This
book is an anecdotal collection of short takes on Cairo life from
the perspective of a succession of taxi drivers. Each of the fifty-eight
chapters relates yet another experience from the streets. Part sociological
studies and part political analyses (of the variant that will thrive
far from libel laws and law courts) it introduces enduring tropes
of Egyptian society through the eyes and voices of the cabbies.
We meet the driver who moonlights as a ‘smokes’ smuggler,
the poignant dreamer who plans to drive from Cairo to Cape Town
for the World Cup, and the sentimental driver who ferries a prostitute
for a while before falling hopelessly in love with her. There is
also the bar waitress who enters her taxi dressed in conservative
Moslem fashion complete with face veil, only to undress and transform
herself into a snazzy waitress in the back of a cab - to avoid the
censure of fundamentalist family and neighbours. Her cabbie relates:
‘After a while she started
telling me her story:
‘I work as a waitress in
a restaurant there, respectable work. I’m a respectable
woman and I do honest work. In this work I have to look good.
‘At home and in the whole
quarter I can’t come or go without wearing that veil. One
of my friends got me a fake contract to work in a hospital in
Ataba and my family think I work there. Frankly, I earn a thousand
times as much working here. In a single day I can get in tips
what I would earn in one month’s salary in the mouldy old
hospital.’ [page 54]
From conspiracy theories to the Moslem
Brotherhood, garrulous taxi drivers get their day on the podium
in Khamissi’s book. The dialogue that emerges from this translation
is a touch glib and it is often hard to tell where the author’s
irreverence ends and where his cabbie’s cynicism begins. These
are after all, fictional dialogues recreated from the author’s
personal experience in taxicabs. If there is a common thread that
runs through the book, it is the epic struggle to stay afloat in
a society that is not engineered to favour the man in the street.
We come away with a sense of helpless disenfranchisement from victims
of overbearing policing and bureaucratic government. The humour,
circumstances and philosophy of the Cairo cabbie is writ large in
this collection by Khaled Al Khamissi, who does not quite stand
outside the frame of the biographical snapshots he has made of his
home city. - In chapter eighteen, he appears with his twins on the
way to a lunch date, where he gives his hostess the final word on
his taxi driver’s sob story, which seemed suspiciously calibrated
to raise donations.
Anyone who didn’t go to
prison in the time of Abdel Nasser will never go to prison. Anyone
who didn’t get rich in the time of Sadat will never get
rich. Anyone who hasn’t begged in the time of Mubarak will
never beg. [page 83]
This author certainly does not spare
himself, and in chapter thirty he relates his principled hostility
to intellectual property rights, a bold position for any popular
author to take, when his pages might be next on the slab of a photocopier.
All the same, Khaled Al Khamissi has succeeded in writing an important
cultural artefact of the Cairo streets, and in this English translation
by Jonathan Wright, it travels rather better than the Pyramids.
Expect more searching conversations between tourists and their Egyptian
cab drivers hereafter. These stories are slices of life; vignettes
from the underbelly of a complex society. Sometimes they are more
about the author and a shoe-shiner acquaintance than a rude taxi-driver
(p. 115). But in all case they are engaging portraits of a city
you may never visit but might feel quite acquainted with, following
an evening with Taxi.  |
