Ijfs.14.4.473 1

International Journal of Francophone Studies Volume 14 Number 4
© 2011 Intellect Ltd

Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijfs.14.4.473_1
Uncanny city: Revisiting Alexandria’s

haunted spaces
Colette Wilson Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies
Abstract Keywords
This article explores an aspect of France’s relations with North Africa that has Egypt
hitherto received relatively little attention from cultural commentators working Alexandria
in the broad area of postcolonial Francophone studies, certainly in the United uncanny
Kingdom, namely, the photographic representation of Alexandria in the 1980s nostalgia
and 1990s. During this period the city was finally emerging from the near obliv- memory
ion in which it was plunged following the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the subsequent photography
expulsion by the Egyptian government of the cosmopolitan community which had
been responsible for its erstwhile success and prosperity since the 1850s. The arti-
cle takes the photobook Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998) published as part
of the celebrations surrounding L’Année France-Égypte launched by Presidents
Jacques Chirac and Hosni Mubarak, as a representative case study of the depic-
tion of the city at the end of the twentieth century. Using theories of nostalgia, the
uncanny, and photography, this study demonstrates how the aesthetic form and
content of Alexandrie revisitée functions as a historical, cultural, political and
memorialist document, as well as a product of the ‘special relationship’ between
France and Egypt.
Résumé
Cet article analyse un aspect des relations entre la France et l’Afrique du nord
qui, jusqu’à présent, n’a pas reçu beaucoup d’attention critique dans le sphère
des études francophones postcoloniale, du moins parmi les universitaires britan-
niques : la représentation de la ville d’Alexandrie durant les années 1980 et 90.
Pendant cette période, Alexandrie sort de l’obscurité qui la sombre depuis la crise
du Canal de Suez en 1956 quand le gouvernement égyptien expulse les membres
de la communauté cosmopolite qui depuis les années 1850 fut responsable pour
le succès économique de la ville. L’article prend en étude de cas de la représenta-
tion de la ville, le livre-photo Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998), publié
pendant les manifestations célébrant l’Année France-Égypte, inaugurée par les
Présidents Chirac et Moubarak. En employant diverses théories – de la nostalgie,
de l’inquiétante étrangeté freudienne, et de l’ontologie de la photographie – cette
étude démontre la façon dont le contenu et la conception esthétique d’Alexandrie
revisitée travaillent ensemble à fin de créer à la fois un document historique,
culturel, politique et mémorialiste, et aussi un pur produit des rapports spéciaux
entre la France et l’Égypte.
IJFS 14 (4) pp. 473–515 © Intellect Ltd 2011 473
IJFS 14.4_Wilson_473-515.indd 473 12/16/11 5:08:44 PM

Despite the overwhelming number of images, reports and commentaries
to be found all over the Internet about the Egyptian Revolution of 2011
which saw the demise of President Hosni Mubarak, a quick search on
Google for ‘Alexandria Egypt’ continues to bring up a number of travel
websites displaying bright, sunny pictures of the city they like to call ‘The
Pearl of the Mediterranean’, in a bid to promote Alexandria to westerners
as a ‘new’ holiday destination to rival Cairo. Judging by the travel company
and hotel websites it is very much ‘business as usual’, a fact endorsed by
Alain Juppé (2011) who, on his flying visit to Cairo on 6 March 2011,
declared: ‘S’agissant du tourisme, la France a été l’un des premiers pays à
souhaiter que se réamorce le flux touristique’. The Guardian followed suit,
dedicating the front page of its Saturday Travel supplement and a three-
page special feature on Egypt and Tunisia on 18 June 2011 entitled ‘Great
deals, no crowds, and a revolutionary spirit’, in which Adhaf Soueif
(2011: 2) exhorted the paper’s readers to help Egypt get back on its feet by
getting tourism going again, this time to the direct benefit of the Egyptian
people. Focussing on Cairo, she declared that ‘if tour operators won’t run,
do it yourself […] Book on Egyptair. Find hotels on the net and contact
them. Everybody’s offering deals.’
The stock photographs of Alexandria’s Sphinxes and Pompey’s Pillar,
the archaeological sites and the Græco-Roman Museum, ‘Lawrence
Durrell’s’ Cecil Hotel (now a Sofitel owned by the French group Accor),
the blue Mediterranean and colourful streets scenes that populate the
travel websites, however, conjure up a vision of the city which contrasts
quite markedly not just with the YouTube footage of the demonstrations
and riots which took place in Alexandria in 2011 but also with the photo-
graphs contained in the photobook Alexandrie revisitée, published in 1998,
which will be the focus of this article. It seems timely, now that Egypt’s
politics – rather than just its tourist attractions – have so spectacularly
re-entered the western consciousness, to revisit Alexandria past
and present.
Alexandria’s reputation as a model cosmopolitan community from the
1850s to the 1950s has only emerged as an important field of critical
enquiry relatively recently. For example, Veronica Della Dora (2006) has
analyzed the city’s geography within the context of the rhetoric of
postcolonial Alexandria based on a reading of examples of ‘nostalgic writ-
ing’ by ex-Alexandrians Hares Tzalas and André Aciman, representatives
of the two principal communities of the cosmopolitan city – the Greek and
the Jewish respectively. In this she follows the path opened up by Robert
Mabro (2002), an Oxford-based economist and native Alexandrian himself,
who has produced a broad survey of a number of memoirs and autobio-
graphical works produced by Alexandrian exiles including André Aciman,
among other lesser known writers. Deborah A. Starr (2009), meanwhile,
has chosen to study narratives of cosmopolitan Egypt constructed by a
selection of Arabic and Hebrew-speaking writers and film-makers includ-
ing Edwar al-Kharrat, Ibrahim Abdel Meguib, Youssef Chahine, Yitzhaq
Gormenzano Goren and Ronit Matalon, in a deliberate attempt to turn the
focus away from representations of the city by ‘European’ writers and
Laurence Durrell, the central figure in Michael Haag’s populist Alexandria:
City of Memory (2004), in particular. By contrast, Robert Ilbert’s (1996)
474 Colette Wilson

magisterial two-volume Alexandrie 1830–1930, remains the most compre-
hensive socio-historical study of the city to date.
Building on this scholarship, my project focuses instead on an aspect
which has hitherto been overlooked by cultural commentators; examples
of the photographic representation of Alexandria by French and
Francophone artists in the 1980s and 1990s, just as the city was emerg-
ing from near oblivion following the events of the 1956 ‘Suez Crisis’, and
undergoing the beginnings of a construction boom and embarking on a
series of major regeneration projects. By positioning Alexandrie revisitée
within its historical, cultural, political and memorialist context, as well as
a product of the ‘special relationship’ between France and Egypt, I wish to
explore the ways in which the aesthetic form and content of the images
and accompanying texts that make up this photobook conform to a pattern
of uncanny staging of the city. Furthermore, and equally importantly, I
would like to go a little way in addressing the relative lack of critical writ-
ing on the modern relationship between France and Egypt, a lacuna that
has contributed to making a whole area of history and cultural production
virtually invisible within postcolonial French and Francophone literary
and cultural studies, certainly in the United Kingdom, where the focus of
attention on relations between France and North Africa has tended, in the
main, to centre on Algeria.
Cosmopolitan Alexandria: A historical perspective

Before discussing Alexandrie revisitée in detail, it may be helpful to pause a
moment to consider the city’s history. Alexandria was founded by
Alexander the Great in 331 bc, re-conquered successively by the Romans,
Arabs, Mamelukes, Ottomans, Napoleon, and then re-founded by
Muhammed Ali (Mehmet Ali in Albanian and Turkish), commander of the
Ottoman army’s Albanian contingent, who took control of Egypt in 1805
(see Richmond [1977] and Marsot [1985]). Under Muhammed Ali and his
descendants Egypt was an autonomous country but continued to recog-
nize Ottoman sovereignty and to pay its annual tribute to Constantinople.
Muhammed Ali modernized Egypt along European lines and encouraged
migrants from Europe and other parts of the Ottoman Empire to settle in
Egypt. Nationalist uprisings in the latter part of the nineteenth century,
however, resulted in Britain occupying Egypt in 1882 in order to protect
her trade routes to India and the Far East via the Suez Canal (inaugurated
by the French in 1869). This was followed by the creation of the British
Protectorate in 1914. Following the demise of the Ottoman Empire after
1918 and the creation of Egypt as an independent monarchy (in name at
least) under King Fuad in 1922, the Ottoman system of rule in Egypt
finally came to an end. Britain’s influence in the country remained strong,
however, and the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 ensured that her inter-
ests in the region continued to be protected. After 1882 France’s political
influence in Egypt declined but her linguistic and cultural hold on the
cosmopolitan and Europeanized Egyptian elite and bourgeoisie remained.
As for Alexandria, while English was spoken by some among the educated
classes, French remained the lingua franca and life continued to function
in the city much as it had always done in terms of its municipal, judicial
and commercial apparatus (Malosse 1896).
Uncanny city 475

Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism gained its major impetus from French
and British imperialism, a fact that probably helps explain the marginali-
zation in postcolonial studies of the history and fate of the city’s so-called
‘European’ exiles after 1956. Following Edward Said, the focus has instead
been on Egyptian anti-imperialism and nationalism. As Ilbert (1996:
vol. 1, 33) explains, however, Alexandria was ‘colonial’ only in the sense
that the term is understood in relation to the Roman Empire and its
Ottoman successor. The power of the various Consulates (British, French,
Italian, Greek and so on), was in reality quite limited compared with the
city’s various communities, which were modelled on the Ottoman Empire
millets of the nineteenth century whereby it was left up to communities to
decide how they wished to govern themselves. Like the millets, Alexandria’s
communities were religion-based in origin but run by French-speaking
secular leaders – all of whom were also part of a wider social elite for
whom religious, ethnic and linguistic differences were considered second-
ary to an overarching cross-cultural solidarity based on mutual busi-
ness interests.
Alexandria’s organizations and institutions were, therefore, not simply
the result of vested European imperialist interests. The city’s population
was a complex aggregate of people who were closely bound, one to the
other, by a common network of family, friends and business associates.
Ilbert argues that Alexandria’s ‘cosmopolitanism’ was not the same as the
American melting pot and that it only made sense within the context of a
city that functioned as a ‘free city’ and where those governing it all knew
each other personally. Legend has it that ‘Europeans’ formed the majority
of Alexandria’s population. This was far from true, however. Non-Muslims
consisted of: Europeans by birth, nationality or culture; Ottomans from all
parts of the Empire – Jews, Catholics, Orthodox – including Greeks,
Armenians, Syrians and Lebanese; and native Egyptians of mixed ethnici-
ties. As a group they never constituted more than 27 per cent of the popu-
lation. Importantly, it was not so much the actual ethnic origin of the
city’s inhabitants so much as their way of life that made Alexandria a
‘European’ city. Alexandria thus exemplifies the complexity of Ottoman
society (Ilbert 1996: vol. 1, 6–8).
That society was brutally cut short by the military coup and revolution
of 1952. King Farouk, the last reigning descendant of Muhammed Ali,
was forced to abdicate. The nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 by
President Gamel Abdel Nasser and the ensuing attack on Egypt by
combined British, French and Israeli forces – ‘the Suez Crisis’ – led to the
expulsion from the country of all British and French nationals and Jews.
The nationalization of all ‘foreign’ owned businesses and increasingly
restrictive employment and property laws meant that large numbers of
other non-Muslim minorities comprising Greeks, Italians, Maltese,
Christian Syrians and Lebanese, Armenians, and others, many of whose
families had been in Egypt for generations, were subsequently also obliged
to leave in a mass exodus that lasted until the mid 1960s.
In the years following Egypt’s break with the West and the
nationalizations, Alexandria – Egyptian now – was left to decay. Even
when President Anwar Sadat re-opened Egypt’s relations with the West
in the 1970s, encouraging French, British and American investment,
476 Colette Wilson

Alexandria was still marginalized. This was not unexpected because,
since the time of the Arab conquest of Egypt (640–642 ad), Arab Muslim
Egyptians had always rejected Greek Alexandria in favour of Arabic
Cairo, founded as the capital of Egypt in 969 AD. During this period of
decline, Della Dora (2006: 209–10) argues that Alexandria’s physical
geography (its deserted and ruined colonialist architecture) intertwined
with notions of Freud’s uncanny to bring to the surface ‘unwanted’
memories of the expulsions following the events of 1956. Drawing on
Svetlana Boym’s (2001: 41) theories of ‘reflective’ and ‘restorative’
nostalgia, Della Dora suggests that nostalgia for the city’s lost golden age
of cosmopolitanism presents an effective counterpart to the colonial
‘cartographic gaze’. With its focus on pain and loss and the contemplation
of ruins, ‘reflective nostalgia’ is the preserve of Alexandria’s revisiting
exiles and travellers to the city.
By contrast, Della Dora suggests that ‘restorative nostalgia’ manifests
itself in Alexandria as a ‘fluid, multifaceted, and performative’ force. After
decades of neglect, Mubarak’s government and urban developers, often in
collaboration with French architects and academics, finally began, in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, to take an interest in the city’s classical and
cosmopolitan heritage in a deliberate attempt to position Egypt within the
global capitalist economy (Della Dora 2006: 209–10). Two examples
stand out, the construction of the prestigious Biblioteca Alexandrina on
the site of the ancient library of Alexandria, and the inauguration, in part-
nership with the Université de Perpignan, of the first international French-
language university, Université Senghor, styled ‘Opérateur direct de la
francophonie’ and named after the famous poet and first president of
Senegal, Léopold Sedar Senghor. The latest Franco-Egyptian project is an
underwater museum to be built around the sunken ruins of Cleopatra’s
palace (Shenker 2009: 24).
Alexandrie revisitée can in many ways be read as another example of
‘reflective nostalgia’ but ‘restorative nostalgia’ also has a role to play in its
representation of the city in the late 1990s.
‘Entre l’Égypte et la France, c’est une longue histoire’

(Jacques Chirac 1998)
Alexandrie revisitée was published in 1998 to coincide with the celebra-
tions of L’Année France-Égypte which took place in the two countries
between the summer of 1997 and that of 1998, the general aim of which
was to showcase the ‘horizons partagés’ between the two nations. The
photobook accompanied the exhibition of the same title mounted in Paris
at the Institut du Monde Arabe from 24 March to 17 May 1998, and
some of the photographs can still be seen on the Institut’s website. The
year 1998 was important in the history of both France and Egypt as it
marked the bicentenary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt. As
such, the bicentenary can be seen within the context of the many
commemorative events that have been taking place in France since 1989
(Nora 2002). These events have ranged from President Jacques Chirac’s
acknowledgement of France’s role in the Dreyfus Affair and the Holocaust
in 1995, to the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of
slavery and the 1918 Armistice in 1998.
Uncanny city 477

According to the official French government website, however, the
aim of L’Année France-Égypte was not to commemorate Bonaparte’s
imperialist expedition, but instead to celebrate two centuries of friendship
and cultural, technological and scientific exchange between the two coun-
tries and thus draw the French and Egyptian peoples closer together at the
dawn of the twenty-first century (Sénat 1998). In total some 100 separate
events took place. At the State dinner launching the joint initiative, Chirac
paid homage both to Egypt and to Hosni Mubarak, emphasizing the
memorialist and historical importance of the celebrations and praising
Mubarak for his leading role as a promoter of peace in the Arab world.
Chirac (1998) declared:
Aujourd’hui, la France rend hommage à l’Égypte, nation amie. Avec vous, elle
accueille l’un des grands dirigeants de notre temps qui n’a eu de cesse d’emmener
le monde arabe sur la voie de la paix. […] Entre l’Égypte et la France, c’est une
longue histoire, ce sont ces deux siècles de passion qui nous ont réunis, ces
‘horizons partagés’ qui donnent son nom à l’Année France-Égypte et que nous
inaugurerons ensemble. Nos savants, nos ingénieurs, nos médecins, nos créa-
teurs ont tissé depuis longtemps la trame serrée de nos affinités.
While Napoleon’s designs on Egypt were certainly imperialist, with the

aim of capturing the country in order to drive the British from all their
eastern possessions and destroy their control of India (Richmond
1977: 16), he did at least, as Said notes, make an effort to win over reli-
gious Islamic leaders: ‘to prove that he was fighting for Islam’ (2003
[1978]: 82, original emphasis) and the French army was made always to
remember ‘Islamic sensibility’. Napoleon was also instrumental in the
promotion of Egypt’s rich classical heritage and in reviving its economic,
social and intellectual importance, thus laying the foundations for
Muhammed Ali’s modernization project. Napoleon’s commissioned
magnum opus, La Description de l’Egypte, brought Egypt to the attention of
its own people as well as to the world at large.
The British bombardment of Alexandria and occupation of Egypt from
1882 only succeeded in strengthening the ties between Egypt and France. As
the Egyptian-born, Francophone writer Robert Solé (1997: 11) states in his
historical account of France’s ‘passion’ for Egypt since Napoleon landed there
in 1798, ‘les nationalistes égyptiens se tournant [en 1882] naturellement
vers la rivale traditionnelle de l’Angleterre pour appuyer leur revendication
d’indépendance’. Such interpretations by those like Solé who champion
France’s relationship with Egypt, while valid to a certain extent, tend to
overlook the fact that France’s ‘opportunist’ republican leaders had been in
complete agreement with Britain on an interventionist policy in Egypt to
protect their respective colonial interests, and had Jules Ferry not been out of
office in 1882 (following the vote of no confidence against him for his inept
handling of the protectorate recently established in Tunisia), France would
certainly have joined with Britain in the expedition to put down the
nationalist rebellion (Sowerwine 2009: 37–38; Watson 1974: 79–80). The
fact that France stood on the sidelines in 1882 and did not support the British
occupation enabled her to claim the high moral ground while maintaining
her strong cultural and linguistic influence in Egypt.
478 Colette Wilson

According to Solé (1997: 11): ‘Aujourd’hui, la France bénéficie en
Égypte d’une image très positive, sans être au centre des préoccupations.
Quant à l’Égypte, elle exerce sur les Français une véritable fascination,
mais il s’agit essentiellement de l’Égypte des pharaons’. It was the aim of
L’Année France-Égypte to demonstrate to Frenchmen and women that
there is a lot more to Egypt and her ties with France than just Egyptology,
however important that aspect of their relations may be. The whole
orchestrated event that was L’Année France-Égypte can be seen as an
example of France capitalizing on her longstanding links with Egypt
which, while certainly damaged after Suez, soon recovered remarkably
well enabling her to carve out a leading diplomatic role for herself as medi-
ator and peace-broker between the West and the Middle East and North
Africa, and between Israel and the Palestinians.
Straight after ‘le fiasco de Suez’, when the close links between Egypt
and France appeared ruptured, many Francophone Egyptians moved to
France and other French-speaking countries. A number of them, described
by Solé (1997: 474) as ‘hommes pont’ (Egyptians with an excellent
mastery of the French language but who never for a moment abandoned
their own culture) proceeded to set up, in 1993, the Centre d’affaires fran-
co-égyptien (CAFÉ). Comprising some 400 Egyptian and French members,
CAFÉ’s aim is to assist companies and institutions in both countries to
work together to their mutual advantage. This initiative and the celebra-
tions of 1997–98 thus helped pave the way for the launch in 2008 of the
Union pour la Méditerranée (UPM) by Chirac’s successor, Nicolas Sarkozy
(BBC 2008). The UPM comprises 27 European Union countries, Israel,
and states from North Africa, the Arab world, and the Balkans, and repre-
sents in total some 756 million people from Western Europe to the
Jordanian desert. That France should have been chosen to lead such an
organization in conjunction with Egypt is not surprising. As Solé
(1997: 474) neatly summarizes, ‘la France et l’Égypte sont en effet des
partenaires obligés. Il est permis de les considérer, au nord et au sud,
comme les deux grands pôles de la Méditerranée.’
However, following the Revolution of 2011 and with Mubarak gone,
the future of the UMP lies very much in the balance and has become the
subject of some criticism particularly by opponents of both Mubarak and
the deposed Tunisian president, Ben Ali. In hindsight, the former French
ambassador to Tunisia, Yves Aubin de la Messuzière acknowledged that in
creating the UMP, ‘[l’]erreur fondamentale est d’avoir tout misé sur
l’Égypte’, in other words on Mubarak himself (Le Journal du dimanche 2011).
Sarkozy, his own presidency increasingly the subject of much criticism,
nevertheless maintains that the UPM is still indispensible to peace and
economic prosperity in the Middle East. What is certain, however, is that
whoever replaces Mubarak in Egypt will be instrumental in shaping the
UMP’s future and we could speculate, based on past evidence, that the
special relationship between France and Egypt will continue. As
Juppé (2011) recently declared in Cairo:
Je ne suis pas venu ici avec des recettes toutes faites ou des conseils à appli-
quer mais tout simplement pour exprimer la disponibilité de la France.
Cette disponibilité se manifestera, tout particulièrement dans le domaine
Uncanny city 479

