Egyptian Street
Review by Sheryl Ga Feldman
Khaled Al Khamissi
aflamebooks.com
2007
215 pp
Too bad they don't speak English, the taxi drivers. They've got the juiciest political gossip, the most colorful opinions, and the best access to Cairo's head, heart and soul of anybody in the city. Sitting in the back seat I enviously watch my colleague Amal she laugh wildly, then crimps her face in distress or struggles with her fury at some reported injustice or another. All this drama for the price of a cab ride and me without the words.
Khaled Al Khamissi fills in. His Taxi, a collection of his encounters with the cabbies, captures the rides - like the one driver who, because he had a payment due on a uxorious loan, put in so much time behind the wheel the he kept falling sleep while driving. (Al-Khamissa drove from the passenger seat.) Another who explained how all traffic was stopped when President Mubarak or his cronies decided to go somewhere, routinely creating humungous traffic jams. (The driver and Al-Khamissa exchanged jokes for four hours.)
There's the driver who explains the seatbelt law:
"'If the police offercier stops you, he looks at the belt and he knows very well it's for decoration. That seatbelt, you have to slam on the brakes to make it grip. But with our cars [Russian, made in the 50s], when you hit the brakes, the seatbelt comes undone. He laughed aloud. 'We live a lie and believe it. The government's only role is to check that we believe the lie, don't you think."
It's a short book. Full of local jokes, often at the expense of the government, and a lot of trajedy, born with wry humor and quite a few nuggets of third world wisdom.
Read it: laugh, sigh and learn what it's like to be Egyptian.
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