Fayoum is an ancient oasis connected to the Nile River in the Sahara Desert of Egypt. My grandmother, who is Fayoumi herself, would tell us about a parable of Fayoum to warn us of greed. That once, the richest man on Earth lived in Fayoum. He believed that he was so powerful, that he could challenge God, and so God punished him by opening up the desert, swallowing up all of his riches, defining the depression of Fayoum, forcing him to wander the desert alone.
I bring up my grandmother’s parable not to be sentimental, but to emphasise that myth is the only way to read the matter of Fayoum. There is another, somewhat more famous myth, which explains the origins of Fayoum, as the landscape we see today. In 1600 BC, it is told that the Prophet Yusuf had a dream. In his dream, Yusuf sees 7 unhealthy cows devouring 7 healthy cows, he warns the Pharoah that in 7 years time, Egypt will face a famine.
In trusting Yusuf, the Pharoah orders a canal be built, an extension of the Nile into the desert to create an oasis as a food reserve. In his namesake, the Bahr Yusuf canal is constructed, the desert is occupied and Fayoum is formed. But the dreams of expansion were not just for the Pharoah’s ears, soon others came, the French, the British, and then the army, who came measure, draw, and render Fayoum into object of their dreams.
They traced the land, discovering where was most productive…
…first, they drew thin lines which imprinted their dreams onto the desert…
…Then, they drew points as dams which blocked the Nile sediment…
…then thickerlines which concretized the canal and its new branches, spilling chemicals for cotton to grow…
Lines upon lines, they drew, manipulating the land with new industries, new toxicants which halted Fayoum’s seasons, until the land was no longer measured by its blessings, but by its yield for Empire.
Then army came with their own ecologists, who drew a polygon in the desert, fencing it, rendering it empty, and calling it a park, the Wadi Rayan National Park, established in 1989 – the final act of the exquisite corpse of colonial containment. Equipped with rational science, they told the Fayoumis that the park would help restore their landscape which had been toxified over the years, but they knew this foreign typology was just a tool to control the Fayoumis.