Lisa Anderson
214 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
night, with no electric lights, no police
presence, and guns everywhere, I could
walk safely in the village.” He marvels
that “in a country where systems and laws
had always been weak, there were other
forces that kept the place from collaps-
ing.” In searching for an explanation for
this mysterious stability, he concludes
that “the only real structure was the same
one that had shaped local life since long
before the ¿rst royal tombs were dug into
the Buried. It has nothing to do with
the Brotherhood,... or Sisi, or any other
political ¿gure or group. For Egyptians,
the family was the deep state.” That
the family provides safety and solace to
Egyptians confronted with a vast but
sclerotic and disorganized state is a
typically astute observation on Hessler’s
part. But even though the family looms
large in Egyptian society, so, too, do
religious impulses, neighborliness, patriot-
ism, and a certain ineable warmth and
lightheartedness.
Hessler ends his book on a wistful note.
“Nobody had asked us to go to Egypt,
and nobody was asking us to leave,” he
writes o his family’s departure, which was
prompted by the realization that there
were “limits to how long [they] could stay
in a place where life was so dicult.” He
was admirably reluctant to admit this to
the Egyptians he was leaving behind, and
for whom there is little escape from the
diculties. Like most visitors to Egypt,
many o whom will value his book as a
congenial guide, Hessler found his travels
interesting and brought home a lot o
good stories, which he tells exceptionally
well—but he was glad to be going home.
That leaves readers to wonder about
the lives o those for whom Egypt is
home. Disappointment with the outcome
o the Arab uprisings has soured manywomen in Egypt. “It wasn’t until I started
visiting Chinese shopkeepers in Upper
Egypt that I realized how much I had
missed seeing men and women together,”
he writes. “It was relaxing to spend time
with the Chinese—I could sit and talk
with Kiki without worrying about her
husband’s reaction or whether my male
presence might damage her reputation.”
Hessler does not seem to have spent
much time with women during the course
o his reporting, but he developed a
clear impression o what everyday life is
like for most Egyptian women. “I
imagined that being a woman in Egypt...
required constant energy, thought and
adjustment,” he writes, adding that a
typical Egyptian woman would have to
“accept the judgements o the men
around her, shÚftÚng her dress and behav-
ior according to whoever they might
be: husband, close relative, distant
relative, friend o husband, neighbor, man
on the street.” He then adds: “O course,
the culture in America and Europe also
placed unfair demands on women but
there was no comparison to Egypt.” As a
woman whose life has demanded con-
stant energy, thought, and adjustment
everywhere I have lived and worked, I
missed a more nuanced account o the
speci¿c ways in which Egyptian women
navigate their world.
A DIFFICULT COUNTRY
Hessler points appreciatively to the
resilience o Egyptians and Egyptian
society, something that surely struck
every foreigner who lived in the country
during the tumultuous years after
Mubarak’s overthrow. In April 2013, when
blackouts were common across the
country, Hessler visited the Upper
Egyptian town o Abydos, where “at