Every day, videos of demolition of “buildings” haunt me like a nightmare, sometimes they give me panic attacks; I fear they would uproot me from my neighbourhood in Dar Al-Salam; I am terrified they would put an end to my community or mutate it into a freak I wouldn’t even recognise.
I watch my community move like a well-orchestrated symphony, I watch while I am buying Falafel amidst the crowd surrounding the beans cart, I listen to the sounds the ladle makes while hitting the metal beans pot which is joined by the chanting of the “bread crumbs” peddler, then the fresh molokhia peddler coming from a village near Helwan joins the scene calling people to come and buy her freshly cropped leaves so she can provide for herself and children she supports after her husband died, and amidst all these voices I listen to the cotton upholstery machine placed opposite to a restaurant. All this makes me feel how distinguished my community is, as if it is a nature reserve in need of protection, I call it a “community reserve”.
I feel safe inside this community, for Dar Al-Salam is a neighbourhood that doesn’t sleep; streets are continuously illuminated and people are everywhere. Simplicity predominates in my community, for example, I buy dinner from the kindest of people working in a bakery in the area, whereas Umm Kulthum’s voice singing “Amal Hayati” in the background. I do all this while being comfortable in my pyjamas, adding only my Hijab (veil). Within this geographical zone in the world, I strip from all the perfectionism the new Cairo dictates on us while it smothers and replaces more beautiful communities.
Cairo is gradually changing into a well organised city, with copy-pasted buildings, I feel like a robot walking in the streets for I’m unable to communicate with the buildings or feel them, unlike the unruly ones in Dar Al-Salam which are full of spirit and life more than those in the modern cities. The most interesting thing I like about my neighbourhood is watching street “brawls” between people there when some neighbour’s chickens jump on the rooftop of another, and what follows on unorganised rooftops where cages for chickens or pigeons are built.
“Slums” is what they call Dar Al-Salam and its likes; narrow streets and unorganised buildings. For example, the sun never reaches inside my room, but I am able to see the sun better inside a room placed inside a cement box in a place called “Compound”. Winter in my neighbourhood is warm as the buildings are close and streets are narrow, but that doesn’t justify not preparing the streets for heavy rains and fixing the rain drainage and developing the infrastructure of the place, only without the removing and demolishing works they call development, for development doesn’t mean tearing a special community apart.
This process of mutilation affected the dead before the living, for they managed to uproot me from there by demolishing my family’s cemetery in Sayyida Nafisah burial ground, this happened before Al-Adha feast, and I am unable to grasp this fact until now… how we are going to take my grandparents remains? To bury them in another burial ground in Fifth Avenue! How is our usual visit to the cemetery every feast turned into a horror film?... I watched their shrouds like those in the films, reminding me when my stomach would hurt watching the hero dies against my wishes, and I would stay affected by this scene mourning this death for a week.
One day I will tell my children and grandchildren – whom I do not expect I would have because of these crises – about building a new city on the ruins of communities used to be filled with a distinguished life they will only see in pictures, I will tell them about the horror and panic I felt watching the demolition “videos”, and the reason I clicked on “uninterested in this video”.
“Hope of my life … O precious endless love … O you most beautiful song”, this is how Umm Kulthum sings, she grew up in a special community and her music distinguishes my community, she can be heard in every café and store, her warm voice soothes the workers, and I am like the “Lady” (Umm Kulthum), my life’s hope to live and die in my community and never be uprooted.
