The Yacoubian Building, The Film

Stunning. Long, but rather beautifully crafted and just as charming as the novel. The credit must go in part to Adel Imam, who plays the part of the dissolute, aging Pasha masterfully. Downtown Cairo is almost a characterful itself, and the aerial, loving shots of its faded, elegant streets and maidans are striking. I have only two reservations. First, the tacked-on, Halloween costume beards of the Islamic radicals were quite silly, and out of place in such an otherwise slick production. Next, why didn’t I notice properly in the novel what the problematic and disappointing characterization of Hatem Rashid, the gay editor of Le Caire, the city’s French newspaper?

It struck me only as I watched the story unfold on screen how Alaa Al-Aswany turns his story’s main gay character into a sad morality tale about homosexuality. We are told that Hatem becomes gay because his parents neglected him as a child, leaving him ‘for the servants to play with.’ He is molested or raped, it’s not quite clear which, by a member of the household staff, and this shapes his lifelong preference, the story goes, for men. Al-Aswany seeminly encourages our sympathy for Hatem, suggesting we should excuse his gayness because of his childhood trauma. Initially I thought it was quite ground-breaking for the novel to center around a gay character, given the taboo against homosexuality in mainstream Egytpian culture, but Hatem only plays on the worst stereotypes, rather than challenging them. How disappointing — a story, both the book and film, with such huge reach across the Arab world could have served up a very different message, but instead it recycled the narrow thinking that the rest of the story challenges.

Sheekamou Part I: Baghali Polo-e Tahmeeli

Welcome to a new section of my blog, Sheekamou, dedicated to food, cooking, and the sensibility of the glutton, which in Farsi is more gently and approvingly referred to as the Sheekamou.

I was inspired to add this section earlier today, after a particularly fraught and unsatisfying experience with the dish known as Baghali Polo, a pilaf of fluffy Persian rice with dill and lima beans. Now extricating the lima bean from its thick, extra-terrestial skin, and then de-podding the bean itself from its outer skin, is an enormously time consuming process that should only be undertaken by women with obscene amounts of free time or household staff. My baghali polo was tahmeeli, or imposed, by my bi-weekly organic produce box, which often arrives with such random and unexpected items. If you present an Iranian woman with a bunch of lima beans, she will have no choice, indeed no other impulse, but to turn them into baghali polo, which is what I proceeded to do at my own peril.

Disappointingly, my rice ended up all broken and nubby, not like those elegant, long grains of basmati that proper Iranian women manage to cook. I obediently made a little mountain of my polo, so the steam would circulate, but this resulted in the beans on top not cooking all the way through. The only thing that saved the meal was the potato tahdig, the layer at the bottom, which was crisp and perfect: a tahdig that would make any mother-in-law proud.

Conclusion: Iranian cooking is truly the haute cuisine of the andaruni, a product of a society in which women were sequestered, and enjoyed vast hours of leisure time, during which they devised recipes of incalculable complexity…multiple types of painstakingly dried herbs, myriad of finely chopped, subtle ingredients that are then cooked in challening and involved phases. This is of course not an original reflection, scholars who do food anthropology have published all about the haute cusine of the andaruni. I would have done well to recall all this, and to have boiled my lima beans into the everyone-pods-their-own street food that vendors sell on the streets of Tehran in the winter.