And One and Two Flew Over Cuckoo's Nest

The following titles come to mind when I see this photo:

• Pass on
• Man's hubris
• Man bends all things to his will
• The sun does not care about the planets that orbit her. She gives and gives
• Sunset (or sunrise?)
• The sun that colors everything beautifully
• Who is afraid of red, brown, yellow and black?
• Law of conservation of energy (or E=MC2 )
• And one and two flew over the cuckoo's nest

I used my favorite as the title of this blog. What title(s) do you read or sense?

Who is Neither From

Quote from Mahmoudan Hawad (source: here):

"The vast Sahara-Sahel area was ‘irrigated,’ in all senses of the word, by the art of creating networks of exchanges, of solidarity and of shared interests between communities with different languages, cultures, ways of life, and competences. This ability to weave links between worlds modeled a kind of man who is neither from the Occident, the Orient, the north or the south, but is a man-bridge, a creative man, that knows how to create original cultural syntheses. It is this nomadic imagination - dynamic and alternative, this staging of plurality in movement, that I put in play and which inspires my stories. A plurality condemned and mutilated by those States heirs to European colonization."

If I summarize his images. "We" can learn from him as nomad:

• Weaving
• Linking
• Bridging 
• Synthesizing
• Moving ... between worlds, man, cultures and plurality.

I am wondering: what does he know that "we" don't (if anything)?  Don't we weave, link, bridge, synthesize or move? What am I missing? What space does his (spoken) language or poems have that we have lost (if anything)? Or is he just another 'romantic' soul longing for a youth, life or lifestyle that is lost in time and history? Longing for physical places that extends over several countries on planet Earth; not wanting to get frozen into one language, one country, one culture, one point, one place, one image or one way of expressing? Longing and demanding plurality by definition?

I ordered his book 'Furigraphie. Poésies 1985-2015' (2017) to find out what he is pointing at.

Endless Circles

A poem from Basma Abdel Aziz:

A bit of a life

I probably did — observe one day

the fall of the sun
and caught the gold that was scattered in the palm of the sea
and enclosed my ribs about the last escaping heat
as I searched for a farewell sifting through piles of sand

And I paced the city back and forth
I hung around in the old cafes sipping at bottles of beer
I met with friends and passers-by
sat with literati and revolutionaries
and among the crowded tables I spent long hours

I went up and down streets and discussions
but I remember that once I bought
from the other end of the street a mizmar!
And I stood under a balcony observing wet newspapers
and the heavy clothes
shifting my feet in a puddle
making endless circles

Source: here. Poem is originally in arabic.

Wrong Side Mediterranean

In the books of Fitzroy Mclean, Patrick Leigh Fermor and the Special Air Service (SAS) I noticed that all of them went at some point to Cairo, Egypt during the Second World War. The place to be. Where plans were made, wounds where licked and parties celebrated.

The details of this era is analysed and written down with great skill in the book: Cooper, 'Cairo in the War 1939-1945' (London 1989).  

Eyeopeners for me: 

• The way the Egyptians deeply hated their "suppressor" Great-Brittain. They wanted independence and rule their own country.
• The impact of 'The Flap' on the social structure of Cairo. Only after the Axis were beaten by the Allied at the 'Second Battle of El Alamein' (november 1942) the daughters of the Egyptian upperclass was willingly dancing again with Allied officers. In a way it seemed a miracle that Rommel never reached Cairo. Everyone was expecting the Germans and Italians.

Nice quotes:

"The Italians hated the desert, and kept it at bay by building stone houses in their camps, laying out paths and little gardens. The Germans fought it with science: their stores were full of foot powder, eye-lotions, insect repellents, mouth washes and disinfectants. The British, Australians and New Zealanders simply ignored the desert. They slept in blankets on the ground, and were not unduly worried about germs" (page 114).

"The taste of war was inescapable in their lives, but the theme that most preoccupied the poets of 'Personal Landscape' was exile. (...) It was not England that they missed [in Cairo, Egypt], but Greece. Quite apart from their attachments to the country, the war had landed them, in Durrell's words, 'on the wrong side of the Mediterranean'" (page 157).

One of the places to be in Cairo during the Second World War was Shepheard's Hotel:  

Entrance of Shepheard's Hotel, Cairo, Egypt in 1890.

The hall of Shepheard's Hotel, Cairo, Egypt before 1923. 

P.S. Both pictures are not being used in Cooper's book.