When in Cairo

The Sounds, Not of Silence

2011-08-13T21:42:00.000+02:00

This morning I hear cicadas in some brief mating sojourn. I cannot see them, for there are few trees in Tucson, and this is where I would have looked for cicadas were I in the Midwest. Not that I want to see them. I have a real “poison-them-all” attitude toward flying things with hard shells. I hear the swamp cooler and two fans, whooshing. Occasionally, a bird, and Bodie, the cat, adjusting his position in a chair before the screen door. My fingers beating at the keyboard. Every fifteen minutes, the clock tower on the university campus, a mile from here, announces itself, so that it is difficult to lose track of time. I’m sure if I listened closely enough I could hear traffic from a few blocks away, but the cicadas rule.

It is strangely quiet in this flat, spare town. Or, it is strangely quiet in this neighborhood. Most of the students have not yet returned from summer break. Even when they return, quietness tends to prevail. I’ve noticed it more since joining the neighborhood listserv after burglaries began to increase here last year. Sometimes burglaries are reported, but most discussion of thievery is characterized by its possibility and emerges from the paranoia of two old women who cruise the alleyways in search of criminals (which they claim almost always wear hoodies and carry backpacks) and refuse to open their front doors if someone knocks, their fingers perpetually poised over 911. At least this is the way they report it on the listserv.

The quietness of this neighborhood is different than the tableau of silence I imagine at my parents’ house in Illinois. It wasn’t long ago that I thought of that place as perfectly silent, almost motionless, for, when I moved to my first real town, Decatur, the city sounds punctured, as did the city light, and I found it difficult for a while to sleep and focus. Of course, the silence of this countryside is a myth, for there is always at least the rustle of leaves, the buzzing of insects, the plethora of bird calls, not to mention the farm equipment and the trains in the valley, which pass at least once an hour.

This morning, I started to read Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage. It opens with a description of her childhood in a Cairo not yet populated by the eternal honking variations of vehicles. Rarely does she hear a car horn, and the family dog always hears a vehicle coming before she does. She describes sounds both invigorating and spiritually lonely – from a reed piper to the greetings of people on the street. In spite of the absence of cars, which are so prevalent in the Egypt I knew, I can relate to the feelings of life she captures – the hearty greetings, the bustle of small business – even individual – commerce, and the growth of plants and animals encouraged by the proximity of the Nile. But mostly, a sense that life was present and acknowledged, a feeling that the existence of others mattered. I don’t want to exaggerate since the Egyptians I knew often complained that people were just not as friendly or helpful to strangers as they used to be, and there were plenty of moments in Cairo where I felt like either just another anonymous part of the hoard or just another foreigner waiting to be parted from her riches. But these moments, in my memory, are counterbalanced by acts of kindness, not only those which happened to me but which I observed from a distance, moments that I think James and I have recorded quite often in this blog. And a texture to those acts of kindness that I haven’t often met back in America.

Silence is not really about absence as much as presence and acknowledgment. I could be silent in Cairo, where “noise pollution” is deadly high, in the sense that I could feel life. I don’t know if that makes sense, but this morning in Tucson I do not feel life, and the silence feels less like silence than something palpably sinister. Where are all the people? Why aren’t they calling out to each other, talking? They know each other, some of these people who have lived here for years, but there is a lifelessness, a huddling that too easily translates to suspicion. I see this in many places in America, even the place I am from, the place that I in most ways love the most, and it makes me wonder about the ways in which Americans are destroying the capacity to love each other. This sounds dire. It is dire. When we can be suspicious of the people across the street, how can it be possible for us to cultivate the capacity to know and understand someone who lives across the ocean? I know this feeling. I live behind a fence, and it is difficult to see my house. I enjoy that. There’s nothing inherently wrong with privacy or solitude. And I stood at my window in Cairo and looked down at the street far too often to claim that I was immersed in Cairene street life. But I admired many parts of that life. I am envious of it. I wish I knew how to live like that. I wish I could be more like the man I passed in Cairo one morning, eating a sandwich, who casually offered me a bite.

-A

Essay in Cerise Press

2011-03-05T21:41:00.001+02:00

Linked here is an essay I published in Cerise Press.
A

http://www.cerisepress.com/02/06/swept-an-expatriate-in-egypt

Egypt Sans Internet

2011-01-29T04:50:00.003+02:00

Word is that Egypt has not simply shut down Facebook or Twitter, but that the Egyptian government took the bold step of actually shutting down the Internet. I was in Egypt for a few days when a ship had dropped anchor on the Internet cable buried in the Mediterranean. That's right, there is actually a cable buried in the Med upon which entire swaths of the Middle East depend for Internet access. The government hasn't cut the cable (yet). The country faces potential financial ruin if businesses open on Sunday without access to the Internet.

I know that Egypt has advanced under Mubarak. I know there was a controversial liberalization of the banks, unpopular with many, and an increase in tourism. And I know Egypt is better than a lot of other despotic regimes. There are institutions of government, and those do operate, even if they are riddled with petty bureaucrats who work an average of 15 minutes per day, the tasks of governance squeezed around Al Arosa tea and Cleopatra cigarettes.

All the same, I know about a police state that crushed dissidents, stifled political opponents, and robbed the democratic process of any integrity. I know basic goods and services haven't always been provided. I witnessed some of this (when I wasn't finding my own little things to complain about). But I also knew that public apathy wasn't the same thing as private discourse, of a talk among friends at the Horreya or the ubiquitous, tiled sheesha cafes. After all, Egyptians are famous talkers. They are lovely, social people at their core. I think they love the world, I really do, despite what you're seeing now, the pent-up anger blasting. They have their thoughts about Hosni Mubarak, as we can see by now. But there has always been a reticence to address it publicly, perhaps because no public platforms existed. So you would see frustration manifest in other ways--the physical assault of a former student, an attack on women by a mob at Eid in 2006, bread riots and strikes in 2008, silent protests in Alex last year when a young man was allegedly beaten to death by police. I wondered how a populace absorbs these blows, absorbs the attack on Christians (by the way, Christians have been protecting Muslims who are praying in the face of police, literally bowing to the illiterate young men wielding batons)--how it maintains its equilibrium in a city that is already tilted sideways, veering on a fine brink. These blows matter. They are felt. They reverberate. They are remembered, and they return when called upon by events like those in Tunisia.

I think I knew this could happen. I remember reading about revolutions in undergraduate history classes, from the brutal tyranny of the Soviets in Hungary and the Chinese in Tiananmen, to the toppling of the Soviet bloc. The governments ignore, then try to appease. Do they wait too long to appease, allowing a fire to go unchecked? Or does appeasement only elevate their opposition, embolden it? What happens when appeasement fails?

We are at that point now. The protestors may be happy with Mubarak's false promises and go home. They may rail until he finally rescinds the emergency law under which he has governed since 1981. They may go home when free and fair democratic elections are held, and the unpopular Mubarak is voted from office. They may not wait for any of this, believing it will never materialize, and continue pushing. And then what happens? I remember that from my history classes too. What happens? Who fills the void? What will result from the scrum? Could it be worse than what they've got? Mubarak seems to be betting so, by trying to drive a wedge between sympathetic but housebound middle class families and those who have taken to the streets.

In the meantime, I have colleagues and former students there. I wonder about them, worry about them. We've heard reports from them downplaying the riots. One colleague breezed through Tahrir Square, seeing nothing. Another, who lived in Lebanon during their bloody civil war, puts the Cairo riots in context: they are nothing in comparison. AUC students sequestered in Kattameya wonder how the events "way in Midan Tahrir" actually impact them. Some don't see the relevance; perhaps they have not yet realized that their ways of life will be altered if regime change comes. They might view it as suffering, or unfair, if this happens. But it's not. As I've learned of late, fairness is about knowing simply that it is possible that you may or may not get your way, and that if you live in a place where the same people get their way all the time about everything, then you have others--most of the people--who never get their way about anything. I think that is how Egypt has operated. It's perhaps why we've seen a conservative backlash during the Mubarak years, a holding dear of celestial justice for a lack of the temporal variety.

That may be beginning to change.

James

On the January 1st Bombing of the Coptic Church in Alexandria

2011-01-03T23:08:00.003+02:00

It was the first time I cried about something that happened in Egypt. It was the first time since moving back to the U.S., too, that I wasn’t there when it happened.

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.
A

2010-09-24T07:51:00.002+03:00

It used to be that the strangers who looked at me were women, and they did so—what few did so—because they found me worth a lingering glance, perhaps a smile and a hello. Like most men in their early twenties, I completely ate it up. This began to change when I first started graduate school ten years ago. The reasons are partially having to do with meeting the other contributor to this blog. But even my interest in her reflects, in part, a shift I began undergoing as I was first meeting her.

In truth, the waning attentions of young women (and the value I placed upon it) were also caused by weight gain and general disregard for my personal health and appearance, a graduate school-induced downturn which reached its nadir just as I was submitting my insufficient fiction for a drubbing at the conclusion of my MFA. Literally and figuratively, I had taken on baggage.

The shift also had to do with taking on young women as students. The student-teacher relationship was new and strange territory for me in 2000, in terms of being the teacher in that equation. I knew very little about it except for what I gleaned from a crash-course pro-seminar in composition theory and teaching. Still, I understood instinctually that the dynamics I shared with that first group of 26, young men and women alike, were different than anything I had experienced before. I possessed some measure of authority, and I didn’t want to use that authority in petty ways or for personal glory. I recognized this as a generosity in myself that I didn’t know I possessed until I stood before students. I began to think about what I wanted from my interactions with students. It’s like entering graduate school was like going into a giant cement mixer; I emerged, fat and exhausted and confused, four years later. I survived it, lost weight, took better care, read and wrote to tried to right what had become a bewildering pursuit for competency as a writer of fiction. Then I went to Egypt. Four years passed. I think I handled those four years so well in part because of the hardship and confusion of graduate school. I also had time in Egypt to hone my teaching persona and think more about the type of relationships I wanted to have with students. There are many AUC students for whom I feel a genuine warmth and hope for the future, a personable interest in their well-being, their education, their futures. I hope very much that those who wish to pursue writing will continue to do so despite the inevitable disappointments to come. And I want to do nothing to violate what I see as a special relationship between a student and his or her teacher, especially one, like me, with an interest in mentoring.

The reason why I write this now is that, in the two months I have been back home, I have recognized that I crossed some age-related threshold while I was away. To the undergraduates at UCSB, who do not know me as a teacher, I am invisible. I am happy about this, by the way, even as invisibility feels so conspicuous after life in Egypt, where my fair skin and green eyes were the cause of countless stares. Another group of humans stare at me now: older men. I’ve felt them watching me when, as I did today, I walk along a path that runs alongside a dog park. A man sat in the shade and watched at me. In his eyes I saw bewilderment, confusion, memory—where had the time gone? I have seen this expression a lot lately. They were once my age—in the full glow of prime adulthood. This all transpired while I was away, as if in secret. Quite suddenly I find myself not the “mere child” that a dear AUC colleague liked to call me, but a man careening toward middle age.

I had difficulty remembering that time kept passing while I was in Egypt; I didn’t believe the calendar. I believed I was still 30. But it seems that the time passed, after all. A transformation instigated by my entrance into graduate school in 2000 feels, if not complete, then at the end of an act.

James

Relief Map

2010-07-18T19:03:00.002+03:00

I remember standing around a relief globe in some elementary school classroom or other. Aside from outdated textbooks, the relief globe was my portal to the world, the real world, beyond the confines of New Carlisle, Ohio. Was it really confining, did it seem that way to me at the time? I suppose not. I remember the physical symptoms of anxiety and dread I associated with the raw social environment of public elementary school in my small Ohio town, the vice around my throat, the fluttering in my chest when I would awaken and, knowing the walk to school, wonder which portly bully would accost me that day. They never harmed me physically, they just liked to intimidate. I was an easy one to intimidate because I was smart but not a good student, small, not really good at things I had been told I was good at. I found a kind of solace in books, from Time Machine adventures to the Hardy Boys. My parents bought me a Hardy Boys mystery novel for Christmas in 1983 and my father read a chapter every night for 20 nights (each of the 58 original adventures weighs in at 20 chapters, 180 pages). I resolved to read all 58 books and so I did, out of loyalty to the gesture of my parents and because I liked what I was reading. At my peak, I would read in classes, in empty periods, shuttering away the down time that never led anyplace good. I could read a book in a day.

The relief map was different. I could run my fingers over the Himalayas and try to make sense of Nepal, a country-sized cliff. I could see such bizarre countries as Jordan, named perhaps after the basketball star just then ascending, or Niger, which caused my classmates to giggle (and me, too, because I was immature and possessed no spine), or puzzling Chad. We joked about other names that might pass for countries. James. Matt. Jon. Charity. Nighthawk.

I remember actually trying to imagine life in those places, and I remember wanting to see…life, in those places, in all sorts of places, all around. I remember feeling, for the first time, the swelling of the world. It was large; I was a pinprick. I wanted to spread myself around. I remember wanting to live in one of these places—I sensed somehow, without any context I can call my own, that visiting was one thing, and taking up residence completely another. It dawned like I say as a sense, but today I can give words. I wanted to see the day to day, the way things worked in a place like Jordan or Chad, how the people went about their days. Their days must be so different from mine—the world was not New Carlisle, right? And I didn’t and don’t hate where I’m from, I’m not ashamed. But it was confining and constricting. Like a depressed person, I would fake an illness to convince my parents to let me stay home. They weren’t fooled, but often they relented. I loved the mornings alone, before the day aged and I began to feel the tug of company again, the weight of the next day, the obligation to act as though I’d recovered from an upset tummy. I always felt the nagging question of what the world held in its palms between fingers with pinpricked tips.

James

Where I Was on December 31, 2009

2010-07-02T12:57:00.001+03:00

I’ve always been a sucker for anniversaries, key dates, passages through time. Of a certain variety. I can’t tell you when my parents were married or when they divorced. I have a hard time remembering if they split in 1984 or 1985, and, for reasons that probably reveal a lot about me, I’ve never asked either of my parents to clarify.

For me it’s birthdays, New Year’s Eve. The trite rituals of reflection, the year-end People magazine best-ofs, the montage of celebrities dead over the past year, set to a string quartet. These appeal to me. I like my own trite rituals of reflection, the sucker they reveal me to be, the boxed-in, unimaginative thinker attached to a cultural nostalgia he didn’t invent and doesn’t understand. That’s me.

Take New Year’s Eve 2009. I felt connected that night to every other New Year’s Eve I could remember. I thought about the turns and twists and circumstances within and beyond my control that had brought me to the Ace Club in Maadi, Egypt, to the Scotch in my hand, to the tableful of Irish and British acquaintances with whom I was seated, to Amanda, my companion for almost ten years and my constant companion in Egypt (except for the sunset weeks of summer 2010). It’s hard to explain how the Brits of Egypt celebrate milestones, except to say: hard, with lots of sun-seared faces, garish mascara, Asian trophy wives and imported spirits. The air stunk of smoldering woodchips and the hint of gasoline, as it always does around Cairo, but this air was redeemed by the alcoholic smells of perfume, beer, Scotch. We were seated in a darkened corner near the brick wall that separated our party from Midan Victoria and the rest of Maadi; we watched a cat slink along the fence and leap onto the branch of the tree under which we sat. The cat came to rest where the trunk held the branches; he looked like he was caught in an alien’s palm, clutching digits. Across the dark rows of tables, wedged between the toilets and the door to the inner bar, a deejay spun and spotlights transformed a concrete terrace into an impromptu dance floor. Our hosts, Vicki and Neil, were there, dancing slowly, chatting with other dancers as their orbits overlapped in the packed space. The Sudanese men who operated the kitchen and the bar slithered between the revelers, holding aloft trays of drinks. It didn’t worry me that they might graze a dancing couple, that the drinks might topple and crash on the concrete. I have learned in Egypt not to worry about such things; or, if I do worry, to create a new space for that worry, a special burden between the shoulder blades that you can learn to carry without even noticing.

And so I actually felt self-satisfied to be there with Amanda, with our friends, and with a bunch of British folks finding extroversion through alcohol. I enjoyed sitting in the dark and murmuring beneath the music. I liked the subterranean feeling; I wasn’t entirely there. I was thinking 10 years earlier. No act of imagination at that time could have placed me in Egypt, in suburban Cairo, in a nest of drunken, reveling Brits counting down the final minutes of the best decade of my life so far.

At the end of 1999, I was only a year and a half out of college and the ceremony that had branded me “educated.” I remember walking with a now ex-friend on the Wittenberg campus in May 1998, as he proclaimed that we would now and forever have B.A. attached to our names. He liked that sort of stuff, perhaps more so than me, but his observation had resonated, first as a thrill and then as a burden. In that moment I felt a tremendous levity; I was ascendant. I was engaged to be married; I was coming back for a year to work at the campus where I had earned my undergraduate degree; I was going to apply to M.F.A. programs in creative writing and, naively, I felt certain I would be accepted.

None of that happened. By the end of 1999, I was renting a room in a house in a village outside my hometown. Grad schools that year wouldn’t have me. One school had taken the extra measure of personally phoning in my rejection. This experience had engendered the suspicion that I was a pretender, a writer of some consequence for a few years in college, but nothing more. I was learning a hard truth. I was being weeded out. I would become one of the legions of undergraduate writers who abandon the enterprise after college—and I can say, twelve years after graduation, that a lot of artist friends have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another. I used to hold their choices in low regard, seeing them as defections, but anymore I don’t do that. Everybody makes choices; I’ve made mine and they bring their own risks.

There had been other spectacular flame-outs that year. There had been a disappointment in love, so to speak, and so I was single. I had flailed around looking for purpose, leading to a botched journey to England on a work visa. I traveled all the way to Ambleside, thinking what I needed was the Lake District’s idyll to salve my wounds, to recover and rebrand and return home with shaggy hair, a beard, confidence restored, a one man Peace Corps operation. Unfortunately I ran out of money. And so I returned home and had to ask my father to borrow his rickety Dodge Caravan, powder-blue with wood paneling and a non-functional heater. This is the car I would drive throughout the winter from my waiter job in Yellow Springs to my rented room in North Hampton, shivering beneath an insufficient coat. For this privilege I had to submit to a berating lecture from my father, who also did not quite know what I was doing with myself. And anyway he had problems of his own. I felt keenly his lack of confidence in me, for it combined with my own lack of confidence, compounding into something near panic. My ex had moved on, and in a few months she would marry someone else, begin a real career. She just seemed so together, so composed. And I seemed so fractured, disassembled. How had this happened, and with such speed? I don’t compare myself to her very often, but at the time I saw all this as evidence that our split had been a great development for her and a disaster for me.

What I remember thinking on December 31, 1999 was trying to come about, to steady myself. I would reapply to grad school, but with an adjustment, adding a couple of M.A. programs. The ex-friend from earlier spoke highly of his current program in Ames, Iowa, and so I would apply there and be admitted and eventually earn my M.A. from Iowa State University. And this choice would bring with it a fresh round of disappointments, of a different variety: the disappointments associated with getting what you want. But it would also transform my life in incalculable ways. I would make new friends, work with a writer I admired, know my own limitations in starker ways than I knew them in 1999. But I did not know that then. I knew that I would apply to grad schools. I did not know that the parents of my roommate, the Boop family of North Hampton, would generously allow me to enter their home when it was empty in the afternoons so I could write, and print, and prepare my applications. The actions had seemed so futile at the time, signifying nothing, without possibility. I falsely believed that this was no legitimate path. If I learned anything in 10 years, I learned that I know how to blaze a path and I learned about the power of small generosity. But I did not know that on December 31, 1999; I did not know that yet! It’s hard for me to conceive now what I did not know then, how nascent I was. It’s almost an embarrassment to admit, until I remember that generosity can extend to the self and keep you from feeling shame and disappointment all over again, and that you can forgive your past selves for having been so dumb.

On December 31, 1999, I made a few basic decisions. I remember pacing around the North Hampton house, spelling them out. In a year, I would be in a better location, one that believed in the things I believed in, that had a literary community that I could join, that gave me a chance to make my way. A friend had offered to share his Portland hovel with me, to help me relocate on the cheap, and I was going. If I got into grad school, then I would go. But I was not going to wait until April or May, until admissions committees had made up their minds about me, again. I would be in a better place a year from now. I would set up shop in Portland, if necessary, and make my way from there.

It was a small decision, but I remember the shift in thinking, the moving ahead with plans and not waiting. I remember how dispossessed I felt and how my choices seemed to lack consequence. I feared that they didn’t matter. I feared that I was not at the right platform and that, because of this, the choices I made were not going to matter. But they did matter, for I went to Portland in March, taking the Greyhound to Portland via Charlotte and St. Louis, to visit friends. And in Charlotte a friend was having his own difficulties, and in St. Louis I said goodbye to a certain way I had been friends with another person—and then I went to Portland where I slept for ten weeks on an air mattress and worked 38 hours a week at a Plaid Pantry convenience store, at a location where a cashier had been murdered the year before, right where I stood for all those hours, alone and unguarded and worth $6.50 an hour. And then I came back to Ohio, because I was admitted to Iowa State and I needed the summer to move. And I went to a bar near campus with a new friend who had taught me a kind of aggressive generosity of spirit, and I remember feeling, if not restored, then relieved. As I told him then, all I wanted was a chance. And now I had the chance.

I didn’t know that on December 31, 1999, but I remembered it on December 31, 2009, as I drank in the sordid air and watched Neil take the microphone and count down the final seconds of the decade. I was among strangers, in a strange place, well beyond any setting I could have imagined for myself a decade earlier. How unlikely, I thought. So I kept close to Amanda, experienced the satisfied warmth in my mouth and my belly from the Scotch, mulled over it. At heart I’m very much a golly-gee Midwestern rube, mouth agape in wonder when I encounter strangeness, a sense of being far away. My childhood voice had the soft edges of Appalachia like my parents, but now the soft edges have been ground out. They return in modest ways when I go home, and, on a night like tonight, when I am half-drunk and warm and glad and happy and relieved, thinking of ten years ago to the day and the years of mediation between, I find myself thinking in that voice, dropping my g’s, compressing my sentences by a half-breath, like an accordion player practicing a provincial anthem, getting it wrong, trying again.

James

Things I’ll Miss About Egypt #4: Feeling Strange

2010-06-15T17:25:00.006+03:00

My brother and certain other people might argue that I’m an odd duck, but one thing I’ve noticed whenever I come back to the U.S. is how invisible I feel. Nobody really looks or seems a bit curious about me in a place where I’m assumed to be like everybody else, whatever that means. I get stared at for pretty obvious reasons in Egypt, and it’s not that I really love it, but there is something to be said for feeling strange.

Today I went with a brown-suited man from my university to a branch of the Ministry of Agriculture in order to get the right paperwork for the cat I will be bringing back to the U.S. I had expected that we would be going to one of the fancy buildings in Cairo that are faux-ancient temples, and I was kind of excited at the prospect of going into these swamps of red tape I’ve heard so much about.

Instead, I found myself in Fustat, one of my favorite areas of Cairo. The old city, the first capital of the Arabs. Here you can find the oldest mosque in Africa and Egypt’s oldest synagogue. But these are just buildings, at least to me. It’s the people and the bustle that are endlessly fascinating. The place we needed was off a gravel/mud/dirt road that curved around garbage, donkeys pulling carts, coffeeshops, and all matter of small enterprises, from the selling of juice to the stacking and binding of feedbags.

I lugged my 80% reformed street cat in his smart and suburban-ridiculous red travel bag into the ministry branch. We sat in a room with a window that looked onto a slum house and listened to a rooster crowing as a farash brought us glass bottles of cold Pepsi and a man behind a desk handwrote a letter to the main Ministry office confirming that the cat was real and healthy. On the wall was a framed and faded poster, the glass cracked, of different cuts of veal. A ceiling fan rotated, scattering my papers across the man's desk. The man left with his letter.

Occasionally, people entered and wondered if there was a dog in the bag, and when I said, “Ota” (cat), they would say, “Kibir!” (Big!). He’s a big tom, but also he’s fed with regularity. He looks like a giant when he goes out on the street to bully his starving compatriots. Compared to the obese cats I've seen in the U.S., though, he's right trim.

Over the hour that we waited for the man to return, Mr. Yasser of the brown suit and I talked. I started with small talk, something I’m terrible at. I told Mr. Yasser I was leaving Egypt and would miss it. And he said to me that the staff would miss me. I was confused. What staff? Staff know me? Most professors don't even know me, some in my own department. I thought he was just exaggerating, which is common around here. He said, “You are too kindly and never make a problem for anyone.” (Often people here say “too” when they mean “so.”) Then he said he remembered me from 4-5 years ago and that it was too bad that I was leaving. "Four years you make no problems," he said, shaking his head.

And I suddenly remembered who Mr. Yasser was. The first time I had to have my annual HIV test (which all foreigners who work in Egypt must have in order to get a work visa) in 2006, it was Mr. Yasser who led me to the certified government worker who would take my blood.

In memory, he wears a black suit and dark sunglasses and looks like a secret service agent. In memory, he scares me a little. In memory, he does not speak to me as he leads me across the street I dread to cross and through the overcrowded medical clinic, and I sit on a dingy chair surrounded by other patients, and there are no lights on in the room, and there are children singing patriotic songs at the French school next door, and I watch a needle go into my arm and then get placed in an open trash can full of used needles. In memory, I am wondering what the hell I am doing in Africa; I have been naively navigating through each initial day, initial week, initial month. In memory, I feel foolish and diffident, not understanding anything anyone is saying and wondering if I will ever get the hang of this place. Everything seems strange, in memory.

Today I talked with Yasser about his children, about the curtain store with the spiral stairway that he enjoys in Old Cairo, about the way he loves this neighborhood, Fustat, because it is the old city, and the people are the old, the real, Egyptians. And the pyramids (the continued revisions to the grounds, the way it’s marketed, etc.), the new university campus in the midst of the desert – none of this feels real to him, and he is grateful that he was able to stay in the few offices left on the old university campus. "At new campus, no one knows me," he said. “It is too far. Where is it? What would you do if the bus broke down from new campus? There is nothing. Nothing. Even men – what would they do?”

The man from the ministry returned with a small pink square of paper. Mr. Yasser put it into a folder with my passport and the cat’s records, and he said that without this slip of paper he would never be able to get this done at the Ministry. (I should probably mention that this is one of the perks I have with this job – people wade through bureaucracy for me for a small sum, which is why someone else has my passport now.)

We left with our paperwork. Mr. Yasser would be headed to the Ministry, and I would be headed la-de-da back to my big flat. There weren’t any empty taxis coming down the dirt road, so Mr. Yasser and I walked back the way we had come. Past men in coffeeshops, smoking sheesha, playing backgammon, observing the street, laughing, chatting. Past women buying and selling vegetables, walking with arms interlocked, sometimes pausing to look at me and smile. Past platters of homemade potato chips on steel counters. Past mounds of garbage and a burned-out car straight out of Mad Max. Flies plagued all of us.

I realized the red bag on my shoulder with the intermittently struggling cat was conspicuous. Yet somehow this relaxed me. I felt a contradictory sense of belonging on this street, walking beside this man in the brown suit on a dusty road, feeling the other men look at me, feeling their curious glances, hearing the tinny recordings of Qu'ran out various windows and radios. Maybe it was a feeling that at least I was somehow in on the joke (this is the question, though, isn’t it – can an expat ever be in on the joke?). My point is that in this situation I felt just fine, and I felt like conveying to Mr. Yasser the reason for this feeling. So I said, “I must look pretty strange walking down the street with a cat in a bag."

He laughed gleefully and said, “Yes! It is too strange!”

We walked down the street and laughed together, and I smiled at any person who was looking at me.

“I guess I’m used to feeling strange by now,” I said, and shook his hand, and hailed a cab.

A

Things I Will Miss About Egypt #3: Perceptions about Language

2010-06-09T11:33:00.003+03:00

I’ve seen a lot of complaints on facebook from my American brethren about things like having to “press 1 for English.” This is usually followed by some sort of rant about how “in America, we speak English.” Most egregiously misuse English grammar and sentence structure as they smugly defend the language.

After four years of working with kids who are fluent in a minimum of three languages as an expectation of their culture and class, I'm sad I wasn't exposed to more languages as a child. I admire those who are brave enough to come to the U.S., where they can actually be ridiculed for not knowing English or for having an unfamiliar accent. When I attempted to learn Arabic in Egypt, I was met with kindness and tolerance. I experienced language as an exchange of cultures, as a potential bridge. I can only hope to practice that kind of tolerance when I return to the U.S. Though I understand that language is a complicated subject, that it is no less complicated in Egypt than it is in the U.S., and that in some ways I simplify the situation here, this feeling of open exchange and diversity is what I learned from "foreigners" while being a "foreigner" myself.

A

Things I’ll Miss About Egypt #2: Days Like This

2010-06-03T22:29:00.011+03:00

We went for a day out – L – an Egyptian, and E, an American expat. First to the Smart Village, a satellite world of modern buildings and kempt grass. Even the mosque was futuristic.

In the Smart Village you’ll find something called CultNat, a project working to archive all matter of information about Egypt. They produce CDs – for instance, you can buy a CD that pulls up a map of several parts of Cairo. You can click on different buildings and get the architectural context of each, zoom in on various attributes of the building, look at it in 3-D, and see various drawings and photos of the building. If you’ve been to downtown Cairo, you can see the influence of all matter of architectural styles, and even an idiot like me can appreciate this. Geography? Wildlife? Tombs at Giza? Medicinal herbs of Egypt? They’ve got it at CultNat. Another room featured a fantastic film about ancient Egypt on nine screens, and another offered an array of 3-D photos. Still another room contains working replicas of such things as the first clock to run on water.

From the strange Smart Village in the desert, we headed to Giza for lunch at the exorbitantly priced Mena House hotel (http://www.oberoihotels.com/oberoi_menahouse/index.asp). It took us a while to get there; we could see the pyramids from the Alex Desert Road, calling out to us across the brilliant green farmland, but, alas, there were no exits. Eventually we found one but still didn’t know how to get to the pyramids.

