Listening
April 2, 2009 by cua_mac249
On some days, as I leave the metro at Midan Ataba, I pass televisions sputtering the latest pop music videos, and on others, they are tuned to one of the many Qur’anic recitation channels. Ascending the steps, I enter the space of the midan (square), where street vendors hawk shoes, tapes, and books, competing in the air for the ear of the passer-by, who would not usually stop, but may if a particularly good price catches their ear. I sidestep a table, upon which is perched a megaphone attached to a wire, speaking the disembodied voice of a garbled, fuzzy prayer sermon. Finally making it out to the street to hail a cab, I participate in the noise by shouting for a cab, while soliciting honks from passing cars who already have passengers and want me out of the way, and whose drivers skirt past me with adrenaline-inducing swooshes and screeches.
The traffic honks, a sprayed, fragmented multiplicity of pitches, chords, and an occasional arpeggio (some of the horns like this hover between creativity and annoyance), continue as I step into a cab, asking for the Al-Azhar mosque, behind which I take my oud lessons. In the cab, two 5-inch speakers sit behind me, their days of clean voices, if they ever existed, now long gone. Every ten seconds or so, I can make out “Allahu Akbar” (God is most Great) spoken and then vocalized by two different voices, the intervening moments impenetrable in their quick, distorted exclamations. About once every minutes, another vehicle’s honk makes a claim to space so close to us that I am jolted from my seat, my oud knocking against the car door, but the driver hardly seems to notice. The sermon is replaced by a radio broadcast call to prayer, and as I begin to ponder where it could be coming from, we arrive at Al-Azhar and my question is answered. The radio carries the official Azhari adhan to this taxicab, and there must be hundreds, if not more, cabdrivers who tune in from the far flung neighborhoods. This is nothing like the barber, who upon sending a newly shaven, older Egyptian man out and seating me in the same chair, turned the radio from the Qur’an to Tina Turner, either to his own relief or my casually assumed preference. In the taxicab, I am far more anonymous, another moment in an constant drive with a constant soundtrack, fascinating yet impenetrable to my linguistic barriers.
I pull my hand recorder out of my backpack and turn it on. Several days before, in my attempt to conduct an interview about the call to prayer at the local mosque, I had refrained from using it. In that moment, it became a political symbol; the silent, spying microphone that symbolically brings together the state censor, the police interrogator, and the prodding Westerner all into a little metallic box, which clearly would have made my subjects uneasy. As I turn it on to capture public space instead of private speech, I wonder if and how this moment may be different. I wonder whether the notebook and pencil escaped these troubling connotations. I wonder what the difference is between spying, learning, studying and interrogating, and if/how my anonymous individuality in public is different from my private interaction with individuals.