Food writer Claudia Roden reflects on The Yacoubian Building by Marwan Hamed
When I was a girl in Cairo, Egypt, in the 1950s, my favourite outing was going to see a weekly film with my family, then going to eat ice creams and pastries. We saw everything that came out of Hollywood starting with Snow White, Pinocchio and Bambi. But when I was a teenager, the films that made an impression on me were neorealist Italian films, such as Vittorio de Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves) and Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice). I also really enjoyed French films such as the Fanny, Marius and César trilogy by Marcel Pagnol. French was our mother tongue and we also spoke Italian.
More recently, a film that means a lot to me is the Egyptian film, The Yacoubian Building, from the novel by Alaa Al Aswany.
Claudia Roden © Stuart Simpson
Set in the early 1990s, it tells the story of the inhabitants of a faded art deco building in the centre of Cairo (its namesake still stands). The film opens in sepia colour with a shot of Egyptian Jews scrambling down the stairs with suitcases. It is a glimpse of what became of the Egypt we left behind after the Suez crisis in 1956. Like thousands of other Egyptian Jews, my family was expelled from Egypt by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the same year. Our flats were given away to army officers and they sold them on.
The main stories focus on an elderly, womanising pasha; an ex-shoeshine boy turned drug dealer, who is trying to buy himself a place in politics and a gay journalist working for a French language newspaper. There is also a young woman who is forced to support her family by giving sexual favours to her boss, who owns the shops on the building’s ground floor and there is the educated and idealistic son of the porter. He wants to be a police officer but finds he has no contacts to help him into the profession so turns to fundamentalism and becomes a terrorist.
The building’s rooftop terrace, where storage rooms have been turned into homes for poor squatters from the villages, has become a most desirable slum.
The film represents a society dealing with the indignities of life in a country corrupted by bribery, commercial venality, political cronyism, class and sexual prejudice. These taboo subjects are treated in a vivid, moving way, similar to what you might see on an Egyptian soap opera. The action spreads out into the world of newspapers, politics, commerce, café society, the army and the fundamentalist mosques.
But it also shows a particularly Egyptian type of decency, humanity and humour. I found it so endearing – it moved me and made me laugh. It is still an Egypt that I love.
Claudia Roden’s latest book, Med (Ebury Publishing, 2021) is out now.
This article appears in the Spring 2022 issue of JR.