If the Greek root arche embodies “both a beginning and a domain for the exercise of power,” then, as Alan Mikhail deftly demonstrates, archival research in Egypt likewise functioned as a point of origin for becoming a historian and an arena in which the power of the Egyptian state and social relations resided. My Egypt Archive contrasts the epistemophilic and cumulative impulses of a budding historian, eagerly seeking to obtain access to 18th-century documents, with the quotidian realities of doing history in the midst of a labyrinthine bureaucratic tangle of security permissions, building entry rituals, and complex social negotiations. The book’s method, “critical self-abnegation in the service of cultural analysis,” highlights the intricacies of research in Egypt (p. 8). The result is a critical meditation on the exigencies of archival work under less-than-ideal conditions marked by power differentials and institutional mechanisms of clearance and obstruction. In the process, we learn a great deal about the conditions of opacity and transparency within the archive, as in history, more broadly.
What the book conveys remarkably well, and in a manner quite distinctive from the large body of literature on the archive, is the range of visceral experiences entailing “personal relationships with archivists and other historians, lost pages, research leads that fizzle out, and all the messy experiences of daily life” (p. 9). At its most radical, the book de-fetishizes not only the Egyptian National Archives (Dar al-Wathaʾiq al-Qawmiyya), but the entire process of archival research. Poetic musings on the archive as an oneiric space, “a place in which people can be alone with the past” while undoing bundles of documents in solitude, gives way, instead, to the curious convivial life of objects, from plastic cards and rickety old metal carts to documents and boxes, shuttled from one room to another. The romance of the archive, as we might wish to imagine it, yields to the “romantic violence” of making history (p. 95).
Such attentiveness to the materiality of the life of objects within the archive is coupled by the author with a concern for its built environment and its embeddedness within greater Cairo. The archive’s architectural particularities—stairs, elevators, cubbyholes, windows overlooking the Nile, an informal café with crimson vinyl chairs, and the calligraphic sign adorning its entrance, as well as its location in the neighborhood of Bulaq, an area reclaimed from the Nile with a high water table and sodden soil underfoot (not a particularly inviting locale for the storage of centuries-old brittle paper, as Mikhail reminds us)—all play a part in this story. The imaginary Victorian stillness of the historian is replaced by the embodied phenomenology of everyday life: standing, sitting, bounding down stairs, leaning against a bar, waiting in endless traffic. Such a shift in attention toward embodiment engenders a marked self-consciousness about the relationship of the body-in-space as it becomes attuned to both architectural forms and power dynamics.
Drinking tea, researchers quibbling, the presence or absence of political speech, exorbitant displays of power and authority, class and gender dynamics, and even accusations of archival theft—all the chaotic business of doing history—is laid out by Mikhail as the Geertzian thick description of the work of culture. On this front, Chapter 5 on noise, aptly titled “Volume,” is particularly instructive. We hear “voices declaring grievance and injury,” as Mikhail admonishes us to listen for the noise and to the noise (pp. 61–62). Rather than conceptualize noise as the detritus that prevents us from performing the lofty, or “staid,” to use his turn of phrase, work that we presume to do as historians, My Egypt Archive unabashedly presents it to us as constitutive of our work (p. 63). “History is done as it is made,” Mikhail reminds us, “in the presence of others, in the living, breathing, messy, loud worlds where personalities clash, mobile phones ring, stomachs rumble, guns fire, and minds wander” (p. 62). We witness the politics of interruption and noise. Who speaks, or who can speak in the archive, and when? The “inescapable soundtrack” of the Egyptian National Archives is dominated by the institution’s matriarch, Madam Amal, wielding her authority like a cudgel, projecting her voice whether chatting on her mobile, gossiping with coworkers, or chastising the basement staff for having lost track of request slips; indeed “hers was a perfected brand of bureaucratic performance art” (pp. 63–64). The messiness of doing history contrasts with the “extraordinary kind of aloneness” that Europeanists, in particular, tend to emphasize in romanticized discussions of archives.Footnote 1 Importantly, it helps us understand the collective affective registers, such as “exhaustion as a public state” (the subtitle of an art exhibit at Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo), explored by Sara Salem as indexical of “(Anticolonial) Revolution as a Felt Archive.”