I love getting lost in Cairo. No, really. Because I am never driving when this happens. So – feast for the senses. Men selling watermelons from a donkey cart by the side of the road. A woman with a stand of drinks in metal containers reflecting the sun. Boys and men on motorcycles. Children tapping on cars in traffic jams. Frankly, I wasn’t a help to L because I enjoyed being lost so much. It’s true, though, that I had spotted the “pyramids” sign on the highway. Of course, I don’t think I was the only one in the car that spotted it – just the only one to be so proud of myself for seeing it.

We arrived at the intersection where the Pyramid of Khufu stands loud and proud.

There, we were accosted by men creating triangles with their hands and pointing, as if we couldn’t see the ancient being before us. One man knocked on the car from front to back. When L rolled her window a crack to ask them the quickest way to get to the Mena House (that we weren’t interested in the pyramids), they ignored her. Though the Mena House is lovely, it was not the main attraction. What we came for was a view of the Great Pyramid from a quiet space.

During lunch, L had decided that the watchbands on both of her guests for this outing were unacceptable. Before she would agree to drop us off on the Corniche so we could catch a cab back to Ma’adi, we had to get new watchbands. She knew where we could get them for twelve Egyptian pounds. Sure enough, soon we double-parked on a Cairo street somewhere near Mohandisseen, and L disappeared. She came back moments later with her fists full of watchbands. E quickly chose one. I, picky, insisted upon going back in with L while E’s watchband was replaced. The store was one of those pantry-sized affairs you commonly find in Cairo. Its main purpose seemed to be the selling of electronic accessories such as phone covers, and behind a counter sat three young men, too many for the size of the store. In one corner sat the watchband guy. Two boxes held a jumble of bands. To my delight, I found one. My watch was admired. The band was set.

On to the Corniche, said L. But, first, let’s drive by Manial Palace. E – who, like me, is leaving Egypt – had wanted to go there for quite some time, but it had been closed for restoration ever since she had arrived in Egypt three years before. At least you can see the outside of it one more time, said L. When we pulled onto the street, L engaged a policeman whose belly was hanging out of his white shirt, which wasn’t tucked into his pants. His belt, its buckle coming undone, was strapped haphazardly over his belly, and he waved a cigarette as they spoke in Arabic. My guess was that they were arguing over whether she could go that way down the street, but when L parked and got out, I discovered that she had been coaxing her way onto the palace grounds. Once inside, we ran into a gaggle of workers who vigorously protested our presence while L smiled and maintained her ground with her firm, charismatic tone. Finally, a man with a conspicuous grey toupee and grey moustache came out from a tent. He protested for a while, and L kept smiling and insisting. I laughed nervously, as is my wont in such situations. E said, “Oh, she’s going to get us in. Just watch.”

Soon we were following the big-bellied policeman, a self-appointed tour guide with an everlasting cigarette, and the tour guide’s friend, who helpfully gestured and served lookout since he knew there would be an inevitable tip at the end of this journey. We peered into a room with solid gold pillars. We rounded a corner, then, to the vast gardens that make up most of the grounds. The centerpiece of these gardens is the “mother tree,” a banyan that birthed all other banyans in the place.

The guide showed us how the aerial prop roots of each tree eventually droop to the ground and plant themselves, growing into trunks that look the same as the original trunk. Older trees can spread across large tracts of land. All the banyans on the grounds, then, are connected, and the mother banyan was the largest of them all.

Earlier, the guide had gestured toward the house of Muhammad Ali, Jr. It was closed, he said. As we passed an open doorway, however, the jaunty sidekick suggested we go in. Quick, they said, glancing around for...someone who doesn't allow rule-breaking in Egypt? Good luck, friends. Anyway, one of them stood lookout as we entered. The inside was covered with tiling and alabaster that looked very much like the Harem of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. So – amazing. We tipped our three guides and headed to the Corniche.

Days like this. Familiar and unfamiliar. I’ll miss the peculiar way I feel this in Egypt.
A

Punks

2010-05-29T09:57:00.007+03:00

Nearly getting run down is a daily part of a pedestrian's life in Cairo. Maybe that's why so few people walk. A week or so ago, J and I were headed home after work. We were crossing a median with a rare area for parking near the Shell Building in Ma'adi. Teenagers often hang out in this area near the Shell Shop, an American-looking convenience store sans gas station. As we crossed, a grey car filled with three teenaged boys swerved into the median, stopping just short of flattening J, who moved out of the way in enough time to only receive a tap on the leg.

I don't know...had it been a long day? J slammed his hand down on the car. I flew to the driver's window, and J raced to the passenger side. J was yelling at a kid with fighter-pilot sunglasses who was getting out of the car, but I don't know what they were saying because I was shouting. I pointed my finger in the driver's face, waved my arms, said something in elderly-lady fashion about controlling oneself, and eventually flipped the bird as I might have done in high school. All of this resulted in getting called "habibti" (rough translation: my honey).

Did I mention that all three of these boys were dressed like it was 1987? Another boy with frosted jeans and a white sweatband pushing up his gelled hair emerged and pulled Fighter-pilot Sunglasses away from J and me.

A tag-team onslaught like this occurred on a recent vacation to Istanbul, when, at the end of our stay, we were charged the equivalent of $100 for two local phone calls. From two sides we simultaneously raged and delivered our personal forms of logic. For the first time, I seemed to be the impetus for a nervous sweat as the bald manager at reception held the bill with shaking hands and mustered a discount. This kind of multilateral attack is a new development for J and me, who aren't very aggressive. But it seems to be effective. In fact, I am not really sure why I am writing about it. But it seems important. I do know I am more likely to stand up for myself in public spaces than I was four years ago. I think I can thank Cairenes for that.

On second thought, I have been thinking a lot lately about the squeaky wheel getting the grease. It's something I've always hated - watching people who surface only long enough to complain somehow get what they want. You see this a lot in academia. It's not something I strive for in my job - that much of my Midwestern work ethic stays intact. But I've seen it in one form or another at every university I've been to.

I don't think the episode with the teens is comparable to the squeaky wheel. It's sticking in my head, I think, because there are these moments in Egypt where we just don't have a sense of humor anymore. I went through a persistent Egypt funk last year, and it was full of moments like these. J has noted that there are some days when I am likely to step out into traffic just to make a point (logical? smart? No.), and the encounter with the teenagers was one of those days.

A

Things I Will Miss About Egypt #1 The Call to Prayer?

2010-05-22T11:41:00.009+03:00

We're going to be leaving Egypt sooner than we can wrap our minds around. On facebook, I've been listing as status updates the things I think I will miss. But the status updates of facebook get lost in the scroll. Isn't it strange how a blog seems more permanent?

I'm sure there will be unanticipated things about Egypt that I will find myself missing in the coming years. I understood this one night this week as I read a novel. I've instituted reading sessions at night, forbidding myself from turning on the computer when I get home at 8pm from work.

It was quiet that night. J was in his office; Bodie was sprawled on the cool wooden floor. Then came the call to prayer.

For the last two years, we have lived right next to a mosque with some mighty fine loudspeakers. We have a front-row seat to heavenward encouragement five times a day, and this includes not only the chanting of the muezzin but also the trickling of water and throat and nostril clearing from the ablutions hall adjacent to our apartment building. Some days it seems louder than other days. On Fridays, the imam's temper can be measured like a Baptist preacher's - you don't have to understand what he's saying - you only have to listen to tone. Barking and biting. Soothing. Chastising. Praising. Joyous. Preachers the world over are not so distinctive from each other as we would like to think.

Often, when I mention the call to prayer to someone who does not live in a country dominated by Islam, I get a sigh of wonder. People just love that call to prayer. It's so...mysterious? My cynical reply is to get back to me when you've lived next to a mosque.

But I have a feeling that I might miss it. That night, I had been reading a novel about the lonely lives of Americans (James Salter's Light Years). Salter's writing is pristine, but I was pretty tired of the characters and their existential concerns.

Enter the call to prayer.

As "Allahuakhbar" threaded the heavy air, I thought about silence. Nothing is ever really silent. My parents' house in the evening is the quietest place I know, and still there is the thrumming of crickets, furnace, coyotes, distant trains. Still there is your pulse, beating in your throat, your ears. But there is a difference between this and the call to prayer. I admit I've gotten into the nasty habit of perceiving the call to prayer as an intrusion. The other night, though, I remembered. I remembered I was in Cairo, Egypt, and that every time the call to prayer rings out, I know that there are uncountable souls around me, pulsing life. For me, the invocation is less about God than human beings. We exist. I wonder if I can find an analog in the next place, something that will thread the air like this. I hope it is something as unexpected as the call to prayer.

A

Lady Doctor

2010-01-15T17:07:00.009+02:00

I was going to the lady doctor. The doctor for ladies.

I grabbed a taxi and buried my nose in a Murakami novel while the driver, turning onto the corniche, slung us around every car in his path, honking and yelling and gesturing and nearly running us into another taxi that balanced un-tethered oriental rugs on its luggage rack. Even the Egyptian drivers were angry at my taxi driver. A ten minute ride was five - I saw the pink monstrosity of the Nile Badrawi hospital before I had gotten through two pages of the novel. The driver screeched across three lanes of traffic and braked next to a traffic cop on the road to the hospital. I got out and gave the guy 10LE, which was more than fair. As I walked away, I heard, "HEY!" in all its shining American rudeness. It was the taxi driver. Disdainfully, he held out my 10LE with one hand and gave me the thumb and first two fingers gesture I have come to know can mean many things here in Egypt. It can mean "Wait." It can mean "Settle down here everybody; there ain't no reason to fight." It can mean "Get the eff outta my way because I'm gonna keep driving whether you stop or not." One night I watched two men in a heated argument. They were standing on either side of a car, and they both made that gesture at each other, reaching over the roof, hands frozen in that position, until their knuckles touched. Their hands slightly shook as they held them there, as if someone had glued them together. Eventually they broke free, exhausted as if they had actually had a fight. That's one thing about this place. I am so sick of people asking me if I'm scared to be here, if I'm scared of the people. The way I've seen people fight here looks like West Side Story. Does that scare you? The only time you should be scared is when the Egyptians lose a soccer match and you happen to be staying in the embassy of the country that just beat them.

But back to my driver. "HEY!" he yelled. Then, "Xamas-taashar!" in Arabic. He wanted 15LE for a 5LE ride. I gave him the gesture right back and yelled, "WHAT? FOR FIVE MINUTES?" And I yelled some other things before walking away.

I entered the hospital, a maze. I had already been there three times, and I had never seen a foreigner in there. By and large, I was also the only woman wearing pants and wearing my hair free besides my doctor.

In a narrow hallway, I waited for the elevator that would take me to the tenth floor. As it came creeping down, three men and two women crammed themselves into the hallway. The elder woman backed her abeya-slung rear into my stomach, slowly pushing me against the gold, cylindrical, full ashtray. As is my custom in public when not being accosted by angry taxi drivers, I looked downward and sort of shrugged to myself and politely waited for her butt to depart from my gut. "Mafeesh mish queda" (no problem), I said when they all stepped ahead of me in a 3x3 elevator, which contained an old operator on a metal stool, and invited me to join them.

In the lady clinic, most of the women in the waiting room were accompanied by men, most were pregnant, and nearly everyone was in traditional dress. The family that had crammed me into the ashtray was there. A high percentage of women in niqab filled the place. A male doctor walked through the waiting room, smoking a pipe and gesturing for a pregnant woman to follow him. The chairs were blue and attached together as in an airport. An awards show in Arabic showed interviews with Arab celebrities wearing sparkling gowns and a ton of makeup. We were all rapt.

Another family was getting off the elevator as I left the clinic. A young man was holding a baby carrier, and I looked, but it was empty. He swung it toward me and said something I couldn't understand. Then I caught enough words and enough of his gestures to understand he was offering to impregnate me. Or, if we want to give him the benefit of the doubt, he might have been asking me if I was pregnant. I don't think he was. I shook my head at him while the women looked at the floor.

A

Bodie

2009-12-30T17:44:00.011+02:00

Pretty much, my whole autumn and winter have been taken up by a cat.

Oh, there was also the swine flu b.s., a load of applications, the production of a scholarly writing sample, an essay about Amy Hempel, a helluva lot of time at the gym, and the usual dance of Cairo, including the horrific thumping of a body against the car of the Metro we were riding in and the subsequent drag and drop of that body. We don't know what happened to that person.

The cats in Maadi are generally in better shape than the ones in our former neighborhood, Zamalek. You see more shopkeepers feeding a few select kitties. They hang in groups, and there's usually one tough boy who heads them. Usually the tough boy has cauliflower jowls from all the scraps he's endured to get his position. Curiously, the big boy in charge of the gang in front of our building has a well-shaped face. He hangs with the regulars - a white gal with a tiny head and enormous, piercing eyes (we call her Ojos Locos), another white guy, and a black and white guy. Here's the tough boy:

He started wooing J pretty quickly this autumn. "Oh, hey, buddy," James says to all animals peeping out from under cars and in garbage piles. J is allergic to cats, but he took to this guy. Or, rather, the cat chose him. He was interested in us. Most animals around here have a blank look of despair, not unlike some of the people. But tough boy was different, and he chose James. Soon, cat food. Eventual inchings of cat into doorway, foyer, dining room carpet. Me saying, "You better not get attached to this nasty cat." Me scolding the cat off the couch when he got too brave.

Me remembering the eleven or twelve cats running around outside when I was a kid, and how I had names for them and loved them all, and would go out on the patio when it was cold at night and gather as many of them onto my lap as I could until my mom made me go back inside. The cats would follow me through the woods in a long line.

I made lots of comments about how I really did not want fleas in the rug. I said, "Hey, disease," whenever the cat tentatively stepped inside. It was hard to explain my ambivalence to J. I was worried about breaking this cat's heart, which would break my heart.

But here he is, just the same. And we decided it was time to adopt him. The cat people in my department were all over this, providing us with doctors' names and numbers, advice about getting the cat to the U.S. (which is relatively easy compared to trying to get a pet into Europe and which doesn't require a quarantine if he's had his shots), and even gift bags of cat toys. We called him Bodie after a character on The Wire. Urban Dictionary will inform you that this name means a guy from the streets who is good with the ladies. We managed to get him his first round of shots, his emasculation, de-worming, and a bath. During this time, I also discovered that de-clawing is an American thing, that it is actually illegal in Europe. Anyway, it was wise not to de-claw him - it would have hurt, and, more to the point, he would have gotten his ass kicked on the first morning we left him to go to work, the day the maid came and let him out. I was devastated. Like an overly zealous new mother, I had called her to make sure the "ota"(cat) was okay. The "ota" was "barra" (outside). "Oh...sa'laam," I muttered. Peace?! My kitty escaped! I was devastated.

"Oh, don't worry," shrugged all the cat people in my department. "He'll be back. He knows where the food is."

We got back at 8pm. By 9, the cat was back, too, but wary. Wary 'til the food was presented. And so the meowing ensued as we shut him back in our apartment. We had a week of break ahead of us, with Thanksgiving and Eid Al-Adha and illogical swine flu extensions. A week of incessant howling each night, sulking and stinkeye, a few pointed poops with our names written in them, and an everlasting smell of cat piss on one of the couches. He really wanted out. After a week, we let him out. I can't explain the relief. We watched from the window as he stepped outside and rubbed against a plant and luxuriously sniffed and trotted about. We saw him periodically cruising about with Ojos Locos. And then, later, he was back. OK, so we would have an arrangement. I didn't know if it was an ethical arrangement. What about if/when we leave? What do we do? I plan to take the cat but not if he hasn't settled in with us. Besides, he hadn't even let us pet him, scratch his chin, though he was playing.

A few weeks later, I was walking down to the ATM and spotted the black and white cat, entrails spilling out in the road. All of the cats on the street were creeping toward it in a slow-motion circle. It had just happened - no doubt he had been run over. Bodie was one of the creeping cats. When he saw me, he ran under a parked car. By the time I came back, someone had scooped the cat over to the side of the road. (In Zamalek, it would have been more likely to rot there for days until it was fully pressed into the pavement). Bodie was trying to get to it, but an orange cat was standing guard over the body. Since he had been emasculated, Bodie was not one to start fights.

When he came in later that evening, he started rubbing against us, and all of a sudden he wanted a head rub, a chin scratch. I have to admit I think that the dead cat traumatized him because all of a sudden he was a lot more needy, particularly toward his buddy James. We got a vet who does housecalls, and Bodie got his second round of shots. He won't stay in all the time, but he spends more and more hours inside, and we even leave him in the apartment when we go somewhere. I am not sure what will become of this cat. But, as J reminds me, every hour he is with us is an hour of comfort for him. I don't think he has ever had such good naps, for sure, with nothing to worry about, no toms picking fights, and food at the ready.

We haven't written much lately. Part of it is that we do not have the same narrative wonder that we used to have. I could tell you about the books I have read this semester, the tedium and joys of teaching and departmental work, my waning relationship with my novel. But Bodie's really the only thing I've found worth writing about.

A

One of Those Days

2009-10-28T20:17:00.004+02:00

It started with James almost getting run over. Nothing new. Only it was just a little closer than usual, so close that the woman in the passenger seat even smacked the driver.

The bus to school was closer than usual to a truck hauling propane tanks.

3 students out of 30 had their papers in hand. When I told them I was extending the deadline, they shrugged like, "Whatever, lady."

Someone failed a government official's daughter. They were told to change the grade.

As I was walking to my 5:00 class, a group of students laughed at a small fire they had produced on some stairs.

4 stops north of here

2009-09-27T20:42:00.013+02:00

Yesterday, A & I took a day trip up to Coptic Cairo. It's just off the Metro's Mar Girgis stop--literally. I have taken the Metro north to Sadat station dozens of times, and each time I have seen the domed Church of St. George looming over the stop. First things first, though: here is a video of the Metro ride. Careful, my camera buzzes for no reason while taking videos in things that are moving.

Coptic Cairo is its own little district, made clean just for tourists. It shows me that Egyptians can keep things Western-style clean when they feel like it, although it is also a protected district and spared the ravages of incessant foot traffic. I take some comfort in the familiar parts of the Coptic iconography and architecture around here. It reminds me of home a little bit, even though Coptic Christianity is different from most versions of the religion practiced stateside. But I can't deny that it is more familiar and I take a measure of comfort in that, strangely enough. That said, the eeriness of Coptic images is compelling and unlike anything I see at home. In the Church of St. George, for example, there is a scene of a man who resembles the Joker spearing a dragon from atop a horse. I saw this scene countless times--in reprinted paintings, mostly, but also embodied in a kitschy statue wrapped in silver tinsel. It's a little bit cartoonish, true enough, but all the same it is serious business to visiting Copts, who show their devotion by touching the glass panes protecting reprinted images of their saints. I'm also unnerved by the commonness of these faces--of the saints, the virgin, the apostles, Jesus himself. Christianity is a religion of faces. Islam has no images of its prophet, and I have not seen many (if any) images inside mosques, where the space is devoted primarily to prayer (and sleep). All the faces of Christianty are eerie, especially when you are looking at 6th or 7th century artwork where the faces are strikingly similar from one image to the next--the round, expressionless faces and eyes, the full, puckered lips, the squared shoulders. No perspective, little variation, just these unblinking chestnut eyes staring out at you, one church after another, one room after another.

Also, along eerie lines, there was this:

Otherwise, I enjoyed the subterranean passages that took you to various churches and a well-preserved synagogue, which was a bizarro mix of Jewish gear with Islamic architecture. Apparently one of the most ancient Torahs was found at that synagogue, printed on gazelle hide. Gazelle hide! I'd have taken pictures but they weren't permitted in the synagogue. At least I could get inside. There is a synagogue nearby us in Maadi that is under police watch at all times. One day, I approached and roused the police into action, which meant they waved their hands and said no, then bade me good day with sleepy smiles. I saw enough of the synagogue to realize that the grounds were being kept (behind a thick iron fence, natuarlly), so I wondered if it was active. Perhaps this is where the Israeli ambassador goes to do his religious duties.

Then there was the hot, dark Coptic Museum. Truly, sometimes I couldn't really make out the artwork, and the still air made me sleepy. There were also 3 or 4 fire extinguishers per room, and yet no staff anywhere in the museum--except for the entrance, where a gaggle of men enjoyed tea and were having a boisterous conversation that followed us all over the museum. I guess it would have been left to us to save the art if a sudden fire broke out. We were impressed by the woodwork of the mashrabiya and the ceiling and would gladly have snapped photographs...but our cameras were barred from the museum. At least we didn't have to tip the staff to get them back when we were finished.

J

Bizarro

2009-09-22T21:55:00.003+02:00

1. Apparently, no one in Egypt may educate or be educated until at least Oct. 4 due to fears of the swine flu spreading. Rumor (a freakishly powerful thing in Egypt) has it that if one percent of the population gets it, schools could be shut down for the year. People are suggesting that the airport should be the thing that gets shut down.

2. The NY Times published an article today discussing the trash problems caused by the killing of all the Copts' pigs back in the spring (a response to the fear of swine flu). The Egyptian gov't is sort of admitting that idea lacked foresight. Or logic.

3. We opened the seal on a bottle of delivered wine tonight, and ants came boiling up out of the cork.

Revivals

2009-09-18T15:08:00.006+02:00

In one of my classes last week, we read Langston Hughes' "Salvation." It's a great piece for any class, but I like teaching it in Egypt because many of the students are unfamiliar with Christian revivals as we know them in the U.S., and sometimes they end up being a little creeped out by them in ways that U.S. Christians sometimes claim to be creeped out by the religious rituals of others.

So I read the piece out loud, asking the students to first describe what had happened in the piece.

Someone said it was about a revival, pointing to the word in the text.

"What's a revival?" I asked.

Most of them shrugged.

Then one student asked, "Is that like what happened in Borat?"

Forgetting

2009-09-11T14:19:00.003+02:00

It's a hot day. The curtains help block the heat of the white sun. The sky is blue, unusually blue, January-in-Egypt blue. We woke up this morning and talked about political rhetoric, about narrative truth, as we sipped coffee. We listened to the imam next door, first praising then shouting then dropping to a soft prostrating lull. We did this as we watched 24, second season. We talked about the way that season reflected an American attitude toward the Middle East at that time, one that has changed in significant ways. I finished reading Wise Blood. J left to run an errand, and I sat in front of the computer, intending to work on a short story I have been working on since 2000. I procrastinated. I checked facebook. It's morning in the U.S. - people are just starting to rise and go to work. I was puzzled by status updates about praying for people, about not forgetting. I felt panic rising in me, and I wondered if something had happened again. It took me a few minutes to realize my mistake.

Chipping

2009-09-08T12:12:00.001+02:00

You can find a piece about my Brevity 30 piece and writing process at: http://brevity.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/chipping-toward-the-center-the-art-of-brevity/

A

White

2009-09-07T22:05:00.002+02:00

It’s time for our annual HIV test, which we have to take with a government official in order to get our work visas renewed. The blood is tapped; the passports are taken. Three to four weeks later, we get our passports back.

To get our visas renewed, we need passport-sized photos, and we had run out. So, in the midst of preparing for a class I am teaching with a theme about beauty and appearance, we headed to a photo shop down the street. It was a hot day. I wore an oversized green tee-shirt, and my unwashed hair was pulled back into a ponytail. I took this approach because I don’t think anything could match the horror that is my current passport photo, which is worse than the family passports in National Lampoon’s European Vacation.

So we got our passport photos, and, as a free gift, framed five-by-sevens of said sweaty photos. Do you want a sweaty photo of my face, with the crazy-eyed look I’ve developed whenever I try to look natural? Because I’ve got one, framed, just for you.

When we returned, I read an email from one of my colleagues informing me that if there was any photoshopping done on passport photos, the government wouldn’t accept them. I recalled the nice woman who had taken my photo. Yes, she had been messing with it, making the background whiter. I think she erased a few frizzy strands from my scalp.

Damn. We headed back to the shop to see if we could get the untainted versions.

The man at the photo shop assured us that he knew what he was doing, that it wasn’t going to be a problem with the stern Egyptian official wearing a suit who will take my blood tomorrow. He said the only thing that was different was the whiter background, and this was a requirement for a visa photo. He assured us that he knew what he was doing.

J circled his face with his hand. “So, none of this was changed?”

“No, no.”

The man gestured at our skin, and then he looked puzzled.

“Why?" he asked. "You are already white.”

Saturday Night

2009-09-06T15:31:00.002+02:00

Last night, as I chopped garlic and onions, I was belting out Ned's Atomic Dustbin's version of "Saturday Night." But it just doesn't work out so well in a country where Sunday is considered to be the first day of the workweek.

Looking

2009-05-23T15:11:00.003+03:00

When I was a kid, I had a book with me everywhere I went. I read from the moment I shut the car door until my parents pulled into the parking lot or driveway of wherever we were going. Reluctantly, I would leave my book in the backseat of the car as we headed into Mass, or to my brother’s baseball game, or to the grocery store. If we were visiting a relative's house, I brought the book in, which seems rude in hindsight but felt as essential as breathing at the time. I read all day on the farm as if I were some privileged lady in a grimy tee-shirt and shorts, sitting in the air conditioning with my grandmother while my father and grandfather worked outside. I still have a book on hand almost everywhere I go, just in case, even if I know there won’t be a moment to read. Maybe it’s my safety blanket. It’s not as if I were a precocious child – I was far from that – my favorite books befit my age. But there was one major problem with this childhood habit, and I understood it when I received my driver’s license and couldn’t find my way around Galesburg. The only road I knew was the self-explanatory set of roads that got me to town. Throw in blocks and intersections, and nothing made sense. I had spent all that time reading, not looking out the window, not paying attention to anything but the voices in my head.

Now I find myself in a mode that reminds me of the embarrassment that came with my driving privileges. For the first year that we were in Egypt, I felt myself eagerly taking in the things I experienced, wide-eyed and astonished, constantly comparing the things I found in this new place to the things I knew and understood in my home culture, my home country. I tried to understand why people did the things they did, tried to politely respect these decisions of others if I could not wrap my mind around them. There were things that bothered me and still do, and I was not a model of politeness or anything, but I think I was more willing to bend my perceptions then. Never an optimist, I was surprised and pleased by my capacity to adapt.

I think there is a danger in refusing to look.

I remember our trip back from the Sinai. We had to have been going over 100 mph on an unkempt desert road with no concept of lanes, even around curves, with a dude who, with no prompting, offered to become J’s personal hash dealer and wanted to know if I was J’s sister. We bumped and swerved in the heat, and I slept like a baby, unbuckled, in the back of the van. This was a prelude to my current ability to read a book anywhere in Egypt – on the speeding bus, in a taxi, pressed against others in the Metro.

I was pretty impressed with myself until I realized that reading in these situations makes me miss things, things I would have felt were important to witness and consider earlier in our stay here. In some ways I have begun to shield myself from Egypt. It is easy to do these days, having moved to a neighborhood that is so expatriate (or American?)-friendly that we have a Subway (you know, the place with “sandwich artists”) down the street and a clean, techno-booming gym. And, while our university campus had always been a bubble in the middle of downtown Cairo, its new location does nothing but confirm its otherworldly status in Egypt. At least at the old campus, you could walk a block away and find a donkey and a ragged old woman selling tissues.

We are nearing the end of our third year here, and I am not pleased with the things that I see missing from my experience. I am building a cocoon. Small things nag at me, such as leaving my Arabic lessons. Just when I had begun to comprehend the rhythm of the language, to pick out a few simple phrases here and there that enlightened me to some basic meanings, I quit. Once I realized I would have to start studying, I said it was too much to do. I keep telling myself I’ll pick it up again, but will I? In our new neighborhood this year, when I try to say some small, simple thing in Arabic, my tongue sticks, and it is clear that the neighborhood Egyptians we have met – the fruit and veg guy, various vendors and shopkeepers, etc. – believe that I am just now tentatively stepping about with random phrases, that I may eventually improve but that I must have only just gotten here. I am now at the same comprehension level as J, who never took Arabic lessons but who is suddenly quicker than me at understanding numbers, for instance.

Yesterday was Friday prayer-time. The men line up on our street and spread the rugs diagonally toward Mecca and slip off their shoes. They fill up the outdoor foyer of the apartment building across from us. At one point during the hour-long session, I glanced outside to see a worried-looking Asian man standing with his briefcase just in front of one line of men and boys who were praying. He was trying to get into the building across the street. You could look at this two ways – first, the man didn’t need to stand right in front of them and keep glancing at his watch with a pained look on his face. He should have known that on Friday, mid-day, you’re bound to run into a cluster of Egyptian men meditating with God since mosques are ubiquitous. He should have known that, while Egypt is moderate in comparison with other Arab countries, this type of devotion is one thing that will not change. But the men were blocking the front entrance to the building – the Asian man would have had to step between them, on their prayer mats with his shoes on, to get through. Perhaps the assumption made by those blocking the entrance was that everybody should be praying right now. Who would need to get in? Focused on praising God, it was as if they couldn’t even see that man, who only wanted to get through.

Brevity

2009-05-08T18:03:00.001+03:00

You can find one of A's pieces about Cairo in the new issue of Brevity 30, along with other pieces about departure and arrival:

http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/index.htm

Spring Tree

2009-05-02T15:44:00.001+03:00

James thinks this is an appropriate metaphor for our feelings about Egypt.

You Stop For Us!

2009-04-28T19:02:00.003+03:00

Before we went to Athens a few weeks ago, we had read about the volatile traffic and pollution. These days, most of the travel guidebooks we pick up are geared toward the expectations of people who are no longer us, people who might get horrified, for instance, with the idea of a rickety donkey cart toddling down a highway along with buses spewing black – no, really, black – exhaust and racing BMWs and men in gallabeyas perching on the median before plunging out into the road…to get to the other side and men sitting on the tailgates of speeding, swerving trucks as if the trucks are at a full stop in some pleasant farmer’s driveway in Iowa.

When we got to Athens, the air seemed pretty damned fresh, the traffic downright reasonable. Everyone stopped at the stoplights and colored within the lines. They just drove fast. I was so calmed by it that I almost got run over once.

