Enchanted at the Cairo Literature Festival

At the 2018 Abu Dhabi International Bookfair, Anvil Publishing’s director Andrea Passion-Flores certainly proved her worth when she met up with foreign publishers to initiate promising arrangements.

My own participation at that book fair the previous year was simply as a speaker, to engage in discussions and interviews with Emirati scholars and journalists, and to read poems and excerpts from my prose works. 

One of the publishers Andrea met was Mohamed El-Baaly of Egypt, who checked out the books she brought. He wound up expressing interest in having an Arabic translation done of my first novel, Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café, which first came out over three decades ago, and has since enjoyed successive reprints with UP Press and Anvil.

Andrea and I couldn’t believe that Mr. El-Baaly had chosen that old novel of mine, instead of another, more recent one also brought out by Anvil. After all, that first one is a comic burlesque of Philippine revolutionary history, with a proliferation of private jokes and takes on sensitive material like raunchy sex, politics, and religion. We couldn’t imagine how an Egyptian translator, however expert he may be with the English language, could adhere faithfully, in Arabic, to my novel’s rather rambunctious meta-narrative features.

As Andrea recounts it, she had asked Mohamed if he were certain of his choice. He said he was, and in fact asked her if I could attend the 5th Cairo Literature Festival where he hoped that my translated novel could be launched, among other international titles also in Arabic translation.

Email correspondence with Mohamed, with whom I was introduced to by Andrea, led to my current attendance here. I should mention that it was also made possible with a travel grant from our National Commission for Culture and the Arts, or NCCA.

Even if the translation couldn’t be completed on time, Mr. El-Baaly persisted in getting me over to join up with over a dozen other foreign writers for the weeklong program of thematic discussions, book launchings and poetry readings.

I’m included in a couple of program events together with Malaysian poet and novelist Bernice Chouly and Singaporean young adult fiction writer Suffian Hakim. We’re expected to discuss “Asian Literature Written in English” at Ain Shams University and “Far Island, Close Literature (a seminar about contemporary literature in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines)” at Beyet Sinary. Then there are a couple of poetry reading events where Bernice and I are scheduled — the lady concluding the fest on February 21.

It helped that a few days before the fest, poet-buddy Alvin Pang of Singapore introduced Bernice and me to one another online. It turned out that we have many other common writer-friends, among them Danton Remoto who heads the English Literature faculty at University of Nottingham in KL, where Bernice teaches. By the time we met over a breakfast table at Santana Hotel where we’re both billeted, just a few hours after I arrived before sunrise, it seemed that Bernice and I had known each other for some time.

She had also made arrangements with a student volunteer at the fest, Shrouk Soliman, for a tour of the pyramids at Giza that Saturday, before the official program started in the evening. Grateful to be accommodated at such short notice, I joined the two ladies for the Uber ride to Giza by noon. That meant striking off an item from my bucket list barely eight hours after I had arrived.

This writer being interviewed for the Nile Culture TV program by host Halima Khattab, with Shrouk Soliman serving as interpreter

We took a horse carriage ride around the popular tourist haunt, a vast complex that also featured the Sphinx, which surprised Bernice and me for its comparatively puny size set against the pyramids.

Our horse rig driver also made stops at a perfumery shop and a papyrus art gallery, where the briefings led to zero purchase. But the enterprising tour managed to double our arranged fare by expanding his hour with us.

Shrouk, who’s at her senior year in Literature and also writes stories in English, proved to be a blessing. No way could we have negotiated the harrowing, chaotic Cairo traffic without her. To our constant amazement, drivers expertly avoided one another’s spirited vehicles, let alone countless pedestrians suddenly darting as heedless jaywalkers on wide avenues and side streets.

Relying alternatively on Uber cabs and the van assigned us for official functions, we soon found out that no destination took less than half an hour through voluminous traffic that careened wildly past roundabouts and over a multitude of bridges across the meandering River Nile.

The opening event was held at Beyet El-Sehemy-Islamic Cairo, inside a centuries-old fort that had also been taken over by a night market, which turned out to conduct non-stop commerce, 24/7. It seemed that hardly anyone in Cairo ever slept, as all the markets we waded through to get to our events forever teemed with people, cars and pushcarts.

I’m incredulous that within my first 72 hours here, I’ve already ticked off the pyramids, a noontime visit to the Antiquities Museum (which Bernice, Shrouk and I reached after a 40-minute walk from our hotel), and a nightcap at the historic Barrel Bar of the century-old Windsor Hotel, besides having been interviewed for a TV culture program, as well as conducted a literary discussion at a university, and engaged in our first poetry reading, at a splendid venue that was a grand 17th-century private residence now turned into a heritage structure.

There, six of us foreign guests — Bernice and I, Kim Soung-hee of South Korea, Christos Papadoppulus of Greece, Mireia Calafell of Catalonia-Spain, and Lois De Paor of Ireland — joined four Egyptian poets who also took turns at reading our poems translated into Arabic.

It doesn’t seem to have been hectic, however, even as we’ve also sauntered to a market’s shawarma stall as well as a fine coffee shop a few blocks from our hotel. Indeed, time warped with the derring-do speed of Uber drivers apparently enhances the non-stop enchantment.

As I write this, I can’t wait until Wednesday when some of us take off for a day tour of Alexandria — where, most likely, timelessness will also contribute to the robust traffic that serves ancient cities.