I’ve finally reached El Gouna, Egypt on the banks of the Red Sea where I’ll be a resident, writing, for the month of June. They’ve put the writers up at the four-star Hotel Mozaique around a pool; we all have small terraces and our meals are taken at a neighboring hotel, mostly buffet style. The revolution expanded workers’ rights — an 8-hour workday has replaced the former 14-hour drudge! — but has shrunk tourism for the time-being, and there are few guests here at Hotel Mosaique: a handful of sunburned Germans and a honeymooning Arab couple who modestly refresh in the pool, he in trunks, she in burqini. They look giddily in love and eat inside the air-conditioned restaurant.
What else?
Mangroovy trees, I guess.
During my first early morning walk to the Maison Bleue, a 6 star hotel still in construction, and down to the beach, I discovered these random clumps of rather desperate looking bushes – Mangroovy trees according to a fading sign. How mangroves became mangroovies, I have yet to find out, but the shift in moniker delights me. Other bonnes bouches I’ve been savouring – this time from the menus –are Green Peepers and Weldon eggs (ie well-done eggs). One could feasibly enjoy a picnic of peepers and Weldon eggs under the lee of a mangroovy; in fact, I might just try that tomorrow.
I love oddities of language largely because they bring us back to the arbitrary, shifting nature of our words. Mangroovies, green peepers and Weldon eggs are not instances of ignorance but of sly resistance, of giving the slip to the linguistic authority of a language that colonized as much as anything else.
I’ve brought my Emily Dickinson books with me – poems and letters – and am enjoying the New England sensibility in these desert climes. She is not unlike a Bedouin, perhaps, taking mysterious short-cuts, confounding the beaten paths.
It has been quite hot here, in the 100s, much like Fresno, CA in the summer only with salutary wind off the sea. I crank up the AC and get to work. Temptations outside are few unless you’re the pool lounging sort – which I definitely am not.
Here’s another source of enjoyment at El Gouna: the other writers! Bernice McFadden, a novelist from the U.S., Razinat Mohammed, a Nigerian novelist and poet John Mateer who hails from Australia. Here’s a photo of us before Razinat, who was delayed due to visa problems, arrived. I’ll get a photo of her soon.