“Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eyes first,” said the 3rd century Coptic Christian bishop Saint Athanasius from Alexandria. A few years ago, his message found a new form, encrypted in a mural in Cairo’s Manshiyat Naser, painted across 50 separate buildings by a group of graffiti artists led by the Tunisian artist eL Seed. Manshiyat Naser, also known as the Garbage City, is a district in Cairo at the foot of the Mokattam Mountain. It is inhabited by some 30,000 Zabbaleen people, a Coptic Christian community who had come to the city in the beginning of the 20th century and developed a unique informal form of economics – one of the most effective garbage collection and recycling systems in the world which is still operating today. They sort (in 16 categories!) and recycle more than 80% of the garbage created by the city of 20 million; the average ratio in the West is 25%. Although, thanks to the Zabbaleens, Cairo is an unusually clean city for the number of its dwellers, it’s a highly stigmatised group in the Egyptian social system. Mokattam is considered an isolated, marginal, and dirty place – also because Zabbaleens, who are Christians, farm pigs, which are an indispensable part of the recycling process. eL Seed’s mural, entitled Perception, is dedicated to the Zabbaleen people and their work and critiques the condemnation and distorted views that stem from the larger population’s ignorance of otherness.
The only official institution aware of eL Seed’s intention to paint the mural was the local Mokattam church and its head, Father Samaan. Under El Sisi, where every inch of the city is controlled by the army, censorship spreads like a plague, and the possibility of any form of creative expression in the public space – especially graffiti, which was an extremely important medium during the revolution – is close to nil. And so the appearance of a work of street art on such a gigantic scale is phenomenal. It was made possible because the Zabbaleens themselves kept quiet about it. What is also phenomenal is the graffiti itself: the fifty fragments, which are each painted on a separate wall, and resemble a stain of paint seeping down from a roof or a creative incident by a sloppy construction worker, come together in a unified and extremely precise image if one looks at it from the top of the Mokattam mountain.
On my way to the top of the mountain, I pass through a village. The narrow streets are flooded with overloaded carts and little trucks.The streets are also filled with heaps of garbage attended by women (the division of labor here is strict: men are gatherers and recyclers; women and children are sorters) and various animals. In between it all I see small stores, recycling workshops, tearooms. Dozens of colorful teddy bears rescued from rubbish dry on someone’s balcony. From a pile of organic waste a woman carefully picks out a bright yellow lemon peel left over from the production of the lemonade beverage so popular in Cairo. The smell in the 35 degree heat is intense; brown and grey colours dominate the scene, mixed with shades of dirt and desert sand. I am fascinated by the order which rules over this chaos and the sorting ladies who are wearing bright and colorful dresses as they sit on top of heaps of unidentified waste and smile at me warmly. They resemble the first flowers of spring that have burgeoned from the moist and dark earth. Now, thanks to eL Seed, one more flower has opened over the heads of Cairo’s cleaners – and this one is the most beautiful of all.
