AUTHOR: ELLIOTT COLLA

A professor in Arabic Literature at Georgetown University, Elliott Colla’s scholarly and creative writings explore the Arab world from its literatures to its struggles against Western colonialism and imperialism. He has translated works by authors from Libya, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine.

In On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, Giambattista Vico wrote “The criterion of the true is to have made it,” along parallel lines 300 years later in Orientalism, Edward Said wrote, “men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities . . .” These lines feel like the perfect introduction to We Are All Things, a story of a love affair in verse told through the (manmade) objects in a room. What do physical objects offer to our stories that are not captured in thoughts or conversations?

Great question. I think the answer has to do with my own experience writing fiction, and finding it very difficult to write description. My favorite authors know how to paint (in words) an entire inhabited world, which invariably is filled with things. Balzac, for example, often builds character through the interiors of their rooms. He shows us how to see the reflection of people in the furniture they sit on, the everyday objects they employ, and especially the tchotchkes with which they decorate their surfaces. In his hands, these things can tell us much more than a description of their physicality. 

Yet, when done badly, rich, thick description becomes a distraction. I often find myself skipping long, descriptive passages when I read because, when it comes down to it, I don’t care about the world of that particular book, or character, and am only curious about plot. When I write fiction, I often begin with description, but find myself cringing when I start to read what I’ve written. Most all of it disappears during editing. Why? Because, if I cannot discover the purpose of that description, it probably shouldn’t be there. And too often, I haven’t figured out how to do it all. But that’s one of my struggles as a writer.

This text is based on the experiment of putting description first. I began by writing up each object as fully as I could, without regard for plot. It was a list, though at the beginning it had no order at all. Some dynamics emerged immediately. First, a mood was set: the emptiness and sadness of the piece was there as soon as I turned my attention to things rather than people. Second, a set of relations between the various objects began to take form. It is a hierarchy of sorts, but it is also a familial, even intimate. These things are stuck with each other, long after the people come and go. 

I should say a word about the room where I wrote this. It was in a friend’s apartment. It was a lovely place, and I vividly recall the months I was there. But the thing I want to signal about the apartment is that it was not where my friend actually lived. As a house, it was usually being leased to people like me. And so while lovely and clean, it was not exactly anyone’s home. This is what is known in Egypt as a sha’a mafrousha (a furnished flat). I give the colloquial Egyptian because those words have a special resonance in the country that ‘furnished flat’ doesn’t seem to have. There’s also a moral judgment in Egypt about the kind of people who’d reside in such a place. In a word, they’re loose people, the kind that might bring disgrace. But more importantly, from my experience, furnished flats in Egypt are fundamentally empty places. They are usually places where locals used to live, but are now empty. And they remain empty until someone—usually a wealthy foreigner—comes along and resides in it on a temporary basis. I spent many years living in such apartments. But as long as I stayed in them, I was always aware that while I was temporary, the furnishings were permanent.

So these two things—experimenting with description and thinking about the particular nature of the furnished flat—came together immediately, but it wasn’t exactly forming a narrative. It was something else.

There is also another strand to this. At the time, I was reading and translating an Egyptian author named Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abdallah. While working on him, I made some discoveries. One for instance: while ‘Abdallah is known mainly as a ‘short story writer’, a lot of his works are not exactly stories. They are intensely small pieces that set a scene and establish a mood. They let the reader imagine the backstory or what comes next. And his language is not like that of other prose writers. It is dense and often lyrical. At times the language is liturgical, with Quranic and Biblical resonances. Voices appear and fade like angels or devils whispering in your ear. At some point, I began to suspect that ‘Abdallah was writing often in stanzas, not paragraphs. When I realized that, a whole set of possibilities opened up for me. He’s a poet, but writing what appears to be prose. Or it seems like he’s telling stories, but these are stories that work like poems. Realizing this helped me relax with the problem I was having between wanting to write thick descriptions of a material world. I let go of plot, until much later, it reintroduced itself by way of the humans that reside—but don’t live—in that world.

Moving from the physical form of objects to many forms of literature, in your article “Revisiting the Question of the Novel/Nation,” reviewing The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to present by Bashir Abu-Manneh, you write:

For Abu-Manneh, arguably the most important component of [Georg] Lukàcs’s theory of the novel is its historicity. The novel is neither a static nor neutral form, but rather one that exists in relation to social history, which means that its styles and genres—its very shape—arise from particular circumstances, and change with them accordingly.

Which I think does well to contextualize an earlier citation from the book being reviewed: 

To read the Palestinian novel or Palestinian politics through the prism of statehood is in fact to repress the history of revolution, modernization and cultural renaissance. In Palestinian politics, the statist option represents an outcome of the defeat of the revolutionary forces. The political and cultural rise of the Palestinians after the nakba was always about much more than statehood, and the shift from liberation to independence reflects a shrinking of political horizons and possibilities.

