Egyptian writer Khaled Al-Khamissi [/caption]Khaled al-Khamissi is an Egyptian who was once hailed as the man who “predicted the uprising”.
Author of the acclaimed novel Taxi, a series of fictional monologues with Cairo cab drivers, his writing captures an intriguing – and often hilarious – snapshot of the issues effecting modern Egypt.
Take this, for example, from a conversation with one driver who has developed the alarming habit of falling asleep at the wheel.
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Taxi, Khaled Al-Khamissi[/caption]
“I shouted out again,” says the narrator, “and he brought the wheel back to straight, assuring me hurriedly that he wasn’t asleep. Then he started talking to keep himself awake. ‘You see, I’ve been driving this taxi for three days now without a break. I haven’t moved from it once,’ he said.”
“Three days? How do you manage that?”
“Today’s the 27th,” he said. “I’ve got three days left before I have to pay the instalment on the car. The instalment’s 1200EP per month [£120]. Three days ago I gave my wife a solemn oath that I wouldn’t come home without paying the whole instalment.”
In country where street hawkers often endure hours of hopping between sweltering metro carriages selling cheap plastic pens or handkerchiefs, is a touching example of the lengths many Egyptians have to go to make ends meet.
Sat in his colourfully-furnished Downtown Cairo apartment, Al-Khamissi explains how he believes the corruption of the Mubarak era fomented an insidious cultured of cronyism which crippled the country. Egyptians were forced to lick the shoes of the system, he said, in order to get ahead.
“One of the aspects of his rule was how people were assigned jobs based on who was related to people inside the security services, or other people related to the system.”
Yet despite the travails of ordinary Egyptians depicted in his work, the writer is not overly pessimistic about the future.
He explained that he believes an old epoch was coming to an end in the Middle East – an age initially dominated by the colonial powers of France and Britain and, latterly, conservative Islamists funded by oil money dispatched from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
“This world is finished,” he says emphatically, adding that humankind was at a similar point to the middle of the 18th Century, when a series of uprisings against the old order swept like wildfire across Europe.
“In the next fifty years we will experience huge changes in all of our systems – the system of work, the system of education.”
He isn’t sure exactly what kind of seismic changes the world is in line for, but like the protesters behind the worldwide Occupy movement, he believes that there must be something better than the policies which delivered the world into its current state of economic atrophy.
As a parting gift, he proffers a copy of the novel Sunshine State, the book by James Miller which imagines a dystopian future where gangs of radical Christian outlaws roam across an America ravaged by climate change.
Whatever the future holds for Egypt, it has to be better than this.
