Cavafy Blinks

In the poetry of the acclaimed Constantin Cavafy, the city of Alexandria is a liminal space – an extension of Greece. Cavafy propagates the myth of a Greek Alexandria in his writing, inventing the city’s identity. Cavafy’s poems take on the status of Greek ruins. Their retrieval becomes an essential part of the hybridized Alexandrian/Athenian national imaginary. In Egypt today, the regime appears indifferent to the Mediterranean as space, with its Graeco-Roman and other European markers. Still, Alexandria as a city is privileged by those very identifiers – we never speak of other Egyptian Mediterranean cities.

Alexandria, as a contemporary city, is corroding, its infrastructure disappearing bit by bit. This loss is analogous to that of Athens, a virtual collapse felt along the fault-lines of economic struggle and gentrification. If Cavafy’s Alexandria was a romantic extension of Athens, of Greece, today the two cities continue to imply each other: the loss of urban infrastructure in Alexandria entails the Athenian struggle of fighting to maintain a space for freedom, autonomy and imagination, against the hegemonic expansion of Europe.