Cairo and Alexandria

Abstract

In Egypt, one of the oldest countries on earth, lives one of the most unpredictable nations; a people who toppled and imprisoned two heads of state two years away from each other—one a secular dictator, the other an Islamist. Two large Egyptian cities played main roles in both of Egypt’s revolutions in 2011 and 2013: Cairo (population over 18 million) and Alexandria (5 million). The two cities not only set the tone of Egyptian political discourse and activism; they are also the two major sites of Egyptian literary and cinematic production, as well as the two major markers of the metamorphosis of modern Egypt from a country which provided various forms of aid to some European and Arab countries from 1805 to 1952 to a country with one of the heaviest external debts in the world today. Nearly everywhere in twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Egyptian culture one can find allusions to that metamorphosis, but perhaps nowhere with more clarity than in the Cairene novel and the Alexandrian film. Taken together, these allusions constitute a kind of fictitiousness that is truly peculiar to those cities.