Searching for a Past: French Colonial Memory of Ismailia in the early 20th Century

Memory of life in Ismailia as depicted in the newsletter of former French speaking expatriates, the Journal de Timsah, relating to the large saline rich interior body of water on which Ismailia looks upon, and connecting Ismailia and Egypt to the imagery of a crocodile. The newsletter, used to update former/exiled French speaking expatriates (and Egyptians in France, who also appear on the membership list), provided photographs, essays and, in several issues, recipes to remind the readers of an idyllic past life of semi-colonial past. Descriptions of Egyptian dishes and full-on recipes were meant to be easily replicated to recreate the smells and tastes of an earlier time, while the photographs painted a picture of water, gardens, beach outings, parties, schooling and villa-life of the European elite of the town who worked for the Suez Canal Company. These memories of a colonial past-life are similar to that of other colonial settings and situations, such as the French-colonial white family in Ousmane Sembène’s film La Noire de… The Ismailia families who immigrated after the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, or even earlier, looked to keep a piece of the colony with them even after their return to the metropole. This paper thus attempts to interrogate the ideas of memory and space as they appear in issues of Timsah. Using the newsletter, I show how the former residents, even in a semi-colonial space or company town setting, cannot let go of their hold on the former spaces. As they try to keep pieces and recreate smells and tastes, they demonstrate their colonial and orientalist gaze on the landscape of Ismailia and the region of the Suez Canal – not the Ismailia or Canal of the present, but one of the past. Methodologically, I use the photography and texts from the newsletter as a collage that I layer with a discursive interrogation of the fragments.