I read these days about how the global crisis is encouraging people to cultivate that great, albeit old-fashioned quality known as thrift. Several ‘how-to’ books have been released on the subject (Live Well, Spend Less and Eat Well With Leftovers for instance) as if the knowledge of how to live according to one’s means as opposed to one’s compulsions was a forgotten science. While people in so-called first world cities may be coming to terms with overspending, in places like Cairo austerity is a way of life, and its own reward. It’s not that people lack material desires, only that they are willing to satisfy them with pragmatic simplicity, consuming without being consumed.
Making-do is a Cairene trait I can relate to, not least since it reflects my upbringing in a working-class American family of first generation immigrants. But also because I found the whole consumerist project, with its blaring advertisements and hypnotic slogans, a debasement of art and even life itself. I remember what a joy it was, when I arrived in Cairo in 1980, to find a place innocent of fast-food franchises, where the only things conspicuously consumed were fresh disks of wholewheat bread, where everything that broke was fixed a dozen times and then ingeniously recycled as something else, where the streets were filled with cars from every era, including Model-Ts. Entire herds of traffic-stopping camels could be seen crossing a Nile bridge, and horse- and donkey-drawn vehicles were given the right of way. People were so generous with the little that they had, it was as if they believed their wealth would only multiply by giving it away.
