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ANNETTE SOLYST Gallery " A World of Imagination " Start Collecting - click here |
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ANNETTE SOLYST Gallery " A World of Imagination " Start Collecting - click here |
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| ANNETTE SOLYST | VOYAGES |
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Her name is Nagat. I first saw her outside Cairo's airport terminal. A woman taxi driver - the only woman, for that matter, among a thick throng of her male counterparts, all busy shouting "Taxi! You want taxi?..." |
| Almost instantly, my searching eyes had picked her out in the crowd despite the fact that she was shorter than the men, and was easily crowded out by their competitive spirit. - Do you know what it is like to arrive in a strange city in the middle of the night? Whether it is Delhi, Bangkok or Cairo - you always arrive in the small hours of the night. Nobody, not even a ray of sunshine is here to greet you. You are travel weary - you may have crossed five time zones and sat in an excruciatingly poorly designed plane seat for the past twenty hours. You have just endured entry formalities and are headed outside, bag in hand. "Outside" takes on a slightly more sinister air when you travel alone, outside even your own culture. For a moment, you may experience a pang of envy for the fellow passengers who are being met by friends or family. You watch them embrace, smile, in the comfort of knowing exactly what to do and where to go from the moment they are earthbound again. Then you take a quick glance down over yourself, your luggage, and wonder if it is all here, if you are energetic enough to brace this. You know there are five, ten short steps left between the glass wall you will pass through momentarily and the new city beyond; five or ten seconds between the known and adventure. - At precisely that point, I always feel my heart beat faster. I hear myself voice a request to be guided to good and kind people. By then, my ten seconds are up and I am facing the throng of taxi drivers milling about in front of every airport the world over. Here in Cairo, the crowd is large and noisy. "Taxi!" "You want taxi?" I hear all round me. Dark heads and flashing black eyes try to catch mine. I smell pungent dark tobacco; I feel air that's warm on my skin even this time of night. I grip my bag just a little harder to thwart the attempts by several drivers to take it out of my hand and thereby force me to follow the strongest or most persistent one. |
Date Palms |
Eternity |
Mintseller |
| "Where is the woman?" I hear myself think. The flash of an instant we had to make eye contact could not have been long enough. What was I thinking anyway? Instinctively, I had been drawn to her in this chaos. But what was she doing here, and moreover, where did she disappear to? Then, I feel a firm hand holding my left wrist. "You want taxi, follow me", the woman says. She doesn't ask, she simply pulls me energetically through the crowd. I hear her shouting out short sentences in guttural Arabic to the men who had not given up on me yet. I follow her willingly. There is this moment when you simply have to trust someone; when you believe that this person will safely take you wherever you need to go. It is a relief to have her take over so capably, fighting off the other contenders. We stop at a dilapidated rusty-red car. It has seen a better day, there are quite a few dents and bruises on its body, the tires are bald and there is a crack in the windshield. But it is a car for hire, and the woman will personally drive me. I breathe a sigh of relief when she heaves my bag into the trunk, locks it and gets behind the wheel. "I will drive you, don't worry", she says and we are on our way to a fading Cairene hotel in the heart of the city. |
Cairo |
Giza |
Restoration |
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Nagat, as she now explains to me, is a professional taxi driver several days and nights a week. She has another job, working in an office, but details of it remain vague. The little old wreck of a car is not hers; it belongs to a boss from whom she in turn rents it whenever she can. She has been a driver ever since her husband had died some ten years earlier and left her with two teenage kids and her parents to support. Both of the children are grown and attend university now. The daughter studies to be a teacher. The son is working on a degree in computer science. He, too, drives a taxi after school to help support the family.
I can hardly contain my amazement at the good fortune of finding a woman taxi driver in Cairo, of all places. I envisioned women delegated to more "feminine" jobs in the work force. "Yes", Nagat agrees, "most women would not want to be a taxi driver. But I am a widow, and I have to do whatever I can. I am not the only one, either, there are five or six other women drivers in Cairo." She tells me that she likes to wait at the airport terminal for fares. She has a better chance meeting tourists who want to be taken all over town, maybe even several days in a row. She knows every nook and cranny in and around Cairo - no easy feat. Cairo with its maze of streets and lanes, its quarters and bazaars is like a labyrinth invented by ancient storytellers. Khan-el-Khalili, hundreds of mosques - many of which are masterpieces of Islamic architecture -, old neighborhoods with houses boxed together, huge Soviet-style apartment buildings on the outskirts and the Nile calmly running through it; all are part of this overcrowded city. There is a sense of decay. Cairo is like an ancient lady who has lived a thousand years or more, who has seen power come and go, splendor and poverty, who has seen people come from all over to trade their goods. A lady who ages, gets brittle and more scattered with each passing year but has learned to tolerate even the starkest of contrasts with equilibrium at first, and now shows no care anymore at all. Now, she simply tells everyone to "live as well as you can within these crumbling walls", and so they all do in one way or another. - Walking through the city you discover a gem here, a treasure there, but all is crusty and dusty and somewhat neglected. You get a sense that cities do have a human aspect, of weariness, of too much history bogging them down - they know too much, have seen too much and they are tired. That's the impression I got of Cairo, and I wonder how such a city shapes the men and women living in it. |
Born to Ride |
Fowl for Sale |
Worker |
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Quite possibly, Nagat is as good an example as anyone could be to determine how a place might shape its inhabitants. Pragmatic, with a mild sense of humor around a deep core of understanding of human nature, she takes control of my sightseeing schedule. Every morning punctually at nine o'clock, I can depend on seeing her short, stocky frame outside the hotel lobby, her round face turning into a big smile as soon as she espies me coming down the stairs. Most every day, she wears an earth tone-colored, ankle length Jellaba . I never see more than the very outer edges of her hairline - the rest is always modestly covered by a large, flowery scarf that she ties under her chin. Her movements are energetic and she doesn't waste any time. Her determined approach seems to have grown on a bed of economy, on the necessity to get as much done as she possibly can. Nothing seems superfluous in Nagat's life. She has learned to stand up for herself, her children; she is an astounding example of an "emancipated" woman in a society that we in the West view as being repressive toward women. What becomes clear to me rapidly as she drives me from museum to pyramid, from one part of town to the opposite, is this: she is a true exception here. Wherever we stop, be it for a cup of tea during a break or upon arriving at an archeological site where her male colleagues gather in the parking area - everywhere, she is being noticed. Men walk up to her in the car with questioning faces and quiz her. As she tells me, they all have one question first of all: "Are you a taxi driver?" She then explains in a few short sentences, and I see the men's faces soften, smile and respectfully and kindly chat with her. This scene repeats itself over and over again. I get the sense that she invites goodwill from the people she meets and on this sentiment; we literally "roll" through Cairo on a positive wave. The manner with which men react to her has another aspect very much to my own advantage: Not a soul pays attention to me. I have become invisible. This allows me to be an unobtrusive observer - rather novel in a country where tourism is the bread and butter of many. I am spared the offers of souvenirs; the hawkers of merchandise find her story a lot more interesting than another tourist haggling over price. Nagat is proud and self-sufficient. One day, as I find her waiting outside a museum, she is just taking a spare tire out of the trunk of the taxi. One of the bald tires had finally gone flat, and she was going to change it herself. Several curious spectators gather around her and she receives offers of help - but no, she wants no part of that. In her efficient, deliberate manner, she changes the tire, and having done so, rinses her hands with bottled water, gets in the taxi and asks "Where to now?" Regardless of destination, I know I have to mentally brace for the mad traffic everywhere. Theoretically, there are a number of lanes on streets, with traffic moving in a particular direction. That theory gives way to practicality rather quickly: two lanes turn into four as needed, with the odd car swerving in and out of tight spaces around the other moving vehicles. One way street and I decide to see something a little way back? No need to worry, Nagat will go into reverse and back down the street against traffic. She is not the only one doing this; and besides, it is much faster than going around the block one more time. Strangely enough, this kamikaze driving doesn't seem to result in accidents - I never even saw a fender-bender, let alone the head-on crashes one would expect. |
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Fridays are special for Nagat. She wears a red Jellaba and new shoes, and her flowery scarf is more cheery that the one she wears the rest of the week. It is Sabbath and she takes a few hours off to go to pray and to get together with her family. In the afternoon, she takes me to her neighborhood mosque and shows me the relic it is famous for. I'm stared at quite a bit here, looking foreign and non-Moslem.
I can't help but think that Nagat has a more far-reaching impact upon the people she encounters in her world than meets the eye. Even though her work is dictated by economic necessity, she is a symbol of change. She arouses curiosity, invites surprised comments, beckons acceptance. Her travels around town allow her to touch many dozens of people each day. And I wonder: how many of the men she talks with repeat her story and because of it, think about the future of their own wives and daughters? Should you find yourself at Cairo's airport, look for Nagat outside the international arrival hall. If you are lucky, you will have a chance to see Cairo through the eyes of a woman taxi driver. (February 1996) |