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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.
She uses words like naughtiness and tummy but beg pardon when she means to say what.
If an Egyptian cannot speak English, who is telling his story?
It is an experience to date a man who used to suck on his grandmother’s teats in a village no one has ever heard of.
