The time is probably not very conducive for strolling, head in the air, heart-shaped mouth and eyes wide open, the streets of the Egyptian capital. Passing tourists will have to wait a bit before returning the pleasure nonchalant.
the early '80s, I was fortunate to make several stops in Cairo, and to have enough time to lose - as they say so stupidly - to wander randomly in the streets.
This is a very superficial approach, and yet ... Given this picture of the crowd so gougueulmapée ant occupant Tahrir Square, an image that has become like the logo of the media revolt of the Egyptian people, I find silhouettes, attendance, lives and faces.
We do that often intersect. Sometimes we exchange in several languages, Greeting drafts that lead to conversations Babelian pidgins. I happened to receive, as an ambassador temporarily available, beautiful homage to France. They had spoken with great seriousness or irony secret - go figure! - But always stirring up some of the later clips my mother tongue. Y were raised all known the glories of my beloved homeland, from Charles de Gaulle, Michel Platini. Once, I was cited with pride, some verses of Charles Baudelaire. It was, indeed, a table of the Cafe Riche, where intellectuals had their habits - among other things, not least, Naguib Mahfouz, I had not read it yet.
I did not read it yet either, and for good reason, Hairs Cairo Paul Fournel was published by Editions du Seuil 2004. There gathered the email he sent to his friends during the years (from 2000 to 2003) he spent in Cairo as Director of French Cultural Center. This book was taken in 2007 in the collection points, still at Threshold.
In the sketches of Paul Fournel, I can find a lot of my impressions walker ... The customary kindness
:
May 3, 2001
(...)
The other morning as I was, once again, lost, I advise two fellows on the sidewalk and asks them my way. Spontaneously, they indicate two diametrically opposite directions. I laugh and ask them, nicely, kindly agree.
Everyone, not to annoy his neighbor, radically changes his mind and shows me the path of another. I laugh again and laugh with me.
A third comes between them. It formally elects one of two paths and explains the other is fine too, but it does not go the same place.
In two thousand years, when there will be signs in the streets of the city, they will have two arrows.
unusual situations:
May 28, 2003
Street Kasr el-Ayni is an artery clearing in the city. The cars will darken over five lines tight and never stop. No lights, the rhythm, no pedestrian crossing stops them, no priority.
The old man stands on the curb and waved his stick in the direction of the cars to tell them he wants to spend. Everyone sees how her reels and said the next stop. And nobody stops.
The old is becoming increasingly furious and tries to type directly on the body with his cane.
A policeman comes up to him and without saying anything, took her in his arms and rushes whistling of his lungs into the circulation. It passes through the laying on the pavement opposite and move on.
Echoing the book diagonally, I stopped on a message that gave me a strong sense of VU jeda - which is a way of symmetrical déjà vu:
March 28, 2003
One begins to understand better what happened. there was twenty thousand protesters last week on Tahrir Square, ten times more than the total of demonstrators last ten years.
One time the police were overwhelmed and could no longer ensure its routine work of encirclement. No wonder, therefore, that she felt obliged to knock hard. There were many wounded. Wounded on the spot and wounded later in the secret police stations. Cudgel blows, torture, the gegene, all recorded by victims and observers.
(...)
Nevertheless, protesters were themselves surprised at their new strength and the square huge downtown became the garden experience of their desire for democracy - real, that we will look at the sticks, not the "fast-democracy "as self-righteous claim to parachute from the outside.
was in 2003, the protest was against the invasion of Iraq.
And it was, of course, the same people.
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