Arms full of things: Souq Al-Imam Al-Shafei at the Southern Cemetery.

The stock--padlocks without keys, limbs of broken plastic dolls, half a pair of earrings, used ketchup bottles, an anonymous photo album filled with family photos--of many of the stalls at Souq Al-Imam Al-Shafei, located in the City of the Dead, are not obviously saleable. Selling, one might therefore deduce, is only one function, and not necessarily the most important, of Souq Al-Imam. More gathering place than shopping mall, Souq Al-Imam provides an often needed pretext for passing time. If the passing of time is one defining characteristic of life, then a cemetery is as good a place as any for a market. Items plucked from the rubbish bins of affluent neighborhoods are recycled, given a new life at the City of the Dead. When counted in piastres, money can be thrown away and, in being thrown away, it can prevent things from being discarded. Because it is cheap, the life of objects in this market can be prolonged. To be all but worthless brings salvation. In a cemetery life cannot be other than mutable; to be at home in the Southern Cemetery is to acknowledge this mutability. And to trade in this Cairo cemetery is less a reaching of the end of the line than an exploration of the innumerable sidings that constitute that supposed end.

**********

Friday Market in the City of the Dead

   I am drawn to places offering
   what people have thrown out,
   discarded, left behind, or have
   simply forgotten to remember,

   objects which for some
   long outdistanced purposes:
   chipped sinks, lengths of pipe.
   hills of washers and fittings,

   levers, plungers, faucets
   unable to carry water to anyone,
   ironwork, spikes and nails,
   doors and window frames,

   old radios tuned to frequencies
   no longer able to be beard,
   cogs, axles, fly wheels, spindles,
   pulleys, halves of microscopes, cracked

   bottles, bent coins, and photographs
   whose faces now lie beyond
   names, whose eyes are not
   fixed on sights we have seen,

   mounds of old wire, twisted knives
   and forks, and angular
   bulks of crank-driven phones
   which have lost all connections,

   dismantled old beds and wedding cups,
   mirrors which when you peer in
   show only blurred patches
   of your face shifting in darkness

   behind peeling silver, clothes
   which no longer fit the way
   they once did or simply no longer fit;
   all lie there naive and artless

   on old blankets or worn stone,
   tended with casual indifference;
   where others may see lives beyond
   this welter of lost objects, I

   cannot believe that these are
   ghosts or that they measure
   any history's passage, this
   is merely the entrance to some

   forgotten temple, these
   the implements of its mystery
   and the path along which we
   are to be led is simply

   a path of shapes into which we
   must fit ourselves, or we ourselves
   are places where these shapes
   must be seen fit.

Tom Lamont

I

On a piece of sacking no more than a metre square lie two empty Coca Cola bottles (glass), a broken teaspoon, a rusting chain and several pieces of scrap metal. They are neatly arranged and nominally for sale, though it would be difficult to imagine who would purchase them. Behind the impromptu stall with its seemingly random collection of objects stands an 18-year-old boy. He points to a small padlock, the key of which is missing.

The Southern Cemetery in the City of the Dead is a far-from-unwelcoming place. Like the Northern Cemetery--indeed like the majority of the city's burial places--it exhibits the kind of urban planning absent in the rest of the city. Single storey tombs, more often than not co-opted as housing, stretch along the foot of the Muqattam hills, each with its own walled enclosure. The tombs are distributed along a rigid, grid-like pattern, with roads intersecting one another at right angles. Because the tombs boast nothing higher than their garden walls, the interlocking streets offer uninterrupted vistas across parallel streets to the rocky outcrop of Muqattam. For three out of every seven days, beginning on Wednesday afternoon, when the honey-coloured light can make even the dust seem sticky, these angular streets till a few years ago hosted hundreds of stall holders and their customers, buyers and sellers at Souq Al-lmam Al-Shafei. And though the souq was moved by the authorities out of the side streets and into the area under and surrounding the Al-Tonsi fly-over, an extension of Cairo's "autostrade" which cuts right through the City of the Dead, this move has had a negligible effect on the nature of the market. The stock of many of the stall holders is no more obviously saleable than the random selection of goods offered by the 18-year old boy. Selling, one might deduce, is only one function, and not necessarily the most important, of Souq Al-Imam.

The 18-year old is loitering. He can do so from Wednesday afternoon to Friday evening because these are the hours of the market. If he is loitering with intent, the intention is to loiter rather than to sell the few objects that lie on the ground in front of him. He is passing time, as are many of his putative customers. Does it matter, then, if in passing their time they pass him by without buying the padlock without key? Who would, after all, buy the padlock, except someone who lost an identical item while optimistically storing the key? Here, though, impossible calculations are discarded, the calculations of probablility ignored.

