Narrating the Personal and the Political through a Visual Method: Interview with Mona Abaza

By Nada El-Kouny

Cairo Collages is a personal narrative joined with theoretical approaches of the changing urban and social fabric of Cairo after 2013. The book comes in the recent scholarly trajectory of Abaza, whose last two works were produced for non-academic audiences. One explored a cotton estate in the Nile Delta, The Cotton Plantation Remembered: An Egyptian Family Story (2013), and the second dealt with a contemporary Egyptian art collection, Twentieth Century Egyptian Art: The Private Collection of Sherwet Shafei (2011). Abaza’s earlier sociological scholarship includes, The Changing Consumer Culture of Modern Egypt: Cairo’s Urban Reshaping (2006), and Debates on Islam and Knowledge in Malaysia and Egypt, Shifting Worlds (2002).

Centering the visual when researching and narrating urban experience is one methodologically promising approach, especially when narrating the fast-changing landscapes of a city and its urban phenomena. This has proved useful for Abaza’s study of Cairo over the past decade specifically. Photography, art, graffiti, and archival documents have factored in her previous works. Abaza noted how she, and many of her colleagues based in Egypt, found the post-2011 period very difficult to engage with meaningfully, and in a “deep” way, especially as events of the revolution unfolded. Yet one way of documenting such fast-paced immediate changes was through photography. Pointing to Ariella Azoulay’s notion of reading photography as a “civil act and a rehabilitation of the political,” Abaza has found it useful to refer to the impact of vernacular photography and the way ordinary citizens’ photographs constitute a valuable archive of the revolution today. While photography for Abaza was crucial in documenting moments of 2011 onward, it turned out to be an “individual archive” and not one that she felt secure in developing as a monograph on the revolution. In Cairo Collages, Abaza adopts the visual as a method, and chose to narrate her story through the framework of collages. Using “Collages in the plural,” Abaza stressed,  conveyed her struggle in narrating two stories at the same time: the grand urban transformations of Cairo during and after the 2011 revolution, and another about the immediate “little story” of day-to-day life in a decaying middle-class building in the quarter of Dokki. “I found myself struggling with images and snapshots of particular moments that might in appearance look unrelated but that are clearly bound together,” Abaza explained. It was, ultimately, an attempt of putting together different pieces of a puzzle that might appear fragmented and contradictory but are dictated by a narrative line of urban life as experienced through the microcosm of living in an apartment building.

Much of academic endeavor is a shared experience, and one that emerges from the intellectual lab of the classroom, where research, ideas, theoretical approaches, and fieldwork initially percolate. Abaza’s “bricolage” approach first emerged from an urban sociology class she taught at AUC, where the first assignment consisted of the students writing descriptions of the Cairo quarters where they lived. The class brought together descriptions of students’ varied backgrounds, such as that of upper-class Egyptians living in new gated communities, and foreign students living in central Cairo middle-class quarters.       

Abaza’s approach of weaving together a microcosmic, mundane daily experience of inhabitants of an apartment building in a central Cairo quarter emerges from a personal and embodied experience; but it also mirrored the larger transformations happening in the city. Abaza’s subjective voice and the “I” factors in strongly in the book. This is a way through which she attempted to come to terms with the “uncertainties, the high anxiety and yet the unique experiences I have experienced, through the pervasive sentiment of chaos that the cities in Egypt have been subjected to”.  Abaza’s reflection on chaos is from her experience of a city undergoing drastic material and psychological deteriorations in connection to a revolutionary event from 2011-2013. The post-2013 period, a period of accelerated gentrification and “Dubaization” of the city, is nevertheless part of a larger trajectory of the modernization of Cairo for the ruling elites. Yet, just as central, are the changes of the city in relation to a larger historical trajectory of the neo-liberalization and gentrification of the city. Abaza specified how Cairo’s urban reshaping began under Anwar Al-Sadat in the 1980s, continued under Hosni Mubarak, and proceeds at a greater scale with the current military regime’s construction of the New Cairo Administrative Capital.

