Each individual chapter is one facet of the greater picture, which is the street in Cairo in that particular moment.Īl-Khamissi also spoke about using 3ameya (colloquial) Arabic vs.

Taxi isn’t a collection of short stories, or a novel, or a piece of journalism, it is a maqama, an old style of Arabic literature that began in the Abbasid era. My idea was built on this structure – that someone rides a taxi, each time with a different driver, he gets surprised, and each driver would give him a piece of the puzzle. A passerby takes him by the hand and leads him through the streets, through his shock and surprise at the changes that have taken place in those 60 years, and he tries to show the man what has happened in society. In one particular maqama written at the end of the 19 th century, a man is buried at the end of Mohammed Ali’s reign and rises from his grave in 1879. The maqama is able to conjure up a vision of society in the mind of the reader and engage with what is happening in society. “The idea for Taxi was influenced to a large degree by the content of the maqama, in particular those written at the end of the 19 th century.

In it, al-Khamissi calls for a critical re-imagining of Taxi (often mistaken for ethnography) as maqama: ArabLit contributor Elisabeth Jaquette has a feature on Khaled al-Khamissi in Full Stop magazine, where she translates a Q&A between al-Khamissi and students at the AUC’s Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) program:

Taxi khaled