Sherry Chandler

When I was a girl, this was a throwaway comic line, heard everywhere from Crosby-Hope Road pictures to Pepé Le Pew cartoons. I knew I was supposed to laugh at it, I knew the Casbah was some exotic, romantic place, but I had no idea what it was.

So I turned to this NYTimes article, “The Crumbling of the Casbah,” this morning with considerable interest. Now that I have a pretty good idea of what the Casbah is I learn that it soon may be no more:

Casbahs, from the Arabic for “fortified place,” exist across North Africa, and many have been beautifully restored. In Algiers the word once referred only to the citadel built above the old city, but it came to mean the old city itself. When people speak of the Casbah, they are referring uniquely to this crowded hillside between the fortress and the sea.

A Phoenician trading post called Ikosim occupied the point of land as early as the sixth century B.C. The Romans arrived 500 years later, and the arc of an amphitheater can still be traced in the walls of the buildings in the lower Casbah.

The Vandals eventually chased the Romans away, and a Berber tribe was living there when Buluggin bin Ziri arrived in the 10th century to found a new city on what was left of the old one. He called the new city El Djazair, which means the islands in Arabic, referring to the string of islets off the coast that form a natural breakwater for the harbor. From El Djazair came the anglicized name Algiers and later Algeria.

The Berbers built a wall around the city. Five gates closed it off from the world, and gates also closed each end of the city’s narrow streets, although both the wall and the internal gates have long since disappeared.

After the Barbarossa brothers captured the town in 1516, Algiers became a fabled redoubt of Barbary pirates who plied the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. In 1575 Miguel de Cervantes was taken captive on his way back to Spain from a military campaign and spent five years in Algiers before he was ransomed and sent home.

In those days the fortified city was filled with more than 100 fountains, 50 hammams, or public baths, 13 large mosques and more than 100 prayer halls, one for almost every street, so that residents could perform the last of their five daily prayers after the gates were shut for the night. A flutist circulated playing a Turkish melody called a coupe jambe — French for leg cut — to announce the evening curfew.

Colonialism was hard on Algiers:

When the French arrived to colonize the country in 1830, one of the first things they did was cut the city in two with the “rue du Centre” to allow their troops easy access in the event of insurrection. They surrounded the Casbah with colonial-style buildings, destroyed the walls and tore down much of the northern quarter to build the colonial neighborhood of Bab al-Oued.

So was the battle for independence, which basically seems to have turned the Casbah into a slum:

In 1958 the Casbah’s 175 acres were home to only 30,000 people. Those numbers swelled as the battle for independence gained strength, and people crowded into the city to escape reprisals by the French. More than 80,000 people live in the Casbah today. Each house, intended for a single family, now holds as many as 10 poor families.

Earthquakes have taken their toll. And so has fundamentalism, which whether Christian or Moslem, never seems to have much concern for culture. The Casbah has been a major hiding place for terrorists.

There is a movement underway to restore/rebuild the Casbah but

“More than a third of the houses have collapsed, and at least another third are in an advanced state of deterioration,” said Abdelkader Ammour, secretary general of a foundation that is trying to save the crumbling swatch of hidden courtyards and winding narrow streets. “We don’t want it to disappear.”

Mr. Ammour said the problem isn’t money. “It’s a question,” he said, “of political will.”

Or as Nabila Oulebsir, an Algerian architect who has written extensively on Algiers, says, “The question is whether you reconstruct or construct something new.”

Historic preservation is a luxury for steady times, and Algeria is still feeling its way toward the future from a dark and turbulent past. It has only just righted itself from a decade of fundamentalist Islamic violence. The nation’s focus is now on economic development. But tourism, the great engine of preservation in so many cities, is low on the list of Algeria’s concerns. Algeria doesn’t really need tourists. It has oil.

Although I struggle with the idea of a “poetry of witness” and/or confessional poetry, I don’t see use of the “I” in poetry as much of a problem. I figure a poem has a point of view that is more or less mine, an observer that is more or less me, whatever way I use pronouns. Self-consciously avoiding “I” isn’t so much a challenge as a hobble.

Still the question is debated in poetry groups I inhabited and periodicals I read, so I find myself more or less forced to consider it and so am drawn to aphoristic pronouncements about it, such as this one I share with you today:

The autobiographical gesture negotiates between self and subject; that is, the poet is never just a unique person speaking honestly about her individual life, but rather, someone subject to social codes such as class, race, nationality, and gender. Morevoer, because the poet uses language, which is also subject to these codes, saying “I” is doubly vexed. No self is primary, untouched by culture — and poets acknowledge this to varying degrees.

— from Natasha Sajé, “Dynamic Design: The Structure of Books of Poems” in The Iowa Review, Fall 2005.

Speaking of point of view, I have spent the last week with mine considerably impaired. My routine cataract lens replacement got complicated by a small benign cyst on my iris. Short version is that attempts to avoid the cyst failed and it bled and shed pigment into my pupil, so that I was essentially blinded in that eye for several days. Disturbing and tiresome, even though one knows it’s temporary. Disappointing when the expected “I can see!” is transformed to “Oh my God, I’m blind!”

My regimen of eye drops has been a full-time job: steroids for the inflammation, glaucoma-type meds to counteract the pressure build-up caused by the steroids, antibiotics. I think this is the most medical attention I’ve ever required in my 61 years, including postnatal care after giving birth to unexpected twins. I’ve been a slave to the clock, having to plan any activities around the drug regimen. Any of my readers who have to do this kind of thing regularly have my deep sympathy. It’s very difficult to always have to be so self-aware.

Being a metaphor maker, I have thought of this experience as first, looking through the windshield of one of those big-ass mudsling trucks, then as looking through a turbulent surf filled with seaweed and sand (the stuff floats around in the eye fluid, hence floaters I suppose), and now finally as looking out on the world through one of those dainty black hat veils such as femme fatales used to wear in 1930s noir movies.

Even so, I don’t have much impulse to try to make a poem of any of it. A week spent staring at the inside of my own eye has not been all that inspiring. I did see (ahem) a small private irony in getting a comment this week from my favorite visual poet, Geof Huth. As a visual experience, Geof, this is the pits except that I do have a much more viseral grasp of how binocular vision works: spots before one eye = spots across most of the field of vision.

As of yesterday afternoon, my eye began to feel somewhat normal in its socket and I began to get glimpses of the improvement I was promised. Best, it no longer hurts to spend more than ten minutes or so reading a book or looking a a computer screen. So I think I’m back in business.

Thanks to Poppysmatus for pinch hitting. My hit numbers have actually gone up this week. I may need to think about that.