A pile of limbs (unwashed, plastic) interspersed with heads and torsos, seldom attached. It takes a while to recognise what these things are because they are dirty. So too is the old woman selling them. Bits of broken dolls, dismembered, burrowed from beneath piles of garbage. Only half of the contents of the sack the old woman has brought to the market has been emptied on the tarpaulin that lies in front of her. The objects offered for sale are unsaleable. But to observe that nobody would buy half a melted plastic doll's arm is to be facetious.

Consider this a village and it is full of idiots. But then retail is the last thing you expect in a cemetery. The dead have been laid to rest but for the rest life goes on. And this pile of remnants, this filthy heap of broken dolls parts, is not worthless. Ask a price and a price will be quoted. The vendor may be surprised, or even unwilling to part with her goods, but she knows her side of the bargain which is to appear to sell when the need arises.

The effort involved in collecting such quantities of patently unsaleable dolls' parts must be immense, and perhaps the reason the sack has only been half emptied on the tarpaulin is to avoid the danger of running out of stock. Without her bits and pieces, there would be no reason for the stall holder to remain. If the purpose of sitting in the market is to sit in a market, then to sell one's all on the very first day would be a dangerous thing.

The broken doll merchant is mad. Yet being mad in Souq Al-Imam, being a mad stall holder, is less mad than being mad elsewhere. Were she to spend the last years of her life picking through garbage to find arms and legs without a stall where they could be offered for sale, she might be certifiably insane. Here she has her pitch and therefore her place.

A small crowd gathers in a side street. They are excited and they are about to buy. The used-sauce-bottle-and-plastic-washing-up-liquid-container man has arrived. The sauce bottles are unwashed, their contents splashed around the rim, smeared over the labels. Palmolive and Heinz ketchup bottles, almost empty Vitrac jam jars, plastic containers designed to be squeezed--hardly a tempting array of merchandise but sought after commodities nonetheless. Such items are plucked from the rubbish bins of affluent neighborhoods and brought to the City of the Dead so that they can be given new contents and a new life.

This is the eco-friendly side of the market, a single act in the massively complex process of continual recycling. Given the internal logic of a market, the used sauce bottles, though they are outwardly no more attractive than the used bits of doll, have a value that can be measured in terms of their discrete utility.

Souq Al-Imam is home not only to the obsessive (doll woman), or the entrepreneur with the uncanny knack for making something--money--out of nothing--garbage--(ketchup container man), it also offers space to refugees from other markets that have been closed by the municipal authorities. There are traders in the kind of junk that people think of as "antique." Pottery, old picture frames, wrought iron taken from demolished buildings, broken chandeliers, ormolu work from larger pieces of furniture are all offered for sale. They are bought by other traders, proprietors of shops in the smart neighborhoods, and by foreign residents in search of bargains.

Look after the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves. Souq Al-hnam operates as Cairo's bargain basement and in the majority of cases it is the pennies that matter here. The prerogative of the rich--buying something simply because it catches one's fancy--is opened up to the poor. And because people's fancy tends towards the promiscuous, it is necessary to offer a completely amorphous, completely arbitrary, collection of objects.

In the great act of recycling price is all-important. That the goods offered for sale are valued in piastres rather than pounds allows for the illusion of saleability. It allows the customer to go to the Market in the City of the Dead with a pound and to emerge with arms full of things.

When it is counted in piastres, money can be thrown away and, in being thrown away, it call prevent other things from being discarded. Because it is cheap, the life of the objects in this market can be prolonged. To be gill but worthless brings salvation. To have outlived a purpose, but to be cheap, allows for the fabrication of other purposes. It also allows for the excercise of imagination. A Galle glass vase that costs 10,000 pounds can never be anything other than a glass vase by Galle. A glass bonbonniere that costs 25 piastres can be an ashtray, a finger bowl, a candle holder, a bird bath, a soap dish. It can be attached to the broken shoe display unit--on sale at Souq Al-Imam for five pounds--making of the shoe tree a modern candelabra.

Pieces of machines have been painstakingly sorted. Row after row of metal basins contain cogs of the same size and shape. This is clearly niche marketing and, to the uninitiated, the origins and destination of these machine parts is a mystery.

But everything--anything--is salvable if it resists being typecast. And even the disposable is given leave to escape its fate in the City of the Dead. The broken need not be mended. What is irreparable cannot, after all, be repaired. The whole is no more wholesome than the part, for the part can be bought and sold.

The kindness of Souq Al-Imam--the willingness to prolong, the resistance in the face of disintegration--applies to people and to things. In becoming what they are not intended to be, objects--people--defy the exclusivity of definition. A mad woman is a market trader, obsession her stock in trade.

