veridiction:s

A report on the challenge of accessing rural areas of the Nile country.
Published in In Press, Winter 2012-2013 edition

Did you know that Mubarak was building a canal in the Western Desert of Egypt that was meant to become a second Nile and double the area of fertile land? This was called the New Valley Project. The plans for the valley were conceived earlier, in the 1960s, during a time of national resurgence subsequent to colonial independence and fall of the monarchy. But the governmental nerve to start the multi-colossal construction project came during the rule of Mubarak in the 1990s and continued until recently. It was a grand technological and investment failure.

I traveled to Egypt to do a preliminary assessment for my upcoming field research on rural microcredit—very small loans meant to send the rural people on the entrepreneurial path, to start or sustain their own business. Microcredit is about small-sized and chunked-up development intervention in peripheries of the developing world and a dispersed, multi-local attempt to govern the economic subjectivities of people in those places.  In geographical, national, and graphical terms it is the opposite of such central projects as the New Valley. How do you make visible the remote, the dispersed, and the subjective and invisible?

Egyptian government’s monolithic character is tied to such massive projects as the New Valley. There is for example a New Cairo, a satellite city built southeast of Cairo for the middle class. Think of moving Amsterdam to Flevoland, because the city would be full of deteriorated buildings, left to laissez-faire since the 1980s. The modernization of the city is not distributed over existing urban spaces. It is characterized by replacement and re-creation of its grand scale and its geographical concentration rather than distribution.

I visited Ad-Daydamoun, a village, grown to the size of a small town, nearby the city of Faqous, northeast of the delta. Contrary to the typical visibility of huge governmental structures in Cairo, here, presence of the governmental apparatus takes two different modes: security forces and organization of archaeological excavations. The excavations naturally tap into the ambition of making and remaking the monolithic Egyptian national heritage. It is a national project to which the villagers around the site have no access.

The security forces have the double task of protecting the archaeological site and, more importantly, keeping an eye on the civilians as well as visitors who show up in places where the official representation of the Egyptian heritage might become instable. My attention was drawn to this fact when I was staying at a resident’s house and it turned out he had to register my stay at the police station. Timothy Mitchell, a scholar of Egypt, writes convincingly in his Rule of Experts, how the Egyptian policy and tourist industry tries to take a hold on travelers’ movement in non-representative areas of Egypt.

Surprisingly, many villagers are not farmers. They are shopkeepers, drivers, government employees, etc. Yet, most microcredit projects seek their clientèle within these populations, not the ‘poorer’ peasants and farmers, the traditional figures of rural Egypt. The people of the periphery imitate the urban economy, so to say. Their villages and their jobs resemble the city, the central, the monolithic government and the visible.

There is a hamlet nearby Ad-Daydamoun just across the canal. I didn’t catch its name as it wasn’t mentioned. There, the houses are from mud; and its residents are tenants. When I was walking with my host and his landlord through the village we entered a small house with open doors. There a mother was making sweets for coming celebrations. Surely, we were invited to come back and delight ourselves.

Despite this hospitable and blissful encounter, my host and the landlord (who offered me Cola at his place) called these people “poor” when we left. I asked the landlord who, then, is rich. “The people from Cairo have more money. But really, America is really rich and your country too.”

Paradoxically, the residents of the hamlet don’t make an impression of poverty and dearth but of sufficiency without abundance. They don’t have access (no TV or means of travel) to centers and so don’t make landlord-style comparisons in the first place. They are not blinded by that visibility of the center. That is exactly what worries the government. They don’t identify themselves much with the national Egyptian identity. The representation of grandeur doesn’t speak to them—they live small. A secondary way to reach them seems to be to foist them an image of poverty, and then provide with help and microcredit.

The visible centers, New Cairo’s and Valleys are a seduction to the people in the periphery and they divert attention from those peripheries. Seduction results in self-forgetting. Microcredit is perhaps an efficient way of helping out, but it is nevertheless based on this same seductive relationship of (in)visibility and unjustified comparison of poverty. Yet, by just visiting the periphery I seem to have transcended this relationship, and by writing I am reversing it.