I've already written quite a bit about feeling foreign here. The week before last's literary and political theme at CASA was الأنا والآخر - The I and the Other. As one of my exasperated classmates burst out after we read yet another article on the current state of the clash of civilizations, we are really tired of this from an academic standpoint. It's not just Samuel Huntington and his disciples, it seems, who are fixated on writing about the tension between East and West, and the crisis of Arabs caught between Western cultural infiltration and rejection of its loose values and arrogance, but a large proportion of academics and journalists here in the Arab world as well. Although I would now almost rather read about any other topic on earth than the clash of civilizations, I can't deny that my personal experience here has made me much more aware of where gaps do exist and conflicted about noting them.
Some days, my expat life and my Egyptian life blend seamlessly together. Two weekends ago, we hosted in our apartment a lovely dinner party with our collective Egyptian and American friends, bringing together the disparate groups of people Sarah and I are aggressively trying to befriend. My attempted contribution to this potluck extravaganza was roz belaban, a common Egyptian dessert made with rice, sugar, rosewater, and cinnamon. Despite my best culinary efforts, my Egyptian friends were not impressed: the consistency was all wrong. That's what I get, I suppose, for believing I can wing Egyptian recipes in the total absence of measuring cups. Aside from this failure, I felt afterward that I really have found a community of wonderful friends here, a good balance between fellow expats with whom I can share the experience of exploring and adapting to this city, and fun, smart, and likeminded Egyptian friends. Nevertheless, as I've noted before, the truth remains that I will leave after a year or so, passing out of most of my local friends' real lives (though probably not virtual ones). And so it's inevitable at times to feel like a temporary fixture, to wonder how close one can become in a year before going one's own way back home and their lives move on here.
Two Fridays ago, (I know, I've gotten pretty backed up here), the art space Dar 1718 hosted an event for World Peace Day full of vendors selling handmade artisan crafts (the trendy kind), and young Egyptians were sprawled out on the grass to listen to a long lineup of young soft rock bands and English-speaking dudes with guitars. Blocking out the immense heaps of cat-infested garbage piled up just beyond the exit, I could imagine for a couple hours that I was at any outdoor concert in an American park. This was really relaxing. I sometimes feel that there is a taboo among expats here and maybe in other developing countries about talking much about things you really miss about home - food, geography, comfort in the streets, etc. It can be embarrassing to admit that you haven't seamlessly gone native, or nearly so -- or, in conversations with Egyptians, it just feels annoying on our part to be making comparisons.
Sometimes I am able to laugh. "You are a white cat," I had one man hiss at me recently. What? Yeah, I think the pith of that one got lost in translation. Another day, though, I wore a button-down Oxford shirt, intending to look business casual for my internship. I guess I looked even more foreign than usual, because probably 10 people, many of them women rather than men, shouting the word agnabeyya (foreigner) at me in the street or pointing me out to their parents/friends/spouses. This visible foreignness is linked, of course, to an ambivalence toward any kind of public presence, particularly on social issues. Ninety-nine percent of the time, this isn't our business anyway. But the recent anti-harassment campaigns are another matter, and at the invitation of local organizers, several of us carefully participated in a small-ish "vigil" outside the Presidential Palace in Heliopolis. Sponsored in part by Haraket Basma, which I wrote about earlier, this event boasted 500 RSVPs on Facebook, though only about 40 appeared in person. The current goal of the anti-harassment movement is a law acknowledging it as a crime. The immediate motivator for the vigil, though, was the killing of an 18-year-old girl in Asyut just a few days earlier (Iman Mostafa Mohamed) after she responded to a local man who was harassing her. He shot her. (The man has apparently now been arrested.) The sign I was given read: "Faynak faynak ya Morsi, el taharrosh ba'a ayny aynak," which means approximately: Where are you, where are you, Morsi? Harassment is completely obvious [to everyone]. We stood spaced out along the high-traffic road by the palace and the Heliopolis Club, and received mostly stares. "Ahla sawra fel donya!" shouted one passerby to me, sympathetic but perhaps for the wrong reasons - "The most beautiful revolution in the world". One car stopped to boo and give us a thumbs down, an inexplicable reaction to the subject as far as I could tell. At least one stopped to give encouragement, though most people were willing to roll down their windows and take a look at our pamphlet. One husky older woman, in galabeyya and hegab, passed by chance with her teenage daughters. I was the first demonstrator she encountered, but when I responded in my accent, she cut me off with a sharp "agnabeyya!" One of the organizers, a charismatic young man, spoke with her, and she was skeptical. Was this really necessary? she wanted to know. Could the president make up a law by himself? If not, why were we at the palace? Suddenly she turned back to me. So where's she from? she asked the organizer with suspicion in her voice. Originally from America, but I live in Egypt, I responded. Amreeka, Amreeka. So then what about the film insulting the Prophet?! Of course this issue has not died. I don't agree with the sentiments expressed in the film, I told her, not going into more detail. Was I really going to agree that it was an ingenious idea to attack the embassy? Violence isn't good either, though, I said vaguely, still trying to disengage. She wasn't convinced.
