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| Chapter 6:
In 1865, Lady Lucie Duff-Gordon, one of the early British tourists in Egypt, commented, “This country is a palimpsest in which the Bible is written over Herodotus, and the Koran over that.” In Egypt, people have spent millennia writing over the monuments of the past, using them as temples, churches, mosques, homes and museums, interpreting them according to their own imaginations, and appropriating them for their own political agendas. In 1400 BC, King Thutmose IV undertook the first known restoration of the Sphinx, putting a plaque between the paws to mark his efforts; the Romans dug him out of the sand again in preparation for Nero’s visit to Egypt in the first century AD, and French explorers of the 1840s again cleared the sand away from his body. In each case, reverence for the ancient sculpture was fueled by a desire to appropriate the power of a long-lost civilization and harness it to a contemporary political order. Pharaonic Egypt became a Greek, then a Roman, colony; Roman travelers to the outskirts of the empire removed obelisks back to Rome and set precedent for European colonizers, travelers and antiquities-looters nearly two millennia later. Coptic Christianity also left its mark, making chapels out of ancient temples and defacing the heretical inscriptions – but also preserving some of them with the mud they used to plaster over them, which protected paintings from sun and wind erosion until the mud was cleared away by nineteenth and twentieth-century Europeans. Since ancient times, Egypt has fueled exotic, and often competing, imaginations of the past. The writing on the various layers of history has often been sufficiently faded to accommodate more inscription – for people to project their imaginations about the past and write their own accounts of history – but this is never without some reference to the traces of what came before, however fanciful the interpretations of those traces might be. Medieval Arabs imagined the ancient Egyptians as a race of giants, and wrote magical treasure-hunting guides that were later translated and sold to 19th century tourists by an Egyptologist. The powdered corpses of ancient Egyptians were eaten and applied topically by Europeans for medicinal purposes, while Arabs circulate rumors about a mythical embalming fluid said to hold the secret to longevity. And, returning to Herodotus (as, it seems, one always does), we find an ancient Greek fascination with an even more ancient Egypt – combined with amusement as he relates dubious facts, such as that the pyramids were built using funds earned from the prostitution of King Khufu’s daughter, and that the outside of the pyramids were inscribed with a tally of the number of onions fed to the workers who built them. (The morals of this story are threefold: foreigners have long imagined Egypt as a wily seductress; guides tell you what they think you want to hear; and travelers love to relate a fantastic story.) But Herodotus’s sly insinuation that the greatness of the pharaohs was built on the prostitution of their women reminds us that the play of historical imagination is not only a fanciful exercise in myth-making. As scholars such as Edward Said, Rana Kabbani and Malek Alloula have argued, writing a description of the Other is always a political exercise. The comparison of Arab and Western tourism in Egypt highlights the historical processes which have produced apparently natural icons of national identity. ... It was a European fascination with pharaonic Egypt that has propelled one elaboration of Egyptian identity as an “antique” land. The Enlightenment fervor of the Western world to describe and rule the Orient was the original impetus for what has become, today, multiple industries: tourism, archaeology and anthropology, museums, tour guides and guide books, antiquities reproductions, and a black market trade in artifacts. The current politics of Egyptology reverberate with the historical process by which a European treasure-hunt and large-scale policy of looting was gradually converted to a science of archaeology under Egyptian government supervision. Arab tourism in Egypt centers on a completely different imagination of Egypt as a people, history, nation and culture. Just as an Egyptian pharaonic identity was constructed through a history of Egyptology and contact with the West, so too is Egyptian cultural identity partially constituted in the productions of popular culture that are broadcast all over the Arab world, from classical singers such as Umm Kalthoum to pop culture icons such as Amrou Diab. Arab tourists come to Cairo in the summer to experience the cultural world of their favorite television soap operas, movies, theater productions, and songs. They hope to see a play with one of their favorite actors, go to a nightclub to see a pop star sing, or, as one Egyptian hotel worker speculated (in Chapter 4), just to meet a friendly Egyptian girl like the ones they see on Egyptian television. In a regional context, Egyptians take pride in a national identity which is constituted less by a pharaonic past than by the fact that it is the cultural hegemon in the Arab world, where Egypt dominates the Arabic-speaking regional media, and Egyptian is the most widely understood Arabic dialect. And yet here too we find fissures in the apparent unity of culture and language that facilitate Arab tourism in Egypt. Gulf Arabs, fed a visual diet of relatively racy Egyptian films, may inappropriately assume that the average Egyptian woman they encounter working in the restaurants, hotels, and casinos they frequent is a sexual libertine, while Egyptians I interviewed frequently confessed to being baffled by the dress styles, food and eating preferences, and other markers of Gulf culture. Linguistic differences between Gulf and Egyptian dialects reflect different histories of transnational engagements, and cultural differences in terms of polite address can lead to misunderstandings (see Chapter 4). The regional context of migrant labor and the inequitable distribution of oil wealth throughout the Arab world contribute to Egyptian antipathy towards Arab tourists, and specific events in Egypt and abroad, from the exploits of Prince Tork to the maltreatment of Egyptians working in the Gulf, fan the flames of resentment. On the other hand, popular Egyptian stereotypes that insist (with a mixture of indignation, resentment, and perhaps a twinge of pride) that Gulf Arab tourists come to Egypt to sexually exploit Egyptian women are belied by the vacation activities of young, urbane Gulf tourists who prefer to see their time in Cairo as an opportunity to meet, date, and court their own compatriots, and regard Egyptians with wariness as economic exploiters, trying to take advantage of imagined Gulf wealth (Chapter 5).... Perhaps a more useful metaphor than the palimpsest is that of graffiti. Egyptologists today encounter layers upon layers of graffiti on the monuments – in hieroglyphics, Coptic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, French, English, and German. Graffiti is an individual act (or tactic), not one which is undertaken by a state or a religious movement or even an academic discipline. It is an act which on one level swallows the dominant reading and labeling of a site, accepting elite markers of civilizational distinction, while at the same time defies the demand for reverence that such dominant narratives require. In trying to overwrite these dominant narratives of civilization and history, graffiti simultaneously requires their underwriting for some of its weight. It is at once oppositional, reinforcing, and mimetic. In this sense, it neatly expresses the complex map of power relations that characterize tourism as a prime site where transnational encounters shape national identities. © 2006, Lisa Wynn and University of Texas Press. Forthcoming November 2007. |
