More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
People think anyone with a camera will have coins instead of skin in his pocket.
I was nineteen. This was ten years ago, 2007, and since then I have been home only once. Somewhere in Shobrakheit, my mother is dividing all the dinner fruits in half.
She is one of those desperate women, like my mother, who, the more effort they put into their appearance, the older they look.
The resemblance between them was uncanny, actually: the same vanity, the femme fatalism, the overpowering smell of creams and powders. You just knew she spent too much time alone in front of mirrors, crying.
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.
The people are warmer here, kinder, more humane, I continued, as though I had been in Cairo for longer than four hours when I met her and could possibly have an opinion. She was excited by this, wanted me to elaborate, which I did. Egyptians are warmer,
This is her love language. She’d arranged everything: Sherry’s driver to pick me up from the airport, an apartment sublet in my name downtown, a job for me at the British Council, teaching English. It couldn’t have been easier, but it has not been easy.
She used to crochet bridal doilies and sell them in Alexandria. All her life she told me I would eat from her hands one day, I would eat with this lace.
I even called one of my students baba by accident, to the class’s uproarious delight. I’d never done anything like that before. When I told Sami about the incident, he quipped with oedipal reasoning that I must be in love with the student.
If you weren’t there I can’t tell you what it was like. To wake up from a dream you have been dreaming since birth is powerful. But to wake up from a dream you have been dreaming from birth with almost a hundred million people, brothers and strangers alike, a collective nightmare, a nightmare we had been imbibing all our lives and passing around to one another, feeding innocently to our newborns—that we are worthless, that we deserve no better than the filth we live in … If there is a Judgment Day, this was it.
It doesn’t have to be like this, my neighbor told me, and when I repeated this idea to my other neighbor, It doesn’t have to be like this, I heard him pass it on in a voice that was louder than mine. We took heart from one another.
was not a political coming-of-age, or even an ideological one. We didn’t take to the streets out of anger, but out of pride. For some of us, it was the first time in our lives we believed in our own capacity for goodness or heroism. I was in the square every day, documenting what we were already calling revolution, and the world was all eyes.
avenging the senselessness of her death and the teeth someone (but who?) had pried from her mouth, the cheapness of the burial, the wooden marker on her grave fading fast, instead of the marble plaque she deserved, carved and inked to resist the weather.
We thought we were toppling a regime, but the whole world was involved. It seems so obvious now, but if you weren’t there, you can’t possibly judge. I can’t tell you what it was like.
I’m caught between my desire to understand and my desire to appear as though I already understand.
If I keep my mouth closed, I can almost pass for a Cairene. People look me up and down, they talk to me in Arabic and I feel I’ve won something. When I start asking questions, they switch immediately to English, as though correcting themselves, putting us both in our places.
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. They took their work and their money and their drugs with them when they left. Even the Egyptians who flooded back in from abroad in 2011, in hopes of rebuilding the country, have since given up and returned to wherever they came from.
I first met the boy from Shobrakheit at Café Riche in downtown Cairo. I was there because I had nowhere else to go after work.
Sat beside me and twitched for the entire hour, jiggling his rounded knees, stretching his neck, cracking his knuckles in quick, unnatural succession. I’d never seen such restlessness. Even his quiet voice was quickly quiet, the way flies and roaches are: atwitch.
This is the dress you were wearing in the stationery shop, I would remind her on the day I finally peeled it off her body. Her answer: What shop? She had not seen me at all. Until now, she thinks we met for the first time two weeks later, at Café Riche, when she borrowed my spoon.
When they realized I spoke no English, no French, no German—when they realized I spoke only Arabic—it seemed to answer a question they had been asking since they arrived in Egypt, land of kohl-eyed pharaohs and fellahin. They wanted someone unpolluted by modernity—an illiterate, straight from the village, with rough hands and hair of black lambswool, sexual hang-ups inherited with bestial customs.
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.