I know there are far worse places for traffic and for nearly everything that bugs me about Cairo, so I don’t mean to sound as if I think I am worldly or have seen the worst shit there is to see. Of course not. But I thought of the surprisingly logical traffic of Athens today for two reasons. First, this morning, as J and I commuted to school, the bus suddenly slowed. Peering over the broken-down median to the other side of the road, we began spotting wrecked car after wrecked car. I don’t know how many there were, but they seemed to stretch half a mile or more as the bus crept along. The term “wrecked” or even the word “totaled” doesn’t suffice for what we saw, actually. Some of the cars were only grotesque twists of metal and dust and shattered glass, and, because they had been shoved onto the sandy roadside next to the skeletons of hasty construction sites, looked as if they had been abandoned years ago. They hadn’t. One of those buses that spews black exhaust had been part of the pile-up, and it had a disintegrated front. Worse, the side of the bus was gone, peeled off, to reveal a set of empty olive-green and pink seats.

Everyone was rubbernecking, but no one looked really horrified (or, rather, no one was pretending to be horrified with hands over mouths for the benefit of other rubberneckers). Some kids on my bus even looked rather amused. I don’t know how to explain that. On the way home, as we passed the same horrific metal clumps, an exchange student whipped out his camera and flung open the dingy blue curtains of our bus, proceeding to gratuitously snap. For a few seconds, the bed of a truck, yellowed with bananas, got in the kid’s way, and he held his camera with an irritated poise. It’s not that I blame him – I wished at that moment that I had a camera, too. But it wouldn’t have sufficed to take a picture, just as it doesn’t suffice to explain it here. Besides, why would I want to scare the bejabbers out of my mom any more than I do? That’s how I’m beginning to feel about so much of my time here, and it’s not as if my experiences have been that unique. There are a ton of expatriates here, and you can bet we are not the only people self-congratulatory enough to feel as if we should write about this place. I am being too harsh, I think.

Anyway, the second reason I was reminded of the seeming ease of Athens traffic: I get off the bus at a place called Midan Victoria. “Midan” means square. I think you know that Victoria was a queen, and our neighborhood this year is very British in its labyrinthine roundabouts (“Look, kids! Big Ben! Parliament!”). It’s a fairly busy roundabout. Today there was no pause in traffic. None. So I started across, holding out my palm. Some people muttered their irritation to me as they drove past. One car came to a stop but not before pushing into my hand. Another taxi driver wanted to know if I needed a ride. Another managed to expertly maneuver his car and be lecherous at the same time. As I made it across in one piece and reflected on my good luck, a fat man standing on the curb looked me up and down and made smarmy comments. Sometimes I feel like punching every Egyptian man I see and shaking every woman – no matter what her nationality – until she joins me with her own fists. That makes me sound intolerant, I know, and sometimes I feel exactly that way.

A few weeks ago I was crossing Midan Victoria with a more hardened and much taller expatriate, and he whipped into the street as a cab sped up (People often speed up here when they see a pedestrian. It’s not an exaggeration.), and he stopped in front of the car and pointed his finger at the surprised driver, who brought his car to a halt.

My normally calm friend then yelled: “NO! You stop for us! You stop for US!”

After we crossed, my friend fumed, and I giggled, as I almost always do when someone surprises me with volatility. When it comes to volatility, most members of my family barely have a pulse, and we like it that way, and we’ll keep it all inside until we take our bitter vengeance on you without you noticing, thank you very much. However, since living here, I have been more forthcoming about my feelings. You can ask the teenaged boys who screeched to a halt in their souped-up car one day in order to make inappropriate comments about my body and who got an earful of my best American expletives and universal gestures of rage. The poor man who was sweeping the street next to the curb wasn’t sure what to do with himself. Moments such as that result from an abnormal amount of suppression that bubbles up every once in a while with an overreaction. Most of the time I walk down the street with a “don’t fuck with me” frown but keep my eyes downcast. It takes a while to shake that off whenever I leave Egypt. It takes a while for me to feel normal around male strangers again, to feel as if I can look at them plainly without sending the message that I am willing to have their babies. It’s a relief to only be looked at appraisingly on occasion; it’s a relief to feel invisible, normal-looking, just a person walking down the street. Men and women have a lot of work to do in all parts of the world – witness the hateful criticism of Hillary Clinton’s outfits rather than her policies or beliefs, or the interchangeable blonde anchors on Fox. But, really, the gender crap here is…too much to go on about at the moment. I’ve written before that I don’t entirely approve of foreign women who go on and on about harassment here to the point of obsession, who respond by egregiously covering themselves and acting fearful (perverts feed off fear) and staying inside all the time and sometimes feeling as if their lily white skin is very precious and exotic indeed when, all the while, veiled Egyptians are harassed as much as they are. But I do understand. I understand how my daily decisions, my small adjustments to my manner of walking and speaking and wearing simple articles of clothing could be insidious. They are habits even now.

I complain about these things knowing full well that my foreignness offers a measure of safety (some of which is simply psychological) that an Egyptian woman, veiled or not, probably doesn’t feel. I complain about these things knowing how little I have to complain about.

But I started this entry thinking about those desolate cars. They have surfaced for me throughout the day, as they will continue to do. So many cars, and what happened to all of those people? How many are dead?

Once we got past the rubbernecking point, our bus driver and the guy with the truck full of propane tanks and every vehicle on our side of the road floored it. Not your version of “flooring it,” I’ll wager. The Egyptian version. You just had to be there.

A Week of Endings

2009-03-21T14:43:00.000+02:00

This past week, I would rather have been at home. It’s not that my vague desire to return home, which is always with me, suddenly welled up to form something more concrete or resolute. It’s not that anything in particular happened here that was bad—just the usual garden-variety stuff for a fairly garden-variety semester. In fact, things are good. My job is going well. I enjoy a flexible schedule that most people my age would love to have. Reading and writing comprise huge chunks of my life, just as I always wanted them to. I work out a lot and I’m getting into pretty good shape. Even my psoriasis is in recession.

But, well, there are times when I feel a tangible tug to be at home—to stand in solidarity with others in honoring a mentor, or in mourning an uncle. That was this week. I learned last Sunday that my uncle had died of pneumonia. He was 41 and suffered from a fairly severe form of Down’s syndrome. He had been living in a group home for many years now—I only remember him from my childhood, when my family would make the begrudging trek down south to visit my grandmother. At that age, I was scared of my uncle. He was unable to speak, but he made grunting noises mixed with high-pitched squeals. He was almost 9 years older than me, a lot larger, and he didn’t know his own strength. More than once had I been caught in his smothering, forceful embrace, as he squeezed more tightly, refusing to let me go until my grandmother or my father forced his arms away.

Still, when I heard the news of his death, I felt the loss. My family was one person less than it had been. I called my father and roused him from Xanax-enhanced dreams, and he told me that he and another of my uncles, Tom, had been in the room when Kelly had died in his sleep. There was no bucking, no death rattles. He just stopped breathing, the end result of his final illness. My father was…sad, in a way that is difficult to characterize. He clearly felt a loss, too, even though Down’s syndrome had rendered my uncle Kelly unable to maintain familial relationships in the conventional sense—although his mother, my grandmother, visited him every Sunday, took him to Ponderosa, and let him wander the aisles of Wal-Mart before returning him to the group home. None of us really knew him because he was locked inside Down’s syndrome, and yet it was clearly a blow to my father, who had lost his half-brother, to my uncle Tom, to my aunt Darlene, and most of all to my grandmother, for whom my father felt genuine sympathy—remarkable if you knew anything about the history of their relationship.

When I talked to my father, I told him I wished I could attend my uncle’s funeral. I felt wrong carrying on with the business of work while my father’s side of the family gathered en masse to mourn, and just like when a childhood friend died in 2006, I spent the day wishing I was at home. I felt the stirrings of a kind of solidarity that have taken root only since I moved here.

In other news, in another stratosphere of life, one of my mentors is retiring at the end of the school year, and yesterday was her surprise party. She is the director of Wittenberg’s Writing Center, has been for nearly 30 years, and writing tutors from all eras descended upon campus yesterday to surprise her with a show of support and appreciation. I was not there. This bothered me a great deal because, well, Maureen was one of the first people to take me seriously. She did so without ceremony, without any of the bluster you see in corny teacher-changed-my-life movies: no howling Morgan Freeman, no streetwise Michelle Pfeiffer. I think this is one of the most important things a mentor can do for a student: you can take that student seriously. Too many teachers are self-absorbed, or burnt-out, or otherwise ill-suited to this aspect of the profession, but Maureen, she was selfless. There was nothing grandiose or self-serving in her taking me seriously. I think she saw a young man—a boy of 18, really—who wanted to be taken seriously. She recognized what it was even before I recognized it myself, although, in looking back over old essays from freshman year, I see a boy trying on words too large for him, striving to show he belonged. Maureen had at least an inkling of this, and that alone is more than you get from most teachers. It’s something I’ve been mindful of lately, in my own teaching: only this week I encountered work from a student who clearly wants to be taken seriously, and I tried to follow Maureen’s lead, by giving this student’s work serious, rigorous and fair treatment. I think this is one of the ways you take a student seriously—you reciprocate that seriousness in your approach to their work, without assailing their rookie mistakes, lack of perspective, or adolescent bluster. These things, one hopes, will pass on their own. My job is to show them another path, just as I was shown. I only needed somebody to recognize that I was searching for that other path, and Maureen was among the first.

This is something I would have liked to tell Maureen in person yesterday. Instead, I am left to deposit this missive ruminating on her and on my dead uncle, shouting at them both from a far distance (in the case of my uncle, a far, far distance). This is something about life abroad I hadn’t considered, the curious immobility of being away. It’s the opposite of conventional wisdom, that life abroad is the ultimate independence. Sometimes it’s about being on the run, or taking refuge, or starting anew after one thread in life has run its course or been ruined. I’ve seen such things in the expatriates here. All of these paths begin with an impulse toward liberation, but they have their own deterministic pitfalls. Me? I can feel the constraints of the ex-pat life this week, keenly. And I know I would have to go on living with these constraints if I were to stay here much longer.

James

Kernels

2009-03-17T19:08:00.001+02:00

A man holds a sack, its edges rolled. Next to him, boys scoop kernels of corn into piles and sweep those piles into their hands. They drop them into the sack. Corn and dust and sand and cigarette butts. Tires, slowed by other tires, pass those small brown hands. Somehow, this corn spilled. It probably fell from a truck. In a city of many spilled things, this corn is gathered.

The boys are on the outer curve of this bridge, and our bus hugs the inner curve. A segment of railing is missing from the inner curve of the ramp. Below us, traffic merges. A row of shops and battered buildings presses against a median, on which a toddler stands. In front of a garage, a man sleeps on a chair with unsteady legs. Adolescents in grease-splattered T-shirts heave tires and plunge themselves elbow-deep into the guts of cars and trucks. When the pollution eases, the Giza pyramids are visible from here.

When I was small, my father would warn me against entering the corncrib – there was the possibility of snakes and mice, but, more importantly, a slippery pile of corn could suffocate, cover, kill anyone, especially a small child. Corn was as potent as sand. From afar, it seemed uniform. Close up, you could see its pink-tinted, disfigured kernels.

**

One of the university students climbs to the highest walkway on campus. He puts his hands behind his ears and closes his eyes and delivers the call to prayer.

There is a photograph of him in the student newspaper. He does this every day because the new campus is perhaps the only place in Cairo where you cannot hear the muezzin’s calls. Many students express admiration for what he is doing; a few find it disturbing. He mentions in the newspaper article that he disapproves of certain aspects of the university, such as the way males and females feel they are allowed to interact or the fact that courses such as philosophy are required.

In a makeshift mosque on the new campus, someone keeps hanging signs that say such things as “Lower your gaze before women” and “Why aren’t you veiled?”.

I remember that student, the one who stands in the photograph with his palms cupped behind his ears and his eyes squeezed shut. I was his teacher during my first semester in Egypt. Each time I returned an essay, he caught the pages with two fingers placed as far from my fingers as they could get.

He recoiled from me. I cannot allow for a softer verb than that.

A

Don't Open the Door

2009-03-05T15:10:00.003+02:00

In class yesterday, we were covering logical fallacies. I had been using a thin slip of paper as a bookmark for my text. On it were several depictions of hand signals accompanied by Arabic. This is not the first time I have seen this paper. A few times a year, J answers the door to a deaf man who passes these out and indicates that, for this public duty, he should be tipped.

Over the course of discussing fallacies, I had busied my hands with this paper. It was one of those days where too many students were actually whiny – whiny as if they were children, whiny to a depth I hadn’t seen since my five-year old nephew and I tried to sort out our differences when he wanted to whisk down the street from me on his bike and I insisted he stay close. I suppose my hands were responding to the voices of these young adults when my fingers ripped the paper in half. But because I am also rather juvenile, I gasped. This caused my students to ask what was wrong. I explained what had happened. It didn’t matter that the paper was torn – I had abandoned my Arabic lessons when I got to the verbs (which took nearly a year to get to), so I would have needed the intelligence of Helen Keller to connect the rather small, depicted gestures with their Arabic meanings.

Nonetheless, my students, in the spirit of distraction and boredom that we all felt at that moment, erupted.

“Professor, doctor, don’t open the door to those men!” they implored.

Students here call you “doctor” and “professor” even if you don’t have the proper degree. My degree is terminal but hardly doctoral. I was not under the impression that my students were concerned about me – I fully understood that this explosive chatter had more to do with putting off the educational process than saving my life. As a result, I tried to calm their pleas and said: “I’m glad you’re so concerned about my safety, but let’s get back to logical fallacies.”

Before my declaration, though, my students had told me about a woman who answered her door to one of these men. He pushed past her, stabbed her, and robbed her apartment. They all seemed to know some version of this story, and, had I let it go on much longer, it may have taken on Headless Horseman proportions.

I have never answered the door when the deaf man has visited, so I can only imagine him, a shadowy presence in the dark hallway, catching a whiff of cats and garbage as he waits for some well-to-do foreigner to open the door. J, our resident well-to-do, opens the door, greets the man, hands over a couple of pounds, takes the paper.

We answer the door all the time. Sometimes we hand bills to delivery-people for which they do not have the right change, and they tell us they will be back. They always come back. Once, I was charged eight pounds too much at a grocery store in Zamalek. The overcharge was less than two dollars, but an hour after I had returned home, an employee of the store showed up with eight pounds that I did not realize I had lost. A man comes to check the gas meter; the bawaab might deliver mail. In Zamalek an Asian woman would come by sometimes with garbage bags full of clothes, and once I let her in and she laid out the clothes on our dining room table, urging me to buy. We hear the bell far more in Egypt than we do at home, and here it rarely occurs to us to peek suspiciously through the hole before opening it.

But I wondered, as I rode home on the bus, where I do most of my reflecting these days, how the students had reached these conclusions about this apparent army of deaf men taking pounds for their informative slips of paper. I had dismissed the students’ comments, partially to get the class back on track and partially because their alarmist response seemed too familiar.

I thought about the balance that I’ve never achieved here but which I strive for. You have to open your door and keep it closed; you have to know your context. There are some things in Egypt that I will never understand, absorb, or accept. But I tolerate a lot here in my daily life that I would not in the U.S. And it’s a matter of determining which things I should accept and which things I should push back against. Finding a middle ground between being completely submissive to another culture and being a belligerent expatriate prick. I’ve seen both ways, and neither appeals to me. It’s a matter of deciding when to open the door and when to keep it shut.

In that classroom, my students’ voices didn’t sound like their own. I often get this sensation from college students and know that it was true about me when I was an undergraduate – the beliefs I first was asked to explain to others expressed themselves in the voices of my parents and the community I came from. It takes time to develop voice – this is one reason I like to teach writing; this is one reason I gravitate toward writing nonfiction. As my students warned me about the knife-wielding army of deaf men stabbing one innocent woman at a time instead of entertaining the possibility that he was spreading awareness in a country that has little infrastructure for disabilities, I could hear something else in their voices, something that wasn’t them. It was rumor and innuendo and gossip. It was class, for the class system in Egypt is so blatant it’s hard to look at sometimes. It’s quite possible it was a story from their parents. Stay on the right side of the tracks. Don’t take candy from strangers. Fear the unfamiliar. Don’t open the door. Build a compound in the desert and grow grass there, far from the cesspool of the ghetto.

But it was the voices from my home, too – the voices of white flight, the voices of gated communities, the voices of simple ignorance, the voices of blindness and barriers and buffers and shields. My students are from a much higher social class than me, and their identities are so different than mine, but in this case, we seemed frighteningly similar.

After I had written the first half of this entry, I picked up Dave Eggers’ What is the What. It’s a nonfiction novel of sorts; Eggers tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the “Lost Boys” of Sudan. The story opens with Valentino, in America, answering the door to his apartment. A woman enters and asks to use his phone. When he says yes, she runs back to his bedroom and slams the door. He begins to follow her only to hear a voice at his back; a man has accompanied the woman, and they are in the process of robbing Valentino. Through the scene, Valentino reflects upon how he got here, the horrors he has seen, experienced, and inflicted. Here is a passage about the robbery from p.4:

I sit now and he shows me the handle of the gun. He has been holding it all along, and I was supposed to know. But I know nothing; I never know the things I am supposed to know. I do know, now, that I am being robbed, and that I want to be elsewhere.

It is a strange thing, I realize, but what I think at this moment is that I want to be back in Kakuma. In Kakuma there was no rain, the winds blew nine months a year, and eighty thousand war refugees from Sudan and elsewhere lived on one meal a day. But at this moment, when the woman is in my bedroom and the man is guarding me with his gun, I want to be in Kakuma, where I lived in a hut of plastic and sandbags and owned one pair of pants. I am not sure there was evil of this kind in the Kakuma refugee camp, and I want to return.

During this scene we learn that, in Sudan,Valentino watched other boys being eaten by lions, observed two boys weakened by hunger fighting over some scraps (an incident that resulted in the weaker one’s accidental death), and, perhaps most chillingly, was running away with two other boys from Ethiopian soldiers when a woman beckoned the boys to come to her. They ran toward her, and she shot the other two boys; she was an Ethiopian soldier, too, who had called upon the power of a maternal voice to murder these children. Valentino is thinking about all of this in the face of some punk who is stealing all worthwhile secondhand material from him – a camera, an old TV, his roommate's laptop. And he is helpless to it. When he tries to defend himself, he is pistol-whipped.

Those students who were paying attention yesterday might tell you that I am headed toward the rather repugnant fallacy of false analogy. I am not trying to do that, at least not in the case of Valentino. It seems that he finds much to fear in America, a kind of pernicious evil that he can’t compare to the horror in his past. My story and the stories of my students hold nothing like this.

A

Dear Taxi Driver

2009-02-12T14:40:00.001+02:00

Dear Taxi Driver,

If I need a cab ride, I will be sure to hail you. In the meantime, it is not necessary to announce your presence by incessantly honking your horn the moment you see me walking down the street. You also need not slow beside me and query, “Taxi? Taxi?” while all the drivers behind you honk. Further, it is unnecessary to flash your lights at me to let me know you are coming. I see you. Even if I didn’t see you, I suspect it wouldn’t matter, because it is clear that you are not going to slow down. You don’t slow down for ancient people with canes; you don’t slow down for babies and children. We pedestrians understand that we must be on the defense. I suspect, in fact, that were I to trip before your car, we would find ourselves in a predicament known as vehicular homicide in another part of the world. To conclude, you must believe me when I tell you that I will let you know if I need a ride.

Thank you, Mr. Taxi Driver,
A

A Friday in Egypt

2009-01-31T15:15:00.000+02:00

I Like Egypt

2009-01-29T17:06:00.013+02:00

The guy who drove us back from the airport last night didn't know where he was going. He skidded between vehicles, all going too fast, and neglected to slow for speed bumps. My jolted spine was encouraging the old habit (formed last fall) of Egypt-fatigue; I had the thought once again that I had made it all the way from the Midwest just to get into a horrible car accident with no reason other than the complete disregard for others on the road. I've made up my mind that this attitude, though, is going to end. After being home, I saw that the recession is not quite as bad as everyone acts like it is (in terms of the majority of people still having plenty of excess that they can expunge before they are truly in dire straits - if you want to view dire straits, come to my neck of the woods), but I can see how it is going to get worse in the U.S. I can see that I have many reasons to be grateful for my situation and to appreciate this place.

In that spirit, these are a few of my favorite things:

1. The Eats. The fruits and vegetables of Egypt are marvelous. My dad loved the fruit juice. It's hard for him to enjoy the waxen, tasteless, preservative-laden fruit of the U.S. now that he has had fruit from the Nile Valley. U.S. organic stuff doesn't compare, either.

2. Generosity and Trust. I have frequently had experiences with kindheartedness from strangers, acquaintances, and friends alike. Once an Egyptian family has you over to their house, you are treated like family and always welcome. In Jordan, we were invited to tea upon passing people's homes. This is not unusual in the Middle East. The guys on our old street in Zamalek would often offer us a bite or drink of whatever they were consuming at the time. You can trust people -- if a guy doesn't have change, he will bring it to you eventually. At the same time, if you don't have enough money, storekeepers will often tell you to just bring it when you have it - that happened to J the first week we moved here, when he bought some flowers. The guy didn't know J but told him to come back whenever he had the money. When you are treated with trust in this way, you tend to start acting the same way. We couldn't afford a desert trip when we went to the Bahariya Oasis, and, after we had talked him down on the price anyway, the dude from the hotel told us we could pay him when he came to Cairo a few weeks later. It was a verbal deal. I also remember the time Bryan and Adriana visited and we were lost in the streets near Bab Zuwayla. A guy carrying a heavy piece of lumber showed us the way out of the labyrinth of alleyways we had gotten into. When I tried to give him money (as people here often hint they want when providing a service, even giving directions), he seemed offended. When you get off the tourist path, the generosity of Egyptians (particularly the poor ones) is striking.

3. Everybody Knows Your Name. If you go to a store once, buy something, and return months later, chances are the shopkeeper will remember you. At the university, there are a few students who have failed my classes who certainly dislike me, but I'm amazed by how many of my Egyptian students (even ones who have failed) are glad to see me when I pass on campus, shaking my hand and stopping by my office and showing continued interest in me long after I am done teaching and evaluating them. I know it's not just my otherness; I see Egyptians treating each other the same way. I just don't get that feeling of personal interest from many people in the U.S.; in fact, it seems customary at times where I am from to pretend as if you don't know or see people you are perfectly familiar with. It is a shame that, at home, people are often treated with suspicion until they prove otherwise. I don't think it was always that way.

4. Specialized Work. In most neighborhoods in Cairo, there are several types of specialized shops, many the size of a pantry. People, particularly in the poorer parts of the city, know how to DO things - I saw a man one day walking down our street, a spinning wheel tied to his back and two children holding his hands. He was calling up to the buildings, seeking some business. There is a shop next to a butcher in Zamalek, where a portly man sits on a tilted chair all day mending clothes, which are piled in the shop and spill into the street.

5. Insha'allah. If God wills it. I usually talk about this Islamic phrase in the context of something irritating me (such as when my students attribute the completion of a paper to God rather than personal responsibility), but it reflects a sense of submission to the possible chaos of life that is admirable when sincere.

6. No Winter Doldrums! I didn't realize I used to get the winter doldrums until I moved to a place where I don't get depressed around late January-February. We just returned to Egypt, and already I have a feeling of lightness and contentment that ice and snow do not inspire. Mind you, I love the seasons and am always irritated by those in no-season locales who don't appreciate my Midwest. I especially miss autumn.

7. Il-hamdulillah. God be praised. It doesn't matter what Egyptians feel like, they will usually end their greetings and discussions with "God be praised." It's another Islamic phrase but is often used by Egyptians of other faiths. There is a communal feeling to Islam and a sense of submission (see Insha'allah, above) that, in the right context, displays the heart and intentions of religion.

8. Devotion to Cleanliness Amidst Dirt. The desert is dirty. Sandstorms, windstorms, and duststorms are at the worst end of the daily, mundane battle with dust. People hose down roads and sidewalks to keep down the dust. I have seen people sweeping sidewalks (which will be dusty again five minutes later) with makeshift brooms, with paper or a few bits of straw. It bothers me when people think that the dirt of Egypt reflects a lack of hygiene. The infrastructure is horrible here -- there are too many people, and it is a governmental failure that the garbage cannot be dealt with properly. This cultivates an attitude that garbage can be thrown anywhere. When people have the means to keep things clean here, though, they usually do. For the amount of dust that can collect inside a home in just a day, it is amazing how sparkling the insides of apartments can be. The buildings often look dirty on the outside, but the apartments themselves are often gorgeous. It's interesting, too, that cleanliness before prayer is so strictly observed.

9. The Rent-Free Deal. J gets a free apartment with this job, and we're never going to live in an apartment this nice again. I'm not one for extravagance, but it's amazing to have my own room where I can write and work. This is an important thing to keep in mind when I think I want to move back to the U.S. We can't afford a place like this in a city at home, not even before the recession. I was paying $550 a month for a studio in Minneapolis and $920 for a two-bedroom. I know in other cities this is cheap, but seriously.

10. Love for Children. You can take candy from strangers here.

Inauguration

2009-01-20T19:44:00.002+02:00

On the day Barack Hussein Obama was elected, I walked into a classroom. My students were beaming. My Egyptian students. You have a history, I thought. You have such a rich history. You are ancient Egypt. You are the bearers, the inventors of so much. My students were looking at me. "Are you happy?" asked one. I looked back at them, the current inhabitants of a sham democracy, who know better than me that even they, the elite, don't have a choice, that to make change they will have to go through far more troubling and violent times than you or I when we ticked our ballots. "I hope someday you can experience this feeling, too," I said, wishing I had the power of voice, the power to transform, the power to give them hope.

How Cold Is It?

2009-01-15T22:51:00.002+02:00

I'm wincing thinking about posting this to a blog, where I could be subjected to hateful commentary. But sometimes I'm too soft, too worried about rejection. During our first year of blogging, someone in the ether commented on a benign entry in which I had described the landscape, saying that if I didn't like Egypt, why didn't I just leave and that people like me made her want to puke. I felt shamed.

It's a measure of the hypnotic power of the internet that such a comment (made anonymously and therefore offering strength to the person who made it) would affect me so personally. I deleted the comment but thought long and hard about what I could have said to offend someone. I had been careful about my entries; I had been careful to describe and to give the new people and place a chance, to try not to judge them or to sound as if I hadn't thought enough about the situations I wrote about. I still try to be, even though I am surprised when anyone but my parents appears to be reading this blog.

Although I focused on nonfiction writing in graduate school, nonfiction scares me - you can't take back what you write once you let it go. You throw it out there and don't know what you could get in return. You have to come to terms with the idea that your perspective will evolve and that something you wrote about a few months ago might not be valid for you now. It's not a safe genre if you're honest about what you write. It's not safe if you acknowledge the complexity of life.

So. All of a sudden people are asking me if I am worried about Palestine and Israel in terms of personal endangerment. I'm not, but this wouldn't be a surprise to anyone in Egypt. It's geographically close to Egypt, so it seems dangerous to someone who doesn't live in the Middle East. But living closer to the conflict certainly makes it more prominent in my mind. So I try to explain Egypt's role as begrudging peacemaker. It's harder to explain that I don't wholeheartedly believe in either side's fight. Bringing this up in Egypt is about as effective as hitting yourself in the face with a cast-iron skillet.

The conflict is more complicated than any of us with mere opinions can say. Israel just happened to reshape its borders, for instance, so that it encompasses the main water supply. So it's pretty easy to withhold that resource from the Palestinians. Many of the olive tree fields that belonged to Arabs in Israel, as part of their livelihood, were razed, and the evergreen tree, that ubiquitous sign and a plant that produces nothing to eat, took the place of the olive trees. It's hard to understand why this had to be done and why Arabs were then forced into ghettos. On the other hand, Israelis are under the constant threat of being atomized should anyone get a hold of the proper weaponry, which would make anyone a little twitchy. And I have heard some of the most ludicrous things about Israel while in Egypt. When people tell you they think the Israelis were responsible for JFK's assassination, it's time to leave the room.

Lately, I have had requests for my electronic support. Groups on facebook dedicated to anti-semitism in the guise of an X over an Israeli flag. Emails in which I am supposed to "vote" for either Israel or Palestine. Too many of these groups feel like just another way to spread hatred. It seems to me that when you are joining a group called "I Hate Israel" (one of the least offensively-named ones) or when you are part of a group that believes Israel is unfairly treated by the media, you might be lacking some perspective. Semester after semester, I am charged with teaching perspective. Too often I have noticed that there are few examples for my students to follow, particularly in the sphere of the internet. No wonder my students don't believe me.

Real people exist in this conflict; human beings exist who are actually enduring this conflict. They exist on both sides and in between. We are all victims of greed and the idiocy that ensues when people feel they alone have some special right, especially when "god-given," concerning land. We are all in some way the conquered and the conquerors. Muslims, Christians, Jews: they have complicated histories and are part of the same family of religion. Each has killed the other. Each has pillaged the other. Each has extorted from the other. Maybe we are too afraid to admit that everybody might be mistaken, that crazies exist in all walks of life, and that it's up to the rest of us not to align ourselves as devotees with notions we haven't investigated with an open eye to all existing sides.

For instance, there are many people on both sides who are trying to organize for peace. Where are those people? Could we please hear about them? Could we please show them some respectful acknowledgment and question them about how they've arrived at their views? Musing over Joe the Plumber and laughing guiltily at Ahmed the Terrorist is easier. It's too easy, too, to make the claim that you don't have the right to talk about something because you're not experiencing it. But I think most of us can say that we have experienced the lash of simple hate, that we have been guilty of simplifying a situation because it's much easier than confronting the notion that we might have done something wrong, too (or that our ancestors might have done something wrong, or that we have actually forgotten who cast the first stone), and that most people aren't evil, that most people want peace. It's hard to let one's sense of personal peace and comfort and solid opinions go when feeling this peace becomes a way of not seeing complexity. I think we all know this well enough.

