A series of poems by Zein Farhan

June 2023

Bridge /brij/ (noun/verb)

To bridge is to reconcile, to connect. To fragment, to dismember, to uproot, to displace. Thick, impermeable concrete settles in the veins of the city. To keep us in motion, supposedly. One body discarded, to eternalize a future. Remember where we lived, walked, played, and buried our dead? Flyovers atop cemeteries, ancestors crushed under steel and stone. Uprooted trees line the road to modernity. One city cleansed, to ensure impermanence. We negotiated space, a desire for memory. Victorious, she emerges, despite.

To bridge is to reconcile, to connect. To fragment, to dismember, to uproot, to displace. Thick, impermeable concrete settles in the veins of the city. To keep us in motion, supposedly. One body discarded, to eternalize a future. Remember where we lived, walked, played, and buried our dead? Flyovers atop cemeteries, ancestors crushed under steel and stone. Uprooted trees line the road to modernity. One city cleansed, to ensure impermanence. We negotiated space, a desire for memory. Victorious she emerges, despite.

Bridge body buried

A future dead steel stone space

For victorious

For Remembrance

What was disjointed

What was stolen

What was obscured

What was erased

What was here before

What is here, still?

What did we negotiate

What survived

What remains

What are the traces

What can we remember

What can we contain

What can we condemn

What can we forgive

What can we transgress

What is theirs

What is ours

What is beyond

Cairo Reborn

Raze ancient trees. Twelve-lanes across the Nile, congratulations on the world’s widest suspension bridge. After erasing El Warraq, Horus City ablaze with commercial and residential buzz. King Salman peering through the window, its axis 50 centimeters away from homes. Bulldoze burial sites. The living in the City of the Dead rising, relocated to 6th of October. Bulldoze more burial sites. The only heritage is dazzling, a new Cairo is coming. Maspero, developing the heart of the capital. Bulldoze more burial sites. Even the dead cannot rest. Another satellite city. Iconic Tower. A crystal pyramid. The Octagon. A new center of gravity. The global city emerges, modern.

Note

In recent years, Cairo has been subject to the construction of a mass of bridges, with over forty planned in total. While the rationale for constructing bridges and highways is to alleviate traffic congestion, bridges are incomprehensibly fragmenting the urban landscape. These spatial ruptures, similar to much other transportation infrastructure that is positioned as the resolution to decades of poor planning, are causing displacement, environmental degradation, and the destruction of cultural heritage sites. Remaining Cairo: Bridges, Fragments, and the Persistence of Memory is a series of poems that explore this fragmentation of the urban landscape in the context of erasure of public memory and knowledge, and the uprooting of human and more-than-human entities to make way for permanent and impermeable concrete. The poetic forms that relate to the violence of these infrastructure projects, including a burning haibun.

Bio

Zein Farhan (Pseudonym) is an Egyptian artist-researcher exploring the ever-changing politics of space, and trying to remember. They enjoy swimming in the sea and playing with light.

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