Tawfig

Or: the places that brought together two or more cartoonists — and sometimes just one cartoonist, that's enough.

Before I begin, I had in mind the importance of food in our lives as comic book artists, seen as a personal experience.

This time, we're not going to talk about comics. We're going to talk about what surrounds the comic artist. Next time, you'll find What do comic book artists in Egypt smoke?, and so on.

But for now, we're talking about food.

Restaurants that brought together two or three cartoonists. And sometimes just one cartoonist sitting alone in front of a plate — his mind completely elsewhere.

People imagine that comic artists live on coffee and cigarettes. People are wrong. We love to eat. Maybe more than anyone. Drawing takes energy. And eating gives it back.

Let me start with Golo.

As I said before, Golo had only one weakness in this world.

The lamb's head soup at the restaurant Awlad Karika.

The soup was white and light. Its smell: ancient spices, black pepper, and cumin. The meat melted in your mouth like butter. Golo would walk into the restaurant. He would say hello very softly. He would sit in the corner — always the same chair. He would order the soup without opening the menu.

The restaurant knew it.

But when we were all together in Egypt — me, Golo, and Shennawy — there was one place we loved.

The restaurant Bab el Yemen on Dokki Square, under the bridge.

To get there, you have to go under the bridge — that enormous bridge so high up you feel like it's going to fall on you at any moment. But it never did fall, thank God, not once.

The restaurant was big, two floors, wooden chairs, red lanterns, and Yemeni things hanging on the walls. The smell of wood and spices would greet you before you even entered the street.

The usual order: a pan-fried lamb liver.

This one was mouchatchata. Not just spicy — mouchatchata.

The liver cut small, fried with onions, garlic, and hot green peppers, and the tomato cooked slowly. The taste made you dizzy.

We ate and we sweated. From the face, the neck, and the back. Like someone running up stairs on a summer day.

Golo laughed: "Are we eating or working out?"

And with the liver — the mandi, chicken, and hanith. The chicken marinated with Yemeni spices you won't find anywhere else, and the hanith — rice, milk, broth, and spices — but really it was something light, it was the dish that truly gave you back your strength.

In the same Dokki neighborhood, also under the bridge, there was a place called Machawiyet Azama.

The owner was a huge guy, twice three times, his laugh was loud. Always wearing a dirty white apron because of the work.

My favorite spot and the cartoonist Ali Galal's, when financial conditions were favorable.

Ali Galal, may God have mercy on him, was a calm cartoonist, he focuses on everything, he doesn't talk much. But when he speaks, you listen. He would choose the kebab carefully. He would turn it with his fork, smell it, then decide to eat.

The best thing at Azama wasn't the kebab. The best thing was the marinated eggplant.

That eggplant was a deep violet. Marinated in vinegar, garlic, and a little hot pepper. Ali Galal would start with it, before anything else.

"This eggplant is what opens your appetite so you can eat the kebab, even if it's below average, or even eat rocks afterward."

Shennawy — the cartoonist who should have been a chef

Let's come back once more to Shennawy.

Shennawy, if he hadn't been a cartoonist, he would have been a chef, a first-class cook. That guy has a sixth sense for food. Not just taste — it's science. He understands ingredients. He understands proportions. He understands timing.

He could eat something just once and tell you: "It's missing a pinch of cumin" or "The salt was added a little too early."

And just as he had taste in his choice of colors and framing in his drawings of the famous character saïss (the valet), he had the same taste in his choice of restaurants.

The koshari sauce from El Tahrir of the old days

It was Shennawy who first told me that its color was the color of the saïss's costume. That dark brown with a slight red in it. And it was true. I had seen it before but I hadn't known how to describe it. He described it in one sentence.

The second dish we loved, me and Shennawy: fish.

Here, we're talking about the Gombouriya fish restaurant in Zamalek. They made fish fajitas whose colors looked like they were drawn with dry pastel or soft pastel. The fish was white. The vegetables green, red, and yellow. The sauce light brown. The sandwich was a painting.

And the Bab el Nil fish restaurant in Bab el Louq. It was a good choice back when Shennawy lived in downtown, close to his place. You'd walk down for five minutes, open the door, and find the calamari and shrimp piping hot. It was a privilege, and we were envied for it afterward — because Shennawy moved out of downtown. And Bab el Nil disappeared from our lives.

The only consolation is that he traded it for Bab el Yemen. One door leaves, another door arrives. ("Life takes and gives, and even if the night is long, it will eventually pass" — excerpt from a famous song, my apologies to Mounir.)

Breakfast — the most important meal of existence

Breakfast, for me, is the most important meal.

I wake up early. The world is quiet, the curtains are drawn, people are still asleep, and I am awake. My hands don't work, my head is at a standstill, even my eyes are only half open.