économique et social puisque nous mesurons bien les défis que l’Égypte a à
relever dans ces domaines. […] Enfin j’ai évoqué la volonté de la France de
mobiliser l’ensemble de ses partenaires de l’Union européenne pour l’Égypte,
mais aussi pour l’ensemble des pays du Sud de la Méditerranée, en refondant
sous d’autres formes possibles ce beau projet de l’Union pour la Méditerranée
lancé en 2008.
Image-memory-text
Alexandrie revisitée, a paperback photobook measuring 190 mm ∞ 140 mm,
consists of a series of 53 black-and-white and eight colour photographs by
seven different photographers and two accompanying texts by the Lacanian
psychoanalyst and writer Jacques Hassoun, who died in 1999, a year after
the publication of the book. As the photographers and Hassoun are not
that well-known in the Anglophone world, it may be useful to preface the
following analysis with a few biographical details on each of them.
Toni Catany was born in Majorca in 1942 and is based in Barcelona.
He published his first illustrated features on Israel and Egypt in the maga-
zine Destino and the newspaper La Vanguardia in 1968 (Forcano 2008).
His photographic work has earned him a number of prizes and awards,
including the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1991.
Anne Favret and Patrick Manez are two French photographers, both
born in 1964, who work collaboratively from their base in Nice. They
won the French Prix Léonard de Vinci du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères
in 1992 for their photographic project on Alexandria. They exhibited their
work at the Centre culturel français in Alexandria in 1994 and in an
accompanying book, Alexandrie (Favret and Manez 2010).
Bernard Guillot was born in Basle, Switzerland in 1950 and studied at
the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris. He has travelled
extensively in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States and since
the mid-1970s has kept a studio in Paris as well as at the Maffet Astoria
Hotel in Cairo. In 1984 he won a gold medal at the Alexandria Biennale,
one of the world’s leading arts events showcasing work from the
Mediterranean region. In 2000 Guillot published Hôtel Maffet Astoria, le
Caire and in 2003 he won the prestigious Prix Nadar for his photobook Le
Pavillon Blanc. Both books are filled with images of haunting interiors and
ghostly figures taken throughout his long career in Egypt from 1977
onwards. He is today recognized as one of France’s leading photographers
(Stehle-Akhtar 2007).
French, Paris-based Gilles Perrin was born in 1947 and is another
highly regarded practitioner. He specializes in large-format photography
using panoramic and pantoscopic cameras at a slow speed of between 1/8th
of a second to a second, which he considers to be a more human/humane
speed by which to catch the life he sees around him (Perrin 2007). In 1996
he exhibited his series Gens d’Égypte at the Centre culturel d’Égypte. The
photographs were published as Mon Égypte (1996) with an introduction by
the eminent Egyptian writer, the late Naguib Mafouz (Perrin 2007).
The Paris-based photographer and human rights activist Reza (Reza
Deghati) was born 1952 in Tabriz, Iran and has been living in exile in
France since 1981 when he left his homeland following the Iranian
Revolution of 1979. He has worked for Agence France Presse, served as
480 Colette Wilson

Tehran correspondent for Newsweek, and was the Middle East correspondent
for Time. He also served as a consultant to United Nations Programming in
Afghanistan in 1989–90, worked for UNICEF, and has ongoing
assignments for National Geographic magazine (National Geographic 2009).
Much acclaimed in France, Reza exhibited ‘Destins croisés’ at the Sénat
(Palais de Luxembourg, Paris) in 2003 and was awarded the Legion
d’honeur in 2005 by Chirac for his international humanitarian work.
Reza is co-founder of AÏNA, an independent charity working to promote
and support democracy, a free press and free artistic and cultural expression
in Afghanistan (AÏNA 2011). The year 2011 saw two further exhibitions
in France; at the Parc de la Villette in Paris where he showed 22 giant-
format portraits of people from across the world, including Egypt, under
the general title of ‘Une terre, une famille’ (echoing Edward Steichen’s
famous ‘The Family of Man’ exhibition first shown in New York in 1955),
and a retrospective of his life’s work at the Centre d’Accueil pour
Demandeurs d’Asile de Beauvais (Webistan 2011).
Nabil Boutros is the only photographer in the group who is actually
Egyptian. A Christian Copt, he was born in Heliopolis near Cairo in
1954. He studied graphic art in Cairo and then moved to Paris in the
mid-1970s to study at the Beaux-Arts. He began working firstly as an
artist then as a set designer before devoting more of his time to photog-
raphy from 1986 onwards (Afrique in Visu: 2011). It was in the 1980s
that he began photographing street life in Cairo, eventually moving back
into his family home in the 1990s. His recent projects include the series
Égypte est un pays moderne! (2006), Égyptiens (2010) and Égyptiens/the
suit makes the man (2010–11). Boutros works part of the year in Egypt
and the rest of the time in Paris. His motivation for moving back to Egypt
was, he says, ‘to understand what this Egypt was, and whether or not I
was Egyptian’ (Rakha 2003; Boutros 2011). Boutros’s concern with his
identity stems from the fact that while Copts are the direct descendants
of the original Egyptians of the Pharaonic period, they continue to be
marginalized within modern Arab Muslim Egyptian society. There have
been frequent violent clashes between Egypt’s Sunni majority and the
Christian Coptic minority, which only makes up ten per cent of the
population (Pommier 2008: 130–31). The most recent incident took
place in Alexandria on 1 January 2011 when a riot broke out following
the death of 21 people and the injury of 70 others in a suspected car
bomb or suicide bomb attack outside the al-Qiddissin Coptic Church.
While Mubarak’s government was always keen to blame ‘foreign terror-
ists’ for attacks on Copts, the 2011 New Year’s Day riot serves to high-
light the sectarian tensions and the hostility felt by Copts towards the
police and a state which has consistently failed to protect them and
allowed their attackers to go unpunished (BBC 2011). It is significant,
therefore, that on 2 February 2011 at the height of the Revolution,
Christian Egyptians showed their solidarity with their Muslim brethren
by protecting them from attacks by pro-Mubarak supporters as they
prayed in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
Jacques Hassoun (b.1936–d.1999), the writer of the accompanying
texts in Alexendrie revisitée, was a Jewish Egyptian born in Alexandria
into an Arabic-speaking family. He settled in France in 1954 after being
Uncanny city 481

expelled from Egypt, not for being Jewish (this was before 1956), but
because of his communist activities. While he became a French national,
when asked his nationality, Hassoun is quoted as saying: ‘I am Egyptian.
Even though I am French I feel I am, and will always be, Egyptian’
(Weinstein 1999). In an interview with Joel Beinin (1998: 270),
Hassoun explains that the contradictions of his identity arose from the
fact that Egyptian Jews did not have the possibility of becoming Egyptian
nationals so some, like him, became communists. The communist move-
ment in the 1940s was not anti-Semitic and after 1947 supported the
creation of the State of Israel. In 1954 Hassoun believed that he would
return to Egypt with full rights if a socialist government came
to power:
I completely identified with the Egyptian people. I considered myself

completely Egyptian. I even had an expression for a very long time, which I
repeated as recently as ten years ago: ‘I am Jewish because I am Egyptian. I
am Egyptian because I am Jewish.’
(Cited in Beinin 1998: 271)
After the events of 1956–57, however, he realized that he would never

return to Egypt, and this realization made him question his identity:
The desire to be Egyptian, Jewish, communist, and French was too much.
[…] I had to practically reconstruct for myself the category of Egyptian Jews.
For a nonreligious Jew like myself, resigning myself to live permanently in
France is extremely difficult. Though I was not religious, I was Jewish. I
called myself ‘Juif d’Égypte’ [an Egyptian Jew] even though I knew I would
never return to Egypt.
(Cited in Beinin 1998: 271)
He resolved the conundrum by remaining a communist and then becoming

a Trotskyist ‘because the internationalist ideology permitted a certain
marriage of all these contradictions’ (cited in Beinin 1998: 271).
Hassoun’s insistence on his Egyptian rather than French identity can
also be seen to bear out Said’s contention that
no matter how well they may do, exiles are always eccentrics who feel their
difference (even as they frequently exploit it) as a kind of orphanhood. […]
Clutching difference like a weapon to be used with stiffened will, the exile
jealously insists on his or her right to refuse to belong.
(Said 2001 [1984]: 182, original emphasis)
For Said and Hassoun alike, no matter how successful they were profes-
sionally, it would seem that they were never able to ‘overcome the crip-
pling sorrow or estrangement’ felt by many exiles, for such success would
always be ‘permanently undermined by the loss of something left
behind forever’ (Said 2001 [1984]: 173).
In addition to his psychoanalytic practice and his academic writing in
the fields of child development, language, memory, emigration, immigra-
tion and racism, Hassoun also became, in an attempt to make sense of
482 Colette Wilson

his own identity, a keen documenter of the history of Egyptian Jews, a
writer of memoirs and autobiographical sketches, and an advisor to a
number of French and Francophone academics working on cosmopoli-
tan Alexandria (see Hassoun 1981; 1982; 2001). He forged links with
other Egyptian Jews exiled in France and took part in preservation
projects to save Egypt’s Jewish cemeteries and thus became a regular
visitor to the country. As a writer and someone who knew Egypt inti-
mately, Hassoun was invited to contribute the textual commentary that
is typically deemed necessary to complement books of photographs like
Alexandrie revisitée. Such ‘testimonials’ by an officially appointed ‘elder
statesmen of media commentary’ or ‘cultural guru’, whether they be
introductions or epilogues, have been identified by David Scott (1999:
84) as providing ‘an authenticating background or polemical foundation
for the images themselves, involving a presentation of the place and
living conditions depicted, which implies that the photographs are both
necessary and eloquent’. Such textual frames, as Scott goes on to argue,
typically display a mixture of appraisal of the images concerned and the
autobiography of the writer himself. Hassoun’s contribution to Alexandrie
revisitée is no exception.
Unlike the majority of photobooks, however, where the accompanying
text usually comes at the beginning in the form of an introduction,
Hassoun’s two pieces are to be found embedded later in the book, on
pages 33–39 and 65–71 respectively. The first is entitled ‘Parcours mille
fois imaginé autour d’une ville plurielle’ and gives a brief personal and
collective history and archaeology of the city. It begins in media res and is
addressed directly and informally to the reader in the ‘tu’ form with refer-
ence to an unnamed ‘lui’ on whose behalf Hassoun describes the city:
Tu me demandes ce que représente Alexandrie pour lui. Il me faut commencer

d’abord par te décrire ce que sa mémoire avait retenu d’elle, durant toutes
ces années au cours desquelles cette Cité était devenue une ville reconstituée
de lambeaux de souvenirs et de fragments d’envolées lyriques.
(Hassoun 1998: 33)
This poetic conceit is an attempt to disguise the fact that Hassoun is deal-
ing with the task of retrieving and making sense of his own fragmented
and bittersweet memories of the Alexandria where he was born and grew
up. It is important to note, however, that Hassoun’s text also has a past
life of its own, the writer having published a first version in the journal
Le Fer à moulin under the title ‘Ville morte – vil mortel’ in 1973, a second
version in 1979 entitled ‘Les avenues de la mort’ in an edited volume by
Octave Mannoni, Des psychanalystes vous parlent de la mort, and a third
version as a chapter entitled ‘Alexandrie’ in his novel Alexandries (Hassoun
1985: 97–112). The boundaries between memory, autobiography, fact
and fiction are thus further blurred, whether this had been Hassoun’s
initial intention when he wrote the initial version or not. Hassoun himself
states in a footnote to the 1985 version that ‘ce récit insiste’ but ‘je postule
que cette Alexandrie (vivante) pourrait épuiser l’insistance’ (Hassoun
1985: 147). His claim was certainly not borne out for, like a recurring
dream, the city and the text continued to haunt Hassoun’s imagination.
Uncanny city 483

Mary Warnock (1987: 146) emphasizes the pleasures of memory, how
it is memory that defines us as human as well as being the ‘place’ where
we naturally feel ‘at home’. Michael Sheringham (1993: 291–3 and 303),
however, takes issue with Warnock and posits that while memory does
indeed have the apparent power to resurrect and restore the past in the
present and to unite the two, it may also bring about violent disruption:
‘memory’s terrain’, he claims, ‘is an uncanny intermediacy between the
living and the dead.’ Furthermore, Freudian theories such as ‘working
through’ trauma, ‘afterwardsness’, ‘screen memories’, and the idea of
memory as ‘trace’, challenge the idea of memory as a homeland
(Sheringham 1993: 293). Drawing on Jacques Derrida, Sheringham
states that ‘to remember is to engage with what is always other. The act
of remembrance merely disjoins our memories from “us”, turning them
into foreign bodies, alien inscriptions’ (1993: 313). Hassoun’s approach
to autobiography, therefore, can be seen to recognize the distance in time
between past and present, between his past self – now seen as other – and
his current state: ‘je’ has indeed become ‘un autre’. In rejecting the
connection between mémoire and personne Hassoun, like Roland Barthes
and Georges Perec before him, attempts to clear autobiography ‘of the
slur that it necessarily [perpetuates] belief in the old stable ego, the “sujet
plein” discredited by Lacanian psychoanalysis’ (Sheringham 1993: 314
and 328). It is no coincidence that Hassoun was himself a Lacanian
psychoanalyst.
Hassoun starts by verbally mapping the city beginning with its crea-
tion by ‘Alexandre le Macédonien – Aleksander Moukden’ and then imme-
diately making the link between the city and its Jewish population:
la cité que les Judéens désignaient depuis le Moyen Âge et jusqu’aux premières
décennies de ce siècle du nom pharaonique de No-Amon. […] le septentrional
[Alexandre] à lancé trois poignards autour desquels s’enroulaient les cheveux
d’Alexandrie. Et la ville s’est étirée, désarticulée, déformée, meurtrie.
(Hassoun 1998: 33)
He goes on to describe how ‘l’enfant’ (Hassoun himself) was later to

discover the inequalities of the city:
Il découvrira que soixante pour cent de la population égyptienne vivait alors

dans des maisons de brique crue recouvertes de crépi. Mais ici [le long de la
Corniche] les balcons en fer forgé et l’inimitable parlé français alexandrin
qui éclate dans l’air immobile, salé et poisseux, constituent comme une toile
d’araignée où sont venus s’engluer – ou s’embusquer – les notables égyptiens
et les archontes des colonies étrangères ou des communautés retranchées.
(Hassoun 1998: 35)
By subsequently switching from the third person to the second person

plural, Hassoun plays with the ambiguity created by ‘nous’ and ‘notre’
which can also stand in place of ‘je’ and ‘mon’, the individual and
personal, as well as the collective implying a shared set of cultural values
and memories with his intended French readers and fellow Jewish
ex-Alexandrians, as well as, perhaps, a sense of shared guilt that he
484 Colette Wilson

belonged to the ‘European’ middle class in Alexandria with its close links
to the imperialist powers of France and Britain, and whose relative
material success was often gained at the expense of working-class
Egyptians. But he is quick to place that success in its full historical context,
in relation to the Jews at least:
La marche de l’histoire, les membres de sa nation l’avaient subie sinon accep-

tée, abandonnant derrière eux le témoignage de leur stationnement bimil-
lénaire qui n’était plus pour les survivants que les traces en voie d’effacement
d’un temps de passage évanoui. […] Et d’Alexandrie à Paris, nous ne cessons
de re-visiter [sic.] les étapes de notre histoire.
(Hassoun 1998: 37 and 39)
‘Sa nation’ refers to the Jews who first arrived in Egypt during Biblical
times and then again with Alexander and who made Alexandria their
home from the time of its foundation. Hassoun is at pains to emphasize the
fact that Jews had lived in Egypt for some 2,000 years – and he articulates
the shared sense of rupture felt by many others like him (and not just
Jews, I would say) whose roots ran deep in Egypt but who were forced out:
‘ceux que le cours de l’histoire a élevés à la douteuse dignité d’exilés’
(Hassoun 1998: 37). Those, furthermore, who have been forgotten and
eliminated from the Egyptian national narrative but who were now
allowed to return to the country as part of what Hassoun calls ‘cette
grande coproduction grimaçante, de cette mise en scène dramatique de la
part oubliée de l’histoire égyptienne qui se distribue également entre
méconnaissance et passion’ (Hassoun 1998: 37).
As Said (2001 [1984]: 173) notes, ‘exile is strangely compelling to
think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced
between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true
home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.’ And, like Said’s
exiled subject, Hassoun, cut off from his roots, his land, his past, feels an
urgent need to reconstitute his life by choosing to see himself as part of ‘a
triumphant ideology or a restored people’, in his case the Egyptian Jews.
Hassoun’s second text, entitled ‘Alexandrie’, provides only a short
commentary on the photographers and some of their images. Thus the
internal layout of Alexandrie revisitée very much privileges the visual over
the textual and for many readers, particularly those who do not read
French, Hassoun’s words are likely to be overlooked all together.
It is significant, however, that while Guillot’s photograph of Alexandria’s
harbour appears (unattributed) on the front cover (Figure 1), it is Hassoun
who is given top billing – ‘texte de Jacques Hassoun’ – beneath the book’s
title, Alexandrie revisitée, followed by the names of the seven photogra-
phers. Furthermore, the blurb on the book’s back-cover consists of the first
five short paragraphs of Hassoun’s text ‘Alexandrie’, quoted under the
book’s overall title of Alexandrie revisitée, and directly attributed to him by
name. It is Hassoun (in other words the writer rather than any of the
photographers) who therefore speaks first and foremost, setting the scene
and introducing Alexandria to the reader. And, while the names of the
photographers appear again at the bottom of the back-cover, they are still
not permitted to speak for themselves: ‘Sept photographes, Toni Catany,
Uncanny city 485

Figure 1: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: front cover), ‘Vue sur la ville,
côté Mancheya’, photographer Bernard Guillot 1991.
Anne Favret & Patrick Manez, Bernard Guillot, Gilles Perrin, Reza, nous
proposent avec la complicité de l’écrivain Jacques Hassoun, natif d’Alexandrie,
leur vision de cette ville’ (emphasis added). Furthermore, the blurb, by
acknowledging Hassoun by name and emphasizing his privileged status as
‘natif d’Alexandrie’, fulfils a key requirement of the ‘pacte autobio-
graphique’ and would thus confirm the third person narrative within the
book itself as indeed autobiographical (Lejeune 1975: 16).
Hassoun’s back-cover blurb speaks of the development of Alexandria
from an Egyptian fishing village to the city founded by Alexander the Great
which attracted first the Greeks, then the Hellenic Jews and later the Romans:
‘ville exceptionnelle, qui dans l’histoire de l’urbanisme, n’a eu qu’une seule
égale, New York’, he claims. Unlike Ilbert (1996: vol. 1, 6–8) who makes a
clear distinction between the American model and the cosmopolitanism of
Alexandria, as Hassoun sees it, the two cities have much in common: ‘même
conception de la ville, même cosmopolitisme, mais aussi, même mise à
l’écart – radicale – de la population au moins durant un temps.’
486 Colette Wilson

