Talking Location With author Jo Jackson – EGYPT

3rd May 2020

TalkingLocationWith... Jo Jackson, author of Too Loud a Silence and Beyond the Margin

Another Cairo

My debut novel was finally published thirty years after I started to write it. A story that had been waiting to be written since I had lived in Egypt in the 1980’s. Two baby girls I looked after there were the inspiration for this fictional story. The babies had been abandoned and were being brought up in an orphanage. Circumstances and events in Cairo at the time means I do not know how their lives turned out. Too Loud a Silence is a book I always wanted to write for them.

Egypt then was a warm, safe and welcoming country with happy smiling people who adored our three blonde haired children. Muslims and Christians lived in harmony with few indications of the racial tensions that would later be fuelled by extremism. It was my first taste of a culture very different from that of England.

In the book we meet Maha a young journalist who has returned to Egypt, the place of her birth, to report on the Arab Spring of 2011.

The day passed slowly, and night fell early. She went outside and lay on a sunbed beside the deserted swimming pool. It was a warm, noisy darkness. The fragrance of frangipani perfumed the night, mixed with the music of the frogs and the cicadas. Here was a lush green oasis, a place to pause but not a place to hide. Tomorrow she would be a journalist, impartial and professional. Tonight she just wanted to be here under a million stars.

We lived in Cairo: a sprawling chaotic city built for twelve million people but home to nearer sixteen million. Cars, buses, animals and pedestrians jammed the streets, a tide that ebbed and flowed. Everywhere the sights, the smells, the colours imprinted themselves on my mind. When, years later, I came to describe them in my novel I was back there amidst the mayhem and the noise. The street sellers calling up to the apartments, women sitting cross- legged on the pavement selling bunches of fresh herbs and the souks filled with stalls selling exquisite crafts from metal work to carpets to mother of pearl boxes. Haggling was a sport, part of the process, just as was sipping tea. “First we make friendship then we do business.”

Maha melted into the narrow streets of the Khan el Khalili where the tall buildings blanked out the sun and cast blocks of shadow over the shop fronts. Spices were packed into sacks or dark, gnarled barrels. Like rows of powder paint, the peaks of green, red, orange and saffron yellow lit up the sunless alley. Their smell, thick and cloying wafted around her.

The Nile is amongst the world’s longest waterways and gave birth to early Egyptian civilization. Many ancient archaeological sites are found close to its shores.  We learned to sail on the Nile though it’s still very much a commercial waterway. Along the river the soil is rich and good for growing crops. Centuries old farming methods were still to be seen: the land being tilled, water buffalo pulling the hand ploughs. Children tending goats and leading donkeys piled so high with crops their faces are all but hidden.

‘The Nile,’ Maha whispered. A pewter swell moved languidly beneath them, each ripple like a thread in a piece of silk. The sail of a felucca billowed with a crack as it caught the wind; a man in a grey robe standing in the stern guided it downstream. The voices of women washing clothes beside the bridge drifted upwards and children bathed in the shallows, squealing as they splashed each other.

Living there gave us the opportunity to know a different Cairo from the one the tourists see. and with our smattering of Arabic the local people laughed with us. Riding horses in the desert was a particular thrill. Led by handsome horseman in immaculate white robes we loved their Oxford accents learned from the British during the war. “Tally ho,” was their cry. Out into a land of shifting sands and silent winds from where pyramids stand proud unsullied by the trappings of tourism. To know the desert is to allow it to become a part of you. Never to be forgotten always to be yearned.

“I love this place,” Hosni said. “We used to come here as children before my father died. Come I will show you.”

The heat was reflected off the sand, but the air was clear, a warm breeze tugged at her hair. She followed him to the edge of a high cliff.  They looked down into a narrow wadi formed by a long- vanished watercourse, Boulders bleached by the sun shone white, dark shadows had drawn an outline around their base. “When it rains water still rushes down and then the desert turns green and flowers bloom. It is beautiful; by the next day it has all gone.”

I have taken you on the briefest of journeys to Egypt. It doesn’t begin to convey the magic of the country or the kindness of the people. Our lives and our children’s lives have been shaped by living there.

Maha was to experience a different Cairo. One that was torn by conflict and cruelty imposed upon people of all faiths who demonstrated for change. I hope Too Loud a Silence pays tribute to them.

The writing is just superb – descriptions that assault all the senses, images that sear themselves into your memory …(Welsh Annie Dec. 2017)

My second book, Beyond the Margin published in November 2019 is set largely on the wild, beautiful west coast of Ireland and tells the story of two people who live their lives on the edge of society.

Thank you so much to Jo for sharing her Egypt with us!

Catch Jo on Twitter

Join Team TripFiction on Social Media:

Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction)

Subscribe to future blog posts