What turns on all these devices: two cups of tea. The first, on an empty stomach, in the silence. I drink it slowly watching the light crawl across the walls. Then breakfast. Then a second cup of tea.

This is the ritual. This is the system.

The artist Mohamed Wahba, whose laugh is loud, who always has a story to tell, shared with me the strangest, most beautiful, and most horrible breakfasts of my life.

We would meet in Zamalek, at a place whose name I will not say. Because the place was bad. Very bad.

We needed to take intestinal disinfectant with the fava beans (foul).

Imagine: you eat fava beans — ordinary fava beans — and you feel like you need a disinfectant. Maybe the tomatoes had fermented, maybe the oil was rancid, we didn't know. But we went there. Why? Maybe because it was close. Even bad food has its own charm.

And with those bad fava beans, we would sometimes have, for breakfast, béchamel pasta from the Bab el Louq market.

Béchamel pasta. For breakfast. In the morning. Early.

Not fresh, surely. Who makes fresh béchamel pasta at 8 in the morning? It was surely from the day before. God only knows. But the cheese was well baked, the béchamel had a nice golden crust, and the pasta still held together.

Wahba ate eagerly: "The pasta is magnificent."

I told him: "You said that yesterday about the bad fava beans."

"Yes. The fava beans were magnificent too, in their time."

Mohamed Wahba has a food philosophy that deserves respect: everything is better — at the right time.

And on the other side of the planet — literally — we were in Paris.

Me and Mohamed Wahba, we lived in the 4th arrondissement. Every day, we would get a brioche loaf from the bakery Aux Merveilleux de Fred.

The place is small. A brown, pompous storefront. The smell of butter and burnt sugar welcomes you. The brioche was soft inside, crispy outside, the sugar crumbs on top like morning dew.

I stopped once in front of the window and thought back on all of it: in Egypt, we ate fava beans with intestinal disinfectant. Here, we eat brioche from a shop called Aux Merveilleux. And we don't know which is more wonderful: the morning béchamel, the bad fava beans, or the crispy brioche.

Makhlouf and hands that open new doors

Let's return to adorable Cairo. To the fava beans, to the falafels, to the fried eggplants, and to the real good potatoes.

This is where the artist Makhlouf put me onto new things. I tried them all. I liked them all.

A sandwich with cheese, tomato, and falafel, at Al Shorouk restaurant on Mohamed Mahmoud Street.

The first time I heard about it, I was skeptical. Makhlouf insisted: "Just try it." I tried it. The falafel was crispy and hot, the cheese fresh and buttery, the tomato gave a slight acidity. The sandwich was strange, like jazz with instruments that aren't supposed to be together. But suddenly, it works.

And the plain fried eggplant sandwich, at Al Baghl — after two in the morning.

The eggplant is so hot it's still sizzling. Slightly crispy on the edges, not soggy, salted just right. You eat it standing in the street, the oil runs down your fingers, and you have five packs of tissues on you to clean up.

But here's what's important: Al Baghl, only after two. Before two, Al Baghl isn't good. The oil is old, the eggplant isn't crispy. The food isn't hot enough.

Mostafa Salem — the savior

This is where the artist Mostafa Salem, caricaturist, steps in.

Mostafa Salem always saved me and Makhlouf from the mistake of going to Al Baghl before two.

He had a clock in his head. When we went too early, he would shout: "It's still early! Let's go to Beshindi now, and we'll come back later."

Abdallah Beshindi in Al-Mounira. At his place, the falafel is yellow like the sun. And a cheddar falafel sandwich — the cheese melts inside the falafel. From the first bite, you feel it filling your mouth.

Mostafa was always right. We listened to him. And at Beshindi's, he welcomed us at any hour: in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the night, at dawn. Always present.

I'll stop here.

The rest, next time.

There are still stories left.

There are still restaurants I haven't remembered.

There are still cartoonists with whom we haven't gone hungry.

Before Golo became the maker of illustrated stories — those works that swing between sharpness and tenderness — and before he became that Frenchman who eats pressed head-meat for breakfast at eleven in the morning, he was a child in a religious school. A school where there was a teacher whose name we do not know, and need not know, who beat them. Beat them often, brutally, and almost daily. Golo, who was no older than ten at the time, was seriously thinking about killing him. Yes, killing him. Not a fleeting daydream, not some naive childish fantasy. He was thinking about how, when, and with what instrument. He carried the kind of anger that does not show on the face — silent, consuming from within, like embers buried beneath ash.

Golo did not kill his teacher, of course. But the desire remained, like an old wound that never fully heals, transforming over the years into something else. Into a hypersensitivity toward those who hold power and use it to break others. Into a sacred contempt for anyone who — as we say — "shames their own family," whether a teacher, a relative, or anyone who exploits their position to diminish those beneath them.

