210 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬LISA ANDERSON is James T. Shotwell
Professor Emerita of International Relations at
Columbia University and was President of the
American University in Cairo from 2011 to 2015.An American
in Cairo
Egypt Through Western Eyes
Lisa Anderson
The Buried: An Archaeology of the
Egyptian Revolution
BY PETER HESSLER. Penguin Press,
2019, 480 pp.P
eter Hessler, the author o several
award-winning books on China,
spent late 2011 to 2016 in Egypt,
reporting for The New Yorker. His new
book, which collects and expands on his
magazine essays, is destined to become the
title that all ¿rst-time visitors to Egypt
are urged to pack, slipped neatly between
their guide to the Egyptian Museum and
the itinerary o their Nile cruise.
Hessler is an extraordinary writer,
and his Egypt is full o scoundrels
turned heroes and heroes turned scoun-
drels. The book’s reach is wide, from the
puzzles o ancient tombs to the preoccu-
pations o contemporary marriage, and
it oers beguiling stories about ordinary
and extraordinary Egyptians alike: a
garbage collector, a police ocer, a devout
woman who wears a niqab, a man who
frequents illegal gay nightclubs, a small-
town politician. Hessler weaves together
rounded portraits o these and other
characters, leavening their stories withendearing anecdotes, a little (but not
too much) modern history, a lot (but
not too much) o Pharaonic history,
and droll observations about what you
really learn when you try to acquire a
new language and what the study o life
4,000 years ago may reveal about life
today. As someone who was living as a
foreigner in Egypt while Hessler was
there, I can attest that much o his portrait
rings true, reÇecting many recognizable
elements o the country—not least the
wry, self-deprecating, prideful humor for
which Egyptians are justly reputed and
the astonishingly powerful family solidar-
ity that is both a source o stability in
turmoil and, in Hessler’s view, a drag on
social and political change.
Hessler lived with his family in the
upscale neighborhood o Zamalek,
within walking distance o the best Cairo
hotels (not that anyone walks in Cairo).
He made a habit o visiting archaeological
sites along the route o the classic
touristic Nile cruise. Everywhere he
went, he found oØeat and sometimes
revealing people, sights, and sounds. With
typical Egyptian hospitality, his garbage
collector Sayyid let this nosy foreigner tag
along on his rounds. Hessler reports that
i he was “curious about anyone in the
neighborhood, I always asked Sayyid”—
one can glean a great deal about people’s
drug use, health troubles, and tastes in
food and sex from their unsorted garbage.
Another important source for Hessler was
his remarkably open interpreter, Manu,
who revealed to Hessler the largely
hidden world o gay men in a society in
which identities and desires are rarely
as straightforward as Hessler expected.
As he observes, for all young Egyptians,
“sexual repression was a constant weight
on their psyches.” He adds that “youngReturn to Table of Contents