When the sea becomes a gated society

The sea of Alexandria was never immune to the city's unraveling. As the city lost its architectural identity and spiritual depth, the sea, the eternal witness, stood as its most fragile element. No one resides in the sea, neither literally nor figuratively, to defend it as they might defend land. As John R. Gillis notes in The Human Shore, “As such, the sea was immune from the losses suffered constantly by land. It was immortal.”

Perhaps the greatest loss Alexandria has endured is the disappearance of the sea behind wooden signs, fences, hotel gates, cafés, clubs, parking lots, private beaches, and yacht marinas. These obstacles obstruct the view, marginalizing the sea as a natural element in the daily life of the city.

The visible size of the sea has diminished. The shoreline as we once knew it no longer exists. It no longer runs beside us unchanged. So absent is it, in fact, that it disappears into the background. The sea was once exposed, like the sky. You didn’t need to look for it. You knew it was there, as you know the sky is there.

Now, however, the sea has been nationalized, just like the gated communities that segregate the privileged from the rest of the city. Walking along the shore now feels like moving through a narrow alley, boxed in by invisible walls and an imagined ceiling overhead.

Slivers for the poor

Roughly 46% of the "visible sea" remains, compared to its state before the Corniche expansion in 2002, during the governorship of Abdel Salam Mahgoub (1935 - 2022), who had held office in Alexandria since 1997. The Human and the City for Social Research/HCSR documented this encroachment in all its forms, noting that it now spans 54% of the shoreline. The center shared this data in an infographic on Facebook.

The center is one of the civil society organizations founded in 2020, operating in Alexandria and conducting research on social, economic, cultural, urban, and environmental rights.

There once was a space and a time in which it was possible to look back in anger.

There is now an endless plan to convert every inch, even if it belongs to the sea, into a source of profit, regardless of the loss, whether it affects the people, the city’s geography, or its spirit.

The Corniche has been treated as an investment project targeting a specific class which the state directly addresses with offers, without questioning what is being lost. Some loopholes remain for the working-class who want to enjoy what’s left of a third-class sea. They crowd into these corners, clinging to the gates. Seen from above, the difference between the two classes of sea is marked by a fence.

No exaggeration. The city becomes orphaned when the sea is cut off from people’s daily lives. Now it lies dead behind barriers. The murals that depict the sea, absent though it is, have turned into memorial portraits, like those we hang on the wall after someone has passed.

Once, it was open to all

In the 1970s, when I first learned to love walking by the sea, no barriers separated it from the city, except for a few locations. There was the Police Club in front of Syria Street, then the Engineers Club in Saba Pasha—specifically at the Al-Kharban beach, once a haven for fishing enthusiasts. In addition, there were stretches of casinos along the beaches of Mandara, Miami, and Sidi Bishr, all the way to the Saraya Casino in Stanley, which had previously been a small hotel called Côte d’Azur. Then came Roushdy Casino, La Corte in Cleopatra, Panorama in Camp Caesar, and finally, Shatby Casino.

Aside from these, the sea was open to everyone. The owners of the cabins played a role in making the beach democratic. They acted as a link between the sea and the city’s people, inviting relatives, friends, and even distant acquaintances to spend the day in cabins that were always open. Any cabin was shared property, a legacy that reproduced itself and spread equally among the family and its broader circles.

At Gleem Beach, I was always captivated by that small brick chalet that extended several meters into the sea. It was used as a retreat by one of the monasteries, like desert hermitages. The nuns, dressed in white, would pray there. We saw them like distant butterflies, living in another land under another sky. There was a rescue bridge that extended from the chalet to the shore. At that time, there was space and time to fulfill the desire to look back in anger. We would go to that chalet, break the bridge, and never return.

My complicated relationship with the sea

I was not a good swimmer as a child, unlike my friends, because I suffered early on from asthma attacks and my family feared the sea breeze would harm me; these waters were forbidden to me. But I could still sit before them and play from afar.

Despite this, the sea played a role in my writing. Walking beside it, thinking, engaging with my inner thoughts, then pausing quietly on one of the green wooden benches, listening to the voice of both instinct and reason. Without it, many of those thoughts and reflections that were hatched by the shore would have remained trapped.

