I recently started reading Leila Ahmed’s memoir A Border Passage. Her writing transports me to a time before Cairo became the place that I called home for so many years, and her experiences resonate with me as distant reflections of some of my own. While I identify with much in her narrative, it is also interesting to see the things that strike me as false, the things that my memory and experience belie.
Towards the beginning of the book, Ahmed spends some time talking about the sounds of Cairo, and she mentions the man who walks the streets in the morning playing a reed flute:
His pipe sounded private, like someone singing to himself. A simple, lovely sound, almost like speech, like a human voice. He would say ‘good morning’ with his pipe and one knew it to be ‘good morning.’ When he passed it would feel as if something of infinite sweetness had momentarily graced one’s life and then faded irretrievably away.
Years later I’d discover that in Sufi poetry this music of the reed is the quintessential music of loss and I’d feel, learning this, that I’d always known it to be so. In the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi, the classic master-poet of Sufism, the song of the reed is the metaphor for our human condition, haunted as we so often are by a vague sense of longing and nostalgia, but nostalgia for we know not quite what. Cut from its bed and fashioned into a pipe, the reed forever laments the living earth that it once knew, crying out, whenever life is breathed into it, its ache and its yearning and loss. We too live our lives haunted by loss, we too, says Rumi, remember a condition of completeness that we once knew but have forgotten that we ever knew. The song of the reed and the music that haunts our lives is the music of loss, of loss and of remembrance.
This is a beautiful passage, and it expertly borrows Rumi’s metaphor of the reed and retells it in a way that is both moving and compelling. While the feelings that she expresses may be universal, I think they may be even more present, more poignant, for the memoirist. If all of our lives are haunted by a music of loss and remembrance, a music that is played softly in the background and which we only notice at certain hours of the day when the sun’s fading light has that quality of melancholy, or when something confronts us that pulls us in and wraps us in the feelings of what may as well be another life, the memoirist brings all of this to the fore in a conscious effort to recall and record what their memories can still grasp of the past.
But for me, this is not the reed of Cairo’s streets; that song is uplifting and joyful. In the days of Leila Ahmed’s childhood I imagine this would have reflected Cairo’s idyllic clime, but in the years that I lived in Cairo, hearing the pipe seller walk the streets calling out with his joyful greeting, it served as a counterpoint to the pain and the difficulty which we, the city’s residents, often experienced. Much like the humor of a cab driver engulfed in smog and poverty, this song served not as a distraction from the hardship, but as an act of rebellion, a lashing out with whatever is at hand to try to conquer the oppression and the darkness. Rumi’s reed is far more mournful, far more beautiful, far less defiant.
There is another passage in Ahmed’s book that explains the discrepancy between her memory and mine even better than the separation of fifty years. Recalling funeral processions that would pass by her home, Ahmed incorrectly quotes the Arabic phrase the pallbearers would exclaim. Concerning this she says,
That was how I heard the phrase, which, as I now know, is different in its “correct” form – but of course memories are the stories of our consciousness rather than just “objective” facts.
We are each allowed our own memory of the reed, and our different interpretations do not cause the music to be any less pervasive, the song any less profound, or the echo in our hearts any less real.
