Pink Rivers: Reading Yōko Ogawa in Cairo
"I always have to go back to where I came from. I have to go back alone. One must always be prepared in the morning to find oneself carrying a new cavity."
The Memory Police, Yōko Ogawa, 1994
Rustum the cat hid between the folds of the white curtain as the city mosque’s minarets began to resound with the noon call to prayer. Radio sounds drifted in from the art studio, playing cheerful advertising songs. It was a delicious noise. I picked up my phone and took a picture of Rustum observing life outside the house: mostly students walking home from school and a man pushing a green cart while yelling to sell fresh mangos.
I browsed through my phone distractedly, waiting for my friends to get ready for lunch. After a while, I opened the novel The Memory Police by Japanese writer Yōko Ogawa. I’d borrowed the book from the public library in Helsinki as soon as it became available, drawn by what I’d heard about Ogawa´s outlandish themes. The characters of the novel struggle to hold onto their memories on an island where things disappear one after the other, not as objects but as ideas and memories: bells, postmarks, and even people. Then the “memory police” ensure that the islanders destroy everything related to the disappeared object. In other words, the thing no longer exists at all, neither as an object nor an idea. This forces the main characters to find ways to preserve other objects that remind them of the disappeared one: the protagonist’s mother keeps secret items in her sculpting atelier, such as a perfume bottle that she shows her daughter. Perfume is something that disappeared before the girl was born, and she does not recognize it. The mother explains to her what perfume is, how to wear it, and her memories of her favourite perfume. For the mother, the perfume bottle is no longer an item that she uses or even cares about. Rather, it is merely something that reminds her of the idea of "perfume," a memory of what she knew in a distant past.
*
This was my third visit to Cairo, and since I had already explored all the museums and monuments, I decided to experience the city this time through the eyes of a lazy observer, rather than a tourist. Later that day, I went out to buy a few necessities, but my shopping mission expanded as I wandered, passing by houses and car repair shops. I stopped by a purple cubic building. It was a very hot afternoon, and I sat in front of the building, drinking an energy drink and coffee at the same time, the can labelled Fayrouz. To my right sat a woman in her thirties, looking bored as she watched her two children running in circles around a toy ambulance. I walked over to her, and as soon as I greeted her, she began bombarding me with questions about my name, where I was from, and whether I was married or single. I later learned that she was the wife of the guard looking after the building in front of which we were sitting.
As I admired the crimson façade, she told me this was the Tijani Zawiya shrine. She then encouraged me to look at the back wall of the building, so I walked that way until the children’s voices faded.
When you find beauty, the world seems to stop. That’s what I felt when I saw the back wall of the shrine. A massive milky circle was drawn on it, adorned with Arabic calligraphy, which elegantly intertwined religious prayers and phrases. The sound of trickling water brought me back to reality as the guard´s wife washed her hands under the shrine’s tap and said, "Ask the shrine for whatever you wish. The only important thing is that your intentions are good."
I stood there, stared at the breathtaking calligraphy, and wished nothing.
*
In the evening, in my room, I went back to reading The Memory Police. As I followed the characters’ fight to save things from disappearing, an idea stopped me in my tracks: Am I in Cairo so that I don’t forget?
Ogawa’s characters stand between the fear of the “memory police” that forces them to forget and their insistence on being real: that is, with solid and fixed memories. Ultimately, the characters do not try to preserve what is lost or will be lost, but rather, all they seek is to preserve the existence of this object in their memory.
The island, the police, and the characters who struggle to preserve memory all live inside me. At some point, I stood between the importance of protecting everything that reminded me of my childhood in Baghdad and my overwhelming desire to be freed from its weight, to move on to a new land and a new identity (as if that were possible). I wanted to preserve the memories of the happy and carefree times spent with my cousins in their swimming pool during summer, the funny moments of creating new games while sitting under the hot sun in a schoolyard. But these memories are intertwined like an unbreakable iron net with memories of war, and the fear of the unknown that the adults used to talk about.
I recalled my earlier conversation with the woman by the shrine. We talked about our personal lives and about her husband’s job as the building’s security guard, which he had been working for seven years. When I told her I was coming from Europe, she told me about a couple living in the building. They had come from Russia to visit Cairo. Their visit turned into a permanent residence permit, and they have been here for almost two and a half years. She said, swatting away a fly hovering around her headscarf, that Cairo would welcome me as a resident, too.
“This is not the effect of the irresponsibility and adrenaline of travel, but rather attributable to an internal algorithm that makes each of us have a place that calls to them in this world.”
I don’t deny that the idea of living in Cairo had crossed my mind many times. It is the only Arab place I have visited since I left the Middle East. It is a city where I have not experienced war and fear like Baghdad. I have always felt that I return as a different person every time I visit, a person who is more confident in what she wants. This is not the effect of the irresponsibility and adrenaline of travel, but rather attributable to an internal algorithm that makes each of us have a place that calls to them in this world. Perhaps travelling to a beloved city washes aways the unimportant details, keeping us more focused.
