THE ARRIVAL - An Artist In Egypt

Buildings, Cairo

Excerpt from 'They Call Him Light' by Katherine Boland

'You are in my eyes', he whispered as breathlessly I collapsed into his arms.
 

I guessed what they meant but in the dim light of his unadorned apartment with the call to prayer filtering through the dusty wooden shutters, I asked him to interpret his exotic words of love in order to savour them a little and relish the unfamiliar sound of English spoken with an Egyptian accent.

‘It means that I see the world through you and whatever I do, wherever I go I have you in my mind', he explained earnestly as he smothered the palm of my hand with soft kisses.

I thought so', I said smiling secretly and deliciously to myself beneath the covers.

It was late in 2010, just prior to Egyptian Revolution, when I flew into Cairo for the first time. Egypt had never been somewhere I'd particularly wanted to visit. Mostly I'd gravitated towards Europe - to France, Italy or Spain. I wasn't that interested in Ancient Egypt or the Pyramids, perhaps because I found the whole Pharaoh thing rather sickening. It seemed to me that the reign of the Sun Gods produced a huge amount of human suffering and for what? The veneration of a bunch of deluded megalomaniacs? I knew nothing about Islam or Egypt's political situation or culture. Apart from as a teenager idolising the seventies pop star Cat Stevens, who bafflingly and devastatingly for his fans and for me in particular, as I'd had my heart set on marrying him, ditched his career at its peak to become Jusuf Islam, I’d never had any connection with a Muslim. Then out of nowhere the Egyptian Ministry of Culture invited me to an all expenses paid International Artists Symposium in Luxor, Egypt. It was an offer too good to refuse and I accepted the invitation even though it meant undertaking another arduous long haul flight so soon after returning home to Australia from an artist's residency in France.

An artist's life can be interesting, unconventional, unpredictable and at times a bit scary, financially that is. There's no regular weekly wage coming in and it's either feast (when you sell paintings) or famine (when you don't sell any paintings). A report by The Australian Arts Council claims there's a 98% attrition rate amongst artists and only 0.004% of them make a decent living. On the plus side being an artist allows you to do something you love. You're not condemned or confined to an office or a factory floor or even to a country which means you can work wherever in the world you choose.

 

'Why don't you get a job you hate like everyone else!' my cautious, conservative, insured to the hilt, Sign of The Goat daughter says whenever I become anxious about money.

 

But I'd made a choice a long time ago to pursue a career in art. When I was quite young it dawned on me that one day I would grow up and have to work. What a terrifying prospect I thought, maybe not in those words but certainly with that sentiment. I looked at my parent's dreary working lives, running a small business in a big country town in rural Victoria. The idea of spending my life doing something eight hours a day five days a week I didn't like filled me with dread. But at school I'd become completely engrossed when a teacher assigned us interesting projects to do such as making coffee stained treasure maps with burned edges or the head of a zebra with Clag drenched strips of newspaper plastered onto an inflated balloon and I knew without a doubt that creating things was the only thing worth doing.

 

At Christmas I'd fashion decorations from silver foil and glitter to hang on the tree and at Easter I'd collect the still warmish eggs from the chooks and paint intricate designs on their blown out shells with pretty crimson cochineal. Weekends and school holidays I'd drive my mother crazy coming up with a fantastical ideas that were way beyond my abilities and pester her until she'd agree to help me realise my dazzling visions. When we were bored my  sister and I would black out the long passageway in the centre of the house and back light our heads with candle light to trace the outlines of our silhouettes on the sheets of butchers paper we'd sticky taped to the door at the end of the hall. Peace would descend on the house hold as we spent a fight free afternoon colouring in the crudely drawn profiles with black Indian ink and my mother would breath a sigh of relief and go and put her feet up.
 

Rainy Sundays were reserved for upturning the sewing basket and constructing whole cities out of cotton reels, buttons, a pack of playing cards and domino tiles. When that ended in tears, as it always did, Mum, to get some peace, would allow us to use felt pens to draw intricate weather maps on the lounge room window and we'd take it in turns to be The Weather Girl from the Bureau of Meteorology on the ABC, expressively pointing out the concentric rings of high or low pressure with a knitting needle and well rounded vowels. Hours could be filled hunched over the kitchen table designing groovy outfits in an oversized sketch pad - culottes, hot pants and mini-skirts, whatever I'd seen featured in the fashion pages of Dolly Magazine that month. I'd cut out the fragile designs with meticulous precision using Mum's precious green scissors and hang the ensembles on my cardboard manikin with their tiny paper shoulder tabs. So as you can imagine, many years later, when my portfolio and application to study Graphic Art and Design at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology was accepted I was at the same time overjoyed and relieved.

I have to say that from the air the Cairo looked bleak. Dust encrusted concrete cubicles with fields of satellite dishes disappeared in the distance, swallowed up by a dirty brown haze of pollutants. It was like someone had taken a huge flour sifter of beige self raising flour to the place or like one of my childhood finger paintings where the colours would turn to mud if I mucked around with it too much. The only appealing landmarks I could see through the mire were the mosques with their elegant white minarets and perfect domes. To my unaccustomed Western eyes, much more accustomed to flying in over rolling and picturesque expanses of green, where glistening rivers twist through craggy, tree covered mountain ranges with interesting little villages perched on high, it appeared inhospitable, almost uninhabitable. I tried to picture what it would be like living in one of those apartment blocks, driving on those roads and walking in those streets. It seemed like one apocalyptic sandstorm would bury the whole city alive. Perhaps a hundred years from now there'd be nothing but a sea of those satellite dishes poking through the desert sand like huge metallic seashells. I squinted to see the Pyramids but couldn't make them out in the gritty atmosphere. 

 

Down there, somewhere in that sprawling mass of mankind and masonry, he was there, like an insignificant grain of sand in the vast desert. I didn't know he existed then. I wouldn’t meet him until I arrived in Luxor in a few days time. But events were conspiring and had been since well before he gently pushed his way into the world only twenty-six years ago.

'I will tell you something', he announced in the early days of our union.

 

It was my first taste of his legendary and endearing introductions.

 

'My birth was painless for my mother', he declared.

 

I immediately thought of the painless birth of the Buddha, supposedly born from his mother’s side. 

 

'She felt almost nothing and looked down amazed to see me lying there beside her’, he added proudly.

 

'Like a little ray of Light', I teased.

She had called him Nour, meaning Light in Arabic. Just one of the ninety-nine names for Allah.

Then the plane banked and I saw it …the mighty Nile. And my heart raced as we hit the runway and taxied into Cairo International Airport.