Beekeepers' Library
“The Beekeepers’ Library” aims to shine light on a fleeting moment in Egypt’s modern history, a moment that nevertheless held great promise for change evinced by the cultural flowering across disciplines. It takes the form of an artistic reflection on one man’s forgotten project and the ripple effect it may have generated within and beyond his immediate circle. That man is my late maternal grandfather, Egyptian romantic poet and beekeeper, Dr. Ahmed Zaky Abushâdy (1892-1955).[1]
My aim is not to assess the success or failure of Abushâdy’s project, but to celebrate his struggle to realize it. The archival source materials at my disposal are varied, hybrid, and far ranging like their progenitor. My choice of collage as a way of parsing and highlighting speaks to the source materials’ dual attributes of malleability and resilience. Through juxtapositions of photographs, design elements, and texts, I hope the collages will at least enjoin a resonance, however oblique and amorphous, with the social, political, and environmental realities of the period from which they emerge. My greater hope is they might prompt a desire to delve deeper into this material, which has been organized as an archive and made accessible through the auspices of NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Library.[2]
A polymath who worked across disciplines, Abushâdy is remembered for his Romantic poetry and as the man behind the influential journal of Arabic poetry Apollo (Cairo: 1932–4). In the period that stretched between the two world wars and the Egyptian revolutions of 1919 and 1952, Abushâdy cultivated his vision for a modern Egypt by enacting his ideals of liberal humanism through poetry, bee husbandry, and other projects that invited cultural exchange. “Bee culture”—the notion of the “hive mind” and harmony through cooperation—was how Abushâdy broadly characterized the complex societal and behavioral patterns of bees, their systems of communication, feeding, mating, breeding, incubating, flight, swarming, dancing, temperature regulation, pollination, selection, gender-morphing, and the production of near-magical nutritional substances such as honey and royal jelly. I am not sure why Abushâdy first became interested in bees, but it may have stemmed from his research in bacteriology and infectious diseases; bee culture seems to have inspired him and provided a potent metaphor for his work.
“The Beekeepers’ Library” derives its name from Abushâdy’s eponymous flow-chart (Figure 1) and the initiatives he launched in Benson, a small village in the countryside near Oxford, over a century ago. A sketch on lined notebook paper, the chart reveals the thinking around his unrealized plan to build a lending library of books that would cover aspects of bee culture across disciplines: literature and poetry; the culinary arts; medicinal uses of pollen and royal jelly; botanical plantings for bee gardens; epidemiology of bee diseases; aerodynamics of bee flight; and standardized practices for modern beekeeping.
The collages that comprise “The Beekeepers’ Library” reflect Abushâdy’s bee culture through visual materials and texts: They incorporate photographs of his apiary in Khorshed, a village in the Nile Delta, and images of his patented honeycombs. They introduce him and his English wife, my grandmother-to-be, Annie (née Bamford), through their portraits. The collages insert elements of illustration, advertisements, and graphic design from Abushâdy’s bee journals, and are accompanied by short excerpts of the editorial he wrote for the inaugural 1919 issue of his English language bee journal, The Bee World. These excerpts are reproduced exactly as they appear, typographical quirks and all.
The year 1919 was an eventful one. As revolution raged at home in Egypt and the influenza epidemic decimated the lives of millions globally, Abushâdy established the Apis Club, a cooperative apiary with educational and research programs, in Benson. He did so with the help of investment from the Egyptian cotton magnate ‘Ali al-Manzalawi. With this financial infusion, Abushâdy launched a parent company called Adminson, Ltd. to finance the Apis Club until it could self-sustain through the annual contributions of its members. In its first year, the coop attracted over thirteen thousand members and grew to over six hundred hives, an auspicious beginning for Abushâdy’s lifelong beekeeping venture. The same year, he launched his first scientific journal, The Bee World, which is still published today as Bee World by the International Bee Research Association (IBRA), and obtained a number of British patents for beehive improvements. The most radical of these was a removable aluminum honeycomb, an upgrade of the existing removable comb whereby beekeepers can extract honey without destroying the colony, a method that remains standard practice today. Abushâdy later adapted these and other practices for use in Egyptian apiaries, where the traditional skep made from twisted straw or wicker baskets and mud was still prevalent.
The Apis Club and The Bee World journal provided Abushâdy with a platform by which he could promote his deeply felt humanist ideals. As a physician who provided care in the most basic sense, he had a vision. He’d practiced medicine during the influenza pandemic, managed cholera outbreaks, treated children suffering from malnutrition, and witnessed the effects of extreme poverty across England and Scotland. The Apis Club offered a way for him to disseminate his views and also put them into practice. He envisaged his headquarters in Benson as an educational center for experts and amateur beekeepers alike, where he encouraged knowledge sharing among beekeepers from different social strata. He used The Bee World to promote best practices so farmers could dramatically increase honey yields and improve their standard of living. He conceived the cooperative as a social and material alternative, and hands-on strategy to counter the classist, racialized, and gendered cultures that he resisted as a doctor, scientist, poet, liberal humanist, and self-proclaimed feminist.