At the end of the evening, despite the low turnout, I did feel that participating in this vigil was empowering. In a city where this kind of activism does have a new oomph in the aftermath of the revolution and the issues very real to all of us, there's a sense (real or imagine) that rather small efforts can and do reach the news and spread quickly. Here's a video from the vigil from Al Hayat TV. (It's in Arabic, but you can get the idea. All the foreigners are friends from CASA, and I make a brief cameo at 2:58.)
On a very sobering note, however, this very positive and somewhat cathartic experience was paired with the reading of a deeply troubling book called Aswat (Voices) for class. Written around 1970 by Soliman Fayad, the book recounts the mostly true story of an Egyptian man who returns to the village he left as child, this time with his chic French wife in tow. At first, the villagers are entranced by Simone, making every effort to beautify the streets and shops before her arrival and guiding her around. When her husband leaves on a short trip to Cairo, though, the village women begin gossiping about her differences. She doesn't shave all her body hair. She walks around by herself. She drank wine with one of the men. She'll want to raise the children as Christians. And, most importantly, she is not circumcised. This, in the minds of the women, including her mother-in-law, naturally means that she is a woman with loose morals and uncontrollable desires who will be a liability to her husband. While Simone naively sits in her room writing letters and listening to music, the women come in and kidnap her. Then they forcibly circumcise her with scissors. She accidentally bleeds to death. I repeat this story in graphic detail because of the force with which it hit many of us. It was very well-written, and in my mind a good choice for our class, but not because it was easy for us to get through. Of course it is an extreme case. (Although, I should note, that about 97% of Egyptian women, Muslim and Christian alike, have undergone FGM, so that part of it is not extreme at all. Both the head Sheikh of Al-Azhar and the late Coptic Pope Shenouda decreed that the practice does not have religious foundations, but it is incredibly ingrained in the culture, as in much of Africa.) As one of my classmates pointed out, what was so unsettling about this depiction of "the I and the other" was that the seemingly small misunderstandings and judgments between the village women and Simone that lead to the final tragedy are the very kinds of things that we encounter here every day.
Against the background of Morsi and Obama's speeches at the UN General Assembly last week, notably addressing their difference in opinion on free speech, we went in search of ways in which we might try to close these gaps rather than reaffirm them. A few friends and I went last Thursday to the U.S. Embassy's weekly screening of the West Wing. Once one gets past all the tanks (and leering soldiers), the embassy is a neat and rather sterile place with lots of trite American flag art on the walls. The screening was in the Information Resource Center (IRC), which is a library for people to learn about America through books, movies, posters, you name it. It is unclear to me whether people actually do this. Do they really want to know about America so badly that they will navigate anti-riot barricades and numerous passport controls? Anyway, there were about 20 young Egyptian men in the screening room. At the front was the embassy's junior public diplomacy officer. We watched a few minutes of an episode about the fictional presidential race. A hand shot up. What's New Hampshire? The show did not have subtitles, which proved to be pretty difficult for a lot of the audience. A precocious teenager who later befriended us, however, had the answer to every question. He had been a participant in the embassy's Election Challenge (something like that), which offered a free trip to the U.S. to the team that best presented the American elections system to other Egyptians. For the rest of the show, then, the diplomat stopped periodically to explain things like "conventions" and "the debt ceiling." Then the giant poster paper came out for "abortion" and "separation of church and state", since at the end of the episode the moderate Republican candidate tells the media to stop asking him about religion. The FSO tried to explain that while the audience might think that Americans are not religious people at all, this tends to be true more in large cities than small towns... Family values! shouted someone from the audience. Generally, although the screening is clearly intended to teach American values, it seemed that many people were there to practice their English. Afterward, about six young guys crowded around us, eager for language partners. A few of them walked us back to the metro at Tahrir, and happened across another anti-harassment protest along the Nile. The woman in charge came over to us to present some pamphlets, and suddenly we were surrounded by a bunch of shining lights from TV cameras as I chattered like a fool to her in Arabic. She demanded to know, rhetorically, if a law against harassment existed in the U.S. I told her it did, but I couldn't really say what the penalties were because it wasn't something I ever worried about when going out in the street. She declared victory -- See, it's not like this in America! she said. But I felt ambivalent: Rotana TV had wanted to interview me, contrasting the state of harassment in the two countries. I said no, because I felt I was getting myself into dangerous waters. What good does it do to have an American in Egypt talking about how much better we are (when it comes to this issue)? It could be terribly misconstrued.
Some days, my expat life and my Egyptian life blend seamlessly together. Two weekends ago, we hosted in