His emphasis then turns to Alexandria as the city of art and learning 1. Hassoun appears to
be confusing Ptolemy
and, more importantly, as the city where the Jewish Bible was first trans- VI Philometor
lated into Greek: (185–145 BCE)
with Ptolemy II
Philadelphus (reigned
Et Alexandrie fut la Cité des Arts et des Lettres, des philosophes et 285–246 BCE). A
des mathématiciens, mais aussi celle qui vit la traduction – sous Greek translation
l’impulsion de Ptolémée VI Philométor – d’un ouvrage sacré, inconnu from the Hebrew
Bible, commonly
de tous jusqu’ici. Cet événement eut des effets considérables sur la referred to as the
culture. Ce livre cessa d’être tribal pour devenir alexandrin d’abord, Septuagint (because,
méditerranéen ensuite, mondial enfin. so the story goes,
it was compiled in
(Hassoun 1998: back cover blurb)1 several stages by 72
Jewish scholars),
Alexandria’s credentials, and by extension those of Hassoun himself and was commissioned
by Ptolemy II
the photographers, now firmly established, the reader is left to open the Philadelphus, and
book and explore the city for herself. is thought to have
The photographs in Alexandrie revisitée – both the book and the been completed
in Alexandria by
exhibition – seem to be at odds with the colourful touristic or more 132 BCE. Ptolemy
traditional ‘sun, sea, sand and pyramids’ view of Egypt. Most of the VI Philometor had
photographs stand instead as an uncanny reminder of Alexandria’s as one of his tutors
the Jewish priest
virtually forgotten past. I use the term ‘uncanny’ in the sense of ghostly Aristoboulos, who
and strange, but also in the wider sense identified by Freud (2003 wrote a commentary
[1919]: 121–62) and later developed by Nicholas Royle (2003), Homi on the Torah (or
Pentateuch), the first
Bhabha (2004: 13–25) and Anthony Vidler (1992), among others, which three parts of the
links the ‘uncanny’ or ‘uncanniness’ to issues of social and individual Hebrew Bible (see the
trauma, and repression, alienation, dislocation, displacement, exile, text of 2 Maccabees
1: 10 cited by Knight
homelessness and death. As Royle explains, the uncanny ‘is a peculiar (2009), and for more
commingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar. […] It can consist in a details the study
sense of homeliness uprooted, the revelation of something unhomely at by Modrzeiewski
(1997)).
the heart of hearth and home’ (2003: 1). The uncanny is also
indissociably bound up with a sense of repetition or ‘coming back’ – the

return of the repressed, the constant or eternal recurrence of the same thing,
a compulsion to repeat. At some level the feeling of the uncanny may be
bound up with the most extreme nostalgia or ‘homesickness’ […] a desire
(perhaps unconscious) to die, a death drive.
(Royle 2003: 2)
The title of the book – Alexandrie revisitée – opens itself up very well to just
such a reading. It suggests the desire to revisit, to return to the very origin
of human existence, to Egypt-Alexandria as mother and womb, to ‘le
retour à un état antérieur […] le retour au repos absolu de l’anorganique’
(Laplanche and Pontalis 1998: 375–76).
Taking Charles Clifford’s 1854 photograph of the Alhambra as a case
in point, Roland Barthes in La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie
(1980) eloquently describes the sense of this Freudian ‘return to origin’ he
feels is evoked by certain landscape photographs:
Cette photo ancienne (1854) me touche: c’est tout simplement que là j’ai
envie de vivre. Cette envie plonge en moi à une profondeur et selon des
racines que je ne connais pas: chaleur de climat? Mythe méditerranéen,
Uncanny city 487

apollinisme? Déshérence? Retrait? Anonymat? Noblesse? Quoi qu’il en soit
(de moi-même, de mes mobiles, de mon fantasme), j’ai envie de vivre là-bas,
en finesse – et cette finesse, la photo de tourisme ne la satisfait jamais. Pour
moi, les photographies de paysage (urbains ou campagnards) doivent être
habitables, et non visitables.
(Barthes 1980: 66, original emphases)
Several of the photographs in Alexandrie revisitée not only testify to the

aesthetic influence of nineteenth-century photographs, such as Clifford’s
‘Alhambra’, but they also share with him his predilection for places and
spaces which are similarly ‘habitables, et non visitables’. That is to say,
they are not touristic photographs, they are, to quote Perrin (2007) ‘une
construction consciente loin de la photographie de consommation’, that
draw the viewer into the sites they depict. The photographs disturb because
they are both homely and strange. The photographer transports the (will-
ing) intended viewer both backwards and forwards in time to an imagined
utopia. ‘Devant ces paysages de prédilection’, notes Barthes (1980: 68),
tout se passe comme si j’étais sûr d’y avoir été ou de devoir y aller. Or Freud
dit du corps maternel qu’ ‘il n’est point d’autre lieu dont on puisse dire avec
certitude qu’on a déjà été’. Telle serait alors l’essence du paysage (choisi par
le désir): heimlich, réveillant en moi la Mère (nullement inquiétante).
(Barthes 1980: 68, original emphasis)
On the surface, the photographs in Alexandrie revisitée are not just at odds
with touristic, or ‘visitable’, representations of the city but also with much
of Chirac’s (1998) politically motivated rhetoric during L’Année France-
Égypte, and yet it is interesting to note that even the erstwhile Président
Figure 2: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 6-7), ‘Catacombes de Kom

el-Chougatâ’, photographer Nabil Boutros, 1997.
488 Colette Wilson

Figure 3: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 10–11), ‘Tête d’Alexandre’, ‘Tête d’Aphrodite’
photographer, Toni Catany 1991.
de la République also felt the need to return to (revisit) a very well-known 2. The calotype is the
direct ancestor of
cliché, with undoubted Freudian undertones, when he described Egypt as modern photogra-
‘“Mère du monde”, qui veut épouser son temps.’ phy. Discovered by
Like most photobooks on cities, the photographs in Alexandrie revisitée Henry Fox-Talbot in
1840 and patented
are sequenced so as to provide an armchair tour of Alexandria both in in 1841, the calotype
time and space. From Guillot’s opening panorama of the city from across process depended
the bay (Figure 1) on the front-cover, an image which is reproduced again on the creation of a
negative that could
alongside another panoramic shot on pages 2 and 3 (Figure 11), we are be used for making
taken by way of the book’s preliminary pages (publication, title and multiple prints, unlike
contributors) to the entrance of the city’s medieval catacombs in a shot by the daguerreotype
(invented by Louis-
Boutros on pages 6 and 7 (Figure 2). This is followed by the first section of Jacques-Mandé
the book proper which focuses on Alexandria’s Hellenic and Ptolemaic Daguerre in 1839)
origins, thus establishing early on Alexandria’s Western European cultural which was a unique
object.
heritage. Catany’s photographs – a series of grainy sepia calotypes – are
taken in the Græco-Roman Museum. 2 These images capture our attention
not just because of Catany’s idiosyncratic use of nineteenth-century photo-
graphic techniques (which take us back to the origins of photography itself
just as the Museum takes us back to the origins of the city) but also because
they emphasize the dilapidated state of the Museum itself with its patched
Uncanny city 489

Figure 4: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 82–83), ‘Lac de Mariout’, ‘Pêcheurs du port
d’Alexandrie’, photographer Reza, 1991.
up walls and eerie dismembered statues and disembodied heads (Figure 3).
The book’s last section transports us to modern-day Egypt with Reza’s
colour photographs of young Egyptian fishermen and boat-hands whose
lives, we imagine, have changed very little from those of their ancestors in
the intervening millennia (Figure 4). Indeed, the first line of Hassoun’s
second text (reproduced on the back cover blurb as noted above), with its
echoes of Genesis, draws attention to this fact: ‘Au commencement était
un village de pêcheurs égyptiens, Mariotis – aujourd’hui Mariout’ (Hassoun
1998: 65). Lake Mariout is a salt lake located just south of Alexandria and
forms the city’s southern border. Mariout is part of the Coptic Holy
Metropolitanate of Beheira and thus traces its history back to Egypt’s
Christian origins. Christianity was established in Egypt in about 100 AD.
In between the ancient and the modern, we are offered a rather dark
vision of a decaying city where, as is often the case with visitors to the
city, the different photographers have for the most part sought out the
city’s wastelands and ruins and some of the last remaining traces of
Alexandria’s cosmopolitan past (Figure 5).
The overall darkness of the majority of the photographs is accentuated
by the aesthetic conception and production of the book as a whole and the
publication series to which it belongs. The incongruous juxtaposition
between what we know in reality is a very sunny Mediterranean city and
the dark images contained in the book is mirrored in the paradoxical
combination of the title of the photobook collection, ‘Monde Soleil Arabe’,
and the name of the publisher, Revue Noire. This semantic paradox finds
its parallel in the very nature of the photograph itself, which is the product
of the marriage between (sun)light and darkness.
490 Colette Wilson

Figure 5: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 22–23), ‘Alexandrie’, photographers Anne Favret
and Patrick Manez, 1992.
If, Reza’s colour photographs aside, Alexandrie revisitée is no National 3. The translation of
Heidegger’s term
Geographic coffee-table book, it is no conventionally nostalgic representa- unheimlich or unhe-
tion of the city either, by which I mean that this photobook differs very imlichkeit is literally
much in its dark aesthetics from Alexandrie l’Égyptienne, for example, ‘unhousedness’ or
‘not-at-home-ness’
another photobook also published in 1998 to accompany an exhibition (McLeod 2000:
during L’Année France-Égypte, with photographs by the Brazilian Paris- 219–20). See also
based photographer Carlos Freire and an introduction and captions by Ashcroft, Griffiths and
Tiffin (2000: 73–74),
Solé (Freire and Solé 1998). That book arguably harnesses nostalgia for and Vidler (1992: ix
Alexandria’s lost cosmopolitan past in order to promote a utopian ideal for and 10–12).
Egypt’s future (Wilson 2012). Nostalgia may, as Margaret Iversen claims
(1998: 426 and 411), run ‘imperceptivity into uncanniness’, and the
conflation between nostalgia and uncanniness may repeat ‘exactly the
peculiar relation of the unheimlich to its opposite, heimlich’,3 but there is an
important distinction to be made between the two: ‘what a nostalgic view
of the past lacks is a sense of the violence of repression.’ The uncanny,
unlike nostalgia, ‘returns unbidden into the present’ (Iversen 1998: 426).
Freire’s photographs in Alexandrie l’Égyptienne do not possess this uncanny
sense of violence and repression whereas, I would suggest, several of the
images in Alexandrie revisitée do.
Uncanny city 491