My relationship with the sea remains ambiguous, even though I broke that barrier late in my twenties, when I finally swam rather than just stare at it. Perhaps that long period of prohibition made the sea more desirable. I wanted it to engulf me, to contain me alongside all the other metaphors that turned it into a bridge to the other side of the world.

Each time I passed by, that old prohibition echoed. I returned to being that primitive person who stands before the sea, feeling the sting of fire on his skin, shivering—without the fire even being present.

The classist sea

My mother kept photos of us on the beaches of Marsa Matrouh and Agami from the late 1960s in a light brown leather suitcase, alongside photos from other occasions. One of my childhood hobbies was to spread those photos across the bed and look at them.

I remember a photo of my brother Hisham, who died seven years ago, sitting on one of the steep rocks at Ageeba Beach in Marsa Matrouh. He wore a white or maybe khaki tank top and shorts, plastic sandals popular in the 1960s, and a straw cowboy-style hat.

Among the photos were also images of teenage girls from our summer group, wearing full-coverage swimsuits, standing on the same rocks where my brother had posed. They were smiling at the camera. Some wore rubber swimming caps, while others had wet hair glistening with droplets.

One night, I saw my mother take out that memory suitcase and begin tearing the photos so no one could see them after she died. She feared that the old memories might fall into untrustworthy hands and that the images of girls in swimsuits would escape the darkness of the wardrobe into the public eye. She feared the bodies of the girls would be violated by strangers.

In the 1980s, the sea returned as a forbidden social space. It no longer existed in its natural state. It became part of the increasingly conservative society surrounding it. Nature was defeated by intolerance, and the relationship between city and sea grew tense over the decades, as the sea turned from a dreamscape into a classist and religious space loaded with complicated meanings.

Escape from time and history

There has always been an intimate relationship between photographs and the sea. The barefoot beach photographer in his signature white outfit—shirt and shorts—was part of the landscape. He wandered among the cabins, immortalizing moments. He knew he was capturing something profound. Being at the beach was no trivial event. It was a rare encounter between people and nature.

Every beach in Alexandria had its own photographer. In addition to his white outfit, he wore a straw hat to shield him from the summer sun and to distinguish himself from others. A leather strap hung his camera from his neck. He paced the shore, barefoot on the sand, offering his services to beachgoers to capture memories.

The sea was always the background of those photos, just like a studio curtain depicting a natural scene, but this backdrop was real. The sea lends a kind of permanence to the image, as one of the oldest and most pliable elements of the universe. It grants the photograph an aged, timeless quality that transcends the moment itself.

Walter Benjamin writes in his essay "A Short History of Photography"  it is "another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious.

The sea, Gillis writes, is “a point of eternal return that promises never to change.” Going to the sea becomes a sacred pilgrimage, and the moments must be documented. The sea has been temporarily frozen in millions of photographs.

“The sea offered an escape from time, from history itself,” Gillis adds.

He also writes about the beach’s historical detachment that  “The beach was created ex nihilo, providing neither sense of place nor the sense of history associated with other vacation destinations.”

It is a place outside of history. The captured moments of happiness at the beach do not belong to any social timeline or class system. They, too, exist outside of history.

The aesthetic occupation of the coast

As Gillis notes, it was not easy for the beach to become a place of pleasure. It came with violations, not just of the beach, but of the original coastal inhabitants: fishermen, plant gatherers, and others.

After these inhabitants were forcibly removed, the coast was used for healing. Gillis writes that the coast also gained therapeutic value after the English upper class began using sandy beaches in the early 18th century as spaces for mental and physical healing. This shift required the removal of coastal residents, especially fishermen and plant gatherers, in what Jean Urbain calls "the aesthetic occupation of the coast through the holiday ideology.”

He adds that the idea of the coast today has expanded through the symbolism it gained as a space for both dreams and nightmares. Cinema helped transform it into a setting of threat and fear, casting sea creatures as lurking monsters. People returned from the city to the shore, but violently and dangerously.

We have abandoned the city’s geography and spirit to fix the beach as a space of dreams. But it is an aristocratic dream. The sea has returned as a classist monster, welcoming only a few. It is yet another cycle in the reincarnation of this rare and exceptional aesthetic space.

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(*)A version of this article first appeared in Arabic on September 16, 2023.