Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism

An Archive

Hala Halim

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780823251766
• eBook ISBN: 9780823252275
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Social Sciences

Interrogating how Alexandria became enshrined as the exemplary cosmopolitan space in the Middle East, this book mounts a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism elevates things European in the city's culture and simultaneously places things Egyptian under the sign of decline. The book goes beyond this civilization/barbarism binary to trace other modes of intercultural solidarity.Halim presents a comparative study of literary representations, addressing poetry, fiction, guidebooks, and operettas, among other genres. She reappraises three writers—C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell—who she maintains have been cast as the canon of Alexandria. Attending to issues of genre, gender, ethnicity, and class, she refutes the view that these writers' representations are largely congruent and uncovers a variety of positions ranging from Orientalist to anticolonial. The book then turns to Bernard de Zogheb, a virtually unpublished writer, and elicits his camp parodies of elite Levantine mores in operettas, one of which centers on Cavafy. Drawing on Arabic critical and historical texts, as well as contemporary writers' and filmmakers' engagement with the canonical triumvirate, Halim orchestrates an Egyptian dialogue with the
European representations.

Chapter One

Of Greeks, Barbarians, Philhellenes, Hellenophones, and Egyptiotes

C. P. Cavafy

In the second volume of his study L’Hellénisme et l’Égypte moderne, subtitled Contribution de l’Hellénisme au développement de l’Égypte moderne (1930), Athanase G. Politis, the historian of the Greek community in Egypt, concludes with the chapter “La vie intellectuelle et artistique des Hellènes en Égypte,” a good portion of which is devoted to C. P. Cavafy. Underscoring the poet’s originality, Politis elaborates on the belatedness of recognition of Cavafy’s poetry, and the role therein of his idiosyncratic publishing patterns, before going on to expound a tripartite classification of his poems. The three categories, which Politis concedes are not impermeable, are (a) the meditative/philosophical, (b) the historical, and (c) the sensual or aesthetic.¹ An anonymous 1930 French article extolling Cavafy’s poetry, and assumed to have been written by him, likewise refers to “his historical, psychological and philosophical value” (SPW 143; see also 163). Some, like W. H. Auden, George Savidis, and Edmund Keeley, have endorsed the tripartite division; others, including Pinchin and Arnold Toynbee, have come up with a bipartite categorization, sometimes construed as overlapping, such as the “historical” and the “erotic” or sensual; yet others, such as John Chioles, have pronounced Cavafy’s three categories “an ironic smokescreen . . . a harmless half-truth.”² But, for my purposes of pursuing the valences of cosmopolitanism in Cavafy’s texts, what gives me pause is Politis’s commentary about the historical poems.

Citing the Hellenization of the kingdoms that sprang up from Alexander’s conquests, Politis says that Cavafy often turns to the Seleucid dynasty, “under which Hellenic civilization made more rapid progress than in Egypt, perhaps because in Syria it did not have to struggle against a local civilization already very ancient as in the Nile valley.”³ As for the broader reasons for Cavafy’s choice of the Hellenistic period, Politis has this to say:

For this historical period [the Hellenistic] is particularly fitting as a framework for the diverse historical characters whom he [Cavafy] wants to bring to life again. In the Alexandria and the Egypt of that time, as is also the case in those of today, there were, alongside the indigenes, foreigners. Among the latter, many, although not Hellenes, nevertheless spoke Greek; they were Hellenophones. They were numerous. Hellenic civilization had melted into one and the same mold men of different nationalities to whom Roman peace (pax romana) had contributed by giving them similar characteristics in such a way that the Graeco-Roman world of back then can be compared to our own nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In brief, what characterizes this epoch is above all the absence of a particular homeland and of a narrow nationalism, the absence of a constraining tradition, the facility of communications and, finally, a freedom of mores and a sexual morality similar to those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁴

The cosmopolitanism that obtains in Politis’s reading of Cavafy would seem to be defined against allegiance to the nation in the sort of intermingling that speaks to what Zubaida construes as one of the hallmarks of cosmopolitan places as supportive of “culturally promiscuous life, drawing on diverse ideas, traditions and innovations.”⁵

