Being here is like flowing through the veins of humanity. Along with all the forever chemicals, microplastics, and indigestible remnants of fast food. With the loud incessant rush of millions of rag-tag vehicles, and millions of lives walking the tightrope of poverty. Cows standing outside the butcher’s waiting to become dinner. People buzzing at 3AM striving to avoid the same end.
Being here is facing the pre-apocalyptic predicament of modern life. Defying the laws of ecology and sanity the city sprawls in the direction of all four winds. The flow never stops, the growth never seizes. One year it’s an agricultural village, another – bustling streets fortified with tall unregulated buildings squeezing them from all sides. One day you’re enjoying the view from your apartment on the 4th floor, another – a six-lane overpass appears within a hand’s reach from your windowsill. The city’s veins always win, the vessels have to just suck it up.
However littered the veins, they refuse to get clogged by overarching regulation and European order. The seeming chaos is a natural order only interrupted by the security services. Mind your political views, keep them to yourself, and the natural order won’t be disrupted. Until your business starts doing too well for you to be left alone enjoying its benefits. Then the big guys step in and make an offer you can’t refuse. Share the fruit or perish.
What you have instead of European order is an unstoppable sense of the flow of millions upon millions of lives. Loud, punchy, and raw. A LIVE gig of life if you like. As a long-deceased Egyptian writer once eloquently put – Egyptians are like catfish, put them in clear water and they’ll die. Consequently, rubbish here isn’t conveniently hidden away or “recycled”, it’s in plain sight. Litter on the streets, trash-grown and trash-flavoured vegetables, trash particles in the air, microplastics in your water and in your cells. No illusions of control or green here. A full-on capitalist realism that wreaks of impending doom. Consume till you get consumed. A self-cannibalism that, unlike here in Europe, does not pretend otherwise.
The irony is that in a country ruled by a military dictatorship one is able to feel more free than back in the so-called free world. Free to hustle, free not to observe the gazillions of rules, free to bribe one’s way out (a right that in Europe is only reserved to the cream of the crop), free to honk to the music while driving. I once heard a scholar pointing out that a medieval serf was objectively more free than the current modern free man of Western democracies. For one simple reason – the kings and the landlords just didn’t have the tools of control we have now. The feeling in Cairo is very similar – the kings are busy doing politics and business deals hence the serfs are left to their own devices.
As a result, the palette of life’s colours here defies categorisation. It would be like trying to label all the different greens in the jungle. For it is a jungle especially when contrasted with spotless clean and orderly urban streets of Europe. A lush bustling jungle only adhering to its own laws of growth, symbiosis, and cut-throat competition vs a carefully managed minimalist desert constrained by top-down rules and the faulty illusion of control.
Oh how I wished I had visited Cairo sooner. Back when it would have seemed exotic. Back when poverty and lawlessness seemed romantic and anti-system. Back when I wasn’t aware of what orientalism is. Ruined are the belly-dances and snake whisperers for me. Ruined are the marvels of colonial architecture and centennial colonial cafes that to this day provide temporary refuge to an overwhelmed Western folk shocked by the city’s intensity and seeming chaos.
I arrived in Cairo with a cause. A cause that was hijacked and extinguished. The tiny camera I had with me (pro gear raises suspicion and is a good way to be turned around at the border) wasn’t meant to tourist around with me or to be pointed at the majesty and eternal mystery of the pyramids. Life happens the way it’s meant to, and all we can do is embrace it. From the time spent among Muslims I seem to have learnt this much – control is only an illusion. One that we – westerners – seem to be more prone to than the Muslims.
Cairo literally blew my mind and even now, weeks later, I struggle to put it into neat shelves of like or dislike. One thing is clear – it’s not a city, but a world on its own, a force of life. A force so strong that it might in the end extinguish the very life that powers it.
I’m typing these lines with trees whispering to the wind, with birds having a townhall gathering around me, and fresh air streaming through my nostrils. Back home, in Lithuania, where the wider world is ever so distant. Does travelling bring us closer to it or the opposite – only serves to confirm the false notions and preconceptions we had before leaving?
Taromatas and urban regulation are great ideas, but so is freedom to rely on common sense, freedom to honk your tuk-tuk’s horn to the beat of music. Can we ever reconcile the two? Can we ever stop measuring which is the better?
Cairo I’d love to return to.
Cairo I was relieved to leave.
