Discourses, Desires, and Hegemony

I still remember my strong shock, which I managed to hide successfully, when I saw Anwar el-Sadat's picture decorating the living room of the first family I visited in the housing project. The husband pointed to the picture and said, “Do you know how much we pay for this apartment? You will never guess! We only pay three pounds every month. Can you believe that? It was Sadat who moved us to these units that we will own soon.” Except for most ex-owners, who lost their material and symbolic capitals by relocation, most people tend to appreciate Sadat's attempts to improve their housing conditions, and one woman compared his policy with Nasser's redistribution of land that benefited farmers. This was one of the main things that I did not anticipate before starting my fieldwork. Informed by studies of this and other projects (Al-Safty 1983; Hassan 19851991); Perlman 1982), I was sure that people would be resentful of the state and would criticize Sadat and his policies. For instance, Nawal Hassan (1985), who studied a relocation project from the old part of Cairo, argued that although such resettlement projects were designed to create “modern Egyptians,” they have led the displaced communities toward a “slow but certain economic death” and the “destruction of indigenous cultural identity” (61).

While acknowledging the negative aspects of relocation and the social

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destruction it caused, people in al-Zawiya also emphasized the positive aspects of this project and often highlighted the advantages of the new units. Many argued that they had acquired better and more “modern” housing, which they expected to formally own after fifteen years of resettlement. I was also struck by how pervasive the state discourse was in shaping people's views. For example, people internalized the associations that the state-controlled media had made between, on the one hand, the location and the size of the dwellings in “unplanned” areas (‘ashwa’iyyat) and, on the other hand, many social problems and transgressions. Similarly, several men and women emphasized that the increasing moral corruption (fasad) and female transgression (inhiraf) were a direct result of the fact that many parents sleep in the same room as their children. Drawing on the media, they suggested a relationship between old quarters (hawari) and unplanned areas and the increasing number of armed attacks in Egypt. A woman expressed her astonishment when she heard that a man had started shooting at people in the subway in New York: “We have terrorism because we have unplanned areas [‘ashwa’iyyat] and old narrow neighborhoods [hawari], which produce ignorance and backwardness, but why do they have crime in advanced America [amrika al raqiya]?”

Therefore, the state public discourse should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric or empty talk. Rather, it is powerful and continues to shape people's identities and their use of space after relocation. As Foucault (1979, 1980a) emphasized, power does not only repress, exclude, and censor. In addition, it “produces effects at the level of desire and also at the level of knowledge” (Foucault 1980b: 59). This is not to say that people embraced everything they heard in the state-controlled media. In fact, they were usually very critical of what they heard, often dismissing it in favor of what they heard from other sources, such as the mosque. They frequently questioned how the country was run, discussed the many problems they faced daily, and linked their problems with the corruption of state officials. These contradictory reactions present another theoretical and methodological issue related to how to conceptualize the relationship between the shifting feelings and views of people in al-Zawiya al-Hamra and the state public discourse. How is it possible for people to both accept and oppose the dominant representations of modernity when these are encoded in physical forms around them? In the coming pages, I aim to account for the desires and effects that the state discourse stimulates without reducing the spatial practices of the “ordinary practitioners of the city” (de Certeau 1988: 93) to a mere reflection or rejection of the state

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policies. I examine the multiple meanings of these practices and analyze their intended and unintended consequences. While men and women welcomed the new apartments and considered them superior to their old units, their narratives and the ways they utilized the new apartments provide a critique of the state project of modernity. As active users, I show in the next chapter, the project dwellers utilized various strategies and tactics to transform the new apartments physically and socially.