Connected in Cairo: Growing up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East

5. Coffee Shops and Gender in Translocal Spaces

5 139 “These towers are for the very rich,” Maged told me, pointing to the thirtytwo -floor First Residence complex adjoining the First Mall shopping complex in Giza. “The flats cost $3 million, just for one. Inside, there are elevators for automobiles, so they can rise up to their flats. And on the rooftop, there are helicopters. If there is trouble, they can fly out of the country.” I’d asked Maged to drive me to see the towers and the First Mall complex after my curiosity was aroused by a research paper written by one of my undergraduate students at the American University in Cairo. Yasmin, whose father was one of the investors in the complex, had spent weeks visiting Cairo’s luxurious First Mall, interviewing staff and customers, and had concluded that the complex is a site of spectacle on three different levels. At one level, the buildings themselves are spectacles, demonstrations to Egyptians and foreigners alike that Egypt is a part of the global flow of commodities and has shopping malls as luxurious as anything boasted by London, New York, or Paris. Second, the shops are sites for displays of goods, a vast array of luxurious clothes, shoes, and other commodities from around the world. Finally, the First Mall is a place in which wealthy elites display themselves to one another in all their finery (on one occasion, when Yasmin asked a friend to go to the First Mall with her, she was refused because the friend “didn’t want to get dressed up”). These levels, moreover, interrelate: for businesspeople, the status of the First Mall as spectacle makes having a branch of their retail store there a prestige marker, even when it is not the most lucrative branch. To visit the mall, to see and be seen, is also to expose yourself to objects of desire, and, of course, the objects on display are just the sorts of clothes and accessories in which one might wish to display oneself in a place like the First Mall. The First Mall is thus a self-contained world of consumption in which one exchanges economic for social capital. The residential towers attached Coffee ShopS and Gender in tranSloCal SpaCeS 140 Co n n ec te d i n C a i r o to it—allowing one to literally live at the mall—just add to this sense of overwhelming splendor. But the construction of class through consumption is not only about the accumulation of goods and the display of taste. It is also about the exclusion of those who cannot, and should not, be shopping here. My interest in the First Mall developed in part from the fact that the place is not only beyond Maged’s experience but likely to remain so, since even in his best clothes he would be unable to pass the scrutiny of the security guards at the entrance.1 Hence his tall tales about the First Mall. False though they may be in their specifics, Maged’s stories concretize a reality of his world: members of the economic, social, and political elite—like those who take my classes at AUC and those who live and shop at the First Mall—live in places from which the poor and middle classes are excluded, except those who work in them as clerks and security guards.2 Even though their Mercedes and SUVs contribute to the noise and pollution of Cairo, in Maged’s tales these cars are literally lifted up and out of it.3 From their vantage points above, the rich who own these cars can look down on teeming Cairo, and if the masses get out of hand, they can escape by flying even higher and crossing borders that, troublesome though they may be for most Egyptians, are open to the cosmopolitan elite. Men of Maged’s class frequently articulate experiences of abjection, “the combination of an acute awareness of a ‘first class’ world, together with an increasing social and economic disconnection from it” (Ferguson 2002: 559). Men like Maged manage this awareness in part by embedding their interpretations of elite Egyptians in moral universes. Working-class people often narrate tales that construct those who inhabit spaces like the First Mall as moral opposites. Maged assumes that no one comes by so much wealth honestly, and that such people are the sources of the corruption of Egyptian society. The children...