Writing a monograph about a moment of personal and material transformations as experienced by living in Cairo comes with great difficulties in trying to make sense of the city. In fact, the large majority of scholarly work, especially by foreign academics, written about the period post-2011 can be seen as “Academic Tourists Sight-Seeing the Arab Spring,” which Abaza takes up. Yet the possibility of writing is further exacerbated in the post-2013 period. Ever since the military takeover by Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, the city has experienced increasing militarization of social and political life. Much of the experience of those who took part in the revolution is one of growing disappointment and disillusion, as Abaza reflects. Undertaking an endeavor analyzing social life during such a moment, and after the massacre of Rabea Al Adawiyya in 2013, is not an easy task. This difficulty is further exacerbated with the state’s increased censorship and tighter security grip currently faced by activists, journalists, and researchers in Egypt. “This explains why I ended up in an ‘involuted’ situation, a kind of hibernation, staring at my ‘belly button’ with a grain of irony and focusing on my building…It was as if I unconsciously wanted to forget about the streets, the marches, the Square, and the effervescent masses,” Abaza poignantly reflects. Yet, the securitization of research and the association of research with spying is not new to Egypt, and has been evident since Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s rule. There is a continuity in the long history of suspicions of military regimes towards academic production. This conundrum is everlasting to producing scholarship under autocratic or military regimes, where academic research will inherently be seen as a threat to security. Abaza’s understanding, nevertheless, is that good social science research can “only be critical of the establishment.”  

Nada El-Kouny, PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at Rutgers University sat down with Associate Professor of Sociology, Mona Abaza of the American University in Cairo (AUC), to discuss her latest book, Cairo Collages: Everyday Life Practices after the Event (Manchester University Press: 2002).

Nada El-Kouny (NK): Cairo as a city has been undergoing drastic transformations of its urban fabric and its physical landscape since Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi was elected president of Egypt in 2013. Cairo Collages: Everyday Life Practices after the Event (Manchester University Press, 2020) undertakes a visual method of conceptualizing “collages” as a way of making sense of the urban experience and its narrativization. How do visuality and your artistic eye dictate how you choose to narrativize the story? Ultimately, how can this approach be useful in narrating the fast-changing landscape of a city and its urban phenomena, and how does thinking through the visual, as opposed to the aural or other forms of sensorial affects, dictate what kinds of phenomena are foregrounded?

Mona Abaza (MA): This book could be considered as an expansion of my previous work on consumer culture in Cairo. The way I attempted to construct my narrative resulted in a bricolage of methods.  The title “Collages” in the plural is the result of a number of ideas I tried to put together. When I started to think about the structure of my book, I was teaching a course on urban sociology at the American University in Cairo (AUC), titled “Cairo Collages,” in which the first assignment to the students consisted of a description of their quarter. I have learned a lot from my students, as a number of them lived in the satellite cities of Sheikh Zayed, Sixth of October, Ubuur, the Cairo-Alexandria Road and New Cairo. We ended up making organized visits to a number of these satellite cities, including their shopping malls, restaurants, and public spaces. The new Cairo they were taking the class to, their lifestyle, the way they spent their leisure and shopping time, had little to do with my own daily life in Cairo. It was clear that there are today in Cairo a number of different material worlds in the making.

I am conscious that much has been written about the lifestyle and worldview of the gated communities. Yet I had, in almost all my classes, two or three overseas students, Americans, Australians, and English, who lived in lower-class, popular quarters in Cairo. They came to Cairo to learn Arabic and some of them excelled in colloquial Arabic. They were eager to understand “real, popular life,” so to say. And here too there are often two reactions: some foreign students blended so well into the urban tissue of Cairo, while I witnessed a few American students sinking into deep depression because they could not cope with the density of the city. However, the interaction among the students was fascinating and enriching in their diverse perceptions of the multiple Cairo(s). The public transportation, with micro-buses and tok-toks, which some foreign students used was the subject of many discussions, and one student wrote a paper on the body and hand language of the bus drivers. Another wrote her thesis specifically on the tok-toks of Maadi. This was in contradistinction to the world of drivers and private cars of many of the Egyptian students. But not all students had cars, and the long hours of commuting on the university buses was one more topic for research—as was, later on, the success of the Uber company. Uber drivers (who include a large number of middle-class professionals, such as lawyers, accountants, and administrators, who have become part-time drivers) were a fascinating topic, as they are the best example of the declining middle class in Egypt. Most revealing is how the enclaves of the walled compound, with its security, surveillance cameras, and exclusivity, creates a clear denial of the center of Cairo, which became systematically associated with the informal areas and condemned as crowded, poor, noisy, and polluted. A number of my students hardly ever visited or knew the Belle Epoque Downtown, and if they did, it was only fleetingly, to visit an old aunt or to recall memories of a deceased grandmother who had lived in an old flat in Downtown.

