Experiencing the Sounds and Silences of Cairo

This piece was originally published in English and Arabic on PLATFORM SPACE ––view link.

The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.

— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972).

I am standing in the heart of one of Cairo’s most chaotic locations. A cacophony of sounds fills the air. Ramses Square captures my attention and disrupts my balance, as I feel overwhelmed by both its ferocious traffic noise and its erratic flow. People rush in and out of the gates of Ramses Train Station, their movement echoing the arriving and departing trains. I am trying to carefully navigate the square’s disorder but at the same time my brain is grappling with the influx of auditory input, too strident and too raucous to absorb.

I am on the sidewalk outside the station, surrounded by overloaded intercity microbuses and cars waiting at an informal bus stop. Assorted merchandise is displayed on cloth sheets spread on the expanding walkways in front of Ramses Station. I look for the boundary of the square, the commotion of Cairo swells beyond sight, while hordes of cars, trucks, buses, carts, bikes and people hurtle across the 6th of October overpass flying above my head. As instructed by both my audiologist and speech therapist, I try to single out and identify distinct sounds in the chaotic noise of the city. I pick out the rumbling of a speedy truck, street vendors calling out the names of their goods, and the hissing of trains.

Cairo, the city of my childhood, is also the composer of interminable, jumbled soundscapes, and has — until now — been silent to me. Before I received cochlear implants, I experienced the city as a cacophony seen and felt, but not heard.

Rumbling cars and trucks were but moving figures motioning through the commotion across the streets.

Industrial cranes demolishing buildings were metal giants, silently but brutally swirling their arms across the sky.

Ambulances with screaming sirens were but flashing lights, moving swiftly along the highway’s clogged lanes.

Street vendors selling their wares were animated characters with red faces and bulging jugular veins.

Growing up deaf, I have touched the city’s ancient walls, so often scribbled with the initials of unknown lovers. I rested my hands on the cold stone pilotis of its apartment buildings, and leaned my face on its carved wooden doors, where I could feel the tingling sensation of sound vibrations on my cheeks. I have ambled, walked the streets of Cairo myriads of times, and meandered under its aging trees, and ran my fingers through their leafy branches (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Al Galaa Square in the neighborhood of Dokki, as seen from Al Galaa Bridge, June 2011. Photograph by Randa Khorshid. Reproduced with permission.

Childhood/Home

I was six years old when I developed mechanisms for coping with hearing loss. I distinctly remember the summer of 2001 — the first summer I spent my afternoons in audiometric booths in an audiologist’s clinics, instead of the beach cabins on the Mediterranean where I previously went for vacation.

“School” was my fifth grade English teacher’s teachers’ lips moving, her breath on my face as she spoke to the class. Learning was me intently trying to pick up looking for cues between the teachers’ lips, breaking down syllables and reading the vowels off the gaps of their teeth. My English teacher liked speaking to herself. I stared at her lips as she muttered fragments of dialogue about her life. Every day, there was a soliloquy. Fifth grade was the year I learnt to lipread and eavesdrop. It became my favorite game.

The short walks to and from school were my immediate communion with the city as a child. I grew up in Al Mesaha Square which is a thirty-minute walk from downtown Cairo. Al Mesaha, with its public garden, used to be a district of mansions and villas. While some of these dwellings were replaced with apartment blocks, the remaining residences now house embassies and schools that contribute to congested traffic during morning and afternoon rush hours. On those walks, I watched kids use sidewalks as soccer fields while others gathered and waltzed around street vendors playing tunes on a hand-made wooden rababa.

After school, I danced along to the other kids’ rhythm.

Childhood was a silent discovery of colors and sensations, the auditory giving way to the visual and the tactile. I recall walking through the long hallway at home, my left hand rubbing against the coarse surface of the wall before taking a hasty left turn into the small dim kitchen. Surrounded by a piercing silence that doesn’t at all scare me, I stand on my tiptoes and lift my arms to reach for my mother’s red radio sitting on the cold granite counter. When I touch the speaker, it isn’t silent anymore — I feel the mesh throbbing through the skin of my fingers, passing a multisensorial wave into my brain. I move my fingers away, it’s silent again. I spend some time fiddling with the radio’s antennas to generate a wobbly noise; the more the radio crackles, the more ticklish the speakers’ mesh feels.

I recall long nights, falling asleep on my grandmother’s lap with my fingers resting on her throat, feeling her vocal cords vibrate to her croons. Her lips moving, her lap swinging to lullabies that I never really got to hear. My grandmother, Aziza, had a stroke and suffered from aphasia before I was fitted with my first hearing aids. This was childhood: I meet sound in a place somewhere between the quivering sound waves and the fleeting fragments of time.

Revolution/The Square

Gunshots. As the demonstrators look for shelter away from bullets and pellets, I frantically search for lips to read in the deranged crowd. It is November 20, 2011, and everyone is covering their faces to protect their lungs and skin from tear gas. My hearing aids only pick up a series of garbled blasts and explosions, muzzling and distorting the chants of freedom, and leaving me in chaos of silence and smoke. They whistle into my ears with the blares of sirens and echoes of gunshots. I try, but I am unable to tell whether it is of live ammunition or tear gas.

Away from the ceaseless clashes in the wide lanes of Mohamed Mahmoud Street and the graffitied walls leading to the Ministry of Interior, the protesters duck into the narrow alleyways of downtown Cairo seeking protection from snipers’ bullets (Figure 2). The labyrinthine pathways are bursting with people. With hundreds of lips chanting shared grievances at once, a thunderous echo hits the concrete fortress and voices bounce off, dispersing into the air (Figure 3).