And this moment from Jolo's childhood made me pause for a long time before those kinds of people in our own lives. How many of us have never — not even for a single second — thought about killing someone? Or at least wished them dead? Perhaps not in deed, but in the heart... in the heart, one wishes.

I remember myself when I was studying law. Yes, I studied law too, before I fled to drawing for good. There was a caricature competition at the faculty. I entered a drawing: the dean of the faculty, with his enormous belly, riding a donkey. In the drawing, the donkey was swollen and feeble all at once, visibly on the verge of collapse under the weight of this magnificent gut. I thought the idea was funny — at least, I did.

A few days later, while I was sitting in a lecture, a security officer came and found me. He whispered in my ear: "The dean wants you. About the caricature competition."

I stood up, heart pounding, imagining I had won. I followed him. When I walked into the dean's office, I saw a sight unlike any I had witnessed before. A massive desk — God Almighty, may He bless and increase it — bigger than my bed and my father's bed put together. And yet despite its size, the dean's belly covered most of it.

I said nothing. I stood there. The dean looked at me, then opened his desk drawer and pulled out a gun. A real gun. He set it on the desk. Then he spoke in a voice that was calm and threatening all at once:

"You're the one who drew me riding a donkey? By God, I'll bring out two hundred of your dead."

Dear reader, I did not wait to ask: Was he angry because I drew him on a donkey, or angry because the drawing was bad? I did not ask. I ran out of the office, out of the building, and did not stop until I reached the faculty wall — which I leapt over like any respectable thief. I never set foot in that faculty again. I collected my Form 6 — the failure form — and returned to drawing, where there are no guns on desks and no deans threatening to kill.

And this, dear reader, is one of those stories that a young artist may pass through at the beginning. A moment in which he discovers that the world is not fair, that power is not necessarily intelligent, and that drawing can be more dangerous than any weapon. But the true artist — and this is something I learned later — is the one who does not turn his anger into harm toward others. He turns it into art. Or keeps it in his pocket, like a heavy coin he never spends.

And this is precisely where we return to Golo. Because Golo — this man who carries within him an old anger from his days in the religious school — did not become a harmful person. He became, in fact, nearly incapable of harming anyone. He can only harm himself, if the expression holds. And during one of our evenings together, I was speaking with our friend, the artist Makhlouf, about the relationship between the true artist and his art, and about harm. Makhlouf said something that has been lodged in my mind ever since:

"It is impossible to find a true artist who is cruel."

We both grew up — Makhlouf and I — and discovered that there are many cruel artists out there. But they are not true ones. And there is no need to mention names now. What matters to me is that Makhlouf himself was a living example of his own theory.

Here is the proof:

In one of those years, Golo and his wife were emptying their apartment in the Sakakini neighborhood, preparing to return to France. They were selling paintings and tools that were too difficult to carry on a plane. Makhlouf — who was at the time a young artist, making do like the rest of us — went to the apartment. He walked among the paintings. Then his eyes stopped on one. A painting he deeply loved. He asked the price. Golo named a figure. And that figure, to put it gently, was "beyond Makhlouf's pocket."

Makhlouf moved to put the painting back in its place. But Golo asked him:

"How much do you have on you right now?"

Makhlouf named a sum that he believed amounted to less than a quarter of the painting's price.

Golo said: "Take it."

The transaction had not yet been settled when Golo's wife intervened — in good faith, it seemed — to "save" the deal from her point of view. She said something to the effect that he did not know the value of his own work and was giving paintings away for next to nothing. She insisted he not sell it at that price.

But Golo, whether he was economically right or wrong, was seeing something else. He was seeing a young artist who loved a painting and could not afford it. He was perhaps seeing himself, years earlier, when he was a young man newly arrived in Cairo, without even the price of a koshary bowl. He was seeing that generosity is sometimes more important than rational pricing. And he was seeing that planting a human bond — one that might bear fruit later — was worth more than the price of the painting.

Makhlouf remembers the moment. And I do not believe he ever forgot that beautiful humanity. And Golo? Golo remained as he always was: generous with the generous, uncompromising with the "sons of the old shoe" — no half-measures. Either everything, or nothing. Either you give him your trust, and he gives you his soul. Or you try to take advantage of him, and he shuts the door in your face without preamble.

And if you truly want to understand Golo, dear reader, do not look only at his stories, and not only at his contradictory actions. Look at the characters he draws. There, in the dense black spaces, in the sharp blocks of color, in the hard-edged lines, you will find the old anger. The sharpness he once wished to aim at his teacher, he converted into hard black lines on paper. And there too, in the flowing lines that trace clothing and form, in the tenderness that suddenly appears in the eyes of his shy characters, you will find the other side. The side of the man who wanted to sell a painting to a young artist for a sum worth less than a quarter of its value, because he remembered that he was once a poor young man in a country that was not his own.