NK: Cairo now experiences a blackout of images, from censorship of independent media to threats to researchers and journalists. What sites of possibilities does your book afford in providing ways to think about continuing to conduct research and produce publications in this current climate?

MA: Well, the carnivalesque, euphoric moment of the street was over after the killings at Rab‘a al-‘Adawiyya in August 2013. We clearly knew that taking to the streets after that was dangerous, and we also know that the activist Alaa Abdel Fattah paid and still pays the price for having continued to challenge the military. On the other hand, undertaking anthropological/sociological research in Egypt has never been easy. Any first-year introduction-to-sociology student knows this. Researchers have been having trouble with empirical research since the time of Nasser. Research since then has always been state-controlled, and any scholar wanting to undertake empirical research has to undergo tight scrutiny from the state, which makes research permits extremely difficult to obtain. It is even harder if the research is on the working classes and the excluded, or on the army, which is completely taboo, as has been pointed out by the two leading figures in Egyptian sociology/anthropology, Mohamed al-Gohari and Saad Eddin Ibrahim. In fact, a number of sociologists/anthropologists have spoken about the long history of the criminalization of social sciences by equating research to spying. There is a continuity here in the long history of the suspicion of military regimes with respect to intellectual and academic production that was at all critical towards state policies. And in my understanding, good sociology can only be critical of the establishment. Clearly, matters pertaining to field research got much worse with the military takeover in 2013, with the clampdown on human rights organizations, the witch-hunting of the already vulnerable civil society, and the closing down of a number of the media and press outlets that blossomed from 2011 until 2013, not to mention the forced disappearances and massive jailing of opponents. Certainly, the Regini affair, the reasons for which remain an open question even today, could be interpreted as a threatening message for all social scientists wishing to undertake research in Egypt. Obviously, the message is that research has become an extremely dangerous endeavor. This explains why I ended up in an “involuted” situation, a kind of a hibernation, staring at my “belly button” with a grain of irony and focusing on my building. It was as if I unconsciously wanted to forget about the streets, the marches, the Square, and the effervescent masses.

NK: You engage with the work of Veena Das and Stef Jansen, who both “reflect upon the functionality, indeed the instrumentality of longing for ordinary life in the wake of wars and disasters” (Abaza 2020: 4). You also draw on this when theorizing about how people come to terms with everyday life after trauma. Can you elaborate more on this way of making sense of the event? Alternately, do you not also see trauma as a contested framework when thinking about the accuracy of the collective versus individual experience of everyday life after the event?

MA: I am mainly interested in the myriad forms of resilience that people exhibit under the current military rule. The point I wish to make is that resilience and resistance were obviously celebrated in Tahrir, in the million demonstrations and public performances, mesmerizing on a global scale, while what was neglected is the resilience of everyday life and the way citizens circumvent the state or find alternative informal solutions, while paying lip service to the state. The years that followed 2011 were violent and have certainly marked Egyptians forever. Veena Das, who reflected on India’s partition, and Stef Jansen, who worked in Sarajevo, both wrote about the victims and survivors of violent, traumatic postwar moments. Both have looked at the instrumentality of ‘routine’ ‘normalcy’ and the longing for ordinary daily life, “after the events” from the side of the victims of war as a way of overcoming trauma. Das elaborates on the process of the “descent into the ordinary” to understand how the survivors of the riots that followed India’s partition attempted to come to terms with the violence they had experienced. I think that keeping a notebook on my observations, and on the expenditures and accounts of the building I had then recently moved to, was one way of putting order into my life. It gave me a form of a routine. It was obviously one way of working out my own trauma.

NK: In what way do you think your writing of this book is an attempt at working through the trauma you describe? What healing process and attempts at working through collective and personal trauma take place when one publishes and has an audience for one’s work? How does that process also bring with it a certain vulnerability that may be difficult to cope with as a writer?

MA: For me, writing is essential. It is one way of giving sense to my life. Writing puts me into a kind of a routine and keeps my brains in constant exercise by reading and actively interacting with texts and ideas. Encountering people and interacting with them is another important part of the story. Writing is an essential way to engage with my teaching and my students. But what interests me is the process itself. One is always delighted to see a book finally come out. However, after each book I finish, I feel an emptiness, which is also productive because it helps me start thinking about the next project.

