When Khan il Khalili was bombed (again), James and I were a fifteen minute drive from it. I felt…sad, of course, but had a sense of clarity that such bombings – the kind that don’t come from war-planes - are reckless and random. You can’t hide from that. It didn’t stop me from going to Khan il Khalili or from taking my parents there months later; it didn’t stop me from doing anything I would have normally done in Cairo.
There are badges each nationality wears, each belief wears, each history of nationalities and beliefs. We can express our sorrow for these badges; we can lay our fingertips on them and try to give solace. We can’t claim events if they aren’t seen as ours. Still, I cried on January 1st. And I knew that, if I had still been in Egypt, where, just a short while before, it had snowed in Alexandria, the texture of the experience would be completely different. I cried, and I missed Egypt.
I watched on facebook that day as Egyptians who were not in Egypt expressed their grief, changed their profile pictures to the intertwined symbols of Islam and Christianity. I watched (or “creeped”) as expatriates still living in Egypt claimed the event, furrowed out their own tears and pain.
As the days pass, one of the overwhelming messages on facebook is that Christians and Muslims are in this together. A Muslim student posts that he will be attending church now in solidarity with the Copts. The Copts post about peace and about the light of God; many of them post about forgiveness. These are the kinds of messages that my tears, as I read the objective BBC news story and watched the gruesome video that opened the story, might have been connected to.
Amidst this outpouring of solidarity, why is it, then, that I keep coming back to this: another former student posts a political cartoon in which a sheikh and a Coptic priest are reaching out to each other from a minaret and a church steeple. Below them is a hulking shadowed man with beady eyes and a cowboy hat pushing the buildings apart, doing his best to keep them separated. The man looks like a bandit or an American cowboy, and I think that this is what he is supposed to be, but the black and white picture appears to have been doctored. A yellow Star of David has been photoshopped onto the bandit’s chest. Yellow. This is the one that really gets to me.
In the comments about the political cartoon on facebook, another Egyptian says, “Oh, so now it’s Israel’s fault?” Good for you, I think. Even as she is answering, the student says she refuses to answer; she posts a link to a photo of a runner in the Special Olympics that has also been doctored with a caption about how arguing on the internet is “retarded.”
I started to write an email to my former student. Often, I craft emails to people that I never send. And what do you think I said? I didn’t say, That Star of David? It’s YELLOW. Yellow. Have you read anything about the Holocaust, about stars pinned to clothes? And that joke about the retards, about the Special Olympics? Retards were also killed in the Holocaust.
Maybe my student was right – take out the ignorance about retards and you have a point about people arguing on the internet – it becomes less the democracy computer scholars hope for and more a series of incomprehensible shouts that no one is invested in listening to. We are all so busy shouting and staking identity claims.
Still, that cartoon she posted is such bullshit - a cruel misrepresentation, a red herring – we know this. She probably knows this somewhere in her young heart and head. Don’t blame her, teacher. That is important. Do not blame. She is young. I am getting to a place where I can say that. What did I think when I was 18, 19, 20? How did I think? What will I think when I am 40? 50? I know a little more now about the ways in which she may have been indoctrinated to think about Israel and the ways in which she may have a right to think that way. I know too some of the ways in which Americans tend to be blind about Israel.
I am quicker now to pull back from being that condescending adult who wants to tell it like it is. That doesn’t mean I am successful since I have always been pretty self-righteous and am sitting here writing a blog entry, which is an indirect confrontation. But I know, too, that I am no longer her teacher and that I should not presume otherwise. Even if I were the teacher, the subject is delicate. The context must be understood and discovered. As her teacher, I would have to respond in a way that didn’t shut her down, in a way that encouraged her to think and that only hoped that one day she would broaden her thoughts and develop a more critical perspective. I see around me many teachers who block their students at the most crucial moment; I do not want to be like that.
Most importantly, I do not know what it means to be an Egyptian who was a child on September 11, 2001, who may have been told that it was the Jews who brought down the towers, that it was the Jews who killed JFK, that it was the Jews who have created a plan to destroy Egypt by sending foreigners with HIV to spread throughout the land, that it was the Jews who recently implanted GPS systems in the heads of the sharks who showed up in the Red Sea and killed a German tourist. I have to hold this in my head. I have to hold it there and not dismiss it even as I find it ludicrous. I have to remember the Gulf War and how the only thing I understood about it was the racist shirts depicting Saddam Hussein that I saw in my junior high. I have to remember that we all knew who the Jews were in my wasp-y school. That some jackass tried to run down a half-black kid in the high school parking lot. That my town, for a while, was dubbed Kluxville, and this was in north-central Illinois, nowhere close to the South. I have to hold in my head the image of the kid on my high school band trip to Washington, D.C., who wore a T-shirt depicting a confederate flag with the caption “The South Will Rise Again” and taped a piece of paper to the bus window that said “Show us your tits.” We all come from broken places and carry fucked-up notions.
Whenever I see news footage of Egyptians, they do and do not look like the Egyptians I know. I know more about the Muslim world than I otherwise would have, but I do not understand what it is to be an Egyptian, or a Muslim, or an Arab, or a Coptic Christian in Egypt this week. What is depicted has edges that confine, like a picture frame – even as there are inaccurate expressions forced by the imposition of the camera, there are things outside the perimeter that we cannot see, or know, or come to understand. We could try harder, though.
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