SeriesTravel by proxy – Born in Alexandria, became a tourist guide, it was in Luxor that she chose to practice her profession. And on the Nile, which is for her “a bit like a necklace with pearls” that she loves.
Alexandria, she says, is the other half of her heart, “Another color”. She was born in the Mediterranean city, speaks moreover with the hoarse voice and the dazzling smile that Lawrence Durrell lends to Justine in The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960). But Ramya Naga chose Luxor, further south on the Nile, as “Capital of memory”.
It was a bit for her that she became a guide in the 1990s, after studying at university. Because the ancient Ouaset then Thebes of the pharaohs was “The oldest of all cities in the world”, in the words of Champollion. But also because her mother was born there, she told her about another Egypt, that of the 1960s, when a young middle-class girl, she walked with sisters and friends on the ledge that runs along the river, “In a blouse and short skirt, like in Italian films or those of Youssef Chahine …”
But the family story turned into a tragedy and announced the future of the country when, on the death of the grandfather of Ramya Naga, a cultivated and liberal man, an uncle close to the Muslim Brotherhood sealed off the girls at home before attempting to steal the heritage, including the land which is today the garden of the Sofitel Winter Palace. It was in the souvenir shop of the same hotel that, a few years later, an 8-year-old girl fell under the spell of a junk Nefertiti. Forty years later, Ramya Naga keeps the statuette as the most precious piece of his sentimental archeology.
At 24, she embarked on her first cruise on the Nile, through tombs and temples to Aswan. It no longer counts the round trips on the sacred river, the number of visitors taken aboard one of these ships which make the discovery of remains a collective sport. But Ramya Naga evokes Amon, the original solar god, Mut the mother goddess and her son Khonsou engraved in stone as close, almost tender deities. She jokes with Min, the fertility god easily recognizable by one of his attributes which is neither the scepter nor the crown …
It puts order in the centuries and the dynasties, tells how the walls carry the pride and the human passions when Ramses II has engraved the epic of an alleged victory over the Hittites, when Amenophis IV become Akhenaton has erased the name of Amon with great blows of the chisel: “The temples are more than beautifully engraved stones, they are the lives of the sovereigns, those of the workers who built them, of the sculptors who carved the bas-reliefs, of the priests who placed the offerings …” Later in the trip, she will make of the myth of Isis and Osiris a legendary soap opera, first episode in Edfu, second in Kôm Ombo, epilogue in Philae, on a small flowered island of oleanders.
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