In a cemetery life cannot be other than mutable: to be at home in the Southern Cemetery is to acknowledge this mutability. And to trade in this cemetery, in Cairo, is less a reaching of the end of the line than an exploration of the innumerable sidings that constitute that supposed end.

Commerce, that most privileged of urban activities, is made less exclusive once it has escaped the calculations of the econometrician. Retail can be re-told, bargains struck anywhere. Commerce can be made to salve and the act of buying and selling can be transformed into a gesture of salvation.

II

There is a smell of mortality--not death--in the City of the Dead. The market is flyblown: one of its tonalities is the desultory. Old people pass their time here. But the market is no old people's home. Nobody is useless. Nobody merely waits. Sit behind a collection of objects, parts of wholes frittered away by time into something other than their beginnings, and you have a place in the traffic and commerce of life. Nobody asks such pointless, pedantic questions as What is it (all) for? Time is being passed: the objects, a pretext. The text itself is deferred.

Nor are the objects themselves useless. They are spare parts. They have been spared by the hand that has lifted them out of the rubbish and laid them on the tarpaulin. But parts of what? In the context of the market, this is yet another superflous pedantic question. If their ultimate destination has been deferred, so too are questions about their origin. Like the vendors, the buyers and the loiterers, the things--whole, spare part or merely part--are the heart of a market that gathers disparate parts and provides the possibility of compatibility, regardless of probability or anything so quotidian as coincidence.

If these stalls seem tragi-comic or pathetic, they are no more and no less so than the lonely hearts column. Five lines summarizing the object and subject of desire do not constitute the hoped for transaction anymore than a single stall at Souq Al-Imam encapsulates that for which, and by virtue of which, it stands. Perhaps the missing parts are fated to be found. Perhaps parts will coalesce to add up to something. This is the market's article of faith. You might as well dismiss Aristophanes's allegory of love.

The hand that lifted the broken plastic earring out of the rubbish heap knows more than merely a heap of broken images. It is a charitable hand that acts in the secure knowledge that the order of things is one in which not a sparrow shall fall.

You are dead. All the members of your family have emigrated. Your photo album will not be incinerated. There is a city for the dead. There is a market in the city for the belongings of the dead. The book and photo stall in Souq Al-Imam will carry your photo album intact. You have a ghost. You have a stall in which to return to haunt. It is a gentle haunting, as gentle as the market that has generously provided you with a space in which to return.

There are side-shows at the market in the City of the Dead. Freak shows. There is the spectacle of a fear that is neither confined nor kept outside the city walls, but that dares to speak its name. In a language other than that of the market, one might describe its participants as lonely, insane, homeless. One might condense and say that they are poor.

But the old woman who painstakingly collects and rescues parts of dolls from the bowels of a garbage can has ritualized and thus transformed, her fear--whatever that may be--into a creative act, an obsession. And it is the market that acknowledges both her creativity and fear, further ritualizing the obsession. By assisting her in naming it, the market both legitimizes and socializes it.

You need not obsess alone. Bring your fear, singleminded or motley, to the market. Display it. No one minds. There is plenty of space. And company.

The freak can have a show, can show himself or herself, can show off whatever she or he feels like exhibiting. Though people leave you alone, they leave you be. Your existence is not denied. Your tears are covered up only as far as you wish to cover them with the doll parts you have found. You and your things have a right to be here. And no one questions it.

Cairo is kind to those who have "lost it." It does not try to find it for them or to interfere. It acknowledges the loss and, in places like Souq Al-Imam, allows it to be borne.

What precisely has the woman with the heap of broken dolls" parts lost? It. No one needs to pry to know what It is. She does not have to explain or justify. It is enough of an answer to the question of loss.

So too in terms of items on display. If It it has a value. It has a place in the Souq and can be piled high, spread out, or neatly sold in an area in front of tombs set in courtyards arranged into a series of adjacent rectangles forming a perfect grid.

Who are these people? Where have they come from and where are they going? Such questions matter. But the people also matter even if the questions have not been answered. The grid has holes, though they are smaller than those in other safety nets.

* The three works--Elmessiri and Ryan's essay. Lamont's poem, and Cross's photos--were produced at different points in time and were not at the outset parts of a larger whole. The poem (Siwa Door: Poems 1993-1997 [Cairo: Um El-Dunya, n.d.], pp. 10-11: printed with permission [c] Poems, The estate of Thomas A. Lamont) was first written in early 1994, and revised over the years: the essay in mid-1005, and then revised (to indicate the change in the Friday market's location): and the photos were taken in February 1998.