Yet if cosmopolitanism takes the form of the melting pot, this is an emphatically Hellenizing melting pot. The dominant theme in the account, ultimately, is not so much the intermixing of cultures, because ethnic difference is superseded by and contained within the Hellenic cultural matrix of “Hellenophones.” Although Politis does not use the term in this context, what informs his commentary is the notion of the Koine, or the common Greek tongue. As for indigenous cultures (the Egyptian in both ancient and modern times and the ancient Syrian), these are acknowledged—in the context of Cavafy’s poetry—only as obstacles, of varying degrees of tenacity, to the desired teleological progression of a Hellenization that would effect an acculturation of non-Greeks rather than allow for any reciprocity of influence. Although Politis does not use the word barbarian, the palpable implication here is that because the Egyptians, the “indigenes,” are not Hellenophone, they will remain perpetually beyond Cavafy’s pale. Of note, also, is the fact that Politis projects the same Hellenizing state of affairs under Macedonian Ptolemaic rule, and under the imperial Roman subjection, onto modern Egypt, which was ruled by a Turco-Circassian dynasty of Albanian origin and was later also simultaneously a quasi-British colony (Pax Romana, of course, echoes, and inspired the phrasing of, Pax Britannica),⁶ and nominally part of the Ottoman Empire (although the latter was no longer the case when Politis published his book). In this sense, Politis would have us believe that Cavafy’s cosmopolitanism is not only predominantly Hellenic in timbre but also in collusion with imperial programs of which the historian, for one, is by no means critical.

Cavafy did in fact write a review of the Greek edition of the first volume of Politis’s book, L’Hellénisme et l’Égypte moderne: Histoire de l’Hellénisme égyptien de 1798 à 1927 (1928). It is significant that in this laudatory review, Cavafy underscores the value of the book not only for the Greek resident of Egypt but also for Greeks of the mainland, and that the only section of this book dealing primarily with the Greeks in modern Egypt that he chooses to single out is Politis’s account of the Greeks in Hellenistic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian Egypt—the period that had inspired a large number of poems in his corpus.⁷ As for the second volume of Politis’s book, there is substantial evidence in the account of Cavafy’s work that the historian had interviewed the poet. Cavafy’s abandoning of his early Byzantine phase, for instance, is, “as he himself has admitted to us,” because it did not provide a suitable framework for his characters; and it was the Hellenistic period that “inspired” him, a word Politis uses despite the fact “that the poet detests it,”⁸ and so on. Such parenthetical statements would seem to imply that Politis’s ten-page section on Cavafy was indebted to comments, always alluded to but never quoted, made by the poet, whether or not the text actually underwent his authorization. Yet two questions remain to be posed: first, given Cavafy’s idiosyncratic publishing patterns,⁹ which the historian himself underscores, to what extent could anything purporting authoritativeness be said about Cavafy’s poetry while he was still alive? Second, to what extent were Cavafy’s comments, assuming he made them, brought in line with Politis’s narrative? After all, where the historian refers to comments made by the poet, it is in contexts other than the long quotation above. My sense is that a number of the poems and prose texts available to us today, many published posthumously, considerably modify Politis’s account, some of the main features of which, albeit mostly independently of his book, long continued to find expression among Cavafy scholars.

A “Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe”: thus the felicitous oft-quoted Forsterian description of Cavafy (PP 91). Apart from his sexuality, that angle is in no small measure formed by Cavafy’s diasporic positionality: an Alexandrian Greek from a cotton-trading, part-aristocratic Constantinopolitan family that had fallen on hard times; who spent some of his formative years in Liverpool, London, and Istanbul; who was later to work under the British in the Irrigation Service in Alexandria, where his English bosses would occasionally correct his English but treat him with more deference than they did the Egyptians working under him; and who visited Greece for the first time at the age of thirty-eight, keeping a travel journal in English.¹⁰ As Cavafy himself famously declared, “I too am Hellenic [or ‘a Hellene’ . . . ]. Notice how I put it: not Greek . . . nor Hellenized [or ‘Hellenified’ . . . ], but Hellenic,’” which, as Keeley has suggested, denotes an allegiance to broader Hellenism.¹¹ Given Cavafy’s self-designation as Hellenic, what significations of “Greek” and “barbarian” obtain in his texts?

Cavafy’s poems are replete with instances of linguistic and ethnic diversity: witness, for example, the Alexandrian crowd in “Alexandrian Kings” (1912; disseminated) that, at a spectacle put up by Antony and Cleopatra, “worked themselves into raptures, and called out / cheers in Greek, in Egyptian, and some in Hebrew” (BTCT 23; see TP1 42), or the young men “In a Town of Osroini” (1916/1917), in Mesopotamia, who “are a mixture here: Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, Medes” (BTCT 61; see TP1 80).¹² But neither such instances nor Cavafy’s self-designation as “Hellenic” settles my question as to the relationship between Greek and barbarian, which, to my mind, is a signal angle of approach to the Alexandrian cosmopolitanism of which he has come to be seen as figurehead in the modern period. It is true that neither category has been historically monolithic: for example, barbarian, if it signifies a Greek-coded “Otherness”—if, that is, it is the Greek name for the Other—has been applied to differently construed and Orientalized Others, such as the Egyptians and the Persians, whose “othering” has likewise shifted over time, as I will elaborate later.¹³ But my interest here is in the interplay between Greek and barbarian specifically in Cavafy, with the historical context brought in, at a later stage in the discussion, as it has a bearing on the texts. The presence of such a category as Philhellene,¹⁴ if we set it in relation to Politis’s Hellenophone, prompts us to ask if—in Cavafy’s texts—the binary of Greek and barbarian is as entrenched as it seems. Is a Hellenophone necessarily a Philhellene, and vice versa? And what of Greeks who are no longer Hellenophone? What is the place of colonialism, the conquest of barbarian by Greek, in the production of Philhellenes? And wherein specifically to factor the Egyptiotes, the Greeks of modern quasi-colonial Egypt, in relation to these questions?

