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“I am not what you think I am. You are what you think I am.” —Instagram caption by @hanaperlas, November 5, 2016
Why have you come here? This is the first thing people ask when they meet me, and their tone is more indignant than inquisitive. The more they discover, the more offended they are. You live in America? Have American passport? Do you know what people here would give for an American passport? We are all trying to leave and you have the option to be there but instead—why are you here? I try to explain that America is not heaven, that there are problems everywhere. Trump, I say, but it is the wrong thing to say, to the driver, to the doorman.
How many questions can you ask before you expose who you are?
I’m caught between my desire to understand and my desire to appear as though I already understand.
When the foreigners left, it all went to shit. When it all went to shit, the foreigners left. The sequence hardly matters, the result was the same.
Clean being code for more than just money; a coveted un-Egyptianness, a combination of first world contact and old-world etiquette.
He says nothing makes for revolution like cocaine.
I am outside of my context, confused about where the margins and the pressure points are. Who has the power? Where is the center? I haven’t seen a woman’s knees since I got here, and no one has seen my knees either.
More than anything, what binds people here to one another here is the pointless struggle for quality of life. I’m learning slowly that having money and the option to leave frays any claim I have to this place. It turns out that to be clean in Egypt is just to be free of Egypt, to exercise the choice to stay or go elsewhere, which most of the population cannot do.
It’s as though the city were deliberately designed to resist comprehension and to discipline those who left for daring to return. You have either lived here and you know, or you never have and never will.
The only mess she allows herself is littering the floor with her clothes (the silk dress she wore a week ago is still a puddle in the corner of the bedroom), but otherwise the space is intentional, sensorial.
She belongs to this apartment as much as I don’t.
You’d walk in and be confronted immediately with the feeling that all the furniture was living in denial of its geographic circumstance, that the human who had done the arrangements was afraid of the city outside her windows.
I tell her that if a bird builds a nest with even one of your hairs, you get a migraine.
He showed me the mosque on Abd El-Khalik Tharwat, where he slept when he had nowhere to go, and his body bears scars in places that should not have seen sharpness.
We live like a married couple dreaming domestic dreams, until he wakes me up.
It was the first time I saw him get nasty and I recognized immediately that it was not about me, not about the classist architecture of my building. Rather, it had all become too much somehow. I held his gaze and said nothing until he left the kitchen, then I picked up the glass shards and swept carefully, thinking, He senses that his usefulness is depleting.
I have a guilt, and the boy from Shobrakheit has an anger.
Every few weeks she asks me why I don’t do photography anymore, and I have to bite back my temper. If you have documented a revolution, how can you bring yourself to capture anything else on those same streets where your brothers stained the asphalt with their lives?
Why is this pity I feel so frightening?
What once was peculiar in him, charming, even, is now terrorizing beyond words. It’s not his fault. He doesn’t speak English. It’s not his fault he has no work. There is no work to be had; all night long the downtown sidewalks and doorways are haunted by whip-thin men who abuse pharmaceuticals, make animal sounds at passing women.
QUESTION: How long can you hate yourself before everyone else hates you too?
I swear this isn’t who I am. I’m not a violent person, but there is a violence that moves through you like a live current when you hate what someone has made you become. I feel estranged from myself the longer I am with her, made criminal solely because she is afraid, made pathetic because she pities me—a poor boy though I never was.
Addicts, like grandchildren, do not fill their hours. They pull the hours apart, entertain themselves by melting the hours into new shapes: a ring, a gray braid down a bare back.
Only now, looking back, do I realize how terrible it is to subsist on just enough, without the joy of beautiful things.
HIGHS LIKE HEIGHTS. A good high demands to be experienced from a point of elevation: rooftops, balconies, bridges
What are borders, anyway? Just lines in the sand. What are citizens? Just people fucking within the same lines in the sand—and their children and then their children,
He can be charming, entertaining. Not a big man, but a man with flooring BDE, an obvious alpha parting through a sea of minor men.
Those outside of a language, of a culture, see furniture through a window and believe it is a room. But those inside know there are infinite rooms just out of view, and that they can always be more deeply inside.
To dress like you have money is not just an exercise in vanity, it’s also a mode of protection. This city punishes the poor every chance it gets.
She was always smarter and kinder than me, in a way that the age difference did not account for. I remember vividly her magnanimity with men, how she protected their balloon-pride from puncture, and I can’t help but wonder: Did I emasculate the boy from Shobrakheit with my independence?
To sleep with her would be treasonous at best. On the other hand, a real Egyptian doesn’t work either. Self-loathing bleeds out beyond his self until the idea of taking a compatriot lover feels paradoxically beneath him, a waste of his potential—he’d be selling short. With me, he gets the cream of both worlds. I am Egyptian—recognizable but also improved by Western inflection, carrying in my fashion sense and orthodontically straight teeth the whiff of opportunity, opulence, and pride.
The boy from Shobrakheit used to swear to anyone who’d listen that even if he had a million pounds, he’d never leave this country. He denounced everyone who did leave as traitorous sons of whores and shoes. But sometimes, late at night, in bed with the lights off, he used to ask me quietly what it was like “outside.” That’s how he talked about the rest of the world—“outside,” as though this country were a broom closet, as though I were a fish-eye peephole.
My grandmother spoiled me by giving me a pride beyond my means. She raised me to believe that wherever I went I would be recognized, I would be rewarded, celebrated, and only now do I see. It was an accident, but she handicapped me to a lifetime of scoffing at the very things I need. There is such a thing as princely poverty.
TRULY THE MOST DEPRESSING KIND OF RELATIONSHIP is one where the blood runs in both directions and it’s unclear who is to blame. While necking, I sink my teeth into his shoulder and pass back the venom I received from him.
I just don’t want you to be frightened, he continued, and it was clear to any American girl that he wanted me to be frightened.
He could not contain himself: I’ve never met anyone as cold as you, you’re not human, you’re not even a woman. A stranger attacked you and you’re not even upset, I’m still shaking and you— I spooned out the sugar, then opened the fridge door for a sprig of fresh mint.
Will my greed or, worse, my need—face-slapping, hair-tearing desperation—bubble to the surface and expose the charade we have been acting out since that night I failed to rescue her and was rescued myself instead?
Don’t ever let anyone photograph you in digital, I said, her hand still in mine, but limp and unhappy there. Your body was made for the screech and grain of old-fashioned film.
As soon as you begin rejecting a man, you have to be twice as polite. There’s a danger between us, but I’m not always sure who it belongs to. Which of us needs protection and which of us should be afraid?
