about what’s happening online and off. I think a lot about people who commit atrocities. I think about people who post about atrocities on social media. The way atrocities are sandwiched between glamour selfies and food porn. The way they’re packaged into moral positions that, no matter what people think they are, are actually just algorithmic trends. Where absolutely everything is an opportunity to spend money. I think about the fact that this is the world we live in. We have no other world.
Against this backdrop, Halloween and El Día de Muertos feel like the perfect time for a brief reunion. Does this Roger Ballen image from the series “Asylum 2008-2011” resonate with you too?
Anyway!
The opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum notwithstanding, I’m writing because I’ve published two new pieces: a short story that might end up being the opening chapter of a speculative novel—a genre I’ve been thinking of as Sufi-fi; and an erotically focused essay about life and love in Cairo since the eighties. The story, “In Charge of My Soul in the Blink of an Eye,” is in Ploughshares; the essay, “Under the Salacious Sun,” in Extra Extra. Neither is online (yet) but both mean a lot to me—especially Sufi-fi.
For the last six weeks or so I’ve been working on essays: about photography and desire, featuring Diane Arbus, Antoine d’Agata, and Linda Zhengová; about New Cairo and It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over; and about writing in sixties Egypt and The Tedious Tour of M—among other topics. I’ve sent out a pitch for a long essay I really want to do about scripting a biopic of the tenth-century poet al Mutanabbi. Surprisingly (?) nobody seems interested. People are periodically starting magazines that want to break out of the discursive hegemony of the West, but even though they cover “international” topics, in terms of perspective and worldview they seldom manage to break out of Brooklyn…
Finally, I’m writing because there is a Cairo event coming up: I’ll be talking to Mai Serhan about her memoir, I Can Imagine It for Us. I believe this is the first English literary event I’ve ever been part of in Egypt; and the book is a source of many fascinating questions, so it should be fun. If you’re in the vicinity of the Gezira Club at 6pm this Thursday, it would be great to see you.
My best, as ever,
Y
The Rakha 
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