When he was ten years old and had just finished a school semester, Sayed Kiwan went to his father’s workshop in Ghayt Anassara village in Damietta and ask him if he should complete his studies or learn the profession of wood engraving. “I cannot allow you to leave our profession,” his father said. It was the answer Kiwan hoped to hear.

When he was ten years old and had just finished a school semester, Sayed Kiwan went to his father’s workshop in Ghayt Anassara village in Damietta and ask him if he should complete his studies or learn the profession of wood engraving. “I cannot allow you to leave our profession,” his father said. It was the answer Kiwan hoped to hear.

Ghayt Anassara is a village in Damietta city – well known for its abundance of sweets and wood – and it is also known for its intricately engraved wooden furniture. Most of the village’s people work in this industry and almost every house has a carpentry workshop.

Waste of talent

Kiwan did not learn the profession from his father, who was a carpenter, but from observing the products in his neighbors’ workshops in Ghayt Anassara, which overlooks Lake Manzala and shares its poverty and pollution as well. Lake Manzala is expected to lose its reputation as one of Egypt’s most important and richest lakes due to the continuous environmental violations while Ghayt Anassara was once a vital center for wealthy Jews and Christians who left behind fabulous palaces, which are now in ruins. The Jews and Christians of Ghayt Anassara have been now replaced by Wahhabi Islamists who perceive the talent of Kiwan as merely a clichéd profession.

Kiwan has what other practitioners in the village lack. He has the talent and the skills to transform wood engraving into sculpting. “Wood is the most difficult material to carve. It is not like metal. You have to be patient enough to make something marvelous,” Kiwan said.

Kiwan has participated in numerous exhibitions in Europe and had several chances to travel, but the elders of the village convinced him of the Islamist notion that sculpting is a sinful deed, so he burned all his statues and restricted his activities to engraving fish and floral designs. He is, however, known as an artist in the village.

“I cannot escape my uncontrollable passion for drawing as I often find myself unconsciously drawing, but I have quit sculpting,” he said.

Kiwan sells his designs to dozens of workshops in the village as well as Damietta and exhibitions owned by trade foremen who “monopolize the profits leaving us the crumbs. They control everything including the prices and the commercial chambers,” Kiwan said.

Repetitive technique

In his designs, Kiwan depends on “the mechanism of artistic repetition and exchange between natural forms”. This mechanism derives its dimensions from the Islamic identity of art throughout different eras inspired by four key elements which are “plant, geometrical, writing and human as well as animal patterns, in response to God’s invitation to contemplate his creatures.”

Creating his own series of decorations by making changes to the original ones, Kiwan goes beyond using just the natural shapes of plants, for which the schools of India and Persia are known, to using plant variation, branching and growing up process adopted by the schools of Egypt,Levant and Turkey.

The plant shapes that I mostly use, he said, “Are wild flowers, palm leaves and carnation the incurved spaces of which stress and increasethe decoration clarity that has become one of the design’s key specialties.”

Egyptian clients prefer Islamic patterns which Kiwan enjoys making while foreigners prefer paranoiac ones.

A good Oyma practitioner is identified by the “level of consistency and coherence of patterns,” Kiwan added.

Low quality products

Hani Mughrabi, a thirty five-year-old Oyma practitioner who learned the profession when he was ten years old and has his own workshop at his house said: “The low quality Chinese products have defeated ours despite its novelty due to its cheap price which attracts customers under the current recessed economic conditions. Additionally, when the Muslim Brothers came to power, they encouraged the import of Turkish furniture. Our national industry should be protected by controlling the Turkish and Chinese imports,” he said.

Mughrabi does not trust the performance of the commercial chamber. “The commercial chamber is supposed to provide protection tosmall workshops and exhibitions, but it is only supporting the large ones mostly affiliated with its interests. They receive the state’s support through the chamber while we owners of small workshops receive nothing and are obliged to buy from them at prices they set,” he explained.

Expressing trust in his hand’s accuracy, Mughrabi said, “Machine have increased productivity, but have killed Oyma’s spirit. Creativity has marked the times of the old practitioners when the imagination and spirit of the artists made an art of wood engraving.”

Exorcism

Mughrabi referred to the ruins of the palaces in the village recalling the time when they were places for richness and art that have now turned into facilities for water and electricity supply. 

“This is the ruin of one palace. It still carries traces of the original profession,” he said referring to a wall. There were many deserted palaces, but they were demolished and despoiled since children believed they were haunted by demons. Many of these palaces are now being used as dumps and recently we have asked to turn one of them into a school,” he added.

Owning the wood

Fifty four-year-old carpenter Muhammad Sweyri said: “Trade foremen have deprived us of the opportunity of being as rich as they are. When dollar rate rose under Mubarak, we formed a delegate to go to Yugoslavia in order to buy wood at lower prices, but we found that trade foremen have already bought the forest wood for the coming four years.”

He added, these traders who are members of the commercial chamber “sell our products at high prices in luxurious exhibitions and when we ask for our shares, they give them to us as if we were beggars.”