A multicultural, award-winning internet portal called Qantara.de has posted a new review (or reassessment) of Waugh’s 1930 travel book Labels: A Mediterranean Journey. This site is sponsored by several German cultural and political institutions, including the Goethe Institut and Deutsche Welle. The review is written by Sherif Abdel Samad from the point of view of a 21st century Egyptian. The reason given for circulating a new view of this old book is that it
still offers a fresh testimony of a world unknown to readers except from the writings of Naguib Mahfouz. Without indulging in lengthy and descriptive passages, Waugh narrates his impressions of the many cities he visited – Haifa, Crete, Port Said and Cairo – in a fresh light tone. Notorious for his wit and politically incorrect statements, he neither shies away from mocking fellow travellers nor from making racist remarks about the locals.
…Waugh took immense pleasure in depicting the hotels and bars of Port Said, staffed by Sudanese and Berber servants, frequented by English commercial agents and partying Egyptian officials; listing venues where the food was great and the drinks pure, ridiculing Europeans turning up on Saturday evenings for dance festivities, all the while observing that those in British service ranked higher than any Egyptian. The expatriate English community lived an extremely secluded existence, indulging in amateur theatricals and dinner parties. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Waugh′s endeavours to delve into Egyptian street and night-life met with baffled incredulity.
Samad says that Waugh contemplated writing a novel about Port Said but never followed through with the project. He continues through Waugh’s book with quotes and summaries, particularly of those portions dealing with Egypt, and concludes:
Waugh also displays a racist colonialist approach towards Muslims. ″Living as we are under the [impact of the] collective inferiority complex of the whole West, and humbled as we are by the many excellencies of Chinese, Indians, and even savages, we can still hold [up] our heads in the Mohammedan world with the certainty of superiority. It seems to me that there is no single aspect of Mohammedan art, history, scholarship, or social, religious, or political organisation, to which we, as Christians, cannot look with unshaken pride of race.″
Waugh was undoubtedly a product of his time, raised in a colonial atmosphere of racial and religious superiority. The impressions he gathers in his book fit the Orientalist mindset, without offering any deeper insights and yet, for all its shortcomings, ″Labels″ remains a fascinating read, presenting the vibrant intensity of Egyptian street life.
After Waugh’s general dismissal of the Mohammedan culture, he writes two pages of descriptive prose praising Arab architecture as an exception (Labels, London, 1974, pp. 111-12). That might have been worth a brief mention. Perhaps Samad will follow up this project with a fresh look at Waugh’s views of Egypt in his novel Officers and Gentlemen where some scenes are set in wartime Cairo and Alexandria, as well as descriptions of Egypt in his later travel book A Tourist in Africa and his diaries and letters.
