posted on 14 Jul 2022

Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller by Nadia Wassef

This fascinating book is a whole lot more than simply another portrait of a bookshop battling against the odds. What Nadia Wassef has produced is certainly that but it’s also a snapshot of modern Cairo, a book about feminism in that city, a personal memoir of family and a tale of individual success and failure.

Wassef’s bookshop, Diwan, was opened in 2002 in partnership with her sister Hind and family friend, Nihal Schawky with an explicit mission to reform the access to books and literature not just in Cairo but across Egypt:

‘We launched Diwan in a culture that had stopped reading…..Education had emphasised rote memorisation and discouraged freedom of thought. Readers were alienated at every turn ... literature died many successive slow and bureaucratic deaths.’ 

Beejay Silcox writing for the Australian Book Review distils the essence of the mission the three women set themselves:

“The country was entering its third decade under Hosni Mubarak’s listless, censorious leadership, and national illiteracy levels were at a record high. Egypt’s publishing infrastructure had largely crumbled, and state-printed books were flimsy creatures, stapled together like pamphlets (and largely propagandist). Bookshops, Wassef recalls, were either government-run, glorified newsagents, or ‘tomb-like’ places where the books desiccated on the shelves. ‘Starting a bookshop at this moment of cultural atrophy seemed impossible and utterly necessary.’”

Gradually one book shop becomes two and eventually they are managing a chain of successful outlets that turn them into uncomfortable – and for Wassef, award winning - business gurus.

The book is structured to reflect the way the books were organised in the stores - “The Café,” “Business and Management,” “The Classics,” “Self-Help” – and these become jumping off points for ruminations about modern Egyptian culture and mores. Western literature is given its own identity in store but also attracts attention from Government scrutiny:

“President [Hosni] Mubarak was proud that under his governance, Egypt was a country free from censorship. This meant that we were permitted to speak or act as we chose, provided it was within the law. As law-abiding citizens, we knew that it was illegal to say, write, or print anything that offended public morals, threatened national unity or the social order, or tarnished Egypt’s reputation in the foreign press.”

Of course, this inevitably raises the spectre of misinterpretation – more comical than sinister – with Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef the book most likely to be detained in case it offends public morality.

Wassef is aware that social class has had a huge impact on books and reading in Egypt. This is an aspect of the book that is picked up by Jennifer Bort Yocovissi writing for the Washington Independent Review of Books in 2021:

"There is also an enduring class structure represented by, as Wassef explains, two Cairos: the one lived on the Egyptian pound, whose members struggle to remain above the poverty line, and the one lived on foreign currency, in which English and French are more frequently spoken than Arabic, and disposable income employs cooks and drivers — and buys books.

Wassef has a relatively clear-eyed view of her place in the latter camp, a product as she is of Egypt’s British International School, where speaking Arabic on school grounds was forbidden. She was late coming to her native tongue, in which the formal language, Fus’ha, is only written; spoken forms are unique to various regions of the Arab world. She realized that “Diwan’s readers were similarly dislocated from their roots and lost in linguistic migration. We didn’t want to punish them; we wanted to invite them in.”’

This is quite an ambitious book that seeks to probe more deeply into social and political issues than is customary with books about bookshops but I found myself struggling a bit with the author’s own persona that I found quite hard to warm to. That is, of course, a purely personal and subjective response and you’ll want to read this yourself and make your own decisions. If you do pick the book up, I think I can guarantee an interesting and thought-provoking read.

Terry Potter

July 2022