Arms Full of Things: Souq Al-Imam Al-Shafei at the Southern Cemetery

Abstract

The stock--padlocks without keys, limbs of broken plastic dolls, half a pair of earrings, used ketchup bottles, an anonymous photo album filled with family photos--of many of the stalls at Souq Al-Imam Al-Shafei, located in the City of the Dead, are not obviously saleable. Selling, one might therefore deduce, is only one function, and not necessarily the most important, of Souq Al-Imam. More gathering place than shopping mall, Souq Al-Imam provides an often needed pretext for passing time. If the passing of time is one defining characteristic of life, then a cemetery is as good a place as any for a market. Items plucked from the rubbish bins of affluent neighborhoods are recycled, given a new life at the City of the Dead. When counted in piastres, money can be thrown away and, in being thrown away, it can prevent things from being discarded. Because it is cheap, the life of objects in this market can be prolonged. To be all but worthless brings salvation. In a cemetery life cannot be other than mutable; to be at home in the Southern Cemetery is to acknowledge this mutability. And to trade in this Cairo cemetery is less a reaching of the end of the line than an exploration of the innumerable sidings that constitute that supposed end. ********** Friday Market in the City of the Dead I am drawn to places offering what people have thrown out, discarded, left behind, or have simply forgotten to remember, objects which for some long outdistanced purposes: chipped sinks, lengths of pipe. hills of washers and fittings, levers, plungers, faucets unable to carry water to anyone, ironwork, spikes and nails, doors and window frames, old radios tuned to frequencies no longer able to be beard, cogs, axles, fly wheels, spindles, pulleys, halves of microscopes, cracked bottles, bent coins, and photographs whose faces now lie beyond names, whose eyes are not fixed on sights we have seen, mounds of old wire, twisted knives and forks, and angular bulks of crank-driven phones which have lost all connections, dismantled old beds and wedding cups, mirrors which when you peer in show only blurred patches of your face shifting in darkness behind peeling silver, clothes which no longer fit the way they once did or simply no longer fit; all lie there naive and artless on old blankets or worn stone, tended with casual indifference; where others may see lives beyond this welter of lost objects, I cannot believe that these are ghosts or that they measure any history's passage, this is merely the entrance to some forgotten temple, these the implements of its mystery and the path along which we are to be led is simply a path of shapes into which we must fit ourselves, or we ourselves are places where these shapes must be seen fit. Tom Lamont I On a piece of sacking no more than a metre square lie two empty Coca Cola bottles (glass), a broken teaspoon, a rusting chain and several pieces of scrap metal. They are neatly arranged and nominally for sale, though it would be difficult to imagine who would purchase them. Behind the impromptu stall with its seemingly random collection of objects stands an 18-year-old boy. He points to a small padlock, the key of which is missing. The Southern Cemetery in the City of the Dead is a far-from-unwelcoming place. Like the Northern Cemetery--indeed like the majority of the city's burial places--it exhibits the kind of urban planning absent in the rest of the city. Single storey tombs, more often than not co-opted as housing, stretch along the foot of the Muqattam hills, each with its own walled enclosure. The tombs are distributed along a rigid, grid-like pattern, with roads intersecting one another at right angles. Because the tombs boast nothing higher than their garden walls, the interlocking streets offer uninterrupted vistas across parallel streets to the rocky outcrop of Muqattam. …