Figure 2. Protesters gather at Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, November 2011, after the security forces attacked a sit-in organized by the families of the victims of the Revolution. Photograph by Randa Khorshid. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 3. Revolutionary graffiti on the wall surrounding the old AUC Tahrir campus in downtown Cairo, September 2012. The wall was torn down in 2015 when a campus building located near it was demolished. Photograph by Randa Khorshid. Reproduced with permission.

As we are tear-gassed again, I hear a loud tinnitus in my ears, and I decide to pull back towards the center of the square to catch my breath. Every few minutes, I spot a passing motorcycle carrying injured young men and women away from the clashes to a make-shift field hospital near Tahrir Square (Figure 4). In these moments, I switch my hearing aids off and sit back to rest. In the silence, I manage to detach myself from the chaotic setting and forget about the danger for a few fleeting minutes. I feel like an invisible observer, watching fragments of a revolution. Lips open — I am on stage. Lips close — I am in the audience

Figure 4. A street scene in Cairo, December 2011. Protesters used motorcycles to carry injured and wounded protestors from Mohamed Mahmoud Street to civil field hospitals and ambulances. Photograph by Randa Khorshid. Reproduced with permission.

Return/The City

I am at Tahrir Square, walking through the streets that saw many uprisings unfold. The year is 2020, the ninth anniversary of the 2011 Revolution, and I have just returned from being away for three years. The square sounds strange, and the city looks reticent and weakened; yet it feels like the revolution never really ended.

It’s a soaring hot Tuesday afternoon in April. The discordant din of the city is familiar. The wind is gently rustling the leaves, as it makes its way through the lush crowns of Cairo’s trees. Under an auriculata tree, I hear the sounds of chirping birds before they are interrupted by the whirs of air conditioners. A roaring winch is loading tons of concrete at a construction site, while two demolition trucks unrelentingly raze an old building block at a nearby lot.

Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t have cochlear implants.

For decades, Tahrir Square has served as a stage for the people. It bears witness to Egypt’s modern history as the location of political and historic events that include the Egyptian Revolutions of 1919, 1952, and 2011. The current government’s prolonged renovation plan to change the visual landscape of Cairo, including the erasure of the graffiti of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, reflects the prevailing political climate. As Khalid Fahmy, a history professor at Cambridge University, writes in an article that was published after the renovation plans were announced, “I think the main message is that people do not belong to the square and the square does not belong to the people. This is a square that belongs to the state.”

I hardly ever speak about the days of 2011. How do I explain the silence preceding moments of urban and revolutionary turmoil, or the quietness in the heart of riots? I have known the boisterous Cairo as an inaudible city, the uprising as conglomerated imperceptible tumults of riots. It is acutely personal; the relentless tinnitus and dread of being in the middle of the wrangling noise taught me to find solace in hearing nothing at all, to fade into the silence and remain unseen (Figure 5).

Figure 5. A protest in Tahrir Square, November 2011. The Mugamma Building, in the background, housed government administrators from the 1940s until 2015 when plans to empty it were announced as part of the renovation of Tahrir Square. The government was also preparing to relocate outside the city center, likely to a new capital city. Photograph by Randa Khorshid. Reproduced with permission.

I keep returning to Tahrir Square, in spite of the obvious danger. I keep returning despite the efforts to expunge its symbolic meaning; the renovation of the square’s roundabout monument, the demolished walls of Mohamed Mahmoud Street and disappearance of the graffiti on them, the repainted facades, and the concrete barricades blocking various streets. I lament the demolition of the National Democratic Party’s (NDP) building, not so far from Tahrir Square, that was set on fire during the eighteen days of the revolution, its flaming edifice mirrored in the Nile as a testimony to the falling of a regime.

My experience of the city has changed. My sonic memory of it is closely interlaced with an optical one, where I could only “hear” what was visible and tactile. With the earlier hearing aids, Cairo was a pandemonium — a sonic mish-mash of whirs, clanks, screeches and blares that echoed the city’s calls for help against the demolishment of modern heritage and urban disintegration.

When the sound processor of my cochlear implant is switched on, I feel like I hardly know this place. I fail at all attempts to conjure the old sounds of my hometown as my brain now perceives them in a different way. The pitches, the frequencies, the tones, and the ranges now have offbeat qualities that have taken over the sounds of the past.

I look around and watch people ramble in and out of the soundscape of their city, mirroring my ambling of the streets and experiencing the new sounds of familiar spaces.

At this moment, I realize that I am discovering my city anew, after leaving it three winters ago. To be hearing my hometown differently for the first time, almost feels like a loss. The Cairo of my childhood is a place of no return (Figure 7).

Figure 7. A side street in Old Dokki, a residential neighborhood in Cairo, July 2011. Photograph by Randa Khorshid. Reproduced with permission.

Sounds are laden with meanings, both on a personal level and on an urban scale. I do not know how to explain my Cairo to the hearing world — now that I am able to experience them sonically: the geophony, biophony, and anthrophony, the natural and industrial. Cairo is indeed loud, but its acoustic mayhem undeniably communicates its rich urban past — Mamluk, Ottoman, Modern — before neo-liberal dreams started looming across its skyline and brought their own sounds and silences (Figure 8).

Figure 8. The Nile waterfront, Cairo, June 2020. Apartment blocks and private gardens known as “Mashtals” are two of the many elements situated along the river. Photograph by author.

With the noises seemingly so foreign now, I wonder if my memory of home has always been visual. A deaf girl returning home — with new bionic ears under her scalp — looking for silence on busy streets. This is me now. I am roaming the streets that I grew up in and chasing the pockets of silence that are lost to me. I stoop to touch the pavement that I used to shuffle my feet on and run my hands against the city’s uneven walls. I see many buildings that I grew up around turn into ruins, and I wonder: if one can’t save their city, can they save their memories?

Author’s note: The author is grateful to Suheyla Takesh and Sarah Rifky for their feedback and input on this essay.