For Avery F. Gordon (1997: 183 and 63), ‘the ghost cannot be simply
tracked back to an individual loss or trauma’, but needs to be contem-
plated ‘at the level of the making and unmaking of world historical events’.
Similarly, for Bhabha ‘the unhomely moment relates the traumatic ambiv-
alences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political
existence’ (Bhabha: 2004: 15). The images in Alexandrie revisitée create
Figure 6: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 27), ‘Alexandrie’, photogra-

phers Anne Favert and Patrick Manez, 1992.
492 Colette Wilson

just such an uncanny experience as they disturbingly bring back into the
present a past that was previously hidden and forgotten, and thus they
bear witness to the identities that were ruptured and the lives that were
displaced following the events of 1956. Empty apartments that were once
warm and comforting homes in a city that was once intimate, knowable
and communitarian now induce a sense of anxiety, terror even (Figure 6).
In his essay ‘Alexandria: The Capital of Memory’, Aciman (2001: 11)
describes his return to the city in the 1990s and how he sought out his
great-grandmother’s house, which had been left empty since the family left it
in 1965. He is at first tempted to go inside but, he says, ‘the thought of a
dark apartment where no one’s been for three decades frightens me. Who
knows what I’d find creeping about the floor, or crawling on the walls’ (11).
According to James Risser (1992: 70), ‘an uncanny space is […] first of
all a space of displacement’, and for Vidler, the concept of the uncanny
finds its metaphorical home in architecture. For while there is no such
thing as ‘uncanny architecture’ there is ‘architecture that […] is invested
with uncanny properties’ (Vidler 1992: 11–12). The most obvious exam-
ple is the haunted house. It is with some trepidation that we, like Aciman,
would dare cross the threshold of the old dilapidated apartment block
captured by Favret and Manez (Figure 7) for example, which recalls
Figure 7: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 24–25), ‘Alexandrie’, photographers Anne Favret and
Patrick Manez, 1992.
Uncanny city 493

4. The Port of Eugène Atget’s photographs of Parisian doorways and Edward Hopper’s
Axexandria eerie stairwells.
constitutes a
palimpsest in itself. Alongside the image of the doorway by Favret and Manez, is their
It was Muhammad photograph of a Coptic chapel (Figure 7, right-hand image). The chapel is
Ali who, from 1805, relegated to the back of an alley, overpowered by massive, rampart-like
was responsible for
the regeneration walls on either side. No sky is visible. The left-hand wall bears a street sign
of the Port of in Arabic, testifying to the Muslim ascendancy in the city and the image
Alexandria. As as a whole could stand as a metaphor for the oppressed, marginalized
Ottoman viceroy of
Egypt he reopened status of Egyptian Christians. The two white crosses attached to the door
access to the Nile and wall of the chapel shine out, however, in the centre of the shot, as if
for the Port via floating amid the gloom of the alleyway and reminding us that the Copts
the construction of
the 45-mile long will never give up their struggle for recognition, equality and justice, no
Al-Mahmudiyah matter what the sacrifice.
Canal in 1820. New We sense in such photographs the ‘strangeness of framing and borders,
docks and an arsenal
were built in 1828 an experience of liminality’ that Royle (2003: 2) identifies as another char-
and 1833, and the acteristic of the uncanny. This experience of liminality and the sense of death
Port became the main and decay it often engenders, is also to be found in Guillot’s shots of the
hub of Alexandria’s
industry, growing long-abandoned docks on the edge of the city where cotton, Egypt’s greatest
in tandem with the export and the chief source of Alexandria’s wealth in the nineteenth century,
city’s commercial was traded (Figure 8).4 Guillot’s haunting images recall ‘La Zone’ in Cocteau’s
and banking sector.
The American Civil Orphée, a chilling vision both of the underworld and the ravages of war.
War created a new Industrial ruins, as Tim Edensor points out, also remind us of the
cotton boom in the cyclical nature of the economic process ‘whereby the new is rapidly and
early 1860s and
inevitably transformed into the archaic, what was vibrant is suddenly
Figure 8: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 42–43), ‘Quartier du docks, Alexandrie’, photographer
Bernard Guillot, 1989.
494 Colette Wilson

inert, and all subsides into rubbish in the production of vast quantities of this, together with
the opening of the
waste’ (2005: 165). Guillot’s ruined docks stand as testimony to the boom Suez Canal in 1869,
and bust of capitalist expansion and the force of national and global politics meant that the Port
and economics. Ruins exist as timely reminders that no building lasts of Alexandria enjoyed
yet another period
forever, ‘they bring to mind new buildings, constructed to promise future of rapid growth. The
prosperity […] but these too will crumble and decay when they are no Port was occupied by
longer deemed economically useful’ (Edensor 2005: 165–66). While they the British in 1882
when they bombed
remain standing, however, ruins are a reminder of what appears no longer the city in order
to be there (Certeau 1990: 162). In Guillot’s images we see the ghostly to quell the local
traces of a once very busy inhabited industrial space where people worked nationalist revolt. The
British maintained
their shifts to create the city’s wealth. There is an old abandoned, rusty their presence in
train and disused tracks. We can see the electrical support posts and the the Port until 1922.
tangled web of overhead wires, the street lights and fittings and the pipes The Port was the
major naval base
on the outside of the buildings, and windows, some shuttered, some just for the Allies in the
black gaping holes. The building walls are crumbling and the ground is Mediterranean during
strewn with debris and detritus. The ruins ‘recollect the mundane passage World War I, and it
was almost captured
of lived factory time in now derelict space replete with the silence of human by Axis troops during
inactivity’ and we sense that ‘a haunting is taking place’ (Edensor World War II. The
2005: 158). As Edensor (2005: 164) has it, ‘the knowledge that emerges British military did
not finally leave the
out of the confrontation with these phantoms is not empiricist, didactic or Port of Alexandria
intellectual but emphatic and sensual, understood at an intuitive and until 1946 (World
affective level.’ As a medium of representation, photography is particularly Port Source 2010).
good at creating not just a memorable visual image but also an affective
and sensorial impression on the viewer (Tisseron 1996: 138–40).
Photographs facilitate memory by evoking not just the sights but also the
sounds, smells, tastes, and even a sense of the physical presence of the
past. Rather than sanitizing and evacuating all the senses bar the optical,
photographs on the contrary release ‘the viewer’s eye/look into its own
synaesthesia […] the eye reconstructs, wants to touch, smell, hear the
photograph’ (Scott 2007: 152–54). Alexandria is a city of ghosts, which
even include its contemporary inhabitants: from Guillot’s blurred, spectral
horseman (Figure 9), to the image by Boutros of a solitary child playing
football in the dark along the shore (Figure 10); from the people relegated
to the margins and dwarfed by the expanse of sea and the buildings
towering above them as they walk along the coastal road in Guillot’s cover
photograph (Figure 1) and again in the larger version of the same image
(Figure 11), to his long exposure shot of a solitary blurred figure hugging
the wall of the Muslim cemetery (Figure 12). People are mere specs on the
landscape and only the camera is there to capture their fleeting existence.
Perrin’s photographs of peddlers and shopkeepers, in the tradition of
the petits métiers images of the nineteenth century, meanwhile, also testify
to the lives of the city’s inhabitants but the images are rendered so dark
that we can scarcely distinguish their features (Figure 13). Perrin’s (2007)
stated aim is not to flatter his subjects or make them conventionally beau-
tiful but instead to depict them ‘dans leur complexité et dans leur situation
au quotidien et de les rendre “presents” à travers mes portraits’. He thus
always makes a point of naming the people and streets he photographs to
avoid turning his subjects into stereotypes. As a counterpoint to Susan
Sontag’s (1986 [1979]: 60–63 and 41–42) strong criticism of European
humanist photography which she claims displays condescension towards
Uncanny city 495

Figure 9: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 50–51), ‘Promenade des amoureux, Corniche du fort
Qait Bay’ and ‘Sans titre’, photographer Bernard Guillot, 1991.
Figure 10: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 56–57), ‘Casino Cleopatra’ and ‘Miami’, photogra-
pher Nabil Boutros, 1997.
496 Colette Wilson

Figure 11: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 2–3), ‘Vue sur la ville, côté Mancheya’, photographer
Bernard Guillot, 1997.
Figure 12: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 41), ‘Le mur longeant le cimetière musulman’
photographer Bernard Guillot, 1989.
Uncanny city 497

Figure 13: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 74–75), ‘Ahmed El Garhe & Karim, ouvriers verriers’,
‘Place Mahatet Msr’ and ‘Place Baba Omar Pasha’, photographer Gilles Perrin, 1992.
its working-class subjects and certain aspects of American documentary

photography which she sees as voyeuristic and predatory, Perrin empha-
sizes that he is,
désireux d’éviter le voyeurisme photographique. […] Aucune photo n’est

prise à la sauvette, il n’y a pas d’images volées. Bien que ce soit moi qui décide
quand je déclenche, j’ai toujours un contact préalable au cours duquel j’ex-
plique mes intentions, ma façon de photographier afin que chaque person-
nage ait le désir d’échanger, d’exister dans sa qualité humaine. J’organise la
pose autour de l’activité du sujet et des gestes qui le caractérisent.
(Perrin 2007)
Perrin is conscious of the fact that his photographs are recording the last
vestiges of a dying world: ‘Mes portraits sont une observation du monde
qui m’entoure avant qu’il ne s’évanouisse’ (Perrin 2007). And the images
by Favret and Manez of the city’s old alleyways with their spectral inhabit-
ants (Figure 14) similarly recall Charles Marville’s photographs of the
ancient, condemned alleyways of 1850s Paris with their rare shadowy
figures, soon to be dispossessed by Baron Haussmann’s schemes.
Perrin’s alleyways (Figure 15) do not display the same sense of uncanni-
ness we detect in those by Favret and Manez, but by choosing to photograph
in black-and-white in strong sunshine, Perrin’s photographs are character-
ized by their dramatic black shadows and the overall effect is again one of
498 Colette Wilson