Devotion

2008-12-21T20:41:00.005+02:00

I'm reading a book called A History of God, by Karen Armstrong, which covers the major monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I became interested in this book when I started to realize I had few grounds to discuss religion in Egypt, the heart of so much conflict and creation. Today I got to the first Islam chapter, which is the most engaging (though all of it has been fascinating thus far).

Since I've been in an Egypt funk this fall/winter (for no logical reason), I've felt as if all I have observed are the things I consider to be nuisances. Case in point: we live next to a mosque, and each Friday I grow successively more irritated that I cannot escape the loudspeakers. And a little tic has commenced: I walk through the apartment for an hour trying to find something to do that doesn't involve having to think, and a juvenile "SHHHHH!" escapes my lips as the imam's recitation intensifies.

But you should see the beauty of the prayer rugs spread on our street, a colorful assortment draped over the cracked manhole covers. I look out the window, and the men and boys - the teens texting on their mobiles, the taxi drivers, the shopkeepers and bawaabs of our street, men rushing up who could not get to their regular mosque in time - never seem to look up or see me; they are waiting and listening, readying to prostrate. They do not bother to look at the Asian couple weaving through their ranks or the blonde American with his backpack, standing on the perimeter, uncertain about how to get through this knot of locals filling the street. I am privy to this public devotion as if I'm looking through mashrabeyya, the intricate wooden shutters that created a space for women to look out but not be seen, in those days described by Naguib Mahfouz when women rarely left the home.

The imam often sings in a rich voice, and you can pick out the repetitions of words. It is the repetition, Armstrong writes, that so many Westerners do not understand. When they try to read the Qu'ran or the Torah in translation, they can get hung up in the repetition and become bored, for in English it doesn't carry the same power. In Arabic, it is an art, conjuring the transformative response we have to poetry. The Hebrew, the Arabic, the languages of this region are known for their beauty.

Strange to think that before I came here, my experiences with Arabic consisted of translated sound bites from Al-Jazeera, and every word sounded angry.

I remember watching my grandpa sitting in his rocking chair, thumbing through his well-worn Bible, and the first time I heard a hellfire sermon at the little church in Nason that he attended with my granny. I was brought up Catholic, and I must have looked scared because my mom sent me down to Bible school in the basement, where we learned the story of Zachariah -- acted out with pastel characters on a felt board -- and ate cookies. I loved the stories, but I wondered what was going on up there in the wooden pews, with the painting of Jesus and his flaming heart hanging over the worshippers. I was worried about what it meant when people were saved because the preacher had forecasted that someone was going to come forward that day and accept Jesus. Until my mom sent me downstairs, I was worried that it was going to have to be me. But I also didn't want to miss the harmony of Southern-lilted hymns, my granny's wailing alto, the Old Rugged Cross.

I remember my grandpa's devotion. It was simultaneously demonstrative and private, as if he knew a secret, and as I watch the men kneeling toward Mecca with their foreheads on the rugs and their feet bare, I do feel as if they have some secret, and whether it is language, or devotion, or some other form of faith, I am able for a moment to comprehend the inescapable and comforting sameness of humans.

Look Behind You

2008-12-18T18:38:00.004+02:00

Thanksgiving 08

T and me

Yesterday we walked through the new campus for the last time with one of our good friends who is leaving to get back to the states to be with his wife. We'll miss him, bunches. As we were almost to the gate, we came upon fake Christmas trees advertising the university Christmas party. (Our university makes use of Muslim, Copt, and Western holidays, as well as Thanksgiving - no complaints here.) T put down the chicken crate that was holding his office supplies and handed J the camera. He posed beside one of the trees. J was snapping away and then giggled. "Look behind you," he said. T swiveled around and snorted. The tree was in front of a men's bathroom we had never noticed before, which for some reason has many uncovered windows, and it was full of men because the sun was going down and everyone was washing up to pray. We found it funny because we are all rather irreverent, but mostly because it was just another example of poor planning on the new campus. I looked over at a security guard who had been watching us, and he smiled at me and laughed at our realization. I think this is only funny if you know T, but it was a great closing moment.

Hers and His

2008-12-17T21:48:00.001+02:00

When she was too small to remember, the cross was seared into the inside of her wrist. As she grows, it gets larger, a tattoo that expands and fades. Some Copts have the Cross on the side of their thumb. Recently she heard the screams of a boy receiving his cross, and she wondered if she had sounded like that, too.

He thinks that harassment of women didn't exist before American movies made their way into Egyptian society. Men who are so stifled must find an outlet. He means poor soldiers from the sticks. Over the Eid, he will go to Sharm El Sheikh, where he will drink and ogle the Russians. It doesn't count there, like Las Vegas.

She wears hijab because it says to in the Qu-ran. She is usually color-coordinated from the veil to the shoes to the designer purse. She is firm about the hijab. I give her my standard opinion: "It's just something I can't wrap my mind around." That's an easy answer.

He expresses a hatred for Egyptian women, a hatred laden with class envy and rejection in the tone of a child. Since I am not his wife or future wife, I am related to as a mother or a sister. He doesn’t have to say that out loud for me to understand it. I am his only female friend. He calls me his sister. I accept this for a long while, trying to be culturally sensitive, until, in the height of Ramadan on a hot afternoon of dehydration, his pronouncements get too invasive, as if any time now he might give me a curfew and forbid me from seeing the boy I live with. I realize that I am not sure he has ever heard a word I have said. He is nothing like my brother.

She is willowy, with a fringe of bangs swept to the side that cause her to tilt her head and pass the back of her hand over the hair every once in a while as if to keep it out of her eyes. She believes that only the Prophet's wives wore hijab and that it is a choice. When she presents this view, she can barely get the sentences out before she is interrupted.

He remembers a protest in the nineties after a few gay men were arrested. He was a child. He watched a clip on television. He says he could hear the soldiers' nightsticks hit the protestors' bones and that, if he were there, he would have beaten them too. He is willing to be friends with a gay man if he doesn’t “act like a girl.” I lean in close to him. I tell him he is free to believe whatever he wants, but his opinions, to me, are simply garden-variety homophobia of the kind I can find in my own country. This is a lesson in audience, for both of us.

Then I talk over him, and him, and him. I just keep talking.

Images of Ma'adi

2008-12-12T14:27:00.003+02:00

Gaya is our new favorite restaurant. That's J passing by.

The cafe at the end of our block. It says "Green Mill Fish," but I haven't seen fish on the menu. We've only been in the cafe under the green awning - there's a restaurant below that. Good cappucinos.

J pets the resident cat from the antique store around the corner.

J at the head of our block, Green Mill to the left.

Compelling Messages

2008-11-26T15:16:00.001+02:00

All semester I’ve been shuffled back and forth to the new campus in “Family Transport” charter busses, wedged in with other faculty, staff, and students. Sometimes it’s like a social experiment on this bus – those who don’t have i-pod buds jammed in their ears can hear complaints about students mingle with whines about assignments, can watch teary-eyed girls fret about GPAs, can observe women saving seats for their friends and telling people the bus is full, can listen to faculty members exchange pedigrees. The conversations are just one part of an eclectic, dissonant ride that features the poor being transported to or from, hopefully, work and the increasing rate of billboards for compounds that feature happy, white, blonde families. This is a blog entry unto itself that I probably won’t write.

All of this becomes relative when the air conditioner breaks. Some of the Egyptian women fret and freak, opening and closing windows, complaining to the driver as he navigates the Ring Road, distracting him from his job of moving us safely through the speeding, no-lane, death-defying traffic. Suddenly everyone on the bus – and let me remind you that all of us live in a desert climate – is a hothouse flower. A couple of people get upset when the green polyester curtains flap outside in the wind. Shut up, please, I think, because I can be a mean old miser about my personal parameters in a public space.

But soon we are stuck fast on a curved bridge. After the Minneapolis I-35 bridge collapse (I used to live a few blocks from it), I noticed how many bridges there are in Cairo, how much we rely on this questionable infrastructure. On this curved bridge, we are surrounded by pale-green Izuzu trucks, their beds packed with yams, or crates of tomatoes, or men. Some men nestle for naps into bumpy piles of onions. They would be asleep even if we were moving. There are BMWs, too, inches from Peugeots. Boxes of tissue and the Qu’ran and furry rugs over the dashboards, prayer beads hanging from mirrors, everyone on a cell phone.

I have cultivated a sense of removal from this place, not always consciously. But today I’m pissed. For me, this has become a personal matter. It’s actually the perfect temperature now that the infamous black cloud has faded for the day. I should be enjoying the fresh air and sunshine, considering how everyone else in my family is bundled for winter in the Midwest. I don’t even mind being stuck in traffic; I have a book I can read; I have the visual bombardment of Egypt to entertain me whenever I want it. As we sit here, though, my right eye twitches tightly, just once. Exhaust pipes are leaking blackness, and it’s coming inside. Particles seep in.

I have to admit I’ve been disappointed in my poor attitude since I’ve gotten back from a summer away, and I like to blame it on a minor illness, though I know there is probably more to it than that. I have just begun to get over a sinus problem that I thought would be forever chronic – undoubtedly caused by the pollution of Egypt – hazardous garbage (rotting and burned and piled in the streets), the fumes of leaded gasoline, agricultural burning, and – to a simpler but no less foul-seeming extent at the moment – the occupied forefingers and thumbs of the smoking population. (One of the first of many complaints from students about the new campus was that there wasn’t a cigarette vendor. I mean, apparently McDonald’s and Pepsi and Cilantro are our university’s corporate sponsors, but the cigarettes are where I draw the line. Anyway, I have my own petty complaints.)

This sinus thing has plagued me since the spring. It creeps in me; it has crept; it lurks. The word “sinus” is so sniveling; these are powerful things, I’ve discovered. It’s a pulsing above my left eyebrow, at times so painful it feels like a hole, some festering round button of hurt with jagged edges that can force my left eye to a squint. My eyes shrink; sometimes they look pinched on the sides. Probably only I can see this. I went on and on with doctor visits and decongestants and antihistamines and sprays, and in a week of desperation started having a shot of fine Egyptian “Auld Stag” whiskey (complete with Bambi’s detached father on the label) every night before bed as my otherwise teetotaler grandfather might have prescribed, and then I quit the medications after the associate director of our department, the expert homeopathist in the region, told me first that most pain comes from a psychological stress that I need to identify and then about a natural salt water spray. I considered what psychological stress my sinuses might be alerting me to then I went to the pharmacy and got my salt-water spray. After a few weeks of using the spray, suddenly things started moving. You don’t need to know the details of my mucus except that I was so pleased to find out that I had some in me, as apparently there had been a knotted jam of it up in my forehead. And I had been thinking about sending the homeopathist, a man who looks wiser by virtue of his crisp white Sufi beard, a balloon bouquet.

A couple of men in the truck beside the bus wave their cigarettes and laugh and stare up at the complaining bus inhabitants. People honk viciously. The phrase “lay on the horn” is made for Cairo. Where I come from, people usually start to annoy themselves at some point when laying on the horn, and then they stop. Maybe they get out of the car to see what the holdup is about. Maybe they yell. Maybe they bring out their easily-purchased assault weapon and wave it around. Here, we plague ourselves in addition to others. Sometimes that’s what it seems like. One day James and I saw this woman who had been jammed into a parking space by a double-parker just sit in her car with her hand on the horn until people started coming out of buildings. She never got out of her car, never did anything but lay on that horn. Eventually, a man came out of a building and headed to the car. She did not remove her hand from the horn. She honked even as she drove away.

My eyebrows tense like muscles, warning me not to breathe until I get back home to the air purifier from Radio Shack. I wish I could comply, eyebrows. No one else on this bus seems angry about the quality of the air they are breathing. Is the wavy, stinky, dizzy, almost-blankness I am feeling with each breath a mirage? It must be that I am the hothouse flower. After all, it’s just a sinus problem. All I have to do is take a drive around town to see more than enough people with worse problems, usually associated with poverty – amputated limbs, malnutrition, weird eye and joint issues – all preventable. Shut up, you, I think, and my eyebrows, though skeptical, agree. There are compelling reasons to stay here and compelling reasons not to. The homeopathist is right – my body has sent its own compelling message.

A

Piles

2008-11-11T18:39:00.005+02:00

The only good sidewalk on the way to the bus stop this morning was piled at intervals with manure. The smell reminded me of home.

On the side of the road, men in green and orange work-suits use straw brooms to collect mounds of sand and dirt, and these, too, are placed at intervals that periodically get trampled or run over or blow away.

At a gas station by the university, a giant pit waits for a building to fill it. In the meantime, it's a dump for the gas station.

When Al-Azhar Park (one of the only continuously green spaces in a city where there isn't enough green to fill each inhabitant's foot) was built, it replaced a centuries-old trash heap. Embedded in the heap was a forgotten relic - an ancient wall now celebrated and restored.

A paleontologist told me that the layers of rock representing our era will be nothing but plastic bags.

New Campus Note

2008-10-26T20:32:00.000+02:00

Desert foxes. Actually, I haven’t seen any, to my disappointment. The university happened to build a desert campus right in the middle of their habitat, though. Apparently, a sighting last week caused “panic” among the student body and has caused security officials to suggest that poison be placed on the perimeter of the university grounds. From what I understand, the desert foxes are comparable to the stray dogs (one of which I saw trotting along with a dead cat in its mouth this morning as I walked to the bus stop) and cats of Cairo – the foxes have adapted to human populations and human waste, and they are glad to scavenge our leftovers as easier pickings than the more difficult hunt. As a naturalist professor pointed out, a part of the mission on the new campus was supposed to be greater attention to the environment and to natural habitats.

I imagine the desert foxes are less mangy and resemble the fascist bunnies from Watership Down a little less than some of the cats that were on the downtown campus. Still, I miss those cats because on campus I can see a great need for them, which is to keep the mouse population down. The mice I have seen are cute plump balls with large velvety ears, and I don’t really want them to be destroyed, but then again I don’t want them in my office. Last week, one colleague of mine noticed that a little mouse had settled for a nap on his foot. Cats seem a simple solution to the mice, particularly since there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of native wildlife hanging out on our concrete campus at the moment, except for those desert foxes, which I’m sure can take the cats in a brawl unless said cats are of the Watership Down variety. At any rate, I really hope the university doesn’t poison the desert foxes just because some students freaked out.

A

Gallabeya!

2008-10-15T16:11:00.003+02:00

Not much to say now, so here you go – a photo of yours truly. Laugh away, fillies. This is a gift given to me last spring by the maid for my mom. I sense that it is currently neatly folded and not being worn. Plus, it is twenty times bigger than my mom. Not to make fun of the gallabeya or whatever, but this one is atypical. It’s like the ones (except sequined) they try to sell tourists on the cruise ships between Luxor and Aswan, with the price marked up and on the condition that tourists wear it to the “Gallabeya Party,” during which the bowtied Egyptian waiters encourage games and dancing and photos. The party occurs right after they serve you fuul and koshary for Egyptian buffet night.

Something Changed

2008-10-03T16:36:00.002+02:00

My as-of-late snarky mood toward Egypt has changed considerably. All it took was to get in a cab last night, the young driver smoking and his forearm flexing as he shifted gears and talked on his mobile. To leave the roundabouts of Maadi and get out on the corniche and watch the part of Cairo that couldn’t afford to go to Sharm El Sheikh for the Eid moseying arm-in-arm in the streets, perching precariously on the bridge to Zamalek. To inch closer to downtown, take the curve that exposes a little park where the headscarved youth of Cairo are said to live some kind of hypocrisy by making out in the grass. To visit our old apartment building, where a friend still lives, and eat koshary, and look out on the skyline and notice that the World Trade Center has a new purple sign and that the bawaab-in-training got glasses and no longer has to squint so painfully to see us.

On the way home, to grab an already-occupied cab and hear the gentle conversation of the driver and his front-seat passenger. To see people leave the Ahly arena and watch fireworks bloom on the sky and listen to the driver and his front-seat passenger say, “Gameel.” Beautiful. To see people smiling, pushing into the street. To see people, rather than just desert and the suspicious scaffolding of “development.” To see the middle class, out and about, and the poor, celebrating. To be in the center. Back on the corniche, almost to Maadi, we got a flat tire just as a mini-bus – crammed so full that a teenage girl’s back, butt, and left arm were hanging from the window – passed us. The driver wouldn’t admit it was a flat until he had pulled over in the middle of the devil-may-care traffic three times. “Five minutes,” he said that third time. “Only five minutes,” said the front-seat passenger, lighting a cigarette. To know that it wouldn’t be five minutes. To pay the guy anyway and tell him to have a good holiday and get into a different cab with its own personal rattling and leaking tires. To feel it all again. And then to return to the new street, so quiet, and to like it, too.

2008-09-26T18:04:00.003+02:00

The Maadi Metro supermarket is a little more cramped than the one in Zamalek. More people have driven rather than walked or taken a cab here. At the entrance, a woman begs with two little girls. One of the girls wears a dingy white blouse with lime green, flared pants, her hair short and coiffed by filth, tinged with red, a tangled, stiff helmet.

I watch her through the glass. The man at the register nods and shrugs, looking a little nervous, and the three baggers do the same. The computer is still loading, stalling everyone.

But – I’m in no hurry, I think. Do I look as if I’m in a hurry?

The men are apologetic, anticipating a kind of impatience and disdain. At the Korean restaurant down the street last week, a British man with a handlebar mustache, smoking a cigar, didn’t get his beer fast enough and clapped and snapped in the air and called to the Egyptian male waiter: “Honey!” It's an extravagance -- this impatience, similar to the kind I've displayed in the last few entries.

The men at the Metro market cash register – in the most Egyptian way possible, which is to say, barely – brace for my impatience.

People are standing and waiting. We need change and cigarettes and detergent. Blonde, pasty people in shorts, black people in bright garb, Egyptians in designer sunglasses. The oversized cars wait in the street – too small, too strewn with garbage, too full of poor people who position themselves exactly where it is hardest to say no, when we emerge with our bounty of groceries.

Today, most of us say no. It is hard to say why – there is no real explanation or pattern concerning anonymous generosity or lack of it.

The computer is working. The groceries are added up and bagged. We emerge from the market and the girl with the stiff coif is upon us, wanting a pound – one pound, madame, one pound – for a package of tissues. We say no, hailing a cab. “Madame, madame, one pound.” Is this like brushing away a fly with your tail? The cab driver, an old man with prayer beads hanging from his rearview mirror, speaks softly to the little girl as her pleas increase. Peace now, he is telling her. Peace, he is saying as she sticks her arm in the window – “Madame, one pound, madame” – and he drives us off.

2008-09-14T22:01:00.002+02:00

There is a mosque next door, a small mosque, with a passageway equipped with faucets where men clean their feet before prayer. The muezzin has a rich voice, so that even as the call to prayer echoes through our rooms, it’s become part of our everyday. The trickle of water in the passageway is pleasant. Then the sinus clearing begins. That part isn’t so pleasant.

Since returning I’ve focused more on the nuisances of Egypt. It may have to do with adjusting to a new neighborhood and a new campus. It may have to do with this being our third year, and how things that seemed merely foreign and bore some getting used to in the first and second year are now just getting on my nerves. It may be that I am still regulating my clock. It may be the heat.

The new campus is in the desert. It’s going to be beautiful, but right now it is a series of stone buildings with labyrinthine passages, very little shade, and very few working toilets. Those toilets that do work but are still under construction should not be entered. I found this out the hard way when I entered the ladies’ restroom in our department only to find unflushed toilets of the grossest kind and scattered cigarette ashes on the seat and floor. Although there is a men’s restroom just next door, the male workers prefer the ladies’ room, I guess.

Actually, when we were looking for apartments, and we came to our current one, there were men inside doing a few renovations. As we examined the bathroom just off the main bedroom, we found a similar pile of poo and ash. But the dishwasher and kitchen and counter space spoke more loudly, so we took it, and I bleached the hell out of the toilet when we moved in.

Back to the campus – I finally got a chair in my office today because I stole one with the permission of the department chair. This is not a tragedy, of course, but such are my complaints. One of my colleagues came to her office this morning to find moldy bread on the floor and dusty footprints on her chair. And, after an entire week of classes, a few flimsy garbage cans have been made available, though it is more in line with the habits of the students to leave their empty cups and cigarette butts anywhere but in a trash can.

Ah, but in our new apartment, we have yet to run into the zeballeen – the trash men who show up in the wee hours of the morning. You might recall that I became rather petulant with the Zamalek garbageman when he tried to get a bonus for first Christian (which we obliged) and then Muslim holidays – to which I said, “But you’re Christian!” And an argument in patchy Arabic and crystal-clear tones ensued. Yes, I’m a jerk, which is why James was the money man from then on. Here, in the new place, we set our garbage outside the door and the bawaab collects it. I am not sure when, which is problematic because of the cats. This morning, as I was waiting for the elevator, I clicked on the hallway light and found an emaciated orange cat with a gnarl of blood on his shoulder, staring at me. Maybe you are feeling sorry for this cat, and you should. But that cat looked me in the eye this morning, and this is what that look said: “You gonna leave or what? ‘Cause I got some trash to dig through and I will bite you, lady; I’ll bite-cha with my disease.”

But I had more important things to worry about. There is a free shuttle to school – which is great – but the problem is that the shuttle just kind of shows up whenever. So it’s supposed to leave at 7:55, for example, but if the guy shows up at 7:40, then there you go. Apparently, in my anxiety about making the shuttle (a cab ride would be pretty expensive), I missed the dead horse in the street that James would see later. I also was busy dodging cars, as usual. Maadi, created by the British, has roundabouts, and this complicates my understanding of when I should be dodging and where I should be looking.

The ride on the shuttle takes you out of Maadi, past sand and more sand and gated communities that are half-built – some more complete than others, some already like ghost towns. All extravagant, at least in the planning. There are other universities – one looks like a spaceship in the sand and is called Future University. Beyond these, desolation – the desert. Not the pretty Sahara – the dug-in Sahara, the uprooted sand, the desert on the cusp of pollution, the desert grasping trash. The shuttle has itchy orange curtains that you pull open and shut depending on the position of the sun. It is the sun, above all else, that I feel I am fighting when I go to work. It’s just always there, and the palm groves have been planted only on the outer edges of the campus, and there is never enough to drink, and it makes me realize how utterly unsuited I am to the desert, to any form of dehydration, and how pale I am, and how much the sun wants to chew me up and spit me out.

There is going to be a turning point for me, I know, when I’ll remember the things I appreciate about Egypt. Not to worry. Just not today.

2008-09-10T11:44:00.003+02:00

Top Questions I Get At Home and the Answers I Would Prefer To Give

Do you have to cover your face/hair? No. Foreigners get away with a lot here; foreigners are often coddled. We get a free pass. It’s telling that I found it much more difficult to communicate in France than I do in Egypt. However, you have to cultivate a sensibility about how you want to dress and what sort of confidence you have in your clothing choices. In some cases, covering your hair is seen as a matter of respect, as when entering a mosque. I haven’t covered my hair when entering a mosque. I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it. I’ll think about this choice. I do, however, remove my shoes. It’s all pretty confusing still. I’m in the phase where I have learned about the gender equality espoused in the Qu’ran, something I guess I missed in the Bible. I recommend the book Scheherazade Goes West if you are a Western feminist who hasn’t delved into Islamic feminism. Anyway, we just moved to Maadi, and people walk around in shorts here, and harassment is minimal. Even though Zamalek is a rich neighborhood, shorts were a rarity and leering was not uncommon. Around the corner from our apartment is a gym with TV’s attached to the treadmills and the cleanest showers I have ever seen. Welcome to suburbia. My parameters are changing. I miss Zamalek. I guess I will just have to drown my sorrows in the freshly-made tofu I can get down the street at the Korean restaurant.
Are Egyptian men hotties? This question is so weird to me, but I get it a lot from strangers. The word "hotties" makes me giggle uncomfortably. I didn’t go to Egypt looking for hotties, but I would say that the ratio of good-looking to bad-looking men is about the same as everywhere.
Do you feel safe? In a car? No. I’ve learned how to absorb myself in reading while being whipped around in a cab because there just isn’t much I can do about whether or not I get in a crash. I also fear getting hit while I am walking down the street. Yet, walking down most streets in Cairo, beyond the vehicles, I absolutely feel safe. I have been met with nothing but kindness and generosity. I have been lost in back alleys piled in poverty and people have led me out and been offended when I have offered them money. The only conflicts I usually get into are about money, and these arguments are usually with melodramatic cabdrivers.
Do they like us? Do they hate us? Who knows? I think when you are living in any foreign country you are constantly met with generalizations and are constantly formulating your own. Here’s one: Egyptians constantly tell me what Egyptians are like. After a while, if I’m not careful, I believe it. Sometimes I find myself then talking about how generous and hospitable Egyptians are, for example. And they are. But I’m also constantly told that they are. By them. Egyptians often say they love Americans. To me. The comedians grin and say they love the American dollar. All in all, what I really believe is that many Egyptians are more willing to give foreigners a chance than Americans can be despite America’s foundations in immigration and equality, and they know more about America’s political status and history than Americans know about Egypt. That said, I’ve heard some pretty offensive things from Egyptians about Israelis and Asians that don’t always support the idea of hospitality. What is springing to my mind now is the multiracial diversity of the American athletes I saw in the Olympics. I felt a swell of pride about it, despite my anger at the way the women’s beach volleyball teams wore wedgy-producing bikinis while the men wore comfy tees and shorts as bikini-clad cheerleaders or dancers or something lined up around the men’s volleyball court. Anyway, when you look at these athletes beyond our obvious gender issues, it’s hard to understand why Americans could be hesitant about somebody like Barack Obama becoming our President, if this hesitation has anything to do with race. This diversity should be a source of pride, a symbol of the ideals that Americans should want people to remember about us. I actually read an opinion piece in the Galesburg Register-Mail before I left the U.S. in which some jerk from Arizona targeted Obama’s middle name (yet again) and then proceeded to say that electing Obama would be akin to electing someone with a Japanese name during World War II. I would hope that most readers would immediately catch the idiocy of that analogy on both ends. When people at home ask me about Egyptians, I give canned responses about how nice the people are, etc. I do this because I want people to know there is nothing to be afraid of, that the Middle East is not some cesspool of violence and hatred, that the Middle East is the root of so much of our ideals about democracy and "civilization." I come back here this third year more confused than ever, though. An Egyptian friend told me the other day that Michelle Obama was bringing down Barack's chances because she "isn't pretty" and Sarah Palin is "pretty." This is the same friend who hopes to have blonde, blue-eyed children one day. I don't really know what to do with comments such as this except become defensive and more confused. I hope to articulate part of this confusion in coming entries. --A--

2008-05-27T13:19:00.002+03:00

I had been warned about the Metro, which is Cairo’s light rail, subway, tube, what-have-you. I had been warned that there would be so much staring, pushing, insults – that it was “survival of the fittest.” People would undoubtedly sleep standing up, breast-feed babies, sell cosmetics, push each other, and generally be unpleasant. And that was just in the women’s car. Apparently, the mixed gender car would be worse in that one’s chances of getting pinched and grabbed and harassed were much higher. I have heard stories of women taunting each other for the tint of their skin, of women in niqab shouting about Allah and how young women need to cover themselves. I’ve heard, too, that everyone stinks.

Yet I’ve ridden the Metro for two days, ever since we moved from Zamalek to Maadi, and the only creepy, unpleasant thing that has happened to me occurred just outside the Metro this afternoon. As I was walking under the street through a long corridor splattered with the same ubiquitous Pepsi ad, I could see someone walking next to me. OK, so we were walking the same pace. Fine by me. But the corridor is quite wide, and there was plenty of room. OK, fine, people have different space thresholds than me in this country. But this person was very close to me.

I adjusted my pace, and this person (a man, I could sense, though I was staring straight ahead), stayed with me. Finally, I looked over, thinking, Geez, maybe it’s just James being weird again. Alas, it wasn’t the face I wanted it to be. A man in a Tony Soprano shirt smiled and asked if I was Egyptian. I said no and stared ahead.

Had he said it in any other way, had I noticed kind eyes or simply an inquisitive expression, believe me, I would have talked to him. But I knew right away that this was a creepy man.

Creeps transcend nationality.

He spoke to me in Arabic, and I ignored him. He then said in English, “Can I talk to you?” “No,” I said. Then I heard him say “Sorry” quietly as he backed away. I kind of felt bad about that as I sent my ticket through the slot and pushed through the turnstile.

I stood on the edge of the platform next to where several women had accumulated, an indication of the approximate position of the women’s cars, which are marked in red and have a painted lady with a triangle skirt as you would see on a bathroom door. I stood there about five minutes. Sure, people stared at me, but I was the only one nursing a bottle of water and one of the only ones who wasn’t veiled. It’s kind of like when I see a veiled lady in Galesburg, IL, or, for that matter, any foreigner. It’s just hard not to stare when something is an anomaly in a given place.

So the metro came barreling toward the Sadat stop, and I got on, made my way down the middle of a row of women, and found a metal bar to hold onto. Then I looked out the window.

And there was Mr. Creep, just outside, blowing me a kiss as if I were his wife and we were briefly parting. GROSS. That artifice of familiarity instantly irritated me. I curled my lip in an ugly way that I have and looked away. I guess he had been standing there, behind me, the whole time. If something like this happened at home, I would feel a bit threatened, but in this case I knew that if I would have needed help, every other woman and man in that place would have beat that guy to the ground. Such is the trust I put in Egyptians. This sort of trust, unfortunately, doesn’t transcend nationality. This sort of security is something I expect much less in the U.S.

Safe is how I felt this morning, as I boarded the Metro during one of the busiest of times. It was strange to feel safe in that situation. All kinds of women boarded with me, and I learned the meaning of being packed like a sardine. There was no need to hold onto anything – we were like books on a shelf, carrying each other’s gravity. Indeed, you did have to push your way in, to toss yourself onto the Metro and somehow slip into the throng. At each stop, more women forced their way in, and I would think, There’s no way another person can cram in here, and then it happened anyway – we managed to become sandwiched just a little bit more.

