“There is no there there” Gertrude Stein famously declared upon her return to Oakland California where she spent her childhood.

Oakland disappointed Stein in two important ways.  It had neither the idyllic pre-industrial, rural small town there of her remembered past nor the there of the world’s centers of commerce and commodity culture, a there that Stein had become accustomed to. Her disappointment was ideological, based as it was on her acceptance of dominant representational strategies, but it was by no means novel. Many who measure their experience of place and time against preconceived expectations have always shared Stein’s melancholia.

Such was the experience of Gérard de Nerval, a 19th century French Romantic writer, during a visit to Cairo. In a letter to his friend Théophile Gautier, Nerval lamented that nothing looked ‘genuine’ in the Cairenean streets or shops. ‘Cairo’, he felt, was much better experienced in the ‘oriental’ cafes of Paris. Dismayed, he wrote, “I have already lost, kingdom after kingdom, province after province, the most beautiful half of the universe, and soon I will know of no place in which I can find a refuge for my dreams; but it is Egypt that I most regret having driven out of my imagination, now that I have sadly placed it in my memory”.(i)

Rather than examine the imagined contents of what he had come to ‘know’ as ‘Egypt’ and the mechanism by which his expectations of ‘Cairo’ were formed, Nerval blamed his disappointment upon some fundamental lacking in the people and places he found there. Also, in his assumption of the right to define the places he set foot in, he demonstrated just how powerful is the ability to organize expectations. In the end, rather than challenge his colonized imagination, Nerval, much like Stein and Oakland, chose to believe that there was no Cairo in Cairo.

Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma