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dream state of life in translation,
This is a book for anyone who’s ever been mesmerized by language, amazed and stricken by what it can and cannot do.”
Hell yeah
These same four hundred passengers disembarking on the other side seemed to have forgotten where we’d come from.
but we knew anyway that she was sour from thinking: Shame to waste the gas and not eat.
Somewhere in Shobrakheit, my mother is dividing all the dinner fruits in half.
Trump, I say, but it is the wrong thing to say, to the driver, to the doorman.
Oh this bok is recent
realized my mother had gone through my suitcase and removed all my sweatpants and short shorts and slides, adding a few dragging dresses still minty with the tags, and many shawls. This is her love language.
All her life she told me I would eat from her hands one day, I would eat with this lace.
In its gaze we became a collective: demonstrative, intentional.
Will thi be their relationship dynamic as well?
I’m caught between my desire to understand and my desire to appear as though I already understand.
When I start asking questions, they switch immediately to English, as though correcting themselves, putting us both in our places.
Not microaggressions that are tweeted about, not theory; these are adult aggressions, bodily, bloodying.
sensory overload with nowhere to hide. It’s consequence.
have since given up and returned to wherever they came from.
Clean being code for more than just money; a coveted un-Egyptianness, a combination of first world contact and old-world etiquette.
glass of wine with your meal but not shisha.
Boooo
Reem, the lesbian with the starched, ironed polo shirt; and Sami, sweating fatly, his rimless eyeglasses sliding down his nose.
Who else do you know that eats so someone else can get full?
So this is crazy
we are not the same even if it’s he who owes me money.
They don’t hate Muslims, they hate the poor, I laughed.
She was from America, rich, obviously, but it seemed she could still be horrified by the wanton
exercise of power, and this singled her out from the others. I felt somehow that she was on my side.
Interesting hlw he is putting her on a pedestal for bekng empathetic
He says nothing steadies the hand like cocaine. During the revolution, everyone was itching and scratching anyway, lice being unavoidable. He
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.
Arabic: this language that had only ever existed for me in kitchens and bedrooms, baby talk, breakfast chatter, Eid mornings at the gym-cum-mosque (before my father converted to astrology), goodnight kisses after Kalila wa Dimna, or fever-talk when I was feverish at age five.
boy from Shobrakheit hot-wires an intimacy just by sounding like him.
They ran away before anyone could stop them, but I’m glad they did and I wish she’d given them even more
What’s a hipster without intentionality? Old-fashioned and proud and poor.
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.
In 2011, when I returned from Cairo for the first and only time, my father came to meet me out by
This desperation to refashion ourselves into the most pleasing form makes fools of us both. We’re pliable and capricious, shed our skin at the slightest threat,
But here I keep saying I’m Egyptian and no one believes me. I’m the other kind of other, someone come from abroad who could just as easily return there.
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.
In Shobrakheit, there are lawyers and electricians, musicians, tailors, knife-sharpeners, teachers, drivers, plumbers,
Filthy in ways that seem magical, given the route I have taken since leaving the shower that same morning.
What if female arousal is just the belief that you will not die at this man’s hands?
I stay in this apartment that could be anywhere in the world—if it weren’t for the balconies and me in it.
meet me before I can finish turning the key in the lock. I used to shower and go out after work, to Riche or the bars in Zamalek, but now we stay in more and more. It’s
He is punishing me for something, and I am letting him. He is weaponizing all his losses against me, and I am wanting the abuse, or, at the very least, accepting it as mine. After years of claiming Arabness as an excuse for
feel I’m earning it at last.
taking for posterity’s sake, as archival testaments to the martyrs and believers, the heroes of our time, ended up being used against them.
kicked her over onto her stomach, using the toe of my shoe like a spade, and she lay facedown, shaking for a long time, but not from cold or fear.
Is it possible to contemplate a thing—any thing at all—without sadness?
The boy from Shobrakheit
Do u guys have names?
Who do you think is funding this regime? Why do you think we’re still in this shit? Six, nearly seven years later and—you
That you hold spoons by the middle the way my grandmother used to?
What’s funny? What’s funny? Are you laughing at me? The boy has never left this country, never will. He is in child’s pose, wetting my floor, offering me imaginary peaches and chocolate croissants. Why is this pity I feel so frightening?