At one point a short young woman in a black niqab, her eyes large and looming behind the mask, had her gloved hands pressed against my chest. Really, it was the only place her hands could have gone. I could smell her breath, and I imagine she could smell mine. I would find my hands and legs in strange positions that I couldn’t adjust. At one morbid moment, I thought, Gee whiz, I might be squeezed to death this morning. Mumkin (possible), as they say.

Yet it was quite bearable. For a while I stood there thinking, Wow, I could really freak out about this. Claustrophobia is for the privileged. I was only taking the Metro because it’s 1 LE each way – about nineteen cents – and it’s so much easier than taking a taxi from Maadi, which could potentially end in many hand gestures and surliness when the driver and I cannot agree upon a fair price.

While the Metro might be taken by more diverse classes of people than the terrible public buses, the majority of riders seem quite conservative and solidly lower middle to lower class. There were many women headed to low-paying jobs in the public sector and many young girls headed to school – and not to AUC, either. Few of the young girls wore their hair free; I suspect that they do not rationalize “taking the veil” as something that happens when they are “ready,” which is something I have heard a lot of my students say. Rather, they probably do it because it is time to do it, and that is that. All in all, though many of the AUC kids are more loaded than anyone I’ve ever met, I was sitting pretty in the Metro.

But even as the niqab woman pressed her gloved hands against my chest, and even as I, grappling for a handhold behind me, accidentally grabbed another woman’s breast or stomach or something fleshy like that, I felt fine. First of all, nobody stunk, for god’s sake. It’s like this – when it gets hot, people stink. I stink. You stink. Etc. But it was morning, and we may all have been as fresh as daisies, for all I could tell. I can't speak for the car with all the men in it, however. Second, a woman in a lime-colored hijab leaned to me and said, “Welcome.” When I responded in Arabic, a few women around me softened and gave kind glances.

As we neared Sadat station, a young woman tapped my shoulder to let me know it was time to start shoving toward the door. She assumed I was getting off there, and she was right. She and the “welcome” woman gave me a nod, and I tried to stick with them as we pushed through women – women staying, women going, and women trying to get on before others had a chance to get off. A Sudanese girl who was staying in the car got spun in a circle as easily as a rack of clothes, her braids flying, as we passed.

A sea of women – we crested then toppled out the door, gripping each other, pressing our hands against each other’s backs, patting each other in that womanly empathy that has become so familiar to me in Egypt. I can’t understand how I didn’t fall on my face, how I wasn’t trampled. And all the while, women were laughing. I was laughing. We had this in common.

2008-05-25T23:57:00.000+03:00

Maadi-ville

First impressions of Maadi? One: what are all these Asian people doing here? Seriously, on our street I see as many Asians as Arabs. And here I was thinking, all this time, that no Asians really lived in Egypt, except for the lovely crew at the Chinese embassy adjacent to our old digs in Zamalek. We would occasionally witness little ladies walking poodles and short, trim-waisted men marching down the sidewalk, making way for nobody, or presiding over the building projects taking place within the embassy, coolly watching as a gaggle of sweaty Egyptians hammered away at some cement or tried to operate a mixer.

Still, beyond the embassy? Nobody. I assumed this was no place for Asians. I was wrong. They’re all in Maadi.

Impression one.

The other impression? It’s quiet. In a city where noise is part of the ethos, the absence of noise is itself an obtuse presence, insinuating itself on everything. Granted, a man in the street was shouting—shouting—into his mobile the other day, for no good reason but to annoy me. And our new bowaab—goodbye, Neghi—argued with a man who drove the wrong way down our narrow street and refused to back off. And there is the mosque next door. Still, even the musical wailing of the call to prayer seems lonesome. In Zamalek, the closest mosque simply joined in with others, who together stitched a ghostly layer of keening that spread throughout and beyond the neighborhood. Here, just a single call, no accompaniment, no backup—no Jordanaires. Within a couple minutes, the call is over and silence rules again. Nothing withstands it for very long.

I’m also impressed by the restaurants on our street and scattered throught Maadi, the clean and efficient Metro market, the more liberal dress code. I wore shorts outside tonight, and nobody stared, unless to take a gander at my birthmark. Many women were dressed as they would be back home, and no lecherous street cop so much as batted an eyelash. I am also impressed, in a different way, by the metro I took into Cairo today, and will take all week. It’s another interesting segment of society here, a new addition to the adventure, another set of principles for considering. And so I will. In September.

James

2008-05-22T23:22:00.005+03:00

I feel a bit anxious. Everything is actually great. But in two days we are moving to Maadi. In Zamalek there are these lovely trees flowering in red that I haven’t yet learned the name of in English or Arabic. They flower beside the girls’ school, surround the Chinese embassy with its newly installed, old-fashioned barbed wire discouragement. On this Thursday evening, the elevator goes up and down, and we on the top floor hear its two-tone announcement each time it reaches its destination, and we hear its telltale creak when someone is coming to our door. A satellite dish, caked in dirt, perches in the dining room. We had no idea we were buying that dish when it was installed. The spiders on the porch still watch me write, still materialize from behind the glass door that leads to the porch, the porch that I will miss though I rarely sit there. There came a point this spring when I was in a taxi, and I finally had the notion – as I easily read a book while the taxi jerked about, as the driver honked and lit a cigarette and cranked up the Quran on the radio, as the offending exhaust from every other car seeped in the open window, as kids in tight jeans and glittering shirts roughhoused within inches of murderous vehicles, as a traffic cop plunked his glass of tea onto the hood of a parked Hyundai – on that spring morning, I had the notion, the feeling: “This is normal.”

2008-05-15T16:04:00.002+03:00

The video below is of the apartment, currently being renovated, that we'll be moving to the weekend after this. Maadi, our new neighborhood, is closer to the new campus. We're going to miss Zamalek but figured if we remained we would spend most of our time each day trying to get to and from school. It's pretty exciting to anticipate another space next year, another part of Cairo we can get to know, and a dishwasher. If you stick around with that video long enough, you will see me all business and "bossy-britches," as Bryan so kindheartedly pointed out, as well as the view of the mosque loudspeaker next door.

2008-05-13T13:38:00.003+03:00

Here is video of our new flat in Maadi. It's unfinished, so no, the mattresses do not belong on the dining room table and the huge kitchen will look better once all the excesses are removed.

It's here twice, unsure why. But now I guess you can watch it twice.

Enjoy! James

2008-04-29T18:04:00.000+03:00

Here is the link to A's photos:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2001768&l=e566b&id=1207531504

2008-04-28T16:30:00.000+03:00

Touching down in Jordan and traveling throughout the country had all these strange, personal connections for me. I remember being intrigued by the country when I was a kid in the 1980’s, when the word “Jordan” evoked the world’s most famous athlete and not the present-day Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. I remember a group of us huddled around a battered globe in my fifth grade class, looking at countries on the far side of the planet. What countries did we notice? Chad, Niger, Jordan. For some reason we were focused on Africa and the Middle East, perhaps because the names were difficult and hard to pronounce, easy fodder for making fun. Jordan stood out, too, not just for its name but for its strange shape. It looks like key support for a weight-bearing wall.

Of course, our journey to Petra, courtesy of Jordan’s own Frankie Valli, our airport taxi driver on the Desert Highway, dreamy blue-eyed driver who stopped twice for breaks in a two-hour drive (and was angling for a third stop: if only I smoked!), was replete with allusions to my younger days, as well. The ultimate scene in 1989’s Indiana Jones movie makes prominent use of The Treasury at Petra. That movie, it turns out, represented a landmark in Mr. J’s own adolescence, as he attended said movie with a young lass we’ll call, I don’t know, Sunshine, his first girlfriend at the age of 13. (Sidenote: I now have two nieces aged 13.) Long before Indy emerges from As-Siq to stand before the ancient grandeur of The Treasury, somewhere in Italy when Indy is chasing some severe-looking Arabs through the water-roads of Venice? Big boats turbine’s chopping Indy’s small boat? A landmark moment emerged from the tumult on the screen, with Harrison Ford and Alison Doody as my witnesses.

These little connections were nagging at me throughout my stay, never really in the foreground of anything, but playing at low volume in a corner: a small noise always for accounting. At Petra, I was consistently awed by its grandeur and artistry—even the unintended artistry of half-completed facades that bleed back into the rock. I spent a lot of time hopping up and down rocks, sometimes with M, sometimes not (she usually preferred the stairs, and sometimes I went bounding over steep rocks or tried inching my way across a rock face suspended ten feet above ground, amateur rock climber all the sudden). The city of Petra is so different from sites in Egypt in that it appears to be largely secular and that it was intended to be hidden from the world. There is no deliberate grandeur here like the pyramids at Giza or Sakkara. There are no messages to the gods, no elaborately furnished tombs like Sakkara, Beni Hassan near Minya—no messages for the higher powers. No, the loving attention given the sites in Petra appear to be for secular appreciation and purposes. Even in the rebuilt Great Temple we see a small theatre in the round used for drama: of the courtroom and of the stage. Imagine one place serving both purposes, in a temple no less.

The structures themselves did not appear to serve the purpose of a message to God/gods, but to impress the living with its grandeur. That seems contemporary until I consider that Petra was supposed to be concealed, hidden. It’s as though the grandeur and the simple workmanship of the city carved from rock was intended for a very select audience. Then there is what happens once you enter these structures: nothing. In Indy, he walks into The Treasury and finds elaborate traps, an invisible bridge, an undead guardian and the fountain of youth. In reality? In The Treasury, The Monastery, all along the Street if Facades and the Noble Tombs, there are just single rooms. Some of them are quite large, have a few wings attached, but they are not elaborately designed. These are not the long subterranean tombs at the Valley of the Kings—the artwork might have been pre-modern, but loving attention was given over to these tombs, which were, at the time, supposed to be sealed away forever, seen by not another living soul. The facades at the valley of the Kings were virtually non-existent. At Petra, the artistry is much more modern but focused primarily on facades: they could have dressed up in the interiors if they had wanted—interiors meant to be accessed by people—but they elected not to. It’s strange to see this lack of depth in a place supposedly concealed from the outside world.

Rather than post some pics on here, I thought this time I’d give you access to my Facebook photo album, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=37590&l=181ee&id=784484609

Perhaps M can do the same with her own pics, once she gets on the ball and does an album (and stops losing entire days to Scrabulous).

Next up: the Dead Sea.

James

2008-04-08T16:14:00.002+02:00

One of my students had an i-pod bud stuck in an ear before class this morning.
I asked what she was listening to.
"English," she replied.
A

2008-04-05T23:06:00.004+02:00

Tonight I drink a rum and coke. Cubano rum. Imported from Canada. World-famous for rum. Right? I feel all right having a rum and coke because I canceled classes tomorrow. Why, you ask? It appears that the food strike is happening tomorrow. And our fair university sits right next to Midan Tahrir, where demonstrations are quelled before they are fully birthed, where a human chain of soldiers will keep foreigners moving happily along and use batons and guns for the smallest of offenses. Indeed, this government has been quelling the idea of the strike (which originated with textile workers who want a fairly basic wage increase so they can afford some fairly basic food) since at least Thursday, having already stationed a heavy military presence in and around the textile factories. It was unlikely that many of my students would come to class, but I was a little nervous to be in the vicinity anyway. It seems to me that when people are unable to get basic food, you've got a big problem on your hands. Another reminder of the place we live. We are often insulated from the vast poverty of Egypt (or it also may be that it gets harder to look it in the eye the longer we are here). I sit here (with my imported liquor, let me remind you) agape at the thought that people aren't allowed to hold a demonstration.
A

2008-03-18T14:23:00.005+02:00

Sometimes you feel as if you've run out of things to say. I have written two posts about the grocery store, for God's sake, and nothing else is inspiring me. There's a dust storm today, fine. Yesterday I flung myself out of a taxi when the driver started bitching about a fare before we had even arrived at my destination, and some old dude's jaw dropped as he stood on the street corner and watched me. And I am reading student papers and trying to shake the tics and flubs of nonnative English from the writer part of my brain. This is a difficult task. None of this is especially new. There is much to write about Egypt, of course, but none of it's in this here head. I'm sure we'll go somewhere for spring break, though, and at the very least there will be a picture.
Anyway, if you're looking for some entertainment, Bryan sent this link a while ago:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/
He sent it to me because of #85 and #21.
Because I LOVE THE WIRE. Except that whole newspaper thing in the final season was pretty one-note. But other than that, I LOVE THE WIRE. It's Shakespeare. No kidding.
I wonder if "making fun of themselves" is on that list.
Anyway, if it's not your cup of tea, and you can just tell by the title of the blog that it isn't, don't torture yourself by going there, and please refrain from sassing me. But if you're in the mood to giggle self-interestedly, by all means, go.

A

2008-03-07T18:47:00.001+02:00

The woman in front of the grocery store, the one with the little boy and sometimes with the placid-eyed baby, stretches out her hand again. I shake my head and tell her “peace.” There’s this old woman on one of the side streets at the university – she’s the one I give money to and buy tissue from. I’ve got a reason, see? I’ve picked one person, you know? Sure.

After I pass, she curses me, finally and loudly, this woman who lets the little boy wander in front of cars, who shoves him out in front of her at passersby, who turns up her nose at bread and shoves it in his little hand. She curses my stinginess, whatever I have, whatever reasoning I’ve cooked up.

Suddenly, something makes sense in Egypt.

Everything in the grocery store is stacked so that it could fall at the slightest whiff of movement. This is something that doesn’t make sense. As I pull a bottle of balsamic vinegar off the shelf – a 27 LE bottle, the cost of which could buy the beggar outside 324 pieces of baladi bread – a bottle of cider vinegar crashes to the floor, the liquid soaking my hand.

I go to the meat counter and point to my mess. The man behind the meat counter yells across the store, and soon the security guard, an older manager-type, a cashier in a red and white striped shirt, and a boy in an apron and a pie-shaped hat meet in the aisle. The security and management give me disapproving looks but say nothing as I apologize. The other young men smile and say, “No problem.” Then they all close in around the vinegar and glass shining under the fluorescent lights. They talk and point. The boy laughs. They seem to argue.

I leave the aisle. My hands stink. Five minutes later, I return for olive oil. They’re all still there – talking, laughing, debating. They haven’t decided what to do.

“Irv, clean-up on aisle seven!”

But there isn’t an Irv, see?

It’s so small, but I think of moments like this as evidence of the ways I could never make sense of the culture, of ways that, ultimately, I could not belong in this place.

A
(Bonus points for identifying the movie reference.)

2008-02-20T16:39:00.000+02:00

You pass a fine chocolate shop, a Costa coffee, a garage, a seemingly abandoned building opened for today to reveal the spillover from Seoudi grocery, a rusted sign for a dentist posted on the side of an apartment building, cats and kittens crossing and huddling and scampering and limping away from tires and feet and casting a cold eye, a mostly-dead eye at you if you cluck your tongue or say “kitty-kitty.” They are feral. They are dependent. They are ready to spring. A few of them gather around a styrofoam container filled with water, next to a rotund man in a gallabeya, arms crossed in a chair. You go back and forth from the sidewalk to the road, depending upon the inches between your toes and tires, holes, abandoned piles of brick. There are villas, large and abandoned by everything but vines and small creatures. One old villa is a school, but you can’t see over the yellow wall. There is a bawaab who looks like a gnarled fairy tale tree, and he doesn’t recognize you today, and you don’t think he will ever agree to recognize you.

The men at the green grocer’s are sharing a piece of fruit. The old father figure shows you newly-delivered, enormous radishes, heaves from his chair, stoops, offers them, waits for your nod, then twists off the leaves of one bunch. The rest is tied with palm. Out on the street the first wave of kids is getting out of school, and they buy junk food just like any kids with some change in their pockets, or they buy yams wrapped in newspaper from the guy who pushes his oven around on a cart all day. Little boys dart in front of cars and laugh. Teens kick a soccer ball to each other, back and forth across a street lined with honking cars. The ball smacks against the door of a BMW, once, twice. The driver stares at the car in front of him.

A few minutes later you cross another street, coming out from behind a truck, and nearly get hit by a boy on a bike. He swerves left, then right, whichever way you swerve.

A

2008-02-10T18:44:00.001+02:00

The weather was like spring today. The sweater-sporting Egyptians might not say that, but, as I rode back to Zamalek this afternoon in the duct-taped back seat of a cab, I could see the blue sky and smell something...fresh? I walked to Metro, the Western-style grocery store located in the basement of an otherwise dilapidated mall. On the way, I said hi to a bawaab who perpetually parks it in a chair in front of his building. A woman in an abaya was walking in the street. Her companion was a toddler in a torn green sweater who appeared to be too far from her grasp. The boy swerved in front of a car, which slowed before it could hit him. The woman chastised the boy and yanked him closer, then promptly let him go as another string of cars passed.

Across the street from Metro is a new Cinnabon cafe.

I got a chunk of cheddar from the Metro deli. The deli guy who grabbed the block of cheese was being watched by another man in a pin-striped shirt. Deli Guy kept switching his plastic gloves under the critical eye of Pin-Stripe. It's getting a little too clean in there - there have of late been several managerial types lingering and analyzing the situation in the store. Thankfully, a fly egregiously sipped at another wheel of cheese, and no one seemed to mind, and that seemed much better than the thought of ever entering the Cinnabon across the street. You know it's time to flee when the Cinnabon comes to roost.

After leaving Metro, I saw the toddler with the torn green sweater sitting against the wall of the building and chewing on a hunk of bread too big for his mouth. The woman in the abaya was there, too, and a strangely quiet baby had materialized in her arms, and she held out her hands and pleaded for money. A corner store had exploded onto the curb with a giant pink gorilla on top of a stack of...pink stuff. Happy Valentine's Day, everybody! I nodded to the bawaab, still sitting in his chair. He tapped a folded newspaper against his shoulder.
A

2008-02-07T14:35:00.000+02:00

I just bought a bunch of strawberries, spinach, bell peppers, leafy lettuce, oranges, lemons, apples, green beans, and broccoli for nine bucks! Here's a photo from Midan Hussein, near Khan-il-Khalili. That guy's carrying baladi bread. And that other guy looks to be sneezing...
A

2008-01-24T16:42:00.000+02:00

"The Palestinians left us with nothing. It's true, they are dear to us, but today, they were like locusts." – Jan. 24 BBC quote from an Egyptian

We saw the soldiers out yesterday - lined up, bulletproof vests, rifles, headgear. But everyone else was proceeding as normal – selling produce, begging, crossing streets with briefcases and ties, honking and gesturing, smiling as we ordered koshary. You wouldn't have known that just a few short hours previously a bunch of Muslim Brotherhood members had staged a nonviolent protest in support of the Palestinians breaching the Gaza border to get simple supplies from Egypt, having had electricity and water cut off by Israel, being punished for the isolated actions of a political group. You wouldn't have known that the Egyptian protestors were chased down the streets, arrested, that batons and tear gas were used. We were at Khan-il-Khalili while this was going on, and we came downtown in the aftermath.

Oh, it's nothing, I said to my parents as we crossed Tahrir Square, as we got redirected through the underground Metro tunnel by a few cheerful policemen so that we wouldn’t exit near the Arab League building, as I asked a vest-wearing soldier if we could walk on the sidewalk, as we boarded a boat and took in the strange quiet of the Nile and passed under bridges brim-full of traffic. Probably just the president passing through, I said. Shows you how used to soldiers I’ve become, even when they’re dressed in the accoutrements of riot suppression.

The season of guests is officially over. I slept until 4pm today after an early morning of seeing off my parents as they continue their journey - a few days in London before returning home. They were not at all like locusts, but they are dear to us.

You'll find photos below of our day at the pyramids (Tuesday), which was rainy. I was disappointed at first, thinking how the photos would not show the beautiful blue sky against the structures, but it actually made the pyramids seem more mystical than usual. Also, we managed to see a bunch of those guys who drive the horses and carts go a little nutty - they were racing around the site whipping the hell out of the horses. The tourist police stopped them, and there was arguing, and one guy got his horse taken away. I think it was a slow day at the pyramids, so they figured - hey, why not race?

That day concluded with a visit to the Museum of Antiquities. From the pyramids, we climbed into a cab seeing its last legs and listened to the driver grumble for an hour and spit mucus, deep from his lungs, out the window. He fell asleep in a long moment of stuck traffic. His window wouldn’t go up, and rain and wind dripped in, and the streets, unprepared for rain, puddled with dirty water. Despite what may seem like a complaint, I was thrilled because it felt like true autumn, a season I really miss. My mom, on the other hand, experienced something I have stopped thinking about, which is how when you are in a grimy cab like that one, you feel as if even your lips need a good scrubbing.

The museum is chock-full of stuff from pyramids and tombs, so full that the extras stored in the basement are literally sinking into the ground and will have to be excavated when the museum moves from downtown to the Cairo exurbs. As the rain poured on the building, we saw it dripping on stairs and leaking on ancient statues. The whole place feels outdated, which is charming. It is badly-lit, and many of the typed, yellowing descriptions neglect to identify the time period of the exhibit. The best part of the museum (and I'm counting the beautiful gold sarcophagi of Tut) is the mummified animal exhibit, where you will see a gigantic crocodile and a monster fish, among other animals – birds, dogs, cats, baboons, and even scarab beetles. Honestly, you feel as if Indiana Jones will come around a corner at any moment, particularly on that dank rainy day.

I'm worried that they'll make the new museum too flashy. I'm worried that, in the quest to entertain and indulge waning attention spans, we will lose a musty feeling of discovery, in favor of flashing lights and touch screens and interactivity. I felt that way upon hearing that the Bell Museum in Minneapolis, with its beautiful and under-lit and sometimes misrepresented dioramas, was going to be moved and some of its exhibits thrown out.

Sure, I would like the statues of Ramses to be protected from the leaky ceiling. But I don't need Ramses to speak to me via computer or something. You sense strangeness and greatness in the Museum of Antiquities without either outdated or updated placards. When you have to squint and bend to the floor as you peer into a dark glass case, you feel like maybe you're the first one to notice the badly wrapped foot of one of the mummies in the Fayoum portrait room. Even the better-lit Tut room lacks order – you push and shove past Russians and Japanese to the sarcophagi and have to read small print upside down to understand which of the two in the room held the mummy.

Anyway, enjoy the photos below. The last one is my favorite.

A

2008-01-22T09:09:00.000+02:00

Karen & Gene - Mediterranean Sea - Alexandria

View of the Mediterranean from the Metropole Hotel

Metropole Salon

Harbor

Little Boy wants his picture - K, A, & J

Fort Qaitbey, site of the Pharos lighthouse, one of the Ancient Wonders of the World

Biblioteca Alexandria - Outer Wall

Biblioteca Alexandria - Karen - planetarium in the distance

2008-01-18T17:48:00.000+02:00

My mom and dad are in town! Here's some of what we did today. -A

Bab Zuweila minaret - J & A

Mom & Dad - Al Azhar Park - View of Islamic Cairo

K & A - Al Azhar Park

J, A, & K - Al Azhar Park view of Cities of the Dead

Crow at Al Azhar Park

2008-01-14T15:57:00.000+02:00

So, last week we took this cruise from Aswan to Luxor, and it was really magnificent. The first day was spent with the boat docked in Aswan, awaiting the newest influx of cruise guests. We had an early flight, so we got to hang out all day. Aswan is pretty! We walked a bit around town, finding the souk. B & Ad bought saffron, as you can see below. I’m going to refer to Bryan and Adriana as B & Ad to avoid confusion but also because if you put it together it equals “Bad,” which they are, in the way Michael Jackson meant it back in the day.

View from the ship in Aswan

B & Ad haggle for saffron

That afternoon we went on a felucca ride with two young crewmen, one of whom was so high it looked like his eyes were bleeding. But he was very happy. And not shy about it. We’ve discovered that Upper Egypt and the Sinai are a little more…relaxed. Many of the felucca guys were smoking joints the size of their little fingers, and J was offered some “marijuana,” hard emphasis on the “j.” As usual, the felucca ride was beautiful. We stopped at a place called Kitchener’s Island, which has been turned into a botanical garden. Curiously, they were keeping well-fed cats among the precious birds and plants. B and Ad dipped their hands in the Nile and didn’t get bilharzia.

The sun was traveling ever down as we circled Elephantine Island. A boy, paddling a tiny boat with two pieces of cardboard, called out to us. The side of the boat was painted in blue with “BOOB 2008.” We’ll just assume that meant “Boy of the Observant Brain.” He wanted to know where we were from. After he made a few wrong guesses, I said “Amrikka,” and he started singing “Yippy-yi-yay!” as he maneuvered himself to the back of the felucca and clung on. Then he paddled away.

The next day we visited Lake Nasser and Philae Temple. Then we got corralled into a “special” stop at a perfume factory, where we had to listen to some dude present to us every kind of natural perfume they sold and then offer a special price with some bottles thrown in for “only 75 LE,” the kind of bottles you can get at Khan-il-Khalili for 5 LE. It was stinky in there.

Philae Temple

J at Kom Ombo Temple

We saw some beautiful temples set in picturesque places. You could still see spots of color in some of the engravings and imagine how loud and proud these were in their prime. We visited one temple, Kom Ombo, at night, and we had our first experience docking next to about seven other boats and having to walk through the foyer of each one to get to the dock. We began to see how lavish you can get on these cruises, as each foyer got nicer and nicer, with marble floors or chandeliers.

Ours was pretty neat, too. Witness the crocodile that the guy who cleaned our rooms made from our bedcovers and towels. Actually, B & Ad’s was better because he propped B’s sunglasses on its snout.

We also had quite a few glimpses of the toll the 400 cruise ships on this route are taking on the Nile as they spew exhaust, their oily deposits skimming the surface. Regardless, as B commented upon in the last entry, the Nile remains ever blue.

The final stop before Luxor was the Temple of Horus near Esna. We then docked for the rest of the day at Esna, waiting our turn to cross the locks, which we weren’t allowed to do until around midnight, owing to the plethora of cruise ships wanting to pass through. We got to relax on the top of the boat, where a miniscule swimming pool and a bunch of deck chairs were located. Little kids would call out to us – two girls convinced me to give them shampoo, and, when I left the boat to give it to them, they told me how their parents were sleeping and pointed to the sky. It was a well-rehearsed speech. Whether or not it was true is not important. In the meantime, B and Ad ventured out into the town, and B got offered a number of camels for Ad.

That night was the Gallabeya Party on the boat, where guests were pressured to buy gallabeyas, the likes of which I’ve never seen any Egyptian wear, and engage in weird dancing games. J and I hung out and watched the lock approach, glancing back at the sequined men and women. I had been really excited about the process and then I remembered how long it takes. So I went to bed as the gallabeyas danced on.

We got up and checked out nice and early for the final day at Luxor and our last day with the tour guide. He was a nice young man but not too interested in questions or in people’s eyes wandering away from his presentation. He dubbed our group “Isis,” and he would constantly call out this name. It was a little confusing when we were at the Kom Ombo temple at night and Ad and I started following the sound of “Isis” in the distance and found ourselves near a group of entirely different Isis people than we had thought we were with. Whenever our multi-national group congregated, he would shout," Where's the Indian family?" He also kept asking me if I could get a discount for him at the AUC bookstore, and when I said I didn't have that kind of power, he would say, "You have that power?" This actually reflects something about many of my conversations with Egyptian men, in which they only hear what they want to hear (and often J will say the exact same thing and he is completely heard.) I know that's a stereotype, but it's been bugging me lately.

There was a moment on the bus to the Valley of the Kings where the microphone stopped working. B & Ad, J and I, and an older British woman and her son were all sitting in the middle back of the sparsely populated bus. Everybody else was crammed up front. It didn’t matter – the guide didn’t need the microphone – he was pretty loud.

Then came a typical statement from our guide: “Isis, can you hear me? I don’t know if you can hear me!”

“We can hear you,” I called. We had been hearing him for three days.

“Isis, I don’t know if you can hear me!”

Then he tries to get the middle-back people to move closer.

“We can hear you,” said the Brit woman.

Since I am a rule-follower, my muscles twitched, ready to get up. Nobody else was moving, though, not even the nice elderly British woman, who as good as folded her arms and shook her head. I mouthed, “Should we move?” to J, and he gave me a blank face. Ad's face was all: "No can do." And B wouldn't look at me. This went on for a few more uncomfortable moments. Then the guide gave up. I think I am telling this story because it reveals how tired all of us were of being passively-aggressively asked if we were paying attention. Ad, actually, had developed a temporary hatred of the guy. Sometimes we would hiss “Isis!” at each other.

So we pulled into the Valley of the Kings, and I was prepared to be disappointed, if only because I had been looking at ancient Egyptian stuff for days now and it was all beginning to look the same: engravings of people smiting other people, people offering various goods, gods weighing hearts, etc. You feel bad about that, but it’s all part of the overload. It’s like when we went to the Antiquities Museum and everything you’ve ever seen only in small stolen exhibits in other countries was crammed into one place and then some. By the time we got to Tut’s goods, which are lovely, we were kind of over it. Sad but true. And frankly I am at times a little weirded out by all this plundering of tombs and the women with fanny packs who pay to see it.

Back to the Valley – tombs literally carved into a mountain with lengthy chambers. We didn’t see the mummy Tut, who was recently unveiled there. Basically, our guide said we could see it if we wanted to purchase an extra ticket but we probably didn’t want to see it because it was really nasty because Howard Carter didn’t do a real bang-up job preserving the boy king. Honestly, we didn’t care too much. We especially didn’t care whether or not we saw another mummy when we entered the first tomb and observed the full glory of what we could only imagine when we had noted spots of color at the temples. Almost all of the color in these tombs had been preserved, and it was rich, and detailed, and everywhere. This goes down as the most impressive “ancient Egypt” site I’ve seen. The only thing that was ruining the moment for me in that first tomb was the guy behind me unabashedly clicking his camera, click-ed-y-click, so busy taking pictures illegally that there was no way he could be appreciating what we were seeing. In an ancient tomb in Egypt, I shot him my own little follow-the-rules passive-aggressive look. The moment became brighter when the security guy who had been at the entrance came in and took the camera away and deleted every one of the tomb pictures he had taken. Heh-heh. Look! Just look! You don’t need a picture, little mustached man!

WOW. You just have to see it.