Figure 14: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 28–29), ‘Alexandrie’, photographers
Anne Favret and Patrick Manez, 1992.
Figure 15: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 78–79), ‘Rue El Lisi’ and ‘Ruelle
Isla’, photographer Gilles Perrin, 1992.
Uncanny city 499

darkness and concealment. Had Favret and Manez and Perrin chosen to
photograph in full colour, their shadows would have been seen for what
they are, day-time shadows which are considered a natural phenomenon
caused by the (masculine) sun’s position and thus considered safe and protec-
tive, unlike worrying nocturnal shadows caused by the moon (feminine, and
therefore suspect!) or artificial lights (Scott 2007: 173–74). Their images
would thus have succeeded in turning the city’s poverty into ‘picturesque
local colour’. We could usefully compare the images in Alexandrie revisitée
with the colour shots of the old Ottoman district and the dock area in an
architectural survey by Sarah Khazindar and Silvana Waguih (2006), for
example, which lack any uncanny charge. However when, as in the case of
Alexandrie revisitée, photographs appear in contexts of haunting, they become
‘part of the contest between familiarity and strangeness, between hurting
and healing, that the ghost is registering’, such photographs are ‘involved in
the ghostly matter of state-sponsored disappearance’ (Gordon 1997: 102).
Shadows, like ghosts, are not part of the real world, we cannot touch or
Figure 16: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 19), ‘Alexandrie’, photogra-

phers Anne Favret and Patrick Manez, 1992.
500 Colette Wilson

Figure 17: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 20–21), ‘Alexandrie’, photographers
Anne Favret and Patrick Manez, 1992.
grasp them, and yet the appearance of a shadow ‘testifies to the solidity of an
object, for what casts a shadow must be real’ (Gombrich 1995: 17).
Among the other of Favret and Manez’s series of photographs is an
image of the Métro Cinema (Figure 16), which was built in 1949 and was
once at the vibrant heart of the cosmopolitan community. The Métro was
and still is the place to see American films in Alexandria. Favret and
Manez’s shots of the main coastal road at dusk (Figure 17) along with
night-time shots of the city beach by Boutros (Figure 18) play out the
cinematic aesthetic creating an urban gothic sublime reminiscent of film
noir. Nocturnal Alexandria is an Expressionist city, a dystopian city straight
out of a crime thriller where, unlike the safe, cosy detective story, there is
no ordered resolution. The darkness, the moonlit watery reflections, the
lights of the run-down casinos and sea-front buildings, and the ebb and
flow of the murky waves beneath the boardwalk in Boutros’s photographs
are suggestive at once of the city’s seamy side and its unconscious.
The images by Boutros of the Italian Santa Lucia restaurant, viewed
from a table at the French Élite café across the road, and of the Greek café
Athinéos – all three well-known cosmopolitan haunts – are similarly like
film stills, pregnant with silent narratives (Figure 19), for it is still photog-
raphy that is recognized as ‘l’art de l’imaginaire par excellence’
(Soulages 1998: 67). Silent and motionless and cut off from the future, the
photograph is reliant on the viewer to construct its meaning.
In the night-time encounter at Athinéos between a young woman and
a young man, it takes a few seconds and a double-take on the part of the
Uncanny city 501

Figure 18: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 54–55), ‘Chatby, Alexandrie’ and ‘Plage
de Stanley, Alexandrie’, photographer Nabil Boutros, 1997.
Figure 19: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 58–59), ‘Elite, Alexandrie’ and ‘Athinéos,
Alexandrie’, photographer Nabil Boutros, 1997.
502 Colette Wilson

viewer, to realize that the two women in Boutros’s photograph are in fact
the same woman. The real woman on the left is reflected in the mirror on
the right creating a doppelganger – another modality of the uncanny. Such
anamorphic optical experiences are part of the very ontology of photography
and are particularly prevalent in the genre of street photography. As
viewers, we look and initially misconceive what we see and have to look
again and correct what we thought we saw (Scott 2007: 139). Boutros’
photographs recall Brassaï’s images in Paris de nuit (1933), which in turn
reference the louche underworld depicted by Zola and Céline. As with the
barmaid and her mirrored reflection in Edouard Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies-
Bergères (1882) and the two lovers in a café reflected three times in two
mirrors in Brassaï’s Couple d’Amoureux, Quartier Place d’Italie (c. 1932), the
couple depicted in Boutros’ Athinéos is similarly fragmented and separated.
We wonder how to read the two images – the ‘real’ and the reflected – and
how they might be connected. Once again we have a disorientating framing,
the blurring of boundaries, literal and perhaps moral too, of a secret fleeting
encounter, ‘of something that should have remained secret and hidden but
has come to light [disturbing] the sense of what is inside and what is
outside’ (Royle 2003: 2). The man is not present in the mirrored reflection,
only the woman. Does the mirrored image reveal the woman’s future or
her past? To quote Scott (2007: 186), ‘mirrors multiply perspectives in
cubist fashion and transform the single image into a montage of images:
the mirror indulges in an act of détournement, diverting the image from
what it would normally say about a moment that “has been”’. Furthermore,
the location of this encounter – a cafe – is significant for ‘the café itself is a
form of social montage. In many ways the café is street photography’s
social utopia’ (Scott 2007: 186). And, as such, the cafe is emblematic of the
utopian social montage that was cosmopolitan Alexandria.
In the double portrait of youth and old age by Guillot entitled ‘Mossad &
le vieux fonctionnaire’ (Figure 20), two men are seen seated at a cafe table.
In his commentary, Hassoun remarks on the old man’s blind stare, which is
caused by the reflection on his spectacles. He descibes the young man as
banging his fist on the table ‘pour exprimer son impuissance, sa rage, devant
cet univers, cette part issue de la ville’ (Hassoun 1998: 70). Like the blind
prophet Tiresias, the aged man’s posture and body language signals his stub-
born disagreement with the younger man and denotes moral rectitude and
the patient acceptance, gained over a lifetime of compromises, of life for what
it is, while Mossad epitomizes the Narcissistic arrogance and impatience of
youth. Each man perhaps sees in the other an aspect of himself that he is
unwilling to acknowledge, for the uncanny has ‘to do with a sense of
ourselves as double, split, at odds with ourselves’ (Royle 2003: 6). The
doubling of the men finds its parallel in the doubling of the framed picture
on the wall behind them with its mirror image in the foreground of the
photograph in what appears to be some sort of uncanny double exposure.
There is a sense too, that this doubling and blurring of identities and bound-
aries not only mirrors Alexandria’s own multifaceted identity, but also that
of Guillot himself. In a e-mail I received from Guillot in July 2011, he states:
l’Égypte a constitué très vite dans ma vie un refuge, quand je craignais trop
la torpeur planant sur la France, durant ces années giscardiennes, dans les
Uncanny city 503

Figure 20: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 46–47), ‘Mossad & le vieux fonctionnaire,
Alexandrie’ 1989, and ‘Sur le pas de la porte de la chambre de Constantin Cavafy, Pension Amir,
Alexandrie’, photographer Bernard Guillot, 1981.
années 70. New York, à la même époque, me servit d’échappatoire. L’Égypte

est devenue une part intégrante de mon territoire culturel personnel, la
France ne suffisant pas. Mon identité est très floue, et je ne pense pas être
représentatif à ce point du Français, d’un Français lié à son Histoire; en tout
cas, l’Égypte est devenue une excellente Terre d’Accueil, ou je me sens avant
tout Egyptien.
(Personal communication)
Boutros, Hassoun and Guillot, each in their own way, find the whole issue
of identity problematic.
In the shot on the adjacent page to ‘Mossad & le vieux fonctionnaire’,
Guillot has sought out another haunted house, a recurring theme in his
work (see Guillot 2000; 2003), the flat that once belonged to one of
Alexandria’s most famous sons, the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy who
died in 1933 (Figure 20, right-hand image). This vestige of the city’s
cosmopolitan past was once famously situated above a brothel and is now
preserved as a museum. It is perhaps no coincidence that Guillot specifies
in the title of the photograph, ‘Sur le pas de la porte de la chambre de
Constantin Cavafy, Pension Amir, Alexandrie’, that he has chosen to
capture the image from the hall area, focusing on the threshold to the
poet’s bedroom. The threshold, like the brothel, is a privileged liminal
space: neither inside nor outside, both homely and unhomely, and signals
Cavafy’s own status as someone who lived on the margins of bourgeois
respectability, both as a poet and as a homosexual at a time when sexual
difference was considered taboo, even in relatively liberal Alexandria.
504 Colette Wilson

Figure 21: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 52), ‘En haut de la rue
Nebi Daniel, Alexandrie’, photographer Bernard Guillot, 1989.
There is, however, a counterpart to all this darkness and melancholia.