Is the form of We Are All Things, the interplay of text and image, an attempt to try to wrestle with contemporary times, seeking new forms to both process the moment while also remaining an active participant in it? How much back and forth was there between you and Ganzeer in the development of what would become We Are All Things?

I first encountered Ganzeer in 2011. His street art in Cairo was stunning. The martyrs’ series he did was monumental in more than a couple ways: he was of course honoring ordinary Egyptian citizens who fought—and died—for a better society, naming their names, showing us their faces, reminding us that the collective contains individuals; and he was insisting that their images weigh on the public sphere as a kind of challenge or unfulfilled promise, a kind of “They sacrificed their lives for a better Egypt. What have you done?”; and finally, like other street artists, he was reclaiming the public space as a place of DIY creativity and democratic meaning-making. Whenever one of his pieces appeared, friends would snap pictures and post on social media. People responded immediately and viscerally to his street art in 2011-13, which is remarkable given how invisible this kind of art had been previously. It was like waking up and realizing that the city you lived in was filled with art galleries. 

I became a fan-boy. When Donia Maher’s book, The Apartment in Bab El-Louk, came out, I saw another, more bookish side of Ganzeer. And then The Solar Grid started to appear, which established that Ganzeer can work in pretty much any format he wants: he’s a guerilla artist working on dusty walls, a gallery artist, a book illustrator, sci-fi visionary, and graphic novelist. 

But I didn’t meet Ganzeer until later. It was at the Cosmos Club in Washington, DC, at an event sponsored by one of our many organizations that come across as a CIA front whether or not they really are. A bunch of us went out afterwards for beer and we talked about comic books and graphic novels mostly. (I am a latecomer to the medium and am still astounded by it.) I’m also one of those annoying people who meets an author or artist and starts to tell them what they should consider doing next. (My partner calls it my “you’re gonna wanna” discourse.) I started throwing things at Ganzeer over email. One was for him to illustrate a list of words for drunkenness taken from the medieval book of words, Fiqh al-lugha by the polymath al-Tha‘labi. He wasn’t convinced. This one, however, piqued his interest. 

He started building images and would send them to me in batches. I remember liking all of them. Ganzeer began by separating each object from the others, giving it its own page. This may have been a natural mode for translating the written text to graphic form, but it wasn’t obvious to me when all I had were words. One upshot was that as each object got its own turn in the spotlight, its uniqueness became more pronounced. As he worked, his images would change my understanding of the written text. So I would go back to that and work on it more. Very occasionally, I would make small suggestions. Like the weevil, which is so central to cotton production and thus to the memory of the cotton. But mostly, the process of collaborating entailed learning more about the text itself.

Most of We Are All Things seems beyond place and time but there are a few clues that ground it in a specific reality. To me the sounds of a call to prayer and the tape cassette deck playing Umm Kulthoum are where readers find solid ground, perhaps a cheeky twist for a story otherwise told through physical objects. What role do sounds and acoustics have in shaping this story (and perhaps the human experience)? The text on the back of the book places We Are All Things in Cairo, what do the architectures and cultural symbolism of Cairo provide to this story?

Cairo is a deeply aural experience. There is an incessant ambient sound that is richly, and often maddingly layered. There are the amplified calls to prayer, which can be beautiful but usually are not. (I remember living next to a mosque whose muezzin had a chronic chest cough. His wheezing and hacking woke all of us up at dawn everyday.) There are the street vendors: the sellers of mangoes or mint with their distinct cries; or the rag-and-bone men whose call, “Rubabikiya” still echoes the old Italian, “Ropa vecchia.” There is the upstairs neighbor installing a bathroom sink at 11PM, or the other neighbor watching Dallas at full volume. Or the sewage truck that comes at 4AM to suck out the septic tank. (And in that case, it’s the smell, not the noise, that is most unsettling.) Or the car mechanic who job consists of banging on a muffler all day long. Or the howling of feral cats, or packs of dogs that used to haunt many of the bougiest neighborhoods. 

There is the honking of the cars, which at first hit me like a wall of noise. Later, my friend Samer Shehata taught me about how soccer fans use particular honking patterns on game nights. It was like Morse code, if you had the code. There are many kinds of horns, and many ways of honking. And some of that honking is articulate language: people letting each other know they’re there; people encouraging people to move; people telling each other to fuck off. There’s a lot of noise in Cairo but a lot of signal, too. 

As your question rightly suggests: all this sound exists in an urban landscape that amplifies, channels, and concentrates it. Here we need to remember the difference between building materials. Concrete, for instance, makes for a lively, bouncy room with a sustain that matches Nigel Tufnel’s Les Paul. In contrast, wood dampens sound. But wood is exceedingly rare as a building material in Egypt. Most Cairo rooms I’ve ever been in are made of concrete, and with ceramic tile floors. If there are no carpets or curtains, they can work almost like a radio receiver—picking up everything and intensifying it in surprising, infuriating ways. It’s not for nothing that so many Cairenes rely on earplugs, hashish, and sleeping pills to get rest. 