After that, we were taken on another “special” trip to a stone factory or something, and I got a free necklace from a guy who said I had pretty eyes and kept asking me where my “husband” was because Egyptian men often become baffled if J and I don’t stay together in one place once they learn we are buddies. I kept pushing the necklace back because I was certain it wasn’t free. In the end, it actually was. Golly. We saw the displaced homes of people who have been in this area forever – there are tombs beneath their homes that the Egyptian government wants to excavate. There was a big story in Life about this. Then to Hatshepsut’s Temple, much of which has been restored, and a literally five minute stop "for photos" at the Colossi of Memnon.

We spent the rest of our Luxor day on the boat relaxing and awaiting our evening flight. I know we should have been out and about and visiting more temples and stuff, but we had experienced a whole lot of hassling, and this wears you down. (After B & Ad left, I decided I needed some time away from Egypt, which involved two days sitting in my apartment watching my satellite and the first season of Huff and speaking no Arabic except every once in a while proclaiming to myself, “Oh, you live in Egypt? I give you special Egyptian price!”)

At one point, some boys in a rowboat with crude oars came up and begged for money, wanting me to throw it over the side. It was an interesting moment because I was only speaking Arabic to them and told them I couldn’t speak English and they couldn’t seem to figure out where I was from, although they were playing a game with me as much as I was playing with them so who knows what they thought. I held up an orange and one of the little boys held out his gallabeya to catch it, and that was that. They made kissy faces and lewd comments and sang as they rowed away, meeting up with a few other boys in boats.

A

2008-01-11T18:43:00.000+02:00

Maybe some stories later, but for now I'm feeling a bit lazy. Below are some choice pics from the visit of Bryan and Adriana, Minnesota friends. So nice to see them!! So, so nice!! All friends: consider coming. I think we had a great time: Islamic Cairo, Al Azhar Park, the tentmakers, Museum of Antiquities, AUC, Sakkara, Dashur, Wissa Wassef Art Centre, Giza pyramids, and a Nile cruise from Aswan to Luxor, during which we saw Lake Nasser, the Philae Temple, Kom Ombo, Temple of Horus, Valley of the Kings, Hatshepsut Temple, the Collossi of Memnon, and ate a bunch of food. We made them try koshary, which Adriana liked and Bryan didn't, but only because it involved some lentils and chickpeas. We finished the last day bargaining at Khan-il-Khalili.

J, Adriana, and Bryan at Bab Zuweila in Islamic Cairo

Bryan and me at the Great Pyramid

Bryan and Adriana's America's Next Top Model Audition - Pyramids of Giza

View from Philae Temple near Aswan

A

2007-12-25T20:51:00.000+02:00

It’s Christmas. We write. I watch the Power Puff Girls and trudge through Pale Fire, which is interesting, then not, over and over. We call people at a dollar a minute. Not bad. Or people call us. We say hi; we listen to kids in the background. Kids who are talking, burbling new words and roughhousing, or settling into adolescence. Across the street the girls are in school, in recess. The last sheep in the yard still bleats. Will anyone eat her? We decide to get out. We go to a restaurant with clouded windows called L’Aubergine. I have “trio of crepes” – one mushroom, one spinach, one broccoli – and a Sakkara beer. J has chicken teriyaki and a weak screwdriver. New Age music in the background and colorful walls. Mostly Europeans here, a mishmash of language. The waiter says “Happy Christmas.” Then to the vegetable seller, who has a fresh batch of asparagus and spinach. He is wearing flip-flops too big for his feet. The air is crisp. No Christmas music, no snow, but cheerful out here. Many restaurants have put up little trees and tinsel. The streets are less populated, so we can feel something, maybe something from the past that we wouldn’t recognize. A little boy, maybe four, wears a gallabeya and sits on the hood of a car. The gallabeya puddles around him. He swivels his head and softly says hi and blinks and smiles. We swerve into a store that sells rugs and bedding. An old man in a brown sweater says, “handmade, handmade.” We buy.
A

2007-12-19T18:33:00.001+02:00

Everyone keeps saying they’ve never seen the pollution this bad. Indeed, it’s something I’ve noted more often in my second year here as a palpable sensation in my lungs and sinuses. It’s not just a disturbing black cloud emitted from the public bus anymore. It’s the realization that we are inside of that disturbing cloud all the time, at the bottom of a valley that’s getting less and less fertile, and that what is outside manifests in the body. Yesterday morning it looked as if someone had shaken a sack of flour over the city. It is on days like these that I sense hours of ginger tea and decongestant ahead.

We bought an air purifier the size of a TV from the ubiquitous Radio Shack, and this has helped. The instruction manual says to clean the filters every two months, depending upon where you live. Here? Two weeks is pushing it.

When the wind pushes away the pollution, and the sky comes through, it’s unbelievably beautiful. If you climb the Muqattam hills, you will see the black cloud below that is Cairo, and above and away, all is pristine. People, even our university, are pushing out and out, pulling the Nile with them in sleek new piping – people who can afford it.

*

Today is the first day of Eid Al-Adha, a Muslim holiday which appreciates Abraham’s (Ibrahim’s) willingness to sacrifice his son to God. Oh, the myriad ways in which Muslims, Jews, and Christians are actually kind of the same…

In the last week, sheep, goats, or cows started appearing on the streets, getting hauled in the backs of trucks, their eyes looking rather dead even as they blinked. The beggars suddenly were holding strangely quiet babies, swaddled in the streets. More carcasses than usual hung in the open air in front of butcher shops, those skinned marbled hunks of meat with still-hairy tails hanging down. Suffice it to say I’ve seen way too many dead buttholes. In the usually empty yard behind our apartment building, three sheep appeared, waking us up a few mornings ago with their bleating. One of them had red wool and a white head. These sheep get fattened before slaughter. Even Alfa, a hodgepodge department store, had a penned goat for sale.

The animals get sacrificed – each family keeps 1/3 of the animal and gives the rest to the poor. Yesterday James stumbled upon the bawaab, makwagis, and various guys who hang out on our street just as they were finishing up the slaughter of a cow on the corner. Bloody street and sidewalk, a sheaf of skin, entrails pulled and squeezed. Our bawaab was wearing tall rubber boots and a sweatsuit rather than his usual gallabeya.

This morning I woke to the sound of a bleat and went to the back porch to watch a man, followed by two little boys, lead the red-wooled sheep away. All three sheep had one front leg tied by rope so that they had to hop; the other two sheep were also tied together, and they bumbled around the dusty yard. I’m sure they could smell what was coming.

A

2007-12-16T13:56:00.000+02:00

From the novel The Map of Love, by Ahdaf Soueif:

"And yet - I sit here in my room at the Shepheard's Hotel possessed by the strangest feeling that still I am not in Egypt. I have sat on the Pyramid plateau and my eyes have wandered from the lucid blue of the sky through the blanched yellow of the desert to the dark, promising green of the fields. I have marvelled at the lines between blue and yellow and then again between yellow and green - lines drawn as though by design. I have climbed the Pyramids and danced at the Khedive's Ball. I have visited the Bazaar and the Churches and the Mosques and witnessed the procession of the Religious Orders and played croquet at the Club at Ghezirah. I know a few words of the language and I can mark many streets by the houses of people with whom I am now acquainted, but there is something at the heart of it all which eludes me - something - an intimation of which I felt in the paintings, the conversations in England, and which, now that I am here, seems far, far from my grasp."

2007-11-30T13:48:00.001+02:00

Last weekend, we finally made our first foray out of Cairo since arriving back in the city in August. And not a moment too soon: as busily as we have been marching toward the end of our 3rd semester here, I have still had time to notice the persistent fog of haze clinging over the city. Is it me, or does it seem worse this fall than it did last year? It didn’t help that hot temperatures lingered into November, packing in the particles. Also not helping: leaded gasoline, the burning of rice fields and garbage, living in a valley.

And yet, what plagues me about life in Cairo implies one of the tremendous benefits of leaving the city. In Egypt, where everything is out of proportion, where most people live on a thin strip of land, leaving the city means leaving behind the stink and the hazy air. Things seem unspoiled. The air is crisp and clear, the sky deep bottomless blue, the sun golden on the craggy, sea-side mountain face. Did I mention the clean air?

Our trip took us a couple of hours out of Cairo, along the Gulf of Suez with its persistent ships approaching or departing the Suez Canal. We visited two very old Christian monasteries, the Monastery of St. Anthony (now with adjoining cave) and the Monastery of St. Paul, the pimped-out Vegas strip of monasteries. These monasteries are still active, populated by many devout and stylish monks who wear black habits and skull caps, and long beards—who also use their BlackBerries to communicate with the outside world and wear fashionable, coordinating sunglasses.

The saints after whom these monasteries are named escaped religious persecution in Cairo and Thebes back in the day, settling in the rugged mountains of the Eastern Desert, a few kilometers from the Red Sea. Following their deaths (of old age), the monasteries were built in their names and have continued to thrive, despite many assaults from Bedouins over the centuries. These monasteries, in fact, have the look of an ancient fortress. Both are protected by high walls, and each has at its center an ancient “keep,” surrounded a moat, where the monks would retreat if their outer walls had been breached.

Today, these active monasteries are protected by the Egyptian government—which I admire, given that the country is now overwhelmingly Islamic. There is one road in to each of these monasteries, and our bus had to stop at a checkpoint, manned as usual by some of Egypt’s finest. The roads extended for miles into the desert, to the foot of mountains where the St. Anthony and St. Paul kept safe in their lifetimes. Inside their walls is a thriving and largely self-sufficient community of Christian monks, giving tours, driving construction equipment, tending gardens, baking bread, splashing unsuspecting agnostics with holy water from the springs that sustained these monasteries for so long.

I have visited some historically significant Christian churches and cathedrals in Europe and America, but I found my sense all things Christian heightened at these places. It was like entering another world, one half-familiar to me. Gone were the minarets, the rounded structures, the open air prayer rooms, of Islamic architecture, which (of course) dominate the landscape throughout Egypt. Instead I saw icons of the saints after whom the monasteries are named, of Jesus himself. I saw it next to Arabic script, as I heard Arabic spoken around me, in the soft, compliant voices of the monks whose homes we were visiting. I sensed, as these monks must have, that these monasteries were safe havens now, protected, their place in Egypt secure. I found myself admiring the monastic life I saw around me, so different from the bustling city just two hours away. Even though the monks buy olive oil from the grocery rather than press their own olives, even though they drive moving equipment and depend upon generators to provide one fundamental of modern life—electricity—their lives are not significantly different than those of monks who have lived at these monasteries for generations dozens of generations. I admire people who live the lives of their convictions, even if I don’t share those convictions myself.

With one caveat—the Monastery of St. Paul. The place itself is ancient, but it is fairly bursting with pilgrims and tourists, much more so than St. Anthony’s. When we pulled up to St. Paul’s, we were confronted with a large but poorly-conceived parking lot built on a hill, which was already half-full with tour buses. As we approached the entrance to the monastery, we passed a roiling gift shop that sold such things as toy machine guns (one little boy had the gall to point and shoot at me, but couldn’t keep firing long enough for me to snap a photograph) and loud religious-esque music blaring from speakers. Inside, we had to squeeze among other tour groups as we visited St. Paul’s relics, gathered into a child-sized coffin covered with a sheet of clear plastic—and the ancient spring, the presence of which our monk guide claimed cannot be explained.

The parking lot at St. Anthony’s, on the other hand, was virtually empty. When we climbed the modern stairwell up the mountainside, ascending to the cave where St. Anthony retreated from persecution, I had to stop a few times, calves burning, lungs belching forth the sediment of three uninterrupted months in Cairo. After reaching the top and squeezing into the narrow cave where the man had lived, after collapsing on the rocks and breathing in the fresh, thin air, I looked over the precipice where we all sat and, for the life of me, I couldn’t see another living soul:

James

2007-11-09T16:46:00.000+02:00

Props for Sari

Hey, guess what? We're still in Africa. In honor of that, you should go to this selection from Brevity, an excellent journal of short nonfiction and a spin-off of Creative Nonfiction, and both of these mags are primo to get into. Anyway, indulge with this great piece of Sari's, which I've always loved:

http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/brev20/fordham20.htm

A

2007-11-04T14:42:00.000+02:00

Another meme – this time from Kate at www.motherswhowrite.blogspot.com. I’m supposed to put down five writing strengths. As a result, this is more like a note to myself, or an affirmation.

1. I try to treat characters fairly and realistically, whether they are fictitious or real.
2. I’m good at describing the region I’m from without sounding totally sentimental.
3. Like Kate, I’m not married to my sentences. I love to cut, edit, and revise. I get a kick out of putting a big X through a whole page. Revision is discovery.
4. Rejection (of the literary journal brand & otherwise) has made me a better writer. One beautiful morning, writer Verlyn Klinkenborg edited every sentence of the eight-page piece I had submitted. I had been hoping to dazzle him into inviting me to write for the New York Times. However, he informed me that I had no idea how to write a sentence. I was in an MFA program, pursuing my second English degree. But he was right. It wasn't personal, either, because he proceeded to say the same thing to all the other MFA students who got to meet with him. Klinkenborg, you pissed people off, but I love you!
5. I don’t get in a hurry about finishing a piece of writing. A lot of books I read feel rushed, as if the heady, ephemeral whiff of publication were the only thing driving the writing.

Tagged: James! Bryan! Stephanie (www.vidadepalabras.blogspot.com)! Sari!

A

2007-11-02T14:49:00.001+02:00

Yesterday, Anne Lamott, author of Bird By Bird (a book about writing), novels, and memoirs, visited the university. J and I were invited to a roundtable discussion with her in the afternoon, and we got to invite some of our students, too. Lamott is an intriguing woman – just look up any biographical information about her and you’ll begin to see the multifaceted nature of her persona.

Last night, she gave a lecture in Oriental Hall. As Lamott was escorted in, she whipped out a disposable camera and began to take pictures of the beautiful room. She proclaimed that she wanted to live there, in that room, for the rest of her life. Me too. Oriental Hall is indeed impressive and lavish, so indescribable that I refuse to try.

She began by speaking about all the things that had baffled her upon arrival in Cairo, the kinds of things J and I were writing about in our earliest posts. It was fun to hear the raw response of someone who had just arrived. Also, it was wonderful to listen to a writer speak, to listen to a writer tell her audience of budding readers and writers all about the joys and heartbreak of writing, to tell them some of the things J and I have come to understand and some of the things we have not fully experienced but have already heard much about (like the fact that publication is not really a ticket to anywhere, even if your book is successful). But we hadn’t heard stuff like this for a long time. This was the kind of thing we had constant access to at home, but here, not so much. This lack of access is both a relief and a loss. For me, yesterday, it was enough to watch some of my students see an aspect of the literary world for the first time. I remember that feeling, and I did catch my breath when dreadlocked Lamott walked into the discussion room that afternoon.

There were questions at the end of the lecture last night. The final question was from a young Jordanian woman who said she had known all her life that she wanted to write, but that she was afraid to work on the novel she had had brewing in her head for some time. She was afraid of failure; she was afraid that she would never do it. Lamott asked her about the novel – if she knew where it was set, the characters, etc. The young woman had specific answers. Lamott looked at the young woman, really looked right at her, as if they were having a private conversation, and told her to go home after this and write for an hour. She told her that if she didn’t do that, tonight, she would never write this book. She joked that she would be watching her.

I don’t know why this moved me so much, but it did. The delivery of Lamott’s words, of course, greatly mattered – her style is casual and kooky and seemingly a ramble, though it is clear she knows where she is headed as she makes her points. The effect she creates is that she is human and fallible and not always certain about her writing and her life. So I think that the reason Lamott so often has a packed house when she goes on tour or lectures is not so much her practical advice but her attitude in presenting that advice. She is eccentric and warm. She is proud of her accomplishments without sounding like a big jerk – for instance, she said she had a “gift with words” more than once yesterday, and, though this sort of thing usually makes me ill, from her it sounded just fine. She looks people in the eye. And she listens to them talk about their own love of writing or reading – she listens to them publicly speak about the 300 pages of their first novels, and she listens to us neophytes try to publicly piece together and declare our penchant for writing – without giving even a whiff that she has heard this so many millions of times before that she could scream and that her writing is eminently more important, thank you very much. Also, her particular sense of humor eschews the kind of irony so popular these days from a literary world that feels threatened by waning public interest. She just doesn’t do any of that crap. I’ve only met a couple of writers like that. Charles Baxter (who is not at all like Lamott) gets the big golden trophy for it, of course.

A

2007-10-30T22:11:00.000+02:00

Oct. 29 Podcast: an excerpt and discussion of my story:

www.indianareview.blogspot.com/

2007-10-18T15:58:00.000+02:00

The scrumptious mango. Its season is pretty much over. The photo does this mango no justice. It's ready to go because sugar-encrusted juice is dripping down its hind end. The mango encourages sloppy eating, stained arms and lips. It's indescribable. Somehow the cafes in Cairo will have access to really delicious mango juice all year, but for us pedestrians, it's over.

Funeral flowers or cauliflower? Oh, methinks it's a big load of cauliflower! We were in motion, so the photo isn't the greatest, but I think you get the idea. You might also note that there are lines painted on the road, and it appears that drivers are staying within the lines in that frozen moment in time. Don't you dare be fooled by that. Be assured that a split-second later we were almost breathing cauliflower.

A

2007-10-07T18:38:00.001+02:00

And now for another angle on this issue of power. I suppose I’ve touched upon it already in my entry regarding the zeballeen (who, incidentally, I haven’t seen since paying him 20 LE about six weeks ago. Wait. We did see him, walking down our street, as we observed from the balcony eight stories up). M has talked about the various ways that power in Egypt (and Cairo especially) is gendered, how sometimes the entire country seems like a guy’s locker room while the women make due in the corners and shadows, seen—but only slightly—rarely heard. Their domain is the household, and within the household they are the nurturers. And, depending upon the class, their roles as nurturers can involve presiding over the nannies and maids who tend to the less pleasant aspects of child rearing.

Of course, Western women are more assertive because they don’t belong here. They function largely beyond the grasp of the culture. Part of this function involves enduring some unbelievable misconceptions about their morality. Some of these misconceptions are funny, some disturbing.

Still, it’s the trade off that the culture makes: we won’t enforce cultural and religious standards of dress and behavior on you, but in exchange, you have to put up with some incorrect assumptions and, occasionally, inappropriate public reactions.

I mention this as a “trade-off” because I want to say something about the larger role of our empowerment in this society. We have it in abundance—both of us, as well as every educated Westerner we know.

One of the most obvious forms this power takes is in our ability to function outside the culture. This is due in part to our ignorance of its finer points. But we also have no direct claim on cultural standards or national or regional concerns. We are always a plane ride away from Amsterdam if the shit hits the fan. We will someday return home. And while we are here, we enjoy elevated status. We live in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city and teach at a university that is, by far, the nicest in the region. The support staff at the university behaves deferentially toward us—and it’s no surprise that the faculty is largely white, whereas the staff are mostly Egyptian. That deference says something about how powerful is the color of our skin. Thing is, it’s always been that way. But you can count on Cairo for one thing, and that is to put you in close proximity with these facts that have been staring at you all along.

This power plies its trade in strange and, often, uncomfortable ways. There is a relationship between the color of our skin, our elevated status as residents of Zamalek, our access to the finest of what Egypt has to offer, and the fact that we are correctly perceived as rich—especially once we are discovered to be Americans. Because America is freakin’ rich beyond belief. Your modest middle class family in America far outstrips 99% of Egyptians. It’s not even close.

Perhaps an example will suffice as illustration. Last week I hopped a taxi for the 15-minute ride to school and found myself talking to a man, my driver, who claimed that he had one baby, maybe two or three babies, in the “moustashfa,” or hospital, with cancer ravaging their bodies. He gestured toward his arms, his torso, saying “cancer” and “moustashfa” and “bebe.” His voice shook with desperation and sadness, the helpless wails of a father. He held in his hands several fifty pound notes, and through his poor English and my poor Arabic, I surmised that he wanted me to give him 300 LE. I looked at his sad eyes and his frowning eyebrows, and they were the eyes of a sad man, and though he emitted the unsteady wails of a man in tears, his eyes were completely dry.

Through this experience, I tried to cultivate a posture of sympathy while at the same time refusing his pleas for money. Frankly, I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but even if he had been telling the truth, I would not have given him that money. It seemed somehow inappropriate for a taxi driver to hit up his American fare for what is, by Egyptian standards, a large sum of money (meanwhile, I had dropped that much on an air purifier for our bedroom). But that sense of inappropriateness is mitigated by the fact that, while this man may have been lying to me, this is a city where millions of it inhabitants are in desperate straits. I sympathize as much as I can, but as I function largely beyond the reach of this society, my ability to sympathize is seriously compromised. It’s because I can land in this developing country and be identified—correctly—with wealth and influence. And I’m not rich in the United States. I’m of modest means. Still, you take a salary of $40,000 a year and place it here, and you’re well off.

And it’s true. We live well here. Very well. We send out our clothes to be ironed. Seriously! We have all manner of items delivered—water, beer, Indian, pizza, Chinese, groceries (all of them), toilet paper, paper towels. I had an external hard drive delivered to our front door last week. We also employ a maid who would cook for us if we paid her a bit more every week. All these people who serve us are Egyptian. We spent a day last month proctoring language proficiency examinations and pulled down 3200 LE between us. Those paying top dollar to take the test? Egyptians.

This is power beyond even our ability to comprehend, just as our apartment, while large, is even larger given the space-starved city where it exists. It’s a complex mix of ethnicity, race, culture, country, but it all expresses great power. It’s a power that we wear, that shows on our faces and in our green eyes, in our red and brown hair, in our freckles and our straight white teeth. We glow with it. We wear it with all the authority of our Western features, which is a remarkable authority even if we don’t think we’re wearing it well at all. We wear it when we walk down the street and Amanda is ogled.

We wear it, we wear it, we wear it.

I gave the taxi driver 10 LE for fare—double the normal fare.

James

2007-10-06T13:59:00.000+02:00

I got memed by www.moonlightambulette.blogspot.com, one of my former colleagues who's gotten all Brooklyn-ed out and has a reading/writing blog and is getting her first novel published soon! These are the questions, which I just realized I was probably supposed to post on my blog instead of on her blog comments. Anyway, this has nothing to do with Cairo. Except I'll say we have an extended weekend because the university decided that 6 Oct's Armed Forces day would be celebrated on Sunday, the first day of our workweek. Three day weekend!

1. Hardcover or paperback, and why?
Paperback in my hands, hardcover on the shelf. I like to bend books, curl their spines in my fists.

2. If I were to own a book shop I would call it…
Dude, I can’t even title my stories.

3. My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…
I keep a little reading book of nice sentences. Here is something. It’s not a quotable quote, but whatever:

“In the wilds, each season has its wonders, but always, unchangingly, there is that immense heavy sound of heaven and earth, the sense of being surrounded on all sides, the darkness of the forest, the kindliness of the trees. All is heavy and soft, no thought is impossible there.” From Knut Hamsun’s novel, Growth of the Soil

4. The author (alive or diseased) I would love to have lunch with would be …
That diseased thing is really in poor taste. Alice Munro. If she’s busy, Iris Murdoch.

5. If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except from the SAS survival guide, it would be…
Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. Seems like I would be feeling pretty lonesome, and that book would crystallize that feeling, maybe make that feeling seem somehow beautiful, or maybe it would just help me off myself more quickly.

6. I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that…
I want something that temporarily sucks in the jacket of the hardcover book while I’m reading it, like into the spine of the book or something, which I always remove because it’s probably as uncomfortable for a book as a shawl seems to me. I mean, if we’re getting all goofy about books breathing and stuff. Actually, I take off the jacket because it gets in my way.

7. The smell of an old book reminds me of…
the bedroom in my grandmother’s house that contained all the books from my aunt’s college English major

8. If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be…
Ramona Quimby, of the series. Because I really wanted to pull other little girls’ curly springy hair.

9. The most overestimated book of all time is…
Um…maybe The Unbearable Lightness of Being? (This is what I said in the original post. But then another memed friend (motherswhowrite.blogspot.com) mentioned The Corrections, and I have to agree that this was one bad book. And not bad like Michael Jackson. I mean, before he was really bad. Or something.)

10. I hate it when a book…
doesn’t have characters that live on the page.

OK! So now I have to meme someone else! I'll go first to the only two other blogs I know of that haven't been memed by ambulette: 1) el apuro es mi negocio! 2) vidadepalabras! And the rest of you can comment here or email me: Jean Anne! Sari! Bryan!

Oh, wait! James!
A

2007-09-28T17:50:00.000+02:00

Rant?

I’ve been dressing a little more like I want to these days. I’ve never cared much for fashion, but I did buy a few skirts at home this summer that I’ve been sporting on the streets of Cairo. I’ve been wearing shirts that bare more arm, more skin below the neck. I’ve been wearing sandals. Oooooh! To be honest, I’ve been less frumpy than I’ve been in years. Even James looks a bit flummoxed when I put on a skirt. I was wondering how this would play out for me – if I would get looked up and down more, or less. Or if I would actually begin to get harassed in the way that many white women say they are harassed in Cairo. Last year I remember seeing women dressed this way and thinking: Oh, she’s green. She just got here. She doesn’t know.

All in all, my public experience is the same as ever. Actually, it’s a little better. I think it’s because I know where I’m going and have cultivated a look of confidence. Maybe the stares blend into white noise with the honking. I don’t dart my eyes away from men. I keep my pupils cool, my gaze nonplussed. None of this is going to stop the next little boy’s hands from picking at my chest in a crowded street or the next hooting man on a bike from making obscene fruit-like gestures with his hands. Sure. This is going to happen. It’s repulsive that a little boy or a little man thinks this is all right. And I really do think that the next time a twelve year old decides he’s going to grab me for the edification of his buddies, I’m going to smack his face. And I really do plan on staying away from crowds of men when possible. Nonetheless, things have been better. It’s hot out. So I wear a skirt. The sun gifts me with freckled arms. At the end of the day, I don’t stink quite so much. And I haven’t seen anyone get too worked up about it.

Granted, I live in Zamalek and teach at the rich-kid university, and there is a specific cultural feel here. Foreigners are common, and you must have some serious means to live in Zamalek (or, in our case, have a rent-free experience), and class blatantly determines your dress code. Gamal, the president's son and one of the richest people in Egypt, supposedly just moved here, and now the routes of the taxi drivers have mysteriously changed and certain streets are gated up. Truth be told, there are things about Zamalek that I don’t get. There are Cairene attitudes about Zamalek that won’t ever sink into my consciousness. Zamalek is the best version of Manhattan that Cairo has. And I will never live in Manhattan, so there you go. It’s true that I would rather not wear a skirt in Old or Islamic or Coptic Cairo, though even in these places I would not anticipate some sort of riot courtesy of my bared calves. But people stare. And women I know keep getting harassed. And even though the government denies it, I'm pretty convinced that at Eid last year, right next to the university, a bunch of young men assaulted women. Do you see how this is getting complicated?

Still, over the last year, I’ve been thinking a lot about my beliefs. I think of myself as a liberal, sure. That’s not going to change. Like the Republicans, though, I have been experiencing a bit of party disruption. I’ve been meeting some really intolerant liberals. Of course, it is foolish to believe that liberalism will breed tolerance. The inflexible belief that one is open-minded can cause one to be more conservative and intolerant than the people one criticizes. I’m not claiming I haven’t ever been like this. Sure I have. Sure I am.

Yet in the case of Egypt, foreign women’s complaints about how much they get harassed are getting old. I’ve gotten to the point where the looks don’t bother me much, where I don’t consider the looks to be harassment. While it was a different experience this summer to walk down a U.S. street and have no one bat an eye at me or my legs, it’s not as if people in the U.S. don’t ever emit salacious stares. It’s not as if I haven’t had my caboose lasciviously checked out in the U.S. Frankly, the fact that people so often tend to ignore each other in the U.S. is a bit creepy after living in a place where almost everyone, in tripping over almost everyone else, feels compelled to connect with strangers.

When foreign women (Americans, mainly) in Cairo tell me stories about being harassed, I’m not sure what they want in return. They close their stories and look in my eyes and wait. Do they want me to hate Egyptian men? Do they want me to agree that this is some foul place? Do they want me to regale them with my own stories of harassment, with my own experiences? Are they thinking that my experiences have somehow curdled into generalized hatred?

Sometimes I just nod and wonder what time it is. Sometimes I say, “You know, I just don’t get that a lot,” and I laughingly add something self-deprecating about my physique or say something about how I have always cultivated a public attitude of asexuality. In these cases, I am glad for my “Midwestern” ability to cloud my feelings. What good would it do to point out the bald inconsistency in claiming to have so much understanding and tolerance while masochistically despising a country of people, or one whole gender within one country? Really. There is this weird gleam in some women’s eyes when they talk about how terrible the harassment is here – as J said recently, it’s like they’re taking a big bubble bath in it. Listen, white lady. I think I feel much sorrier for the Sudanese refugee who takes a maid job and is abused by her Egyptian employer. Just a bit.

I guess my lack of empathy with these women is also selfish. I do get the sense that some women think I am in self-denial about harassment in Cairo. Certainly, here I am pointing out my feelings on the internet, another way to confront something slantways instead of just insisting upon my point of view in person, which I have been conditioned to feel is rude and confrontational. You can always leave a blog entry. So I sit and listen to the complaints. I must be boring company. You know, I’ve got that Midwestern reserve. I like to mull it over. I like to wait. I’m not always sure that the throw-up of my contemplation needs to be puddled in someone’s lap. I do like to avoid a misstep. I’ve been at the butt end of remarks about Midwesterners, but I find that the kind of reserve inculcated in me in the abdomen of America has actually helped me in being, as James, another Midwesterner, said recently, “not just OK in Egypt, but fine.” Happy. I certainly don’t think that the Midwest is infallible, and I definitely don’t think Egypt is. But pollution, of any sort, doesn’t have to blind you.

