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Samia Mehrez is a professor of modern Arabic literature and director of the Center for Translation Studies at the American University in Cairo. She is the author of Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction: Essays on Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim and Gamal al-Ghitani (1994/2004) and Egypt's Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (2008/2010). Most recently, Mehrez edited and partially translated the companion volumes The Literary Atlas of Cairo: One Hundred Years on the Streets of the City (2010) and The Literary Life of Cairo: One Hundred Years in the Heart of the City (AUC Press, 2011).
Michelle Johnson: We've read where you've described yourself as "a Cairo girl." Is there a particular text that captures what Cairo is to you?
Samia Mehrez: If there were one text that captured what Cairo is to me, I would not have undertaken the two-volume literary atlas project! Each and every text that I included in the atlas imparts one impression of the city, one level of its energy, one aspect of its life, of being in it, moving in it, but also reading it, discovering it, and imagining it. It was a great pleasure working on the atlas project precisely because it brought together all these representations of a city that defies being "captured" in one text. Moreover, the city is an ever-growing creature with many faces that are in constant flux. I grew up in a Cairo that was substantially different from what the city has become today. I therefore share a lot of the nostalgia in some of the texts for that city of my childhood as a privileged, upper-middle-class child and teenager. At this level, I can relate to representations of a belle époque Cairo with its clean boulevards and posh neighborhoods, its bourgeois households and tastes, etc. But I also know how limited and limiting that impression of the city is. Hence my fascination with those other faces of Cairo that I don't know firsthand and that have come to preoccupy much of the more recent imaginings and literary topographies of Cairo. I have learned a tremendous amount about those fragments of the city through the aesthetics of their representation in the texts.
I remember telling one of my friends, writer Mona Prince (whose work...