Temporal aftermaths and ruined spaces in the African Metropolis: Cairo in the crime fiction of Parker Bilal

Abstract

Literary narratives of Cairo imagine the complex social, economic and political life of its inhabitants as constituted by the spatial and temporal dimensions of contested urban spaces. This article investigates urban spatiotemporal cartography in the crime fiction of Parker Bilal, the pseudonym of the well-known Anglo-Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub, and the way in which his narratives portray crime in contemporary Cairo at the beginning of the 21^st century. I argue that the first novel of Bilal’s/ Mahjoub’s Makana series, Golden Scales (2012), presents contradictory and conflicting temporalities, with one strand of the narrative gesturing forward and with linear momentum towards the 2011 revolution and another narrative strand presenting the present, in David Scott’s term, as “ruined time”, resulting in a crisis of arrested teleology. This temporal paradox sheds light on an African metropolis as a contested space: it becomes the shifting ground of a society caught up in government repression, crime, revolution and the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. Despite its revolutionary potential, the narrative renders the metropolis a space where the future becomes unimaginable.

Keywords: African crime fiction, ruined time, urbanity, Cairo, Jamal Mahjoub/ Parker Bilal