As Royle (2003: 2) notes: ‘the uncanny is never far from something comic:
humour, irony and laughter’. Examples of this are to be found in Guillot’s
photographs of a wickerwork model of a mosque seen dangling
incongruously in the space between two buildings (Figure 21), and of a
ruined building with a rather kitsch sphinx mounted above the doorway,
and enigmatically titled ‘Le numéro douze’ (Figure 22). Boutros similarly
plays with the ironic, grimly humorous aspect of the uncanny in his
photograph of the demolitions that are controversially razing parts of the
old city, wiping out its past and making way for yet another property
development (Figure 23). The bulldozers are notoriously employed under
cover of darkness in an attempt to evade the conservationists. The pyramid –
that arch-symbol of Egypt – is here ironically built out of rubble.
There is another example of surreal humour and anamorphosis
(double-take) to be found in the deceptive perspective in Reza’s photograph
of an archaeological dig (Figure 24) where the head of a Greek statue –
Alexander’s no doubt – appears to be huge next to the men in the centre
of the shot until we realize that it is being held in another man’s hand in
the foreground. Uncannily, this shot takes us back full circle to Catany’s
sculptures in the Museum, where we find Alexander’s double (Figure 3).
Uncanny city 505

Figure 22: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 45), ‘Le numéro douze,
Alexandrie’, photographer Bernard Guillot, 1984.
Figure 23: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 62–63), ‘Sidi Bishr, Alexandrie’ and ‘Stanley’,
photographer Nabil Boutros, 1997.
506 Colette Wilson

Figure 24: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 81), ‘Le site archéologique de Kom-Ed-Dik,
Alexandrie’, photographer Reza, 1996.
Hassoun too invokes the comical and theatrical in his description of the
remaining European-style houses in the city: ‘des villas nichées au fond de
parcs toffus, jungles domestiques, jungles d’operette’ (Hassoun 1998: 34).
In the avenue named route d’Aboukir ‘règne la pacotille, le semblant’ where
‘les arrière-petits-enfants’ (those returning to search for traces of their fami-
ly’s past) find themselves in ‘un musée de hazard, dans un marché aux puces
inespéré ou même chez des vieilles antiquaires dénichées au détour d’un
obscur passage hollandais’ (Hassoun 1998: 34). Like the surrealist ragpicker
purposely seeking out some objets trouvés, visitors hope to come across the
‘hiéroglyphes d’une passion qui leur permettra de constituer à bon compte
un musée personnel, une généalogie fabuleuse’. And so, Hassoun tells us
using playful typography, ‘l’éCOnoMIQUE vient prendre tout son sens et
l’idéalisation du passé donner toute sa mesure’. Thus memory and nostal-
gia, the uncanny and surreal, the comical and absurd, the social and
economic, all fuse together to create a collage of the city in the 1990s.
Conclusion
The city depicted in Alexandrie revisitée is both beautiful, as in Reza’s
Monet-inspired examples of the industrial sublime and the urban pastoral
(Figure 25), and disturbing, as in its haunted ruins. It is both a familiar
Uncanny city 507

Figure 25: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 84–85), ‘Lac de Mariout, Alexandrie’ and ‘Entre
Alexandrie et Rachid’, photographer Reza, 1996.
and a strange city and, like Baudelaire and Lautréamont, the photographers
in Alexandrie revisitée find beauty in ugliness and decay but also in modern
life. We should note, for example, the city’s contrasts in Boutros’s
representation of the city centre’s famous Ramleh tram station (Figure 26).
In the foreground, the horse attached to one of the city’s trademark taxi-
carriages (Arabeya hantour) forages for food in the rubbish that litters the
Figure 26: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 60–61), ‘Gare de Ramleh, Alexandrie’ and ‘Abou Hef,
Alexandrie’, photographer Nabil Boutros, 1997.
508 Colette Wilson

gutter, a reminder of the poverty that still exists in Alexandria and Egypt
generally, while in the background to the left we see an illuminated
neo-Classical building, a relic from the city’s cosmopolitan past and, to the
right of that, a more recently erected McDonald’s sign.
Alexandria’s seemingly unceasing reconstruction, commercialization,
and reinvention as a tourist destination make it part of the wider globalized
cultural and political economy. Alexandrie revisitée exemplifies the notion
put forward by Mladen Dolar (1991: 7) that there is a specific dimension
of the uncanny that emerges with, and is a counterpart to modernity, and
that ghosts are a product of that modernity. If, as Derrida (1994: xviii, 176
and 175) claims, we need to exorcize ghosts not so as to chase them away
but to learn to live with them and to grant them the right to speak, out of
a concern for justice, then, in the final analysis, Alexandrie revisitée
succeeds in performing just such an exorcism. The book liberates and
rehabilitates the city’s ghosts (‘ceux que le cours de l’histoire a élevés à la
douteuse dignité d’exilés’, to recall Hassoun’s phrase) and gives them a
voice and a presence at last in modern Egypt. Furthermore, if culture is a
process of ‘“recycling” […] in which nothing is lost but returns in new
hybridized forms’ (Labanyi 2001: 12), then in 1998 the time had come
for Egypt to recycle Alexandria’s cosmopolitan and classical past for the
purposes of ‘restorative nostalgia’ but at the same time this process also
enabled the once dominant (and hence subsequently long marginalized)
culture of the city’s ‘European’ citizens, the culture of modern Egyptian
history’s ‘losers’ in effect, to be rediscovered and finally reintegrated into
the nation’s narrative.
Since Barthes we have become accustomed to the notion that in all
photographs there lurks something undeniably terrifying, ‘le retour du
mort’ and that ‘le photographe doit lutter énormément pour que la
Photographie ne soit pas la Mort’ (1980: 23 and 30–31). This theory,
which grew out of Barthes’s own sense of loss and bereavement on the
death of his mother, turns the photograph into the modern equivalent of
the ‘image sacrée’ and associates it with ‘la magie, la folie hallucinatoire et
la mort’, but ultimately we need to reclaim our right to enjoy making and
looking at photographs (Tisseron 1996: 162). Contrary to Barthes,
Tisseron (1996: 163–64) contends that the specificity of the photograph
does not lie in its ‘mélancolie essentielle’ but that in fact the photographic
image testifies to two things: that a close union between the subject and
the world (as between the mother and child) did really exist, and that once
this union came to an end, both the subject and the world may have been
left with scars but not an open wound.
In the case of the images in Alexandrie revisitée, as we have seen, death
and loss is indeed a recurring theme but it is significant that the book
closes with Reza’s photographs of resent-day native Egyptians which take
us away from the dark reflective melancholy of the earlier images into a
world of restorative colour and light. Reza’s photographs, in line with
National Geographic’s agenda at the time in the 1990s, certainly draw
attention to the serious ecological and environmental issues facing
Alexandria, and Egypt more widely and, as a consequence, act as a
reminder that there is a price to be paid for the city’s survival at the dawn
of the twenty-first century, but they are nevertheless more commercial
Uncanny city 509

Figure 27: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 88), ‘Port d’Alexandrie’, photographer Reza, 1996.
and optimistic images in their conception and outlook. The book’s

narrative concludes with Reza’s photograph of a bright blue, though
rather rusty hulk of an old fishing boat (Figure 27). The rust is a reminder
that life is, and will continue to be tough for this city and its people, but
the young Egyptian fishermen standing on top of the boat, with only their
beautiful legs and feet visible, serve to reconnect the city to the sea – to the
source of its life, of all life – and exemplify Alexandria’s hope, in 1998, for
a better future. As Christian Poncelet (2003) would have it, referring to
Reza’s series of portraits of people who have suffered social and political
abuse, ‘plus qu’aucun autre, comme tous ceux qui ont souffert, il sait en
510 Colette Wilson

effet distinguer dans chaque œil, même le plus désespéré, cette lueur
d’espoir sans laquelle la condition humaine ne serait que tragique.’
Barthes famously claimed that:
La Photographie ne dit pas (forcément) ce qui n’est plus, mais seulement

et à coup sûr, ce qui a été. Cette subtilité est décisive. Devant une photo, la
conscience ne prend pas nécessairement la voie nostalgique du souvenir
(combien de photographies sont hors du temps individuel), mais pour toute
photo existant au monde, la voie de la certitude: l’essence de la Photographie
est de ratifier ce qu’elle représente.
(Barthes 1980: 133, original emphases)
As we revisit Alexandrie revisitée in the wake of the Revolution of 2011,

Barthes’s ‘ça-à-été’ takes on a double significance. Alexandria, and by
extension Egypt, is on the cusp of change once again and soon there will
be new ghosts to bury.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Toni Catany, Anne Favret
and Patrick Manez, Bernard Guillot, Nabil Boutros, Gilles Perrin, and Reza
for supporting my project and granting me permission to reproduce copies
of their images in this article, and to David Barnes for generously giving
up his time to make the required image reproductions. Thanks are also
due to Maryam Ashrafi of the Webistan Photo Agency, Paris, Fernando
Peracho of the Galeria Valid Foto BCN, Barcelona, Alix du Serech of the
Skoto Gallery, New York, and Lisa T. Walker of the National
Geographic Society.
Suggested citation
Wilson, C. (2011), ‘Uncanny city: Revisiting Alexandria’s haunted spaces’,
International Journal of Francophone Studies 14: 4, pp. 473–515, doi: 10.1386/
ijfs.14.4.473_1
514 Colette Wilson

Contributor details
Colette Wilson is Lecturer in French Studies and Director of the MA in Cultural
Memory at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced
Study, University of London. Her research interests are in the fields of French liter-
ature of the nineteenth century, cultural memory, history and politics, the visual
arts and photography. Her recent publications include: Paris and the Commune
1871–78: the politics of forgetting (Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 2007), which was short-listed and highly commended for The Society of
French Studies R. H. Gapper Book Prize in 2008, and the co-edited volume, part of
an AHRC award, entitled The Photobook from Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2012) to which she contributed the chapter ‘Memory and Nostalgia
in Carlos Freire and Robert Solé’s Alexandrie l’Égyptienne (1998)’. Her current
research, for which she has been awarded a British Academy grant, focuses on
French representations of Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Contact: Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, Senate
House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, UK.
E-mail: colette.wilson@sas.ac.uk
Uncanny city 515

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International Journal of Francophone Studies Volume 14 Number 4

© 2011 Intellect Ltd

Uncanny city: Revisiting Alexandria’s

IJFS 14 (4) pp. 473–515 © Intellect Ltd 2011 473

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474 Colette Wilson

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Cosmopolitan Alexandria: A historical perspective

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476 Colette Wilson

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‘Entre l’Égypte et la France, c’est une longue histoire’

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While Napoleon’s designs on Egypt were certainly imperialist, with the

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I completely identified with the Egyptian people. I considered myself

After the events of 1956–57, however, he realized that he would never

He resolved the conundrum by remaining a communist and then becoming

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Tu me demandes ce que représente Alexandrie pour lui. Il me faut commencer

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He goes on to describe how ‘l’enfant’ (Hassoun himself) was later to

Il découvrira que soixante pour cent de la population égyptienne vivait alors

By subsequently switching from the third person to the second person

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La marche de l’histoire, les membres de sa nation l’avaient subie sinon accep-

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indissociably bound up with a sense of repetition or ‘coming back’ – the

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Several of the photographs in Alexandrie revisitée not only testify to the

Figure 2: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 6-7), ‘Catacombes de Kom

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Figure 6: Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998: 27), ‘Alexandrie’, photogra-

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