Abushâdy met Annie, his wife-to-be, on a London bus soon after he arrived in London in 1912. She was born in the town of Stalybridge in Greater Manchester, one of twelve children from a family of pub owners, Odd Fellows, and cotton weavers. As a teenager, she read the Last Letters from Egypt by Lady Duff Gordon and the novels of D. H. Lawrence. She was a few years Abushâdy’s senior, had a head of voluminous hair upon which she perched large feathered hats, and chain-smoked. They moved into a little brick house on Cairn Avenue in Ealing, where he opened a private practice and a small research laboratory. In the backyard, they established a small colony of bees. They married before they left England for Egypt in the fall of 1922.
I often wonder to what degree Annie must have influenced Abushâdy’s ideas about cooperatives and social change. I like to think that she inspired him to implement the principles of the cooperative movement. The movement was also emerging in Egypt in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it is reasonable to imagine that Abushâdy became enamored of the concept of cooperation through Annie and the sense of radicalism, historical depth, and proximity her family’s past conferred. She grew up not far from its birthplace in Rochdale, where the Society of Equitable Pioneers established the first cooperative nearly twenty years earlier in 1844. Also persuasive, Annie claimed Samuel Bamford (1788–1872), the famous labor organizer and voice for peaceful activism, as her forebear, although itis not clear to me how they are related. Bamford, who wrote poetry in Lancashire dialect, was present at the 1819 Peterloo Massacre and authored several books, including Passages in the Life of a Radical, a chronicle of conditions among the working classes in the years after the Battle of Waterloo.
After Abushâdy returned to Cairo, he briefly continued to edit The Bee World but soon resigned to focus his energies closer to home. In 1930, he launched a second scientific journal, The Bee Kingdom (Mamlakat al-naḥl), which accepted contributions in Arabic and English, and took in articles as well as advertizing from around the world. He established the Bee Kingdom League, an Egyptian bee husbandry cooperative, in the Matareya suburb of Cairo where he and Annie were raising their family. Under its auspices, Abushâdy published papers and monographs on aspects of bee botany, diseases, and breeding methods. With support from the Egyptian Ministry of Education, he taught beekeeping to grammar school and high school students. The Ministry of Agriculture sponsored his organization of the first international bee conference and honey fair in Cairo, and at the request of King Fu’ad, he established the Royal Apiaries. The Bee Kingdom remained in print for a decade, while members of the Bee Kingdom League continued to hold meetings and conferences long after his death, as recently as 1978.
Looking back at these collages and the materials from which they are drawn, I am left with questions. Do forgotten works of social good leave an indelible mark on communities despite their short-term failure? Did Abushâdy’s initiatives, many of which were unrealized or cut short by circumstance, nevertheless project themselves forward through time, remaining dormant to bloom at a more auspicious moment? If that were the case, was he likewise acting as the instrument of his creative and spiritual forebears? Does husbandry—for bees as well as other kinds of mentorship and shepherding—have a lasting effect in what may otherwise appear as a landscape of attrition, profound loss, and resounding darkness? I do not have the answers to these questions, nor do I expect to find them. But I am prepared to be continuously, even pleasantly, surprised by the infinite ways radical methods of hope, creativity, and community organization can blossom across time and space.
Notes
[1] The author has kept the outdated transliteration of her grandfather’s surname that he favored, which includes the Ottoman circumflex: Abushâdy.
[2] The materials from which these collages are drawn span the years of Abushâdy’s youth, his English education and marriage, his return to Egypt where he became a significant figure in modern Arabic poetry and bee husbandry, and his final years in the United States (1946–55) writing theatre and cultural broadcasts for the Voice of America’s new Arabic radio program. They include manuscripts, deeds, family trees, snapshots, large format photographs, significant artworks such as paintings, sketches, cartoons and calligraphy by artists in Abushâdy’s circle, books and serials, audio recordings, small objects and ephemera, and a large amount of correspondence in English and Arabic between Abushâdy, his peers and family members. In April 2020, New York University’s Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Library acquired the archive and the collection is now available in the Archives and Special Collections department of the Library.
Bio
Joy Amina Garnett is an artist and writer in Los Angeles who explores forgotten histories through archival materials. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum, MoMA-PS1, the FLAG Art Foundation (all in NY); the Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland; and the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC). Her writing has appeared in a number of journals and books including Evergreen Review (New York); Rusted Radishes (American University in Beirut); Full Blede (Los Angeles); Ibraaz (Kamal Lazaar Foundation); The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook (powerHouse Books 2016); and Cultural Entanglement in the Pre-Independence Arab World (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury 2020). She is currently completing a memoir of Egypt.
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