Remembering Childhood in the Middle East: Memoirs from a Century of Change

Hamza al-Din (Egypt)

egypt Hamza al-Din, a noted performer and composer of Middle Eastern music, was born in 1929 in southern Egyptian Nubia, near the Sudanese border. He was educated in Egypt and received further musical training at the Academy of St. Cecelia in Rome. His many recordings and CDs include Eskalay (The Water Wheel). He has played in concerts all over the world, made his debut at Carnegie Hall in 1966, and has been a featured soloist at the Woodstock Festival, with the Grateful Dead in Cairo and in Japan, with Peter Sellars at the Edinburgh Festival, and, most recently, in the United States with the Kronos Quartet. Hamza al-Din On a hot July morning in 1929, in a village of 3500 souls living along the Nile valley of Nubia, I was born to a tribal family composed of my paternal grandfather, grandmother, teenage aunt, a cow, a donkey, a modest flock of goats and sheep, plus pigeons, ducks, and rabbits. Of course, I also had a mother close by, but my father, another uncle, and an older aunt were living more than six hundred kilometers north in Cairo. My mother was the youngest in a family of eleven sisters and one brother. When her parents died, her uncle adopted her, and when the time came, he married her to his oldest son and she gave birth to me. That is why I was surrounded by my paternal relatives in a home shaded by a huge acacia tree on the banks of the river Nile. I left that home for the first time around my fifth birthday . I was helping my mother pack for our trip to Cairo to be with my father. Because our village was flooded part of the year by the rising of the waters behind the first Aswan Dam, we couldn’t raise enough food to feed us all. So my father and most of the young men were forced to migrate to find work in order to support the old men, women, and children remaining in the village. Every detail of that trip to the city is still clear in my mind. Young men loaded our belongings onto the backs of donkeys to be carried to the dock and packed into the sailboat which would ferry us to the opposite shore of the river. There we were to board the steamboat to Aswan and then take the train to Cairo. We bade farewell to the older people and the young children and went out the main door of our house to head for the river. My grandmother hastened to first voyage Hamza al-Din ^ gather a bit of dust from underneath my mother’s feet as she took the first seven steps of her journey; my young aunt hurried to do the same for me. But she had a hard time doing that because I was so excited that I wasn’t walking straight. In our culture, they save this dust until the family members return, and then they spread it out once more in front of the house. Down by the shore, we climbed on the sailboat to travel to the place where the posta, which was the river steamboat that would carry us to Aswan, would stop. The sailboat slipped through the water and we fell silent, listening to the lapping of the water against the hull and the snap of the sail in the wind. We talked to bolster our spirits and then again became silent with the burning pain of the coming separation. We landed on the opposite shore and piled up our belongings with those of another family that was traveling; the man of that household became our guide for the rest of the trip to Cairo. In the evening, the steamboat appeared, big as a huge house with light spilling out of its many windows onto the face of the Nile. Before it landed, it cried out in a huge bass voice like the bellow of many cows together: “WOOOOOOOOO!” As the boat came closer to shore, a disturbing second voice came clattering from it, “KAR-KAR-KAR!” The posta boat trip was a thrilling experience. I heard so many different noises and voices for the first time, including the high-pitched trilling whistle of the captain, each whistle echoed by a big bass bellow, “WOOOOOOOOO.” Then a new repetitive sound, over and over, “KARATIKI-KRATIKA KASHSH...