Edward Said: "Cairo and Alexandria"

Edward Said “Cairo and Alexandria” Reflections on Exile and other Essays Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Said recounts a recent visit to Alexandria, which proves disappointing to say the least...

“Alexandria has always been known as Egypt’s second city. It was, until recently, the country’s summer capital, and during the first half of this century and elegant seaside resort whose pleasant beaches and plentiful historical sites made a visit there an attractive prospect. I’ve never been convinced by Alexandria, however; throughout the early part of my life, spent in Egypt, I regarded it as boringly affected and impossibly humid, miles beneath Cairo in splendor and interest. Ever since, I have believed that one is either a Cairo person -Arab, Islamic, serious, , international, intellectual -or an Alexandria amateur -Levantine, cosmopolitan, devious, and capricious." (337)

“Alexandria has been written about by Lawrence Durrell, E.M. Forster, Pierre Louys, Cavafy and Ungaretti, none of whose spirits are much in evidence in today’s disappointing and disenchanting Mediterranean port. I spent my few days there hunting the the Alexandria of the past, rather like Stendhal’s Fabrice searching for Waterloo. I found next to nothing of it." (342) 

Speaking of the Graeco-Roman Museum: “a handsome and well-appointed repository of coins, statues, friezes, staffed by devout young women who neither help nor hinder your sojourn.” (323)

Apparently Victoria, B.C. and Alexandria have something in common: "When I was in Alex (as the city is often called) I learned that sewage and general waste are simply flooded into the sea off the city’s best beaches. Even the Montazah beaches, once among the finest anywhere and now parcelled out into small private lots, are littered with eggshells and orange peel; the odd plastic bottle rides the waves like a forlorn buoy, most certainly not marking a site for bathing." (343)

“the city celebrated by European travellers with decadent tastes had vanished in the middle 1950s, one of the casualties of the Suez war, which drowned the foreign communities in its wake. One of the few meaningful glimpses of old Alexandria is a little quasi-monument to Cavafy, the great Greek piety and former Alexandrian resident, that exists more or less secretly on the second floor of the Greek Consulate." (344)

"So forlorn is the city without its great foreign communities, so apparently without a mission, so reduced to minimal existence as a cut-rate resort that it filled me with sadness." (343)