I’m confused about my right to offense, just as I’m confused about drinking as an act of resistance. There is something entitled about it. Yes, there is something rich.
Now, twenty years later, I realize I have never been loved by a man the way my father once loved me.
Every single eye at the ahwa was on us. A woman who exposes her hair in a city where most women cover their hair is already considered attractive—in the neutral sense of the word, meaning she will attract attention. But a woman who neither covers her hair nor exposes her hair because the hair itself is not there … A woman who, of her own volition, shows the skin of her brain to the public
She was Egyptian enough to wax her arms but American enough to shave her head. She was Egyptian enough to sit at the ahwa under the bridge but American enough to think a silk nightie was appropriate wear at the ahwa under the bridge.
They thought it made them look conscientious instead of guilty and voyeuristic.
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.
I stayed for one week and, that whole week, dizzied around the house that had never homed me, like a trapped moth.
We were both more convincing Egyptians in New York than we’d ever be on this side of the Atlantic. There I had enough Arabic to flirt with the Halal Guys and the Yemenis at my deli. At school, identity was simple: my name etched in hieroglyphics on a silver cartouche at my throat. I could say, Back home, we do it like this, pat our bread flat and round, never having patted bread flat or otherwise. But here I keep saying I’m Egyptian and no one believes me.
You have either lived here and you know, or you never have and never will.
When I came to her at the age of seven, she made space for me in her narrow bed, and that was how we lived. It was more generosity than I had ever known. We lived like royalty, eating when we wanted, whatever we wanted—I grew four inches in my first year, breakfasting on cake from flour she had ground herself—sleeping rarely, swimming often in moonlit rivers.
She was a proud and loyal wife, and afterward lived independently for forty years, despite the family pressuring her to remarry. She lived with my grandfather’s memory alone, and it was enough. Then, at age fifty-eight, she was forced to move in with her daughter, and the humiliation killed her long before the dinners could, long before the oven.
When she killed herself, I washed her body with my hands as she had washed mine for half my life. I remember her body as though it had been my own. She was almost boneless, her meat so soft, almost edible, then the long, sagging breasts.
At the burial, I carried the plywood casket on my shoulders through the streets of Shobrakheit and within six months had lost a third of my body weight.
It’s exhausting—the levels of dysfunction, the sheer effort it takes to complete even the simplest tasks: crossing the street, buying fruit, changing the gas cylinder in the stove … Everything is more circuitous than it needs to be.
What if female arousal is just the belief that you will not die at this man’s hands?
That elevator only takes two people at a time, he said loudly but not to me. There was a sign on the elevator door saying as much. We’re two people, I countered as I got in with the boy from Shobrakheit and slammed the skeletal metal door, trapping the doorman on the other side with both his feet now on the ground. We went up with a shudder and the next time I came down in the elevator, I came down thankfully alone.
She tells me the apartment was rented furnished from a distant relative, an academic who lives most of the year in Berlin. But even if this is true, enough of it is her own. She belongs to this apartment as much as I don’t.
But in the American girl’s apartment, she is perfectly comfortable and I am the one slinking around the rooms like a thief, unsure where to sit or what to do. She comes and goes “to work,” and I stay in this apartment that could be anywhere in the world—if it weren’t for the balconies and me in it.
Can home be passed from one body to the next, like a secret whispered in the ear?
I ask him how he used to call out to his grandmother and he says, I wouldn’t need to call, I’d be by her side.
That sheepishness, afterward, at having been caught believing. For every Egyptian of my generation, this will be the greatest political event of their lives, the drama they return to and repeat to their children and to their children’s children to explain the world they are born into.
We’ve been playing house for the last two weeks. Except that I’m both father and mother, bringing home the meat and also cooking it while he waits for me with his cheek in his hand.
I tell her my grandmother used to save the hair she had cut, tie it around a stone, and toss it into the Nile so birds would not build their nests with it. I tell her that if a bird builds a nest with even one of your hairs, you get a migraine.
Some things, I say my grandmother used to say, are holy.