In recent years, especially after 2011, I have realized how close the personal is to the political. I wished I could have been a novelist, but I do not have the craft for it. However, I find that sociology provides us with inspiring tools, and the sociological imagination offers much that allows us to approach subjects with a rejuvenated lens. The blending between the literary genres, philosophy, and ethnography has a long and rich history that we need to excavate.

As for the question of which audiences I want to address, that is a different story. This year I was so fortunate to have had a long and enriching communication with my dear friend Michael Burawoy, who pointed out to me to the eternal problem which numberless academics are confronted with, namely the problem of recognition. Related to recognition, or its lack, is the mounting resentment caused by the fact that so many of us are probably never satisfied, since a prophet in one’s department is often treated as a madman. Obviously, publishing in the field of academia is all about recognition, and I guess that the issue of how and by whom one gets recognition is always subject to much discussion and disagreement. One can also speak of a growing unequal division of labor in academia internationally, the full-time tenured faculty versus part-time teaching faculty, the influence of prestigious US universities in setting the dominant ideologies, the modes of ranking within the academic system, the role of reputable or less reputable publishing houses in marketing and celebrating certain books, or the politics of quoting, if you want your article to be published in a reputable journal. Having said that, I regard it as a privilege to be in a relatively small American university that is not located in the US, but in Cairo. I find it essential for my work to be located in Cairo and not the US or Europe. I have learned through the years that what interests me today is the process, and the fact that writing keeps me busy. What interests me really is to communicate with the circle of specialists in the field I know and enlarge it with young scholars who have similar interests.

Besides, “recognition” is a relative concept. It was again Michael Burawoy who urged me to read Alice Goffman’s inspiring and remarkable book On the Run. I understand that Goffman underwent a ubiquitous character assassination in the US precisely because of her ethnographic work. Apparently, she was criticized for her contested methodology and theoretical framework, and perhaps also for her silence regarding her positionality vis-à-vis the Afro-American male community. Whether or not she has survived these attacks and whether she succeeds as an academic in the US is not the issue for me, although I have a lot of empathy for her. What really counts is that she wrote a genuine and interesting work. Even though she was attacked on various levels, I believe that her work will be read for a long time.

For the same reasons I now write less and less for academic journals. Perhaps because I do not really have the urge to do it. However, I hope to continue to write on subjects that give me pleasure and motivation. Having said that, one can never be sure if one’s work will be appreciated by large audiences, or if it will earn fame or become a best-seller, although nothing of what I write is meant to become a best-seller. Having said that also, the last two books I wrote before this one, were both intended to reach larger non-academic audiences. I am always delighted when I get positive responses from non-academic publics.

NK: One of the most defining characteristics of Cairo and its social makeup is that it is a city of contradictions. This is something that resonated with me when reading your book. Can you reflect on this sentiment and how it emerges in your writing? Additionally, what generative processes for analysis emerge out of “contradictions” for the benefit of social science research?

MA: That Cairo is a city of contradictions is no news. That over sixty percent of the population will end up living in informal areas, while the rich are increasingly deserting the center to move to the gated and walled communities, is also no news. That there is an acute housing problem, seriously affecting the poor, due to long years of failed policies that benefited mainly the rich, is also no news. My point was to zoom in on the life world and transformation of a middle-class building, as a topos that tells us about the changing hands in the central quarters of the city. Now large parts of Dokki—similar to so many other quarters like Mohandessin, Heliopolis, and Maadi—have been deteriorating according to middle-class standards, because of noise pollution, the roaming population of street vendors, the endless schools, and cars that block the streets. Many buildings like mine are witnessing a massive exodus of their original residents. This does not necessarily lead to economic decline; on the contrary, lucrative financial businesses, cafés, and shops occupy almost all the ground floors of the buildings.  This is certainly affecting the quality of life for the middle classes. On the other hand, the process creates a lively street and a flowering informal sector that needs to be understood on its own terms. Although in my book I complain that the street never sleeps, and as a consequence I also had very little sleep, it was nevertheless a fascinating laboratory for observing the mushrooming popular cafés, youth and gender interactions, the mahrganaat music in the street, and the lively interactions of the entire population of garage attendants, car guardians, and shopkeepers who live and socialize in the street. A particularly interesting question is how they cope with the state, which is constantly closing down the cafés and taking away the plastic chairs, while the cafés reopen the next day with even more chairs that were hidden in the garage. Thus, the quarter is far from dying, it is simply changing hands.

