Cairo Magazine - Oral history

“This is not a history book” says Francois Pradal, head of the French Cultural Center in Heliopolis, in the preface, “but a book that tells stories.” The volume, in French and Arabic, is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Heliopolis residents, past and present, grouped around a number of themes (“Transportation,” “Schools,” “Distractions” and “The Desert”). It is also in great part the result of the ongoing research of scholar Mercedes Volait, who wrote several of the chapter introductions and works at the National Center for Scientific Research.

The reminiscences of residents are juxtaposed with a vast collection of photographs, which alone make the book worth buying. The photos include the archives of famous turn-of-the-century photographic duo Lehnert and Landrock, several private Cairo collectors, and many of the interviewees, who contributed images from private family albums. The end result gives the reader a touching sense of life in Heliopolis, of what residents loved about their city, and of what some of its defining meeting points, social customs and overlapping communities were.

That said, it is not clear how representative the book is of the totality of experiences of Heliopolis. The interviewees are mostly members of the French Cultural Center or other individuals contacted through them; Pradal

estimates that about 70 percent of them are Francophones. Reading the book, one gets a clear sense of the world of upper classes in Heliopolis; but there is little evidence of the life of the workers that kept the whole place running. Readers would benefit from more biographical information attached to the quotes (the age of the interviewee, where he or she lived in the city), to situate more clearly where these voices are coming from. The point of view of Egyptians who moved to Heliopolis after 1952—who were not so sentimentally attached to the city’s origins but actually benefited from the departure of most foreign residents—would also have been a welcome addition. Nevertheless, Mémoires Héliopolitaines is an invaluable anthropological history and a fantastic visual reference.

Mémoires Héliopolitaines (Heliopolis Memories), LE200, Harpocrates Publishing to come out in May.