I keep thinking about Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s visit to Columbia University last week. Why invite someone to your university in the first place if you are going to ridicule him before he has a chance to speak? Let the little man hang himself with his ignorant and hateful remarks, as he undoubtedly would have anyway – why preempt that with your own brand of idiocy? Everybody the media focused on looked like an ass. It was like they were all at a Little League game. Here were all these little bright ideas – these important and breathing ideas waiting to be molded into something decent, sitting in the dugout, handling the ball, swinging and missing, swinging and hitting, sliding up a cloud, staring at grass, accumulating dirt necklaces and blurry green stains and bands of sweat – here was the beauty of all these ideas mucking around with each other – yet a bunch of adults wrestled separately on the bleachers, in their own game of words and misunderstandings and inflexible beliefs and haunted, sullied pasts. Behind the bleachers were the smirking adults who thought they were above it all. They couldn’t even see the game. Irony, which is perhaps a key myth of the liberal psyche, is over-schlepped. It’s confused with detachment and, at times, with humor. And it is too often connected to the ideals of liberalism, which are easily overcooked, just like any ideal placed in a human fist. Sincerity, on the other hand, is too often mocked, a dusty book from childhood relegated to the shelf.

When I walk out the door in Cairo, I am ever conscious of being female and, as a result, knowing that whole parts of my personality are as nothing, are severed. This is not a pleasant feeling. It’s not something I think is okay. I really resent that James can have a completely different experience than me, that his maleness so blatantly asserts power, possession. Icky-poo. (James begs to differ in some respects, and I hope he tells you about it sometime). I am ever conscious that the way I choose to act can be perceived as some foreign stereotype, that the conversations I engage in with taxi drivers while baring a leg can be misconstrued. None of this will change. Last May, when I wanted to hug my real-live male Egyptian friend goodbye before departing Egypt, even I understood that we should go upstairs to the apartment in order to avoid freaking out the dudes on my street, who were already peering suspiciously at my audacious appearance with a male friend sans the Keeper-Man, James. I don’t always defy that assumption – sometimes it’s easier. Without a doubt, I find typical Egyptian attitudes about women, even the attitudes of some of the male Egyptians I know and like, to be unacceptable. I can’t fathom, for instance, why any woman should cover herself in heavy black fabric in the desert heat. This is of course the woman's attitude as well. Some of my Egyptian friends have heard about my feelings, and they will continue to hear about it. There sure are lots of sexists in America, too. But to view these attitudes as wholly reflective of the humanity of a person, of a culture, of a region, of a country sometimes exposes much more about your own ugly flaws. I gotta say I’m kinda sick-a that. I really hope I don't do it too much.

A

2007-09-24T17:53:00.001+02:00

When we first arrived last year, Neghi was ringing our doorbell at 9 am on the first morning. How did he know we had arrived? A few days later, a member of Cairo’s permanent underclass, known as the zeballeen, visited us. The zeballeen are garbage men by trade—it’s a family tradition that goes back for generations. You’ll see the families walking along the crowded streets, the father bent at the waist, arms contorted around the twisted straps of an ENOURMOUS SACK OF GARBAGE, which is balanced somehow on his back. The sizes of the sack and the man are dramatically out of proportion in relation to one another. The kids, if they have come along that day, are sometimes walking alongside. If the zeballeen is particularly industrious, well-off, resourceful or just lucky, he’ll be pedaling down the street aboard a kind of centaur-like creation, half-bicycle, half-cart, full of other people’s garbage.

Where do they take the garbage? We’ve heard it’s off to the edge of town, where they sort out the plastic and glass bottles, which can be returned for some money, and they burn the rest of the garbage. Given the size of this city, I can only image the size and depth of these burning pits. They must be vast…and stinky. In fact, depending upon which way the breeze blows in the Nile Valley, some of that smoldering stink can waft back over the city, which already has problems with pollution.

I’d like to provide a detailed summary of the typical day of the zeballeen, but I don’t know enough to give a faithful telling of their particular tale. But I know enough—the heavy sacks full of garbage, for instance—to have an inkling. Which brings us back to the zeballeen who visited us last year, in the first week of our stay in Egypt. Apparently, without my entirely knowing it, I engaged in some sort of contract with him regarding the disposal of our refuse—even though the building has an “official” garbage man to whom we pay 10 LE per month. We had been told about this guy, the “official” guy, but the zeballeen fellow, who I meant to politely decline, instead begins to knock on our door to collect our garbage. And I find myself sorting out the bottles for him, so he won’t have to, and shelling out another 10 LE per month (not to mention “bonuses” at the post-Ramadan Eid and Christmas) for his services, which really aren’t necessary, if the truth be told, since we have the official guy.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year thinking about this zeballeen fellow and why I haven’t fired him. I find that I don’t have the stomach for it, to fire a man so I can save less than $2 per month. I also think that reason reveals an attitude of pitying condescension on my part; my good intentions and well-meaning attitude only underscores what is an indescribably dramatic difference in the conditions of life for the zeballeen and me. Even my thirteen year-old nieces have $2 of disposable income.

Am I just handing out charity? No. I give charity to the old woman who begs on Falaki St. near campus, even though her panhandling is dressed up as a legitimate business—packets of tissues in exchange for charity (truth be told, tissues are in high demand here). For the zeballeen, I am supposed to charge a fee in exchange for a service. The man has professional pride, after all, as an independent businessman of sorts. But the truth is that I don’t really need his service, and he did engage in the rather “unctuous grace that qualifies as deference in the Middle East” in order to secure my monthly fee—he knew that I didn’t understand exactly what I was agreeing to—and he will let me twist in the wind of my ignorance of the language as he attempts to extract extra money for both Muslim and Christian holidays. But I think I know why he does these things. He does them because 10 LE per month is in fact a lot of money and he is willing to hump a month’s worth of garbage to the edge of town and light it on fire in order to get it. He is willing to pretend he missed me while I was away this summer. It’s the same reason why the taxi drivers will sometimes get worked up over another 2 LE they perceive to deserve (the taxis have meters, but none of them work). It’s the reason why the vendors at the pyramids will offer “free” camel rides then charge 50 LE to help you off the moody beasts. It’s because they need the money. They need it. I think I understand very little about such Egyptians, the vast classes of the economically depressed, but this much I know for sure. They need it to live. And so I’ll pay more for a cab and tip our gopher 10 LE each week, just for bringing a case of beer and some bottled water into our kitchen. I’ll pay the zeballeen 10 LE every month and I will resist the feeling that he is taking advantage, which wells up in me sometimes, usually when I am idly reading or watching satellite TV or looking at the dead potted plant he still hasn’t taken away.

After all, I know I’d do the same in his situation. Work for the money to live, and cling to it, and get a bit more here and there when I can. Wouldn’t you?

James

2007-09-13T15:48:00.000+02:00

Desert Pups, Minya, April '07

2007-09-07T20:03:00.000+02:00

An Egyptian friend called us when we were in the U.S. When I mentioned to him that for some reason overly hyped Christianity was getting on my nerves (see J’s July 18, '07 post to see what I mean) and that it was weird, but I didn’t feel quite so overwhelmed by Islam in Egypt, he said, “Maybe it’s because you aren’t part of the culture.” Yes. DUH! It’s easy enough to shut it off when it’s not your Thang. It’s easy enough to walk past a soldier, his head to the prayer rug he’s unrolled on the sidewalk, and just to keep talking and swigging my bottled water. It’s easy to ignore the niqab when every other woman isn’t even veiled and she’s on the arm of a gentleman in an Italian suit. It’s easy to shrug your shoulders at the loudspeaker that projects Friday’s shouting imam right into your bedroom when you can’t understand what he’s saying. Most of all, as my friend suggested (or as I interpreted for my own purposes), it’s easy to accept something that is running parallel but not intertwined in any concrete way with your life, and to then be able to see it as less of an intrusion than a rhythm that’s there in your experience, in that one singular experience you are having in a place that is foreign to you.

Next Thursday, Ramadan, which is celebrated at a different time every year, commences. The Egyptian government has already made us fall back an hour so as to prepare for shorter days and keep Ramadan more bearable. This year it will be hotter than the previous Ramadan, so I imagine it will be more miserable to go without water, food, and all vices (cigarettes, sex, sometimes even looking at a woman) the whole day than it was last year. I teach an 8:00 class this semester, but the Ramadan schedule has me teaching at 7:30 in the morning. I don’t think it matters – the students will be tired no matter what time of day it is. I like this because with my other classes I’ll be done about 1pm, and traffic around 2 or 3 stays in one honking place during Ramadan.

When I was in college and stupider than at present, I went through a semester or so where I fasted each Monday. I don’t really remember the rationale, just that it had something to do with the gluttonous nature of college weekends and some stupid shit about “purifying” myself and the constant, unoriginal, and false belief that I was a fatty. Simply put, after scarfing down a frozen pizza and a bag of Cadbury eggs with one of my friends at 4 in the morning, I decided to embark upon fasting. I relive this embarrassing situation only to point out that, after a day and night of fasting, the next time I ate was a miserable experience culminating in body meltdown. (I’ve heard there are “good” ways of fasting, but I was 19.)

Now imagine that fasting is not only a month-long religious obligation, but at the moment of breaking fast (Iftar), you are plied with ridiculous mounds of glorious food. Then, a couple of hours later, you and your sluggish body are expected to go back to school for your rescheduled Ramadan night class. Not fun for you or for your teacher, which was me when I got stuck with the night shift last year.

Anyway, just a note, I guess, that Ramadan is about to begin. Everything shifts – daily schedules, general moods, the nature of student excuses, and your ability to complete anything bureaucratic. Oh, yes – now this is something I notice. The other stuff, the more important spiritual stuff, is what I’ll try to remember and acknowledge, rather than just my petty annoyance.

A

2007-09-02T16:07:00.000+03:00

I’m certainly no design maven, but Amsterdam’s airport was impressive – clean, modern lines, sort of like whatever a high-end secret IKEA devotee would put together. Yeah, IKEA. (By the way, Europe's airports are so much more accommodating to international travelers. O'Hare's international section sucks. Even Cairo's airport beats the crap out of it.) The airport has a casino, an art museum, a meditation room, plenty of overpriced “duty-free” shops, lounges, and a food court. And lots of natural light, telling us that yes, indeed, there was an outside world. And we had a 13-hour layover, so we went to it. Passport control consisted of a nod and a stamp, no questions. Just like in December when we were stuck in London, we re-discovered the sad little exchange rate between Euro-cash and Ameri-cash as we purchased our train tickets, which translated to about $20 apiece for a ten minute ride to downtown. We had plans, see? The Van Gogh museum, Madame Tussaud’s, a healthy bite to eat, a glimpse of the Red Light district. Couldn’t wait! On the train beside us sat some American boys who were complaining about how the world looks the same everywhere. Shut up.

We burst into a world of bicycles, pedestrians, and canals.

It was eight in the morning, so the street cleaners were just coming out to take care of the previous night’s refuse. There were cats hanging around in front of the shops, but most had collars with bells and Pantene Pro-V coats. Aw, kitties. Madame Tussaud’s wax museum sat on one side of the city square. A waxen Christina Aguilera preened behind glass. Impressive enough, we said, as we parked ourselves on a pigeon-covered bench in lieu of standing in the winding line to the museum. Musicians played in the square, and a man in a skintight blue suit covered with metal (meant to suggest that he had spent a little too much time in brine) sat on a bucket, which was decorated the same as he was, and slowly put a mask over his head. I think he was Neptune or Poseidon, but I have no idea. He had a trident. Some little kids tried to talk to him, and he shooed them away when they wouldn’t dispense money into a little hat he left on the sidewalk. He was really adamant about people giving him money, like he would come over and stomp your camera if you dare try not to pay him for the privilege. J totally got his picture taken with Neptune. You know it's true. But neither one of us likes to have our jetlagged faces advertised.

Once we realized that our butts would be planted to the benches if we didn’t get moving, we quickly came upon the infamous coffee shops, where you can enjoy your hash in public and in peace. Because of the strange nature of jetlag, in which you feel at times quite lucid while simultaneously as if your muscles have atrophied even as you continue to walk around, we didn’t need the hash. Plus, who wants to walk into Egypt reeking of pot? Not me. On the street, people ate paper cones of French fries slathered – no, gooped – with mayonnaise. Because I like to eat, I gravitated toward the restaurant menus posted on windows. A few Indian restaurants looked good, but they appeared to be advertising services that went beyond the food. That’s because hand in hand with the coffee shops we were passing were the sex shops, which gave onto the Red Light district. Plate glass windows lined the street, some covered with red velvet curtains, and others opened to reveal bikini-clad ladies ready for business. They would eyeball us with the gaze we see in the most supposedly benign of TV, ads, films. None of them were the same, though. At least they all had a persona. I never saw a man hawking his wares, but maybe I didn’t search long enough.

Lots of things in that spot struck me, but the most interesting was that this section of the city was not physically cut off from the rest. Men and women pushed strollers down the street and held toddlers’ hands. Lovely apartments spilled flowers from windowboxes just above many prostitutes’ working spaces. On corners, construction workers unearthed pavement. Suitcases were rolled down the street. Shopkeepers washed windows. Shiny cats flicked their tails as they peered at the canal water. In front of one shop, a group of tourists scratched their chins at the seed selections. In the next window over from a glaring prostitute’s space, a placid man painted a wall.

Later, we found ourselves in front of Rembrandt’s house, a small museum of exorbitant price. We eschewed the museum for its next-door tourist bar, Rembrandt Corner, where I got a yogurt, honey, and granola breakfast. The ceiling fans were on a rotating pulley system, and the food served by the surly waitress emerged from a dumbwaiter.

It had been about 5 hours. I dealt out the idea of the Van Gogh museum, and we looked at each other, and we shook our heads, and we made our way back through a street fair (where one used-ware shop was selling a "Let's Roll!" plate), onto the train, and into the airport, where we skimmed by passport control and promptly found the lounge with the reclining chairs. I began my week of Poor Decisions About Sleeping or Not Sleeping by nodding off about 45 minutes, waking up, envying J’s slackened jaw, and heading to the airport museum, where I learned something about minor Dutch artists from the 1700s. I didn’t sleep on the plane, either, because Babel is a good film. Brad Pitt probably should have been nominated for that. But I’ve found out a little something about the arbitrary nature of the Oscars, after tearing through all the old issues of Entertainment Weekly that J’s mom sent back with me. I love that magazine. I would like to say it’s because they review quality books, which they do, but I love me a fashion do and don’t, which I got in the Oscar issue. Of course, I’m sitting here wearing a pink shirt with a longhorn on it that says: “Tough as…Texas.” My gift from J’s summer jaunt into the Lone Star state.

A

2007-08-30T13:16:00.000+03:00

It’s not so much that I enjoy the experience of jet lag so much as I appreciate the license it gives me to be a lazy bum, which pretty much describes me since returning to Cairo. The journey from the US to Egypt seems a little shorter each time we make it, the adjustment to life here just that much smoother. Our descent into a mostly non-stinky Cairo night was smooth and easy, which characterized both of our flights this time around. My only complaint is that I didn’t have the attention span to watch all of Chinatown, which was in the on-demand library of movies accessible on the TV in the back of the seat in front of me. But the plane had a lot of empty seats, so it was easy to spread out and relax, and the wine flowed freely, and for free.

Our pal Ahmed was waiting for us on the other side of passport control, hopping up and down happily, grinning widely. He was the first of many to receive us so gladly. He even hugged M in public, much to the interest of a couple Arab guys who were warily eyeballing the whole situation. He lives with his family in Heliopolis, a suburb beside the airport, and he had come at 2 am to bring our house keys. He was doing this because our bathrooms were remodeled over the summer, the locks changed after the work was done. Plus he was eager to see us, and we were eager to see him. And what a change to have a familiar face awaiting us on the end of our journey! Just another way that our arrival into Cairo was markedly different than a year ago.

And then it was off along the flyover road that sweeps you in rollicking fashion over the dark immensity of the packed neighborhoods and past the giant advertisement for CSI. Hey there, Gil Grissom. What are you doing in this part of the world? Our driver was the same one who had taken us to Zamalek a year ago, and as M noted, he had seemed gruff at the time. Now he was just a guy doing his job, probably a little bit tired, but somehow somewhat gentle. He gave us the ol’ Hamdulillah after I found my passport a moment after misplacing it. He drove a Jeep. He avoided all the cars that had parked, inexplicably, along the narrow shoulder of the freeway, including one car whose tire had blown. A group of women in burkas stood beside the open trunk as a man lay on the freeway underneath the car, surveying the damage. A couple of girls dressed in white played near the bumper. We zoomed past. Just before we hit Zamalek, the driver served to avoid a microbus that had stopped in the middle of a busy street to pick up a passenger, who ran into the street and climbed aboard. A moment later, the driver deftly avoided a car driving along the same busy street in reverse. M and I shared a grin over that one.

Moments later we were back. We woke up the poor, sleepy young bowaab who sleeps in the “office” (really just a closet underneath the steps). He was polite as always, just with bedhead!

It was a welcome sight to return home. That’s strange to say, since I am reminded of my whiteness and my foreignness every time I walk out the front door. But, it’s home, as well. Our apartment is still huge—and is even larger than it seems to our eyes, given the pervasive lack of space in this city—and now it features two sweetly remodeled bathrooms. These bathrooms make me smile each time I visit them or simply pass by them. As you can imagine, I’m smiling a lot, even if I’m a little sheepish about being so happy about such a thing. Another thing I’ve enjoyed is the happy reception we’ve received from Neghi, who received his digital watch two days ago, UmmNadia, from the good folks at the Euro Deli, from the man who cleans my shoes (he gave me a hug), and a much longer cast of characters who hang out in our neighborhood and who have helped to make this a friendly place to live and to return to.

Next time: Amsterdam. Here’s a preview.

James

2007-08-17T19:40:00.000+03:00

Simply Newsy Unless, Perhaps, You Belong to my Family

A week left in the U.S.
Together James and I have covered much of the nation. After flying in from Dayton, J helped a friend move from Portland to Houston, and this week he helped another friend move to D.C. I think he’s ready for a nap.

As for me – MN, KS, much of IL, IA, and OH have been covered in the Midwestern Tour of 2007. However, I’ve had plenty of naps, sometimes with babies and toddlers snoozing on me, and other times on the 13 hour train ride from Dodge City to Galesburg, by which time I could have been in Africa, but dang it if those train seats aren’t way more comfy than a plane’s. My new niece is a sweaty-headed little cutie, and my nephew is an utter and hilarious joy. Visited the twins, a pair of nieces about to walk, in IA; saw MN buddies, J’s OH family, my southern IL family, etc. Below, you will see my favorite little boy on his first fishing trip courtesy of Grandpa. He couldn't sit still yet managed to catch three bass.

Deer in my parents' yard:

Last weekend Mom and I went to Granny’s 80th birthday bash. Aunt Tammy, the caterer, had a cake made with an edible replica of Granny as a 16 year old and had put together a photo collage of Granny, all of her children, and each of her eleven grandkids.

Nobody seemed willing to eat the part of the cake where Granny’s face was:

My dear granny glowed with happiness, and there was the usual grinning and laughter of the women in the bunch, in addition to the witty repartee of Ashtyn, my cousin Jamie’s oldest kid, who was wearing a chic pair of Hot Wheels sunglasses and was highly interested in the bubble-gum pink punch. Cousins Kelly and Jamie, sisters, are super-cutely-pregnant. And I got to see my “baby” cousins, all grown up now and the cutest (and probably nicest) guys ever. Below are three generations - Granny is 25 years older than Mom, who is 25 years older than me, a fun and symmetrical coincidence that I broke when I leapt beyond 25.

This week I headed to Springfield to do research at the Abraham Lincoln presidential library, which is right across the street from the new museum. The museum is awesome – so awesome it was covered in the Smithsonian magazine when it opened a couple of years ago. If you don’t count my silly fear of the ubiquitous lifelike replicas of Lincoln located at every turn, I had a super time. Recommended. Because of a technical dilemma, the hotel upgraded me to their "Governor's Suite." I seriously doubt if Blagojevich has stayed in that room, but the whirlpool and adjoining meeting room were nice. If only I had had a Power Point presentation to show to my imaginary friends. Downtown Springfield is quite beautiful, but I was sad that I didn’t run into Barack Obama. That ranks right up there with not seeing Dave Chapelle when J and I were in Yellow Springs, OH. I only visited the presidential library, the A. Lincoln museum, and the Old State Capitol, but I've already got some vivid memories of sweltering days and the yellow school bus that transported me and other whiny kids to Lincoln's tomb back in the days of Room Mothers and soggy sandwiches. One day in Springfield I had lunch at a place called The Garden of Eatin’ and was enjoying the music in the café when I realized it was the same kind of music I hear all the time in Egypt. I asked one of the girls at the front counter about it, and she said, “I don’t know” and yelled back to the kitchen, “Hey, Habib, what are we listening to?” “It’s Persian,” Habib yelled back. Oh, Arabia – we’ll see you soon.

We’re looking forward to going back to Egypt for several reasons, but one of the most superficial is that we’re sick of traveling. (I know – BOO-freaking-HOO, and get a real job, right?). One of the things I was most concerned about before moving overseas was not spending quality time with family. Yet I think I spent more time with my nephew (and his new little sis) this past year than I would have had I still been in Minneapolis. Something about being far away can make you more thoroughly enjoy and appreciate the people at home. Plus, it can sure as hell guilt people into prioritizing you when you’re here. Anyway, I’m grateful to everybody who gave up time to hang out and glad for the Q-time with all family and friends willing and able to spend it with me. Come visit us in Egypt, and we’ll treat you up right.

A

2007-08-04T22:37:00.000+03:00

It’s not really unique for me to identify myself as one of the former U of MN people who lived in Minneapolis, a quarter of a mile from the I-35 bridge. I lived there for four years before moving last year to Cairo. I knew that area – I walked and drove around, under, and over that bridge almost every day. I drove over that bridge multiple times this June. But if you live in Minneapolis, you have driven over that bridge.

When I am horrified by or grieving about something, I stiffly clutch my jaw with my palm, as if somehow holding my face up can keep me cool. I sat there like that in front of CNN after J called me from L.A. to let me know about the bridge collapse. I called people – one friend had simply decided to take 94 instead of 35 that day because he had a craving for a sweet shop called Diana’s Bananas. “Diana’s Bananas saved me,” he said, downplaying it Minnesota-edly, even though he’s from Arkansas. Once I thought I had everyone covered, I would think of one more person. And then I would think about people I’ve lost touch with. My former colleagues. Even people I disliked – oh, please, let them be all right. My former students. And so on.

In Egypt, it was about 1 am when the bridge collapsed. Even so, I received an email from one of my Egyptian friends just a few hours after the incident. He knew I had lived in Minneapolis, and he wanted to send his sympathy for my family and friends and make sure everyone was all right.

On September 11th, I remember clutching my jaw. I had been eating some granola that morning in Ames, Iowa, before I found out. I woke up J and snapped on the TV like everyone else. Hours later, I looked down at the bowl of granola, lumped in soymilk, in my lap. I didn’t cancel my classes the next day like many instructors – instead, my students and I tried to talk about it. What a mess that discussion probably was.

My Egyptian friend has a September 11th story too. Once he heard the news, he ran to find his brother in a café, which was eerily silent except for the TV. The men in the café were stunned. “No one was rejoicing,” he said sternly, when I claimed that this was indeed different than some of the images I remember CNN broadcasting – for instance, the image of Arabs joyfully burning an American flag. In 2001 I could not have told you what country that image was from.

Despite the nice time I am having in Egypt, there is this sadness, a beaten-down kind of sadness that comes when one’s social and economic life, due to the stagnant politics of the country, are not really free. Many taxi drivers in Cairo have PhD’s in fields such as engineering, medicine, and law – and they are stuck there, where there aren’t jobs, and often barred entrance from places like the U.S. Yet so many of these people mourned for those killed on September 11th. And my friend, across an ocean and a continent, heard about Minneapolis, a city nowhere close to the population of Cairo and in a tragedy – yes, I think it’s a tragedy, so don’t misunderstand – that claimed comparatively few lives, and he sent his regrets.
More often than not, I have received a surprised response when I say that the Egyptian people are the nicest I have ever met.

A

2007-07-18T00:03:00.000+03:00

Bye Bye, Egypt

The night we left Egypt, we were met at the front entrance to our apartment by university driver Hossam, the same young man who had whisked us away to the Western Desert in the waning days of last fall’s Ramadan. “Hossam!” I said, and he smiled back at me. I’m not sure if he recognized me or simply thought, “Look, a whitey.” In any event, he was as affable as our language barrier would allow for, even saying “bye bye, Egypt,” as we sped away from Zamalek and downtown and began the fast and winding drive to Heliopolis and the airport, where we were deposited, for the first time, at Terminal 1, the much more modern facility that was constructed, naturally, after Terminal 2. This terminal was strange because, well, it was a full-on modern facility, cavernous, windowed, the floors shiny, organized lines of people shuffling through the security line to the ticket counter, where they expertly got my bags sent to Dublin and M’s to Chicago, even though we were checking in at the same time and departing on the same flight to Amsterdam. Another odd thing: at this point it’s around 2:30 in the morning and, but for a late afternoon nap, I had been awake since ten in the morning. This wouldn’t be my first all-nighter.

We departed Egypt around 4:30 am. M fell asleep before the plane even took off and remained that way, slack-jawed, for most of the flight. Me, I had burst through that unfortunate boundary where fatigue turns to bleary-eyed wakefulness, so I sat there with my eyes half-closed for half the flight, watching a Diane Keaton movie on the screen. And damn, those KLM 747’s haven’t changed much since I flew on them in the late 1990’s. Even the stewardesses’ electric blue flight uniforms haven’t changed a lick.

Something else that kept we awake was the rollicking travel over continental Europe. Takeoff was fine and dandy, but as soon as I saw the first glimmerings of the horizon through the windows to my left, we also entered a thick soup of fog that reached up to our 41,000 feet of altitude and made for a rollicking adventure. So I spent a lot of time watching the horizon dip below and rise above the wing, and being pissed that I couldn’t get my speakers to work, so I had no idea what Diane Keaton was teaching Mandy Moore about life and such. When we landed, some armed security guards checked everybody’s passport before allowing us into the airport. They only gave ours a cursory glance, but the Arabs sure got a lot of attention. Isn’t that strange?

We said goodbye to one another in that suddenly hasty way that seems specific to airports: we trudge through the very long airport at Amsterdam, arrive at my gate, find it boarding, M realizes her flight to Chicago will board in another 10-15 minutes…and suddenly there are public hugs and kisses, which seemed strange to me after a year in Egypt, where we didn’t even hold hands in public. Then I was aboard the much smaller and green plane taking me to Dublin. It was aboard this plane that I was reminded of the friendliness of the Irish, thanks to a guy named Patty, who had spent the weekend in Amsterdam playing in a football league and was returning to Sligo on the west coast of Ireland, where he lived with his four children. Beside Patty was Dublin Ken, who ordered two cans of Heineken about twenty minutes into the hour-long flight and managed to finish them both, although I don’t actually remember him taking a drink. WE descended into Dublin on a partly cloudy day, but to me the sky was brilliantly blue, the waters or the Irish Sea as we coasted over it pristine, the shoreline lush, so so green, and the air clearer than it ever is in Cairo. Patty tried grumbling about this, I believe because the Irish are still attached to their downtrodden identity of not-so-long-ago. The truth is that Ireland is thriving these days and a bunch of ugly, soulless, pre-fab buildings are replacing the cool older ones that help make Ireland such an appealing destination in the first place.

I caught the bus to Monaghan town an hour after passing through passport control, and I only 90 minutes I was in CO. Monaghan, the northernmost county in the Republic of Ireland. That fast, to go from east coast to northernmost! That’s like traveling from the Atlantic seaboard to Minnesota in the same period of time. I spent the night in Monaghan town, at the Hillgrove Hotel, where I napped heavily, enjoyed their pool, steam room, sauna and hot tub, and hung out with my pasty-skinned brethren. It was curious to hang with people who look so much like me. Where I live, I am conspicuous. Nobody looks at me and thinks (in Arabaic), “That is one light-skinned Egyptian.” In Ireland, everybody assumed I was Irish until I opened my mouth and spoke. The typical response: “You’re not from around here?” No, I say, and then I explain how I am from America but I had started that morning in Egypt, my country of residence. This got their attention. Question: “Is it safe there?” To which I say, in one way or another: I’m as white as you are, and nothing bad has happened to me yet.

The next morning I arrived at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, an artist’s retreat in rural Co. Monaghan, about 5 miles from the nearest village of Newbliss. What can I say of the place? I had a remarkable time. I found myself slipping into an insular, quiet life, hardly social (and even this small place had its modest social society), days built around writing my 1,000 daily words, walking the grounds and encountering friendly dogs who became my closest pals for 4 weeks, napping (a lot), reading, cycling to Newbliss for groceries, beer and the butcher: salmon and chicken every day. I was still plagued by the strange feeling that I was not doing enough writing, since, after all, I found plenty of time to nap, drink beer, and watching movies and TV shows stored on my laptop. Why not two large per day, or three? I also found myself thinking about taking photography classes, which I have long meant to do but never had the time. I thought about owning a dog of my own some day, or learning how to cycle, really and truly learning about it, the strategies and the best way to use the gear shifts…all these small things leaked into my life, looming large. I spent a sunny afternoon photographing the exotic flowers and thought I should learn to identify them (I kept myself plenty busy identifying all the birds). I think this is what happens when you push teaching aside, push aside your personal life as you know it. All these small things you might have momentarily considered learning, perhaps late at night of during a particularly restful weekend, when spaces emerge and respites seem best filled with some activity that will turn you into the more-interesting person you still envision yourself becoming, someday. Anyway, four relatively carefree weeks passed in this way, and lonesomeness did not really bother me until that last week, which was also my least-productive week of writing.

This was followed by two days in Dublin. Perhaps more on this another time.

Bye bye, Ireland.

Then I came back here, to America. On the flight in, Tom Ridge appeared on our television sets to tell the foreigners on the flight how happy the US is to welcome them in, but we’ll need their fingerprints, an optic scan and a vial of still-warm blood to make sure they don’t want to do a jihad on us. He also listed the number of countries whose citizens can enter the US without benefit of a visa. I noticed, unhappily, that most of these countries are predominantly white. Isn’t that funny?