Golo is this very contradiction. Sharp as a knife, and tender as a mother. Furious at the world, yet unable to harm a fly. He is a living lesson in what it means to be a true artist: you know anger well — but you choose not to wound anyone with it, except the page.

In 1973, Guy Nadaud — whom everyone calls by his artist name "Golo" — arrives in Cairo. He is 25 years old, a young Frenchman, and he thinks he's just taking a tourist trip. He doesn't know yet that this visit, born out of a passing curiosity, will turn into a love story that will last for decades.

Golo, who would later become one of the great names in adult comics in France and Europe, finds in Egypt far more than just a country passing through: he discovers a mirror the size of his joyfully anarchist soul.

He settles permanently in Egypt in 1993, and finally puts down his suitcases in the village of Gourna, in Luxor, in 2001. That's where he still lives today. In his works — such as his trilogy My Thousand and One Nights in Cairo or his collaboration with his wife, photographer "Dibo," on Chronicles of the Necropolis — Golo offers what one might call "comic strip investigations." Far, very far from the superficial Orientalist gaze. As close as possible to the pulse of ordinary people. No one has his style: a free line that observes, that gently pokes fun, that doodles the little stories everyone else forgets.

But what the books and articles don't tell you about Golo is what I discovered myself during my very first encounter with him.

It was right in downtown Cairo, in 2014. If you had seen Golo back then, you would have thought you were dealing with the classic European khawaga stereotype: a frail figure, silent, almost shy, one of those Frenchmen who walk around with a notebook and a pencil as if afraid of their own shadow. But him, as I quickly understood, was more like a black box full of surprises. As soon as he opens his mouth, the image shatters. From that mouth doesn't come refined French or cold artistic analysis, but an overflowing reservoir of perfectly delivered Egyptian jokes, a lightness of spirit you'd only find in a son of the bustling neighborhood of El-Sharabiya, and at the same time, the delicacy and generosity of the Sa'idis mixed with the blunt frankness of a true Cairo native.

We didn't meet in chic galleries or cultural debates. No: we saw each other in koshari joints, butcher shops specializing in lamb's head, mandi restaurants scattered between Cairo and Giza. Our gatherings were full of lighthearted jokes, hearty meals, ephemeral drawings on leftover pastry wrappers from Oriental bakeries, and the smell of a shisha pipe floating somewhere.

Golo, because he's a true artist with real life experience and not just a poser, has endless stories. And among all those anecdotes, the one about his friend, the artist Gouda Khalifa, remains etched in my memory as one of the ones that helped me understand Golo the best.

Gouda Khalifa, apparently, was a man of magnificently artistic chaos. Golo tells the story that one day, when it was very cold, Gouda went to the police museum. He was freezing, Gouda was. Then he spotted, inside one of the display cases, an impressive Sufi cloak. He didn't hesitate for long: he opened the case (very simply), took the cloak off its stand, and put it on. All hell broke loose. Some accused Gouda of high treason and museum theft. But after the investigation, it was discovered that this wasn't just any cloak — it was the cloak of Mustafa Kamel, the national leader.

Golo told this story laughing with all his heart. He loves Gouda Khalifa, he loves his resourcefulness, he loves that creative chaos that can only grow out of Egyptian soil. A part of Golo himself has transformed into that magnificent Egyptian chaos. If one day you're looking for Golo in Cairo and he doesn't answer his phone (which sometimes happens often), don't go to his studio or to the newspaper offices. Go straight to "Mesmat Oulad Karika" (The Grill of Karika's Sons) on Mohamed Farid Square. That's where you'll most likely find him.

I remember one day at the CairoComix festival. We were waiting for Golo: me, the artist Shennawy, and Bushra, the wife of the late artist Gamal Sy Al-Arabi — "Burgi," as we all call him. Golo was running late. Shennawy said, "I think he's having breakfast: fool and taameya." Bushra said, "No, I think he's eating koshari." I gave my opinion: "No, no. I think he's eating lamb's head."

When Golo arrived, it was eleven in the morning. We asked him, "Why are you late, Golo?" He looked at us with that smile of a truly happy Egyptian, then he said, in that magnificent Egyptian Arabic that only belongs to someone who has lived the country and loved it:

"I was having my breakfast… lamb's head."

Dear reader, if you ever look at a map of Cairo and Giza restaurants that connects each establishment to one or more cartoonists, or to one or more comic book artists, or to a certain artistic atmosphere (this is a subject we will explore in detail later), you will discover that Golo is the only artist I know who can perfectly have lamb's head for breakfast, completely naturally, enjoy it, and tell you all the details as if he were born in an Egyptian working-class neighborhood.

Golo is no longer just a French artist living in Egypt. Golo has become one of us. Or rather — and this is more likely — Egypt has become a part of him.