In the following days, as I walked along Al-Hussein Street or Ibn Tulun Mosque’s periphery, both old, low-income neighborhoods, I began to seriously consider that my return carried with it a longing to stay connected to certain memories, to my roots. When I visit Cairo, I seek out places that remain unfrequented by tourists, and I consciously avoid the massive shopping malls and gated communities that bear a distinctly Western stamp. If I reflect on why I search for these places now, I realize they remind me of my simple childhood, untouched by the European modernity that swept through Iraq after 2003. They take me back to the first culture I knew, to the time before I left Iraq at the age of ten for countries with different languages and customs: first Syria, then Finland. It’s not just the age of the buildings and streets I’m drawn to, but a complete way of life: people walking on the streets despite the availability of sidewalks, the pungent smells of food wafting from windows, the curious eyes following your movements, groups of children in the streets in their dirty clothes, always trying to win a game, the loud songs blaring from passing vehicles, their lyrics barely audible before they fade away.
While the people of Cairo complained about the noise, I found myself in a familiar and delicious happiness. I knew with certainty that my happiness was not influenced by the white man’s culture and his fascination with the East, but rather, it was simply a return of memories, a relief.
*
Sometimes I get the feeling that there is something in this world, something we cannot be certain of scientifically. But it exists, something through which the world communicates with us. Some call it coincidence. The idea of my frequent visits to Cairo intersecting with reading The Memory Police seemed to me a nice and even necessary coincidence. There was one point at which this coincidence overtook me. I was walking along the Nile Walkway at sunset. The pink sky reflected on the river looked exactly like a scene from the novel. The memory police decide to erase a type of pink flower by picking them all from the field and drowning them in the river, which at that moment turns pink. The Nile was pink for a few minutes as well, and life was calm, people waiting for night to fall so that a different rhythm could begin. Gradually, the cafés overlooking the Nile began to fill up with friends and families. The small boats that toured the river turned on their lights and played their usual music: Mihrajanat, a contemporary music genre that combines working class Egyptian music played at weddings (shaabi), EDM, and hip-hop with heavy autotune.
Standing before the pink river, I thought: The noise never ends. Cities have pasts, their own complex characters, their own traumas, their own voices. Without this voice, Cairo would be something else. I might not be here now. I smiled in wonder, as this was exactly what I’d read in the novel yesterday: "When you lose your voice, you lose your ability to express yourself."
“Sometimes, memories can be false if they have only a single layer; many times, we have to go back to a certain place or situation to understand the real shape of the memory we have inside us. ”
Though the two cities’ voices differ in their Arabic dialect, Baghdad and Cairo have a lot in common when it comes to noise, which brims over from the streets: the sellers’ repeated calls, the car horns which some Cairenes insist drivers press aimlessly, simply out of boredom, the calls to prayer.
In my childhood, each call to prayer had its own meaning. The dawn call was right before we went to school. The afternoon one was the one we hated the most, as we were forced to take a nap. The evening one was the happiest; we would jump out of our beds to go play outside with the neighbourhood kids. The sunset call signified it was time to go home, and the night call we didn't usually hear, because we had gone to sleep.
The next morning in Cairo, I felt lightheaded. It was as if a door had opened inside me that I had not known existed. I took a small chair to the balcony. I told myself to look at the buildings and people instead of the sky. I lit a cigarette while contemplating the windows of the opposite building. There were decorations wrapped around all the balconies that said Happy New Year. The decorations were old and covered in dust. One of the windows opened and a child’s head poked out. He looked at me in wonder and stuck his tongue out. He was not doing it out of mischief, but trying forcefully to touch his chin with his tongue. His mother, who followed him to the window, did not understand and began to scold him. The father also came and looked at me with a scrutinizing look that did not last long before he closed the window.
Since I’d left Iraq, my life had become an invisible attempt to recall the life I had left there. When I visit Cairo, I repeat the life I lived before in Baghdad: the noise of the street, the old congratulatory flyers, the stares of neighbours from the shy windows. It was as if I came here to return certain things to their place, or more precisely, to plant them in my memory. Sometimes, memories can be false if they have only a single layer; many times, we have to go back to a certain place or situation to understand the real shape of the memory we have inside us. The paintings I make that often depict figures with wide eyes and linked eyebrows (referring to Mesopotamian sculptures´ eyes), the fiction I write now while living in Helsinki—they all return to those initial memories and fears that I, or someone else I knew, had experienced in Iraq. These paintings, writings, and visits to Cairo are not the result of unbridled nostalgia, but rather a conscious act of telling a story and refining it until it becomes solid in the face of fading places and time. Is this not what people usually do—take their story seriously, blend it with the life of others, for no reason other than to make it more logical to themselves?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aya Chalabee was born in Baghdad, Iraq and lives in Helsinki, Finland. She holds a BA in interpreting from Diaconia University. No Sun in Baghdad لا شمس في بغداد is her first short story collection (2015) and Two Friends in Urصديقان في أُور is her latest (2021). Her works also appeared in the Eksil anthology by Screaming Books (Denmark). She has translated the children’s book Siinä Sinä Olet البعيدُ القريب from Finnish to Arabic 2021 and participated in Linnun Neljä Laulua 2022 book as translator. Beside writing, Aya studies fine arts and discovers places.
Read Aya’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
Header photo by Alex Azabache.