When I write, I try to start from the specific, not the general. The historical, not the timeless. And you’ve just put your finger on one concrete detail that opens up the historical moment of the poem: the cassette tape. My life in Cairo could be explained through cassette tapes, which are now a sound medium relic, only without the vintage aura of vinyl. Back when I was in my 20s, I had the great fortune to study Arabic with Abbas al-Tonsi—any student of Arabic now will know his name, because it’s on the cover of the textbook everyone uses. Ustaz Abbas used to make us record ourselves reciting practice sentences, or lines of poetry, on cassettes. Then he’d listen to them, grade them, make his comments, and return them to us to record again. But that wasn’t all. He made a generous offer to those of us who were interested in the kind of poetry and song that wasn’t sold on the market, because either it was banned, or because it wasn’t meant to be commodified. Music and poetry by the Egyptian radical duo—Sheikh Imam and Ahmed Fouad Negm—or by the Iraqi communist poet, Muzaffar al-Nawwab. We’d bring in a blank cassette, and Ustaz Abbas would make copies from his library of recordings. And these copies were themselves copies of other copies from other personal collections. In time, I did the same with my copies, sharing them with other friends. As Nick Hornby taught us in High Fidelity: sharing music is a time-honored method of male bonding.  

They also got me out exploring the city of Cairo. I first listened to Umm Kulthoum on cassette tapes when a hash dealer in Boulaq Aboul-Ela told me to. He also told me to start with al-Atlal, which I later found out was like older stoners telling you to listen to Dark Side of the Moon. Cliché, yes—but not a bad place to start. 

Cassette tapes took me to an amazing music market in the gritty district of Ataba. The place was the ground floor of a concrete carpark, and it was filled with small music shops that sold mostly Nubian and Sudanese music. It was right next to the station for the long-distance buses—the ones that could take you to Riyadh or Baghdad or Benghazi and Tunis. The travelers on these buses were usually peasants embarking on long labor migrations: for them, the market was the last stop where they might find familiar music to bring along into their exile. I would ask the people in the shops what they listened to, and they sold me treasures like shaabi music superstar Adawiyya and the Sudanese rocker Sharhabeel Ahmed, whose voice is about the sweetest thing you’ll ever hear. I wouldn’t know any of these guys if it weren’t for those shops in Ataba. 

Now, cassette tapes are almost gone. But let me share one more story about them. Around the time I wrote We Are All Things, a friend used to take me often to the weekly flea market in Imam Shafi‘i, which is a big mausoleum complex in the southern graveyard. You could find pretty much everything in that market—and over the years, we bought all sorts of things from there, old wooden radios, antique photographs, magazines, a brass bed. Because it is relatively close to where many of the garbage collectors live, a lot of the stuff on sale is culled by those same rag-and-bone men I mentioned earlier. You could buy beautiful bottles salvaged from the trash of upscale Zamalek households: Sport Cola, Hendrick’s Gin, Johnnie Walker Red, Tanqueray, Beefeater. There was a guy who sold nothing but dolls’ heads and another guy who sold nothing but dolls’ bodies that needed heads. Everything.

My friend wanted to show me how poor he was when he was a kid—and he did this through the cassette tape stalls in that market. There were men who sold the empty, plastic cassette cases recovered from the trash collectors. And next to them, were men selling the tapes themselves. Imagine piles of black magnetic tape, sitting under the sun, covered in dust and bits of trash, and that’s what it was. People would come up, pick through it, and offer pennies for an armload of the stuff. If the vendor liked you, he might give you a few extra handfuls for free. Later, at home, you would respool the tape (using pencils, of course) into the empty cassette cases. It was the ultimate in surprise shopping: only then would you find out what you’d bought. But all too often, my friend told me, it wasn’t music at all. It might be a religious sermon or recording of an old radio program. Or if you were really unlucky, the magnetic material on the tape might be so scratched or damaged that it wouldn’t play at all. 

See how much life is involved in an object as common as the cassette tape? This is why it’s difficult to imagine cassette tapes as inanimate! How could I when I learned a language through cassette tapes? These same tapes went on to entertain parties and keep me company when I was alone. They became the currency of friendship and something to argue about, something to preserve or record over. For me, they are a key to a complicated world that stretches from the desperation of migrant workers and street kids, to the biting political verse of a poet like Negm, to the sublime sounds of Umm Kulthoum, all the way to me—a transplant from Los Angeles who, by virtue of US empire, privilege and luck, managed to have my life transformed in Cairo. Not bad for a spool of magnetic tape encased in plastic.