Reflections on water in the Middle East

These Bodies of Water begins dramatically (as befits a book derived from Sabrina Mahfouz’s Royal Court show A History of Water in the Middle East) in a stuffy little room in Whitehall where the author is being interrogated by a man in a beige mac who is vetting her for top security clearance. It all sounds a bit James Bond, except that Mahfouz is more like an ‘Egyptian Guyanese Nancy Drew’, as a boyfriend joked – extremely unusual in the civil service fast stream as a woman, working-class and Middle Eastern (her father is Egyptian, her mother is Guyanese-British). While her peers laugh off questions like ‘Have you ever had sex with an animal?’, Mahfouz finds herself ‘existing purely in opposition’ for the first time in her life. It’s a ‘sudden and vicious shift’. But when the man in the mac asks her about water and empire, she becomes, very fruitfully, ‘obsessed’.