An Incurable Past

Mid-century Egypt seems to shift its shape in light of ordinary peoples’ memories. In An Incurable Past, Mériam Belli examines collective memory, oral histories, and everyday communications to reveal not just the history of mid-twentieth-century Egypt but also the ways in which ordinary people experience and remember the past. Using official archives, government publications, press reportage, fiction, textbooks, cinema, art, and public rituals, Belli constructs a ground-breaking theoretical framework of “historical utterances” which provokes questions about the relationship between remembrance and reality. Belli argues that such personal testimonies and public representations allow us a deeper understanding of Egypt’s many sociocultural layers in the 1950s and 1960s. She spotlights three topics of vernacular expression in modern Egypt: education, the anti-colonial Limby Festival, and the 1968 apparition of the Virgin Mary at a Coptic Orthodox Church in Cairo. Linked by the mid-century shift from communal life to an industrial and individuated society, these expressions also disclose the contradictory influence of ideologically homogenising state policies.

Examining history not as it was but as it is remembered, this book contextualises the classist and deeply disappointing post-Nasserist period that has inspired today’s Egyptian revolutionaries.