NK: In my own fieldwork research in two Nile Delta governorates, what became very apparent was the concept of the “social infrastructures” that citizens utilize to fill in for the absence of the state in service provision and infrastructural services. Your book shows the larger valency of this concept of “making do” and citizens creating their own infrastructures. Can you reflect a little more on this idea, and what it means for thinking about citizenship and the role of the state today in the twenty-first century?

MA: The main problem is that we have a clearly absent welfare state, a state that does not deliver the goods to the majority of the poor citizens. It has been replaced by an omnipotent and controlling security and police state. Citizens are forced today to remain apolitical. I sensed this myself in the way in which I became completely depoliticized after 2014. Yet what I am trying to argue is that there are attempts on the micro-level (of a building) of citizens trying to get together, away from the state, to solve their material daily problems. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, but these endeavors should be taken into consideration as alternative ways to read the political.

NK: Your narrative and corresponding analysis is filtered through your position as an upper-class Egyptian female academic (along with other identifications) who spends half her time in Egypt and half in Berlin. How do you feel that the aesthetics of class and taste affect your view of the, “Post-euphoric Bakhtinian collective trauma” (Abaza 2002: 7) of the event and your sentiments towards the ruination and transformation of Egypt’s changing urban fabric?

MA: One cannot deny one’s class origin, but one can remain critical and conscious of one’s positionality. I am an actor myself in the story. I did trigger the mobilization of my neighbors to meet on a regular basis and organize to create a residents’ association, which did not work out. However, the residents did get together without me and managed, after almost a decade of internal fights, to replace the ailing elevator. All, the residents eventually agreed on their shares of payment for the elevator. This was a rewarding accomplishment for me.

Similarly, I cannot deny the fact that I have lived for many years in Europe, and in particular have spent long periods in Berlin during the last eighteen years. Berlin has certainly influenced my perceptions of urbanity, my sense of aesthetics, and it reshaped my multiple identities and visions of what makes a city livable and enjoyable. I am a walker and love wandering around the street. Both Cairo and Berlin are fascinating cities. But Cairo remains my major source of inspiration. As much as I love Berlin, I would find it impossible to leave Cairo for good. I don’t think I could stand the situation of being reduced to an emigré or an exile in Berlin, even though the state of exile induces a rich intellectual production, as the exiled Germans who migrated to the United States during WWII confirmed in a number of fields. I think of the members of the Frankfurt School, of Hannah Arendt, Bertold Brecht, and in the field of cinema, Billy Wilder.

After completing my Ph.D in Germany in the early nineties I have experienced highly difficult moments in the academic field. It made me understand that as a female Egyptian I had practically no chance in the German academic job market. This negative experience turned to be the best thing that happened to me. It was one main reason why I wanted to return to Egypt. It changed completely my intellectual trajectory by opening my eyes on what is relevant or irrelevant in research. Once again being on the spot makes all the difference. In the world we live in today, I think it is a privilege to be able to live in two places.

The growing number of Egyptian activists who ended up in exile in Berlin is worth a separate study. The question remains whether these activists will be able to form an independent and productive intellectual community. But that is a different story. However, in the section of my book on meanderings during the long hours of commuting to the desert while being bombarded with billboards about the dream world of compounds, I could not stop flirting with the idea of wanting to leave the country for good. Clearly, the Cairo I grew up with no longer exists today. Part of my strong sense of disappointment after 2013 stems from the feelings of loss and nostalgia for the past that many who experienced that older Cairo feel today. And yet, as a sociologist, I am quite conscious that the growing feeling of nostalgia for the past is obviously caused by being unable to interact with the present. Therefore, we are unconsciously embellishing and remaking an invented narrative of the past to help us survive the hard and ugly present. For me, the urban destruction of the city started violently in the mid-seventies with the systematic disappearance of old buildings and villas, the shrinking of gardens, greenery, and open spaces, and the systematic witch-hunting of trees. Very quickly, we witnessed the massive transformation of Cairo, as the ugly abraaj (skyscrapers) replaced the villas, one after the other. Shops and cafes mushroomed, and green spaces disappeared. Escaping to the satellite cities in the desert became the ideal solution for the middle and upper classes to avoid noise and pollution. The American dream of owning a typical villa with a swimming pool and an outsized garden was only realizable in the walled compound. In a nutshell, the main question I raise is: how is it that what I personally consider a dystopia, namely the walled and restricted compound life of gated communities, is successfully marketed and sold to us as citizens as utopias? It seems to be working well, but certainly only for the happy few.