On the first afternoon of Eid al-Adha, I found myself wandering the streets, filled with people grasping for a reprieve from the unrelenting harshness of the rest of the year. My steps led me to a traditional café, not in a poor area, but undeniably a working-class neighbourhood. The café was packed with a mix of patrons—teenagers, young adults, and the elderly—each distinct in their appearance, shaped by the festive occasion.
Like countless others of its kind, the café had a television, its screen inundated with hundreds of satellite channels offering what could only be described as the shallowest output of Arab civilisation—an endless parade of gyrating frivolity. The café owner, with his oversized LCD screen, was engrossed in a never-ending struggle to select what to broadcast for his diverse clientele.
In his moment of supposed brilliance, he settled on the Gulf-based channel ART Cinema, which was halfway through its airing of the Egyptian film The Jungle. True to form, these channels seemed determined to air films that degrade Egypt repeatedly, even on festive occasions, spoiling the fleeting window of joy available to many. The Jungle is a low-budget film marked by realism, audacity, and an abundance of pain. It tells the story of a group of street children of varying ages, united in one of Egypt’s over 1,000 informal settlements. They survive on the fringes of society through scavenging, theft, drug dealing, and prostitution.
The film delves into the circumstances that drive these children to such extremes, implicating both society and the government as direct culprits behind the crisis—a crisis that continues to grow unchecked. With harrowing, tear-inducing intensity, the film’s narrative heaps tragedy upon tragedy onto a single family, rendering the viewer incredulous at the plausibility of such misery. Yet, the harsh truth is that these horrors are all too real, ignored by everyone, even the poor themselves.
What struck me most was the audience’s reaction—a response that defied any semblance of normal human empathy. Despite their rapt attention to the film’s harrowing events, the results were unsettling. During an intense scene where a father rapes his daughter, one of the patrons quipped, ‘Well, they’re not going to show us anything—not even her leg! What a lousy film.’ The room erupted in laughter, the kind of laughter that reeked of sickly glee. As the scene shifted to reveal the bloodstained evidence of the girl’s lost innocence, another chimed in: ‘What a shame, she’s ruined now—she won’t be able to marry.’ Again, the room dissolved into laughter.
In the climactic scene, as most of the family members are killed and their organs harvested, there was no commentary—only more laughter. The film ended, and the café owner promptly switched the channel to a comedy film, as though nothing had happened. Life at the café resumed its routine.
This incident starkly illuminated a catastrophe far beyond economic or social boundaries. It laid bare the breakdown of fundamental human empathy, our relationship with ourselves, and our engagement with the suffering of others—not in some distant country, but perhaps just a street away from the café. One could write volumes analysing this calamity, or perhaps distil it into a single word. Who knows, or dares to know? After all, we exist in a state of collective denial, oblivious to our own moral collapse. We inhabit a parallel world, equipped with selective vision that only perceives what can be endured in silence, punctuated by idle, laughing words clung to by those around us. Or perhaps these scenes call to mind the timeless verse of the great Lebanese poet Elias Abu Madi from The Clay (1927), ingeniously reproduced as a theme song in the background of tragic imagery from the critically acclaimed film Gate of the Sun (2004):
‘He cries and laughs, neither out of sorrow nor joy… Like a lover who pens a line of passion in the air, only to erase it.’
This article is originally published by AlBorsa in Arabic and later AI-translated by South Push.