The Egyptian Coffeehouse by Dalia Said Mostafa and Amina Elbendary

Author:Dalia Said Mostafa and Amina Elbendary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The café as a witness to the deterioration of urban living

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, we observe how the motif of the fragmentation of the traditional alley was depicted in several popular films where this urban space came to bear witness to the remarkable changes that had constituted a ‘malaise’ in Egyptian cities: the sharp rise in unemployment, the unprecedented levels of urban poverty, the widespread use of drugs among youths, the inability to find decent housing in the big cities, the deterioration in the standard of public schools and universities, domestic violence against women and children, and much more. Such social ills led to the depiction in cinema of alienated, lonely, stoned or violent characters who had lost their bearing, or even their identity, in huge crowded cities that seemed to lose touch with humanity. These films were pointing to the social manifestations of the neoliberal era and how individuals from the low-income strata were struggling to make a living. The alley with its transformed identity was reflected visually in detail to mirror the breakdown in physical infrastructure caused by dysfunctional state institutions: lack of clean water; constant power cuts; crowded roads filled with garbage; air, food and land pollution; poor housing conditions and narrow dilapidated rooms where people are crammed because they have nowhere else to go.

The new-realist films of this era by directors such as Mohammad Khan, Atef al-Tayyeb, Khayri Bishara, Ossama Fawzi, Magdi Ahmed Ali, Radwan al-Kashif and Daoud Abdel Sayyed focused on how the protagonists had to cling to one another in their small communities to be able to survive, and one place where men were still able to meet and socialize was the ahwa baladi. Famous films such as Youm Morr, Youm Helw (Sour Day, Good Day, 1988) which starred the legendary actress Faten Hamama;36 al-Kitkat (Kitkat, 1991),37 a cinematic adaptation of Ibrahim Aslan’s novel The Heron (discussed in

Chapter 3); and Leih ya Banafseg (Violet Flowers, Why?, 1993),38 show the urban alley in this new light, through an illustration of the bottom layer of society to convey to the viewers the forceful changes which big cities, especially Cairo, were experiencing.

In this context, such representations encapsulate once again what scholar Asef Bayat has termed ‘the city-inside-out’, which we have highlighted in earlier chapters, where the urban poor are constantly present on the streets while taking their activities outdoors. But what cinema has done here is to show in meticulous detail the physical decay and mental deterioration of the characters within neoliberal economies. It is indeed the ‘necessity to survive and live a dignified life’, as Bayat argues,39 which drives these impoverished characters in the films to carry out their activities into the public space. In fact, we repeatedly see in some of the new-realist films of the 1980s and 1990s how the café is represented as the place where the ‘subaltern’ characters ‘express their grievances and resolve their problems’.40 It is true that the characters here attain some autonomy in the public space outside the

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