Since I’ve been back, I find that I have taken a lot of interest in things American. Visiting the Waffle House seems like a cultural experience. So, too, does taking in a baseball game on July 4. Here you see me taking a picture of Ken Griffey Jr. as he lines a foul ball down the right field line.

Otherwise, it’s interesting to be back in the land of Jesus Christ. In Egypt and in all Muslim countries, it’s against Islam to depict images of the Prophet Mohammed, since an image is considered an imitation, and why imitate that who is transcendent? America is a little different. You can’t spit without hitting an image of our handome, European-looking religious transcendent. Sometimes you can’t even drive down I-75 without seeing a 62-foot high scultpture of Him reaching up from the man-made lake before the Solid Rock Church. Sometimes.

James

2007-06-18T04:49:00.000+03:00

SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

My short story, "Boiler Room," is now on the shelves in the summer issue of the Indiana Review, 29.1.

"On the shelves" actually means: You can do one of three things: 1) Order it via the handy printable order form on the IR website. 2) See the "list of bookstores" link on the IR website, where you might find a store near you. 3) Get it from the library or do an interlibrary loan.

http://www.indiana.edu/~inreview/

Thanks for your support,
A

2007-05-27T17:05:00.000+03:00

So Long, See You Tomorrow

A few evenings ago, M and I were standing at the window, looking down at out street. It’s a view I’ve become quite accustomed to and which I’ve taken pains to describe more than once on this blog. “It seems like we’ve been here forever,” I said, and she agreed.

My father likes to describe the giddy feeling of displacement he gets after traveling by plane—how, in a just a few hours, you can take off in Los Angeles and land in Dayton. It’s a feeling I’ve had a lot this year, and I’ve usually had it standing firmly on the ground (or on the deck of a yacht). I seem to have left Minneapolis longer than 11 months ago. Even summer camp and all its heated dramas seems like a distant memory. Perhaps the most distant of all recent memories is our first arrival into Cairo—the bleary-eyed arrival into the hazy, primordial stink of summer nights here. The ride into Zamalek from Heliopolis, with an equally exhausted colleague chatting in my ear. The dark and narrow streets of the island, that sense of finally being about as lost as I care to be. Everything was so new to us and that newness registers in my memory as a kind of stain on oak, or the feeling of an antique gift being unwrapped. It’s familiar to me now, but I can remember the newness. I remember our bawaab awakening us the next day (after noon), to introduce himself. I had no idea what he was saying to me, but somehow I knew he was the bawaab. I remember our first foray out into the street, the sensory overload of what is really about the most benign street in the most benign neighborhood in the city. I remember my whiteness pulsing, and I remember telling myself that I’d get used to it.

I wanted to get used to it. I think sometimes we put a premium on newness for its own sake, and that as soon as we begin to feel accustomed, then the shine has come off our original purpose in doing the new thing. I wanted very much to come here and be a good young professional, make no doubt about that. It’s a subject for another post. What I also wanted was to come to a place like Egypt and see for myself what life is like, what people are like, what happens when an American lives in the Middle East and walks down the street and does, in some measure, represent his country to those who live in this country. I wanted to be from the America of George W. Bush and the Iraq War and to walk down the street anyway. I wanted to be an American who can think and act with respect toward others—indeed, when appropriate, in deference to others. I wanted to give a different image, and I wanted to see a truer image than I had been shown.

This is what I’ve seen:

James

2007-05-26T18:20:00.000+03:00

In a short time, we're leaving Egypt for the summer. Today, on our way out for a walk, Neghi (the bawaab) informed us he wanted a Casio watch from America. The old man who guards another building came over and tried to translate, because I thought Neghi wanted to know what time we were leaving on Monday, since the word for "time" is the same as the word for "watch," even though when I think back on it, he was clearly saying, "I want a watch." Neghi kept giving me a disapproving look every time I told him we were leaving at one in the morning.

Suddenly, as happens here, we were surrounded by well-meaning Egyptians trying to get Neghi's message across. (This unabashed friendliness is what I will miss the most when I am in America.)

Finally, we understood what he wanted.

Then the old man said Neghi wanted the numbers in Arabic. I mimed something like, "In America? Pshaw!"

Neghi shook his head furiously and pretended he was going to fight the old man as he pointed at his watch.

"Numbers in English," the old man said. Mafish mish queda, we agreed.

Also, there are two lizards on our porch. The enclosed porch. They probably got in through that hole the satellite guy put in our wall. I walked in there to do something and hightailed it out when I caught a glimpse of scaly movement over my head. If you are my mother - thanks a lot - you've done a superb job instilling the heebie-jeebies in me. :)

Last night we watched the lizards get aggressive as they stared at us with bulgy eyes, and we listened to their small chirps - a sound we had all year mistaken for bats or an eerie brand of mockingbird we had just never seen.

I always liked the lizards when they were on the outside porch. I always thought they were really beautiful. We call one of the outside guys Little Jack Bauer after Kiefer's swift yet cunning character on that sort of anti-Middle East show, 24. Aww, we say, as we hang out the wet clothes. So cute!

Inside? Not so much. They're really fast. In the meantime, we leave them be, and they can eat the spiders and roaches and ants that will make their way to the abandoned abode. Eat up! Maybe they'll be fat lounging lizards when we get back, chilling in front of the TV.

I imagine that some memories of our first year in Cairo will become sharper with distance. Or, at least, we will look at them sideways and articulate them with a different kind of clarity. So there will probably be some blog entries. In the meantime, see you later, Cairo!
A

2007-05-22T00:19:00.000+03:00

Goodbye, Pink Bathroom

On Wednesday I collect papers, and by Memorial Day I should be in Chicago unless for some reason I get stuck on the runway at the Cairo airport for 6 hours again and then Amsterdam has a giant fog issue the likes of London’s December ’06. J leaves me at Amsterdam for a month-long writing residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, for which he got a grant, I am proud to say.

Anyway, right now I prefer to talk about the impending destruction of the bathrooms. Because we have ancient pipes that continue to be problematic (to have a perspective, we at least have a method to dispose of our sewage), the university is replacing them. OK, we said. No problem. Mafish mish queda, to put it in local terms. The guy in charge of all things plumbing and tile, Ahmed, says, OK, so one day I’ll come get you to go pick out tile. No, really. He said that.

Today was that day. I cannot explain to you the importance of tile in this town. I thought we already had nice tile. I was wrong. Ahmed tsk-tsked that it’s completely outdated.

So this afternoon I’m walking through a tile store with J, after getting to ride in my first pickup truck since coming to Egypt. People are giving us tea in glasses – because that’s what they do here, place scalding glasses of tea in your hands. We shuffle through pattern after pattern, all displayed on hinged doorway-type things (what is the term?) stacked against each other. Tiles are not just tiles here – they have flair. A bunch of tiles, all just one color? No, my friend. There must be decorative tiles, smattered in with the rest. I present to you our current decorative tiles so you understand what I mean:

We know a history professor who has Venus as part of her decorative tile in her bathroom. Today, we actually got away with requesting multi-colored tiles with no decoration.

I’m beginning to understand why people moan and groan so much about the decisions they make when renovating their homes. I don’t even have a stake in these bathrooms, even though for some odd reason I was trusted to pick out their design, which is hilarious since I can’t even dress myself fashionably. I think the only other thing I’ve selected from a group of hinged doorways was a Tiffany poster. Back in the day, it was the red hair that made her win out over Debbie Gibson.

To be honest, J has a better eye than me. But every time he stated his opinion, the tile guys gave him a funny look and then looked at me like: Why isn’t he clearing this with you, woman? And I looked back all: Oh, he thinks he’s in control but has no idea he’s not!

Oh, I’ve engaged in that kind of interaction before, and it wasn’t in Egypt.

Wait a minute, though. We picked out some beauties, perhaps to be photographed and included in the fall when we return to Cairo. But – we have a pink toilet and a sort of puke beige toilet, I say to Ahmed. That’s not gonna look too good with these tiles. Mafish mish queda, Ahmed says – we’ll replace it all.

A

2007-05-06T12:45:00.000+03:00

It's so weird when the forecast is sand...

2007-04-26T18:45:00.000+02:00

Known as the Bride of Upper Egypt based on its Nile Valley location, Minya (though technically in Middle Egypt) has been a difficult place to get to since Islamic militants launched terrorist attacks in the 1990s and were then systematically obliterated by the Egyptian government. Minya is located near the tombs of Beni Hassan, Deir al-Adhra (the Church of the Virgin, founded in 328 AD by Constantine’s mother), the ruins of Hermopolis, Tuna al-Gabel, the Frazer tombs, and Tell el-Amarna. We saw these sites, but there are many others.

Remember the Pharaoh Akenhaten and Queen Nefertiti? Tell el-Amarna was their realm. Akenhaten enforced the idea that there was one god instead of many, and, on the surface anyway, people pretty much went along with that until he died, after which the people returned to multiple gods and set about defacing every image they could find of Akenhaten and Nefertiti, including those in the tombs we visited, where you could see depictions of his body, but his head and any written form of his name had been completely rubbed out. The belief was that if you rubbed out every image and word about someone, you would erase that person from history forever. Worked out well, didn’t it? You should really research this and find out more, OK?

We (a bunch of AUC faculty) set out from Cairo in a huge charter bus. What should have been a 3-4 hour trip turned into 6 hours because the original plan to take the Western Desert Road was foiled by police who forbid the bus to go any further after dark. This police protection would become a pattern. The bus and the group were not allowed to go anywhere without a smiling police escort in a Nissan truck or a blue Peugeot leading the way. We had to stop every once in a while as they radioed ahead for replacement shifts and drank tea. Hello, tourists! Anyway, we were diverted through Fayoum, an oasis, and our route was much more interesting than the other (which is, as its name suggests, simply desert) since we went through many villages. Conspicuously, as it were. Everywhere we went in that ludicrous bus, people stared, emphatically waved, nodded, shouted, jokingly offered drags from sheesha pipes, narrowed their eyes. Hundreds of children waved wildly and chased the bus. Only a couple threw rocks.

In Minya, we stayed at the Aton Hotel, a series of bungalows on the Nile. It was beautiful. There were soap and towels in the bathroom, and I didn’t have to throw toilet paper in the trash basket, and someone came in and made the beds while we were gone! Oh, how standards have changed. Actually, it was quite nice – clean and beautiful and quiet. Right on the Nile, where I finally dipped my hands. Across the way was an island with a small hut, cows and goats wandering nearby. On the terrace that looked out over the river, we had Sakkara beer, served with a plate of chickpeas and fresh lime juice. Recommended!

To get to our first set of tombs on the first day, we had to take a ferry from a small village. As the unwieldy bus was maneuvered into a parking position, children gravitated toward us, holding baskets and necklaces woven from fresh palm fronds. The necklaces were a gift unless you got one with a small lime creatively woven in, in which case they were a pound. Both kinds of necklaces smelled great. Of course a pound makes the kids smile, and they were relentless about asking us our names and trying to sell us things. We had to wait a few minutes before the ferry came across the Nile to retrieve our group, and every time I looked over, J was surrounded by children and goats. Par for the course.

Ferry Crossing, Nile River

As the ferry floated away from the shore, two pick-up trucks pulled up, full of villagers who were singing and playing instruments and waving. Along with two boys in gallabeyas handling a donkey cart, and the ever-present police truck, we were crammed on the ferry with some of the kids who had snuck on to continue their sales pitches, ducking the swipes of scolding adults. (Honestly, the only time I have seen a kid dragged out of somewhere by the ear that wasn’t in a film has been in Egypt.)

When we crossed on the way back, we had the added pleasure of standing next to flimsy crates with an assortment of sickly, overheated ducks, rabbits, hens, roosters, and one fairly staid turkey who seemed all right lounging in the same crate with rabbits who had clearly lost the will to live. Anyway, as hay and feathers flew, yet another little boy sidled next to J and regarded the birds and then us, and I swear it seemed as if he were trying to imagine what it was we thought we were seeing. There was one particularly gorged crate of hens from which a small brown egg suddenly emerged, pressed against the side of the crate. I pointed at it, and J marveled. “Yes,” he said. “Those chickens have been in there so long that one of them has laid an egg.” That sweet boy took J’s interest to mean that J wanted the egg, so he set to work. Eventually, he broke one of the wooden bars (and I, watching him, imagined a great but ultimately futile escape), retrieved the egg, and immediately brought it over to J, who found a graceful way to deny it and give the boy “filoos” (money) anyway. I’m pretty sure that J’s rejection was bird flu-based, since he had said, “Hey, bird flu!” the moment we found ourselves staring into the wounded eyes of the poultry.

The View from Deir al-Adhra

Later: Tuna el-Gabel. We stopped at a resthouse for lunch before heading to another couple of tombs, an ancient waterwheel, and the mummy of Isadora, a young woman drowned in the Nile. This was one of the only mummies around, it seems, most having been carted to museums. I’ve found I’m not a big fan of mummies. In general, I think it’s gross to stare at somebody’s corpse. And then to dig it up and put it on display? Hm. But let me tell you, the mummy of Isadora was pretty gross compared to all others I’ve seen. Of course, the mummies in Egypt have been in very un-British Museum-like conditions. (No, we haven’t been to the Antiquities Museum yet!). We saw the “Golden Mummies” in Bawiti, in a dank room with cracked glass cases, and I’ll never forget the head of one of them, cracked open and spilling dust from the back, and the feet covered over with thick new cotton “because of the smell,” according to our fairly uninformed guide. And Isadora, whose condition I won’t describe. I had to leave almost as soon as I saw poor Isadora – I was totally creeped out and people were making weird uncomfortable jokes. Things got better, though. We entered the catacombs where baboons and ibises, considered sacred, were mummified. Mummified animals? Fascinating! There weren’t really any left, though. A slippery stairway led us to a room with a shrine of a baboon skeleton that may as well have leapt off a Grateful Dead T-shirt. The rest of the place was a series of corridors that for some reason we were left to wander with no guidance and almost no lights. There were all these dark alcoves. In one we saw a pile of discarded ibis mummies thrown in with sand and pottery. Would Arnold Vosloo show up? Sadly, no.

Near the Tombs of Beni Hassan
Sugar factory pollution

Regarding Minya, the tombs and all that were nice, but for me the real pleasure was in the lush farmland, the people at work, the multitude of goats, cows, camels. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t have stupidly quaint visions of squatting in a field all day in the blazing heat, pulling onions, or scolding my donkey, or grinding my own corn. Don’t forget that I grew up on a farm, even though I was spared the hard work and there was machinery. I can be sentimental, but not in that way. As you can see from some of the pictures, though, the only things really spoiling the beauty were the haze created from a single sugar factory and our enormous charter bus.

A

2007-04-18T19:24:00.000+02:00

A year ago at this time, I was considering the offer to come to Cairo. I did so from the vantage point of my temp job at the University of Minnesota, where I had been persona non grata since the previous September. I came to enjoy the advantages of my position. The job was so easy that I could do a day’s work in only a few hours, and because nobody there really cared about me so long as I did the work, I was almost never disturbed by anyone for any reason.

I was sitting in that lonely cubicle one morning when I learned about the Passover bombing in Dahab. On CNN’s home page, a detailed map of Egypt. Here was Cairo; over there, on the Sinai, several hundred kilometers away, was Dahab, written in large bold lettering. A part of me thought: Okay, that’s over there, in the Sinai. The Sinai is a whole different thing. It’s hundreds of kilometers away! I can just never go there! We’ll certainly not visit Dahab! People get blown up there!

But really, isn’t it always that we’re cool so long as the bombings take place “over there,” whether it be New York City (so says the Midwesterner), the Middle East (so says the American), or the Sinai (so says the Cairene). I think this need for a buffer is the driving force behind politics and war, at least in part, and it’s an idea I have difficulty accepting. My wimpiness nagged at me even after I moved here, since part of the reason I wanted to come was to see the Middle East for myself. It seemed like I was already setting up boundaries and buffer zones. Why bother coming?

Of course, as you all know by now, we did visit the Sinai. It is basically a vast, deserted demilitarized zone. Every so often you pass police checkpoints, where the poor boys are still being forced to wear their black wool “winter” uniforms despite the rising temperatures (update: they switched back to their summer whites this week). Michael told us that the US keeps a minor military presence there—350 soldiers—to help enforce the peace brokered between Egypt and Israel. We passed one of their little outposts, complete with Ford SUVs, about ten million satellites, and a sand volleyball court. “Amrika,” our crazy-ass driver Hossam told us as we whizzed past at 100 or so mph, weaving from one side of the road to the other. Then, he offered to become my personal hash connection, but that is another story.

It’s funny how much less concerned I have become about terrorism since arriving here. It’s strange that the anxiety strikes so much at the heart of Americans, given our natural geographical advantage of being really far away from everybody, and our status as HUGE WORLD POWER. Why do we feel so damned insecure?

Not only have I visited Dahab, but also the Khan el Kalili bazaar, a popular tourist spot and thusly a target for terrorists—who have indeed bombed it in the recent past. It’s not to say that I am flippant or unconcerned. But then we arrived in Dahab and saw that it was nothing more than a village, not yet overdeveloped despite its popularity (but getting there), and that everybody was so friendly and laid back, to the extent that shorts are normal and women wear bathing suits. This is a big deal because of its contrast to Cairo, where the conservative backlash is in full effect. Dahab maintains a very small, intimate, unworried atmosphere, and it’s infectious. Our hotel, the Bishbishi, was wonderfully comfortable, and the owner Jimmy—quite the businessman—helped us arrange trips to snorkel in the Blue Hole, which is a coral reef complete with tropical fish and harmless jellyfish, and, of course, to Mt. Sinai, where we suffered a la Charlton Heston and listened to a bunch of Nigerians sing Bible music.

The front shoreline of Dahab has been completely overrun with a bunch of expensive restaurants that imitate Bedouin-style seating, in which you sit on the floor, surrounded by pillows and low tables. Some very friendly Egyptian men stand outside these restaurants and try—aggressively—to woo you into their establishment. I fear that these restaurants and clubs, which have hogged all the shoreline, are pushing out the less-cushy establishments on the frontage road, including this small, delightful Italian-style restaurant where I gorged on delicious garlic pasta and pizza late at night, and where Michael ate a sausage pizza about three hours before ascending Mt. Sinai. Ouch!

Still, our boy Jimmy walked us across the frontage road, where Bishbishi is located, to a restaurant called the Funny Mummy, with a great view of the unspoiled waters of the Gulf of Aqaba and, 20 miles across, the mountains of Saudi Arabia. It’s impressive. As you can see from the pictures, it’s difficult to imagine a more tranquil setting. I drank a Stella beer and soaked up the crisp air, the bright sun, the carefree atmosphere.

James

2007-04-07T14:37:00.000+02:00

Gebel Musa
(Mt. Moses)

When I was first rationalizing a move to Egypt, one of the things I would say was, “It’s not like we’re going to Sinai or anything.” I started saying this because we were making the decision about moving in April 2006, about the time a town called Dahab was bombed. Well, I just fell in love with Egypt a little bit more this week, and it was because we were in Dahab. J will write more about this beautiful, friendly town on the southeastern coast of the Sinai Peninsula, but, obviously, my perspective on this region has changed, which would take more than a blog entry to explain.

Before a climb up Mt. Sinai, at the Bishbishi Garden Village, our hotel:

On our first full day in Dahab, we went snorkeling, rested a few hours, then set out for an evening climb of Mt. Sinai. At around 11:30pm, we were herded into a minibus with nine other people – five Swedes, a few Chinese women, a couple of British isles chaps, and three Americans – J, me, and J’s visiting friend Mike. We slept for most of the two-hour drive from Dahab to Mt. Sinai until we pulled up to the first checkpoint outside of St. Catherine’s Monastery, where all of us relinquished our passports for inspection by a stern man in a Cosby sweater. There were a few more checkpoints before we arrived at the monastery, which sits at the foot of Mt. Sinai.

Now, I’ve never climbed a mountain before, and I have no idea what constitutes a high mountain, but I found myself inspecting mountains along the way and thinking, Yeah, I could handle that one, or No, if Mt. Sinai is that big, I’m not doing it – no way, no how.

Mt. Sinai is about 2,300 meters high, or about 7,500 feet. If you’ve climbed a mountain before (I’m talking to you, Sari and Marge), you’ll probably just laugh at the rest of this entry, because it seems that for some people (again, you know who you are) this would be cake.

When we pulled up to the monastery in the wee hours, I still couldn’t tell which one was the infamous mountain from which Charlton Heston descended with stone tablets. After paying 5 pounds for the use of the abnormally clean bathroom, we set off through a metal detector, where two soldiers gave a cursory glance through our backpacks, the luggage we would grow to despise the higher we climbed. It was here that we met our guide, an intrepid young Bedouin who climbs this mountain seven days a week and would be climbing it twice in the next 48 hours. He named our group “Ramses” and insisted that each time he called out this name we all respond so he could make sure that we hadn’t fallen down the mountain. He didn’t actually say the part about falling down the mountain. This kid was texting on his mobile the whole way, and he literally bounded from rock to rock in between smoking cigarettes. I remember at one point when I was lagging a bit, he came swooping down, grabbed my hand, and got me going like he was a personal trainer. Then he moved on to the next few people who were lagging behind.

We found out we would be going on the camel path, a lengthier but less steep route to the top – it was supposed to take 2-3 hours. It turns out that ascending the other path – 3,000 Steps of Repentance carved out by a self-flagellating monk – was not an option at night. We would see why in the morning. I can only say that I was elated to not be able to see the extent of what we were about to climb. And I fear I would have been cursing rather than repenting, anyway, if I had taken those 3,000 Steps.

The first part of the climb involved weaving through a camp of Bedouins and their camels. “Camel? Camel? Camel? Very long way. Camel?” Most of the camels were sacked out and masticating and, I imagine, thinking grumpily about how this was the day they would feign an itch and “accidentally” shake a tourist from their backs. I would have thought them adorable if I didn’t already know better. Later, one of the women in our group would try to pet a seated camel as we passed, and it would try to bite her. Don’t mess with camels. The ones in the camp seemed docile in the light of the full moon, though, and the Bedouins were adept at making a camel ride seem like a good idea. In fact, as we climbed throughout the night, we would periodically pass other small groups of camels, and the Bedouins’ suggestions about getting a camel ride were more and more seductive: “Camel? You look very tired. Camel? Camel make it easy.”

Now commenced the real climb. There was a strange logic to each group member’s approach that reminded me of when we had to run the mile in gym class. (Here comes my flashback of Miss Randall’s disappointment in my finish time.) A couple of people in the group were steady and quick the whole way. Others tried to make out like “men” and started off too fast, eventually pooping out. I took the slow and steady approach, and one of the Chinese women joined me. She is taking a year off from teaching social studies in Taiwan to travel the world by herself. J took the steady approach as well but was much quicker. However, all of us made it to the top, and no one fell off or sustained any major injuries.

For me, this first leg of the ascent was hardest because my brain was at its most practical. I was doing things like singing little inspirational ditties in my head with lyrics like, “Come on! You’re only 29!” Once my sense of logic crumbled to fundamental instincts, I was golden. I lost all sense of time and only cared about watching out for camels and keeping my eyes to the uneven ground.

The Bedouins have a beautiful system, though. Along the way are pit stops, where you can go into a hut, sit for a few minutes, and buy drinks or snacks. The higher you go, the more expensive the food and drink. About halfway up, sweating through our clothes, we realized that water alone wouldn’t cure the inevitable dehydration that was coming, and we bought a couple of Sprites for ten pounds apiece (normally you can get a can of Sprite for a few pounds), which had amazing, immediate results. Our guide had a wonderful way of making it seem like the next pit stop was right around the corner.

There came a point when I realized how far up we were and stupidly glanced over to see the sheerness of the mountainside. The camels we passed hugged the edge of the path, and I couldn’t imagine being up on one of those unwieldy humps, swaying toward the side of the mountain. We then decided it was time to turn on the flashlight we had bought, an enormous lamp that thereafter became the envy of all Bedouin guides. This was a fun reversal because I was asked numerous times if I would give such-and-such guide this flashlight, and I always responded with an exorbitant price.

Finally, we reached the spot where the camels will go no farther. The camel path meets up with the Steps of Repentance for a final 750 steps to the summit. On this last leg, some people literally crawled. We met a group of three ancient women coming down these steps on their canes in the dark – no guide, no flashlights. I shone my flashlight down the stairs for them until they went out of sight, but I think this just annoyed them.

There was one last spot before a final 50 steps. Because our group had become several individuals, each going at his/her own pace, our guide instructed us to meet him at “Coffeeshop #5.” J and I were proud to make it up there just after the Swedes, who proved to be the fittest people in the group. We waited a while and rented a ratty, never-been-washed blanket for ten pounds, because it was getting windy and cold. It was around 4:30am. The sun would rise at 5:50, we were told.

Finally, a last tiresome bit before the summit of Mt. Sinai. Our guide secured a spot for us which involved climbing up a “ladder” that was actually part of a fence tipped on its side. It was, indeed, lovely to watch the sun rise out of the haze and become apparent little by little.

As this happened, Nigerian groups on a different part of the summit began to sing quite beautifully. Something about this (probably the repetition of hearing this singing every day) irritated our guide, who remarked: “See? We are a good group. No Nigerians!” It was at this point that I recognized a bit of irony in the dependency of so many Christians and Jews on the Muslims who will get them up this mountain. As we left the summit, pushed by our guide to hurry, we watched people praying, preaching, photographing.

We were deliriously fatigued at this point, but we were halfway through. Theoretically, going down should have been easier. For this lady, it was the most excruciating part of the trip. Let me put it this way – my kneecaps? I lost them somewhere on the crazy monk’s steps. And today I've developed bruise stripes on the backs of my calves. The 3,000 Steps of Repentance are a jagged, steep, zigzagging path of uneven rocks, and the distance between some steps can be a few meters.

Despite my fight with the hobbling, quivering things I call my legs, I found the descent to be absolutely gorgeous. We finally got to see the thing we had been battling all night. And about three-fourths of the way down, we spotted the monastery. As soon as he could get a signal, J called his father, who was the only one we knew to be awake in the States, on our borrowed mobile. You wouldn't believe the signals you can get in the desert.

The Descent:

The view of Mt. Sinai from Elijah's Hollow, a spot about 3/4 of the way up:

St. Catherine's Monastery:

At the bottom, we discovered that the monastery was closed that day. Do you think I cared? I had been looking forward to seeing the Burning Bush, but as we walked down an endless road to the parking lot where we would be picked up, and a police truck approached us, and I said to J, “He’s just going to have to run me over” because I no longer had the capacity to veer to the right, and I watched a woman try to leap onto a ledge for a photo and fail because her body literally crumpled beneath her, I thought, monastery schmonastery. I fell into the minibus and slept the whole way back.

There were probably lots of revelations on the summit of Mt. Sinai – some imagined, some real. I didn’t have one until that next day. I was grimacing at my sore calves and sipping a lemon juice in a café called The Funny Mummy that looks out over the Red Sea. Then one of the waiters said something to me about how Egyptians understand that the American people are different from their government. For a moment, I had that relief I have always had in hearing that comment – that people can understand that citizens don’t necessarily bear the responsibility for their government’s actions. Later, though, I realized that it is extremely generous for people to go so far as to say they understand that American citizens are not to blame. Just because I didn’t vote for So-and-So doesn’t mean I don’t bear some of the responsibility for the things I wish our government wouldn’t do. Complacency can be a considerable fault. But Marx says all of this better. It's just that I started to feel like my relief at the comment I've been hearing since I've gotten to Egypt is actually part of the problem. I'm not sure what this has to do with Mt. Sinai.

In conclusion, if you visit me, I will be glad to take you to Dahab. And I'll gladly steer you toward Mt. Sinai and see you when you come back down in the morning.

A

2007-04-02T10:45:00.000+02:00

Step Off

Sorry for not posting sooner. Last week was midterm evaluation at the AUC and this brought with it a flurry of activity. I've been half-writing an entry on the sandstorms that have blown into Cairo over the past few weeks, but that entry hasn't caught fire or held my attention like I hoped it would.

Now I'm falling behind: tomorrow we depart with our friend Michael for the Sinai Penninsula, where 3,000 Steps of Repentance await us on Mt. Sinai. (There will also be a beach, and snorkeling in the pristine waters of the Gulf of Aqaba.) This trip will warrant at least one post, maybe more. And yesterday, Michael and I traveled south of Cairo to the ancient pyamids at Sakkara and Dashur. We drove through small agricultural villages, so green and irrigated, and then as we approached the Sakkara complex, the green simply ceased, and sandy desert began.

Sakkara is best known for the Step Pyramid, which as you can see is mightily impressive. It predates the Giza pyramids by several thousand years. But the area is actually an enormous funerary complex--aside from the ruins bunched near the Step Pyramid, it seems at first as if there is very little to see. But the longer you stay, the more the eye discerns: off in the desert, you see huts that protect the entryways to ancient graves dating back several centuries. It's not surprising to me that archaelogists are still finding tombs here. Also, the vendors are much less aggressive here than at Giza--though one guy did manage to dress Michael in decidedly non-Egyptian, Obi Wan Kenobi-like garb while I had my head turned.

Dashur is best known for the Bent Pyramid, so named because it rises at a very steep angle for a time before literally bending--the pyramid's angle of incline was adjusted and the structure was brought to completion. It's a mystery why the Bent Pyramid is, in fact, bent. There are a lot of theories. Also, this pyramid had more armed guards than tourists. There were only a few of us out there. Really great. The desert is a quiet place.

Dashur also has the Red Pyramid, which more closely resembles the ones at Giza. This one you can climb into. First you climb a hundred uneven steps to get to the entrance, then you bend over and lower yourself about a hundred feet into the center of the pyramid, which smells like sweat, urine and ammonia. Then you have to come out the way you entered, and your legs feel like they are being stabbed with a thousand little knives, and the next day your ass is extremely sore. Or so I've been told.

More on all this soon. In the meantime...

James