The question of bureaucratic authority suffuses the text, as it does everyday life in Egypt, whether through identity cards, photocopying permissions, or traffic stops, and the book is peppered with bureaucrats, including Ahmed sitting behind the entrance security desk, a man inexplicably guarding the stairs and elevators of the second floor, Abdel Rahman in the musty basement storage room, and the men and women of the photocopy department. And where there is bureaucracy, there is hierarchy, both that of the bureaucrat who wields their authority within what Albert Memmi termed a “pyramid of petty tyrants,” as well as the state apparatuses that authorize such institutional structures and the hierarchies embedded within them. Unlike in the West, where one must often turn to critical theory to highlight the capricious nature of power and authority, the fact that the “law is the law,” an authority without truth, based on a traumatic, irrational, and senseless injunction to obey, here it is intuitively understood, laid out for all to see.
What is unique about My Egypt Archive is the way that it brings to life the quotidian experience of working and living in Egypt. These experiences include idling for hours in endless traffic, encountering the inexplicable obstacles erected in one’s search for knowledge, observing, sometimes passively, sometimes protestingly, the injustices of everyday life, what Mikhail collectively calls the “low frequency frustrations” of daily life (p. 9). Such injustices are amply recounted by the author, and the text makes no pretense to veil the multiplicity of forms of inequality that reside in the archive, just as in wider society. “The reading room of the archive,” Mikhail observes, “was not a neutral space of objective knowledge production, a romanticized sanctuary of quiet reflection and thought. It was the place where reputation, status, nationality, and experience were the coin of the realm” (p. 2). Class background, urban or regional affiliation, national origin and place of domicile, educational status, and all the other hierarchies such as gender and religion, and even marital status, that we know to mark Egyptian state and society, saturate the experience in the archive. Given Mikhail’s research between 2001 and 2010, such hierarchies of power, status, and stratification are even more heightened, as is the awareness of the capillaries of power embedded within the archive, especially as we see the mounting dissatisfactions with Hosni Mubarak’s regime and its thirty-year emergency rule, along with the nepotistic power structures and crony capitalist networks that sustained it.
Part ethnography, part memoir, part social history of Egypt in the 2000s, this engrossingly written book will be relevant to scholars interested in the archive tout court, as well as those about to embark on archival research in Egypt, including those who intend to use the adjacent and less august Dar al-Kutub, which houses manuscripts and printed books. The writing is so crisp as to summon visually, particularly for those who have been to the Egyptian National Archives, the space itself and to conjure it for those who have not. My only criticism is that the book could have explored in far more detail what the daily experiences in the archive meant for the finished products of history. How, precisely, did it influence the writing of the specific histories crafted by scholars in its wake? Indeed, Mikhail asks, “where does the experience of doing history go when writing history? How, more abstractly, do the conditions of the production of history affect the history that is produced?” (p. 10). To these partially unanswered questions, I would add: how do the conditions under which history is produced affect our narrative arcs—lachrymose, sanguine, or neutral, for instance? How do such conditions affect our relationship to larger historiographical debates or even our views on the philosophy of history itself?
One might be so bold as to suggest that it is precisely through the experience of archival exhaustion that a different form of knowledge might be created. Rather than be lulled by the false transparency embedded in the excessive impulse to accumulate, what Mikhail provides instead is a musing on our “critical relation to our own archival and evidentiary desires.”Footnote 2 Thus, for example, in an experience to which so many of us who work on the Middle East can relate, Mikhail wryly remarks that after a mere week in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, he “left, quite proudly, with ten thousand photos,” only to have “cursorily read a few of these documents at the time” and, subsequently, “a scant few more. Slow thinking, understanding, and transcribing make for better historians than quick scanning, rapid checking, and partial reading” (p. 96). The brilliant assertion that “transcription is thinking and, ultimately, proves much more productive than the camera’s mass capture” (p. 96), then, is a lesson well learned amid the complicated bureaucracy known as the Egyptian National Archives.
