Book review: Women in the City of the Dead

[badriyaz]

Women in the City of the Dead, by Helen Watson, is a collection of life stories and creative stories told by the very poor women who live in the City of the Dead, a giant graveyard over four centuries old just outside Cairo.  Initially it was inhabited only by gravediggers and groundskeepers and their families, but as more and more rural people

Comments

[suzycat]

That book sounds awesome, I must read it.

Yes. I wonder if my Bhuz-derided cheap red bedleh was made there? It might have been. When I took the bra apart I kind of had visions of some small brown unmanicured hands making it, a woman, not a child, in a light place. I know that sounds weird.

[badriyaz]

It might sound wierd, but it also might be totally accurate.

[badriyaz]

It didn't seem like the women felt personally unsafe there--some of them lived alone with their children, or just completely alone. But none of them had much of anything worth stealing, and of course outsiders might be treated differently. They were very nice to the anthropologist, though.