take long walks in the woods to do my thinking before I put finger to keyboard.
Or superstitions?
Fear of jinxing my manuscript by showing it before it’s done or telling people about a book before it’s published.
I admire…
Gabriel García Márquez.
I am inspired by…
Passion, romantic and otherwise.
Guilty pleasure?
Reading during the day when I should be writing or working.
Favourite trashy read?
Political comic books, especially by the irreverent Doonesbury and Kudzu.
About the book
The Alternative Universe of the Imagination
By Samia Serageldin
Every writer’s relationship with books must surely start as a passive one, absorbing and internalizing, until the day you begin to create. For me, growing up, reading was my refuge. It was around the time when the world around me turned confusing, when the adults in my life took to speaking in anxious whispers, that I became a compulsive read
er. I was too young to understand about revolutions and house arrest and ‘enemies of the people’. I escaped to my alternative universe of books.
Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series; the Comtesse de Ségur’s stories; selections from Librairie Hachette’s rose imprint, colourcoded for age-appropriateness. I was omnivorous in both French and English. As I grew older I graduated to Walter Scott and Thackeray; Georges Sand from Hachette’s green imprint; Stendhal and Balzac from the black. I was the kind of child and, later, adolescent who couldn’t go anywhere without a book in hand, the kind who, temporarily bereft of reading material, would resort to reading the ingredients on sauce bottles and the labels on shampoo. Reality intruded feebly into my alternative universe. I remember raising my head from the mist-shrouded moors of Wuthering Heights and blinking in disoriented resentment at the blinding glare from the Mediterranean sun glancing off the water at the beach in Alexandria.
I began writing sporadically as a teenager, entirely imaginary, escapist short stories, but also a few surprisingly real, stark poems. But as I grew into a woman I seemed to lose my voice. Living abroad as I did, from the age of twenty on, there was no room in this brave new world for my memories of jasmine and dust; I locked away my photo albums of Egypt in the attic. My sons grew up playing ice hockey in Michigan and Massachusetts, baseball in North Carolina.
‘I returned to Egypt constantly, in my mind, weaving my memories into stories I stored away in that virtual filing cabinet all writers carry around in their heads.’
But I returned to Egypt constantly, in my mind, weaving my memories into stories I stored away in that virtual filing cabinet all writers carry around in their heads. I’d be walking in the woods, and make up-entire chapters in my head, down to the last comma. Then one day I finally sat down at my computer and put finger to keyboard, so to speak. As soon as I started writing I became so lost in my invented universe that the tangible world outside of my imagination receded in the background. I became a moving hazard at the wheel of a car, so distracted by the stories in my head that I had several accidents in a two-year period. If, before, I had been lonely sometimes, once I started writing I always had company. I woke up every morning impatient to get back to my characters, imagining them waiting for me on the page like friends eager to take up an interrupted conversation.
I discovered what other writers have found, that it is easier, if anything, to evoke a place from a distance than if I had been living there. Isak Dinesen wrote Out of Africa after she returned to frigid, gloomy Denmark; she wrote her Gothic tales in the stark sunshine of Kenya. And of course Cairo is a city with such a unique sense of place of its own, even the night air has a memorable quality. You become more aware of it, rather than less, at a distance. You can live along the banks of a great river and not be actively aware of how its rhythms punctuate your daily life. Growing up in Cairo on the island of Zamalek in the middle of the Nile, I crossed the river several times a day, but it is only after living abroad for years that I realized how much it had marked me. I always felt restless in any landlocked place far from a great river or a sea; I missed a point of orientation. There was no ‘there’ there.
‘Cairo is a city with such a unique sense of place of its own, even the night air has a memorable quality.’
When The Cairo House was finally published, it came as a complete surprise to most people who knew me, since I had kept my writing strictly private. It was also a coming out of sorts for the reserved person I had always been; people who had known me for years looked at me in a new way. I had always tried to blend in like a perfect chameleon. There was no hypocrisy involved; only the need to compartmentalize in order to survive. When glimpses of my former life transpired, I dreaded the slightly sceptical question that inevitably ensued: ‘So what are you doing here in Houghton (or Newton, or Chapel Hill)?’
And that is why the central metaphor of the book is that of the chameleon, someone who has more than one skin and is an expert at blending into more than one culture. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that what resonates, even with a reader who has no connection to the Middle East, is the universal sense of exile from an idyllic place or time, even if it is remembered through the rose-coloured lenses of childhood.
‘The central metaphor of the book is that of the chameleon, someone who has more than one skin and is an expert at blending into more than one culture.’
For me, unearthing the essential metaphors in a novel helps me to see how each part relates to the others. The palimpsest is another such image: the idea that each of us is a palimpsest of sorts, with hidden layers of the past, of memories and experiences, underlying the superficial image we present to the world; layers hidden even from ourselves, very often, and only visible under strong light and careful scrutiny. The kaleidoscope, too, has always fascinated me as a metaphor for life: how a seemingly slight incident can alter the course of one’s destiny, just as an almost imperceptible shift in the angle of the lens changes the composition to form an entirely new pattern.
That is the pleasure of writing for me: shining a light to uncover the palimpsest under the surface; tracing the changing image to the shift in the kaleidoscope; exploring the path taken and the path not taken. The great satisfaction of being read comes from taking others with you on that fascinating journey.
Read on
If You Loved This, You Might Like…
Be one of the first to read an extract from Samia Serageldin’s new novel, El Greco’s Illusion
Robert folds the scrap of paper in his hand and looks out of the window. The view outside is very different from the one that this same desk faced only a few months ago, before he sold his business. He looks out at the garden in the back of the house; the dead leaves drifting into the drained pool, the umbrellas folded over the tables on the patio, the shrivelled geranium heads in the stone planters.
He should get a yard service, or a proper gardener, he thinks, instead of Professor Ilya. Russian ornithology professors do not make good gardeners. It is supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but there are not many jobs available for an elderly Soviet refugee who doesn’t speak much English.
One ring. The man pushing the French Minitel telecommunications deal. Sounds interesting, but it would take too much energy. Robert does not pick up.
Three rings. Susan, suggesting he join her and some benefit committee for lunch. Sounds concerned. He doesn’t pick up.
One ring. His accountant. Sounds worried. Needs to speak to him quite urgently about an audit on back taxes. He doesn’t pick up.
Three rings. Dr Berenson. Reminding him this is the second appointment he’s missed this week. Sounds concerned. Missing appointments is a bad sign. Robert doesn’t pick up.
He puts the scrap of paper in his pocket. Is this what retirement is like? He doesn’t know what he expected. Not having to take any calls. Not having to wear a watch. Time. Switching off the treadmill under his feet for the first time in his life. He stares out the window. A squirrel scrabbles up the tree in front of him.
Robert takes the small scrap of paper out of his pocket and unfolds it slowly. He picks up the phone and dials the number he has copied on the paper. Two rings.
‘Hello?’
Robert is taken aback. Her voice is high and light. He expected it to be low-pitched and throaty, perhaps with a slight accent. This voice does nothing for him.
‘Hello? Hello?’
He hangs up. He thrusts the scrap of paper into his pocket.
He picks up the phone and punches in Drew’s number. Perhaps he can talk him into coming home from college for the weekend. He hasn’t been back since fall semester started. There is no answer.
One ring. The stockbroker he was supposed to have lunch with today. Sounds as if he were trying to hide his annoyance at being stood up. Robert doesn’t pick up.
He takes the scrap of paper out of his pocket and dials the number again. This time her voice is more wary. ‘Hello?’
‘Hi. This is Robert Bauer. We
met at Caroline Norton’s party last week?’
‘Oh – yes. Excuse me, I didn’t quite catch…?’
‘Robert Bauer. Caroline told me a little about your research, and that you’re new to Boston. I may be able to help you meet some people.’
‘Oh, that’s very kind of you.’ She sounds doubtful, Robert thinks with a grin, because she is trying to remember meeting him.
‘Why don’t you and your husband come over for coffee tomorrow morning? You can tell me a little about what you’re working on. And Susan – my wife – would like to meet you.’
‘My husband’s out of town right now.’
‘I’ll expect you around ten o’clock? Let me give you the address.’
‘Tomorrow? Perhaps we could put it off till my husband gets back?’
The Cairo House Page 27