I therefore look at a number of poems, not all of them necessarily related to Egypt, where the meaning of these categories shifts, as a backdrop to another discussion later where I bring these questions to bear on Egyptian themes. The poems tackled are not confined to what is referred to as the Cavafy “canon,” meaning poems he considered final and published (after his own fashion), but include the unpublished or “hidden,” the “repudiated” and the “unfinished” ones. In drawing on the noncanonical poems, I consider the implications of the given text’s status. In light of the 1970s critical stances that Hellenize the city through a Cavafy oblivious to Egyptianness and hence go on to “barbarize” postcolonial Alexandria, I dwell on things Egyptian, whether Pharaonic, Coptic, or modern, and vestigial Arabo-Islamic elements in Cavafy’s texts, and, where relevant, read these in terms of the British occupation of Egypt. I also seek, to the extent that space allows and wherever relevant, to draw into the discussion Egyptian responses to Cavafy. Tracing these categories has dictated my choice of texts: several of his poems set in Alexandria are not relevant to these issues, while others set elsewhere, as well as little-discussed prose texts, speak far more directly to my concerns. My argument is that in almost all the categories, there is some evidence—to a greater or lesser degree—of a binarism at work; simultaneously, the corpus of prose and poetry is also polyvalent in that it yields an antiessentialist permeability, a continuum of shifting identities and an empathy that bespeak a diasporic Greek’s sensibility.

Hellenism, Philhellenism, and Diaspora

The poem “In the Year 200 b.c.” (1916 [?]/1931) is a good starting point in that it refers explicitly to Alexander’s conquests and is spoken some 130 years after his decisive battles by a narrator who is a product of the new world that the Macedonian’s conquests brought about. The poem takes as its epigraph part of an inscription that, according to Plutarch, Alexander sent to Greece carved on spoils of war. Cavafy’s epigraph reads, “Alexander, son of Philip and all the Greeks except the Lacedaimonians—” (BTCT 181; see TP2 93). That the poet has omitted the rest of the line as cited in Plutarch, “who won this spoile from the Barbarous Asians,”¹⁵ begs the question how this blanking out of the barbarian plays into the poem.

The speaker begins by conceding what he assumed would have been the indifference of the Lacedaimonians, or Spartans, who refused to participate in Alexander’s conquests, to the snub in the inscription. He then goes on to enumerate the victorious battles and sing the praises of the post-Alexander world thus:

So, except the Lacedaimonians at Granikos;

and after that at Issus; and in the decisive

battle that demolished the terrifying army

which the Persians mustered at Arbela:

which set out for victory from Arbela, and was demolished.

And from this marvelous pan-Hellenic expedition,

the triumphant, the effulgent,

the extolled, the glorified as

no other had been glorified,

the peerless: we emerged;

a new Greek world, magnificent.

We; the Alexandrians, the Antiochans,

the Selefkians, and the numberless

remaining Greeks of Egypt and of Syria,

and those in Media, and those in Persia, and all the rest.

With our widespread governance of many lands,

with a versatile process of judicious adjustment.

And the Common Greek Language

which we’ve carried as far as Bactria, as far as the Indians.

As if we’d mention Lacedaimonians now! (BTCT 181–82; see TP2 93–94)

The poem appears to be charting a celebratory progression, starting from the city-state to a Hellenistic cosmopolitanism in consonance with Politis’s claims. Although Cavafy ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Of Greeks, Barbarians, Philhellenes, Hellenophones, and Egyptiotes: C. P. Cavafy
• 2. Of Hellenized Cosmopolitanism and Colonial Subalternity: E. M. Forster
• 3. Uncanny Hybridity into Neocolonialism: Lawrence Durrell
• 4. “Polypolis” and Levantine Camp: Bernard de Zogheb
• Epilogue/Prologue
• Notes
• Works Cited