Other people’s words about … funfairs
Deep down, the funfair was a sad place. You couldn’t hear yourself think. Everything was too bright and too big. The floor was covered in sawdust and underneath it, dirt. On the other side of the Round Up there was a wire fence around a patch of muddy grass with a few bits of hay, and inside the fence was the saddest horse you ever saw. Chestnut brown with white socks, covered in flies, its nose more or less touching the ground because its own head was too much for its neck to bear. It wasn’t just sad: there was something mean in it that wasn’t its fault. When I whispered to it, ‘hello, horse’, it slowly turned its whole body away.
from ‘Western Lane‘
by Chetna Mario
In my memory, the Cairo Zoo is a little like the funfair that Chetna Maroo’s narrator describes in the passage I’ve quoted above.
I visited the Cairo Zoo thirty-two years ago, just once. I didn’t take any photographs or record it in my diary at the time, and the man I visited it with, the man I was living with in Cairo, an American man, is no longer in regular touch with me, so I don’t know how accurately I’m recalling it. But in my memory the zoo was a place where the animal enclosures were small and narrow with bare ground and no grass, a place where the animals were thin with their ribs showing through their mangy fur. It was also a place where families wandered down the paths with an air of celebration and festivity, where children carried balloons and mothers pushed prams and vendors walked past, selling roses and snacks. It was a sad place. That’s how I remember it.
Largs Bay, June 2024.
In the camel enclosure, a camel stood before us, a camel whose toenails had grown so long that they curved down towards the ground. The American man and I stared silently back at the camel.
‘That’s cruel,’ I said at last, my voice wobbling. ‘They should cut its toes.’
‘I know,’ the American man said back.
He laughed helplessly and then he looked as though he might start to cry instead.
‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Oh God, Rebecca, let’s get out of here.’
And we fled.
How did we get to the zoo that day — by bus or train? I don’t know. Where did we go afterwards — back to our apartment in downtown Cairo or to the fiteer place that we loved for lunch? I don’t know. Is any of this memory true? I don’t know.
And if it’s not true, this memory, this story that I’ve just told you — even though I remember it that way — do I have the right to tell it to you?
I don’t know.
Lately I’ve been reading …
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- The sobriety narrative is appealing in that it organises life into a tidy before and after, the epitome of a transformation story, powerful proof of the capacity to change: On the subject of telling troublesome stories, here is Sara Martin exploring the recovery narrative. In my novella Ravenous Girls, the narrator, Frankie, longing to understand what her anorexic sister is experiencing, devours memoirs written by people who have recovered from an eating disorder. It’s only slowly that she realises the inherent faultiness of these recovery narratives. This, in part, is what Martin explores in this piece.
- While eating disorders are more prevalent among adolescents and young women, eating disorders affect people of all genders and ages, including those in experiencing perimenopause and menopause in midlife: On the subject of eating disorders, here’s the Butterfly Foundation on the growing recognition of the prevalence of eating disorders in older women.
- Disappointment isn’t self-indulgence or a lack of gratitude; it isn’t a failure of character or a threat to my wellbeing. It is the natural byproduct of wanting something that has not come to fruition. To desire is to make ourselves vulnerable; to come up empty-handed hurts: I am usually wary of people who write about their mindfulness and spiritual practices. I find the language they use, somewhat counterintuitively, self-absorbed, and the practices they preach alientating. Despite this, I found this piece by Benjamin Schaefer, on how writers often mistake disappointment for jealousy, thought-provoking.
twenty-one words 