Carnavale Al-Qahera – Moshahadat Min Akd Al-Tessa’inat (Cairo Carnaval – Images from the 1990s), Pp 287, Alaa Khaled, issued by El-Maraya in August 2024, set out for a signing and launch on Tuesday, 17 September, at Al-Balad Library, not very far from Tahrir Square.

It is hard to qualify this close to a 300-page volume that recalls Khaled’s years in and out of Cairo.

In a way, the text is a memoir of his years of "becoming" a name to reckon with in the cultural Egyptian scene at its "centre" in Cairo.

However, it is also a profile of the core of this centre: downtown Cairo with its cultural and political debates in the 1990s. At that time, the dreams of hope had been abandoned, and no other dream had come yet for the embrace of the people – or for that matter the cultural elite.

Moreover, the text is a sequel of profiles/book reviews of top literary names who moved from the years of big dreams in the late 1950s and 1960s and came a little late to the big dreams in the 1970s.

At the same time, it is a profile of the evolving political dynamics brewing in a couple of decades leading to the January 2011 Revolution — those politically loaded years where a new dream was being charged with the cultural energy of the nation's centre.

Furthermore, it is a text about a thread of associations: first, the association between an avid Alexandrian who comes to Cairo for a temporary and resurrecting separation from his own Alexandrian self, before the comeback he has/wants to make to his beloved but at times limiting city.

Then, it is about the association of the last wave of Egypt’s Leftists with the cultural scene at the capital and the inevitable and dominating emotional association that people have with their city as they saw it or thought it to be in the formative years of their childhood.

Ultimately, it is about this evolving association between the city itself with the big national dreams, the defeat of 1967, and the many subsequent sombre transformations that came before the 2011 January Revolution, as the calendar flipped from the end of the first decade to the entry of the second decade of the 21st century.

In short, perhaps, Khaled’s book is about this association between time and place – and of course people.

“I love Cairo where I am not who I am when I get there; I love that air of that temporary self-separation that I go through as I get to the city,” Khaled wrote.

For him, as for many others who came from without it, Cairo is the centre, but it is also the city that allows people to get lost enough to rediscover themselves.

This, he argued, is perhaps a function of the fact that, unlike Alexandria which has its past hidden underground, Cairo has its past spread all over, for people to contemplate and think.

Khaled came to this city after his graduation from university to try his hands as a journalist in the cultural section of one of the weekly papers with limited circulation – a very short-lived experience but quite an introduction in a highly clustered and classist scene of journalists, writers, and intellectuals. 

Despite the early apprehension of such a scene that sometimes seemed intimidating, Khaled kept coming and exploring the city, with its inexpensive hotels, new and daring publishing houses, cheap and not-so-cheap bars, cafes, and movie theatres.

He kept coming, as he wrote, in pursuit of bigger dreams of his own that sometimes seemed unattainable away from the altar of the centre's core: the cultural scene as it gathered at the cafes and bars of downtown Cairo.

Cairo's Carnaval certainly offers a comprehensive and interactive map of the landmarks of this core of the centre: L’Atelier, Le Grillon, Gallery Town House, Sharkkiat Publishing, Madbouli BookStore, and for that matter the house of Amina Rachid and Sayyed Al-Bahrawi. Unlike the former ones, the latter was the place where at least one dream, that of marginalizing the social class system, was realized, at least partially.

It is also a documentary of all the cultural activities that kept unfolding and "occupied" the city's heart in the lead-up to the day the masses occupied Tahrir Square with the January Revolution.

The book is also a tribute to the fallen heroes of big dreams across the generations: those of the “defeated” January Revolution who like Arwa Saleh, of the 1970s generation, “were once touched by a dream” and those of the earlier generation, like Ala’ El-Dib, who were broken by the 1967 military defeat but kept on afloat with life suspended in the city that lived the dream and the defeat.

It is also a tribute to the books these authors wrote about themselves, their dreams, and their city as the ultimate witness to everything they have been through.

“It is Cairo … It is the Cross and the eternal memory … It is wild and beautiful … Freedom is there in its air, and the power and strength are there in its light … Grand he who lives in Cairo and defeated he who has to leave it … It is Cairo that nobody could ever change,” Khaled said, quoting Ala’ El-Dib’s masterpiece Zahrat Al-Laymoun (The Lemon Blossom).

Khaled was born in January 1960 and wrote several novels and books on Alexandria.

Before Cairo's Carnaval, Al-Shorouk published his most recent 2019 novel Beit Al-Harir (A Silk House), which follows the trail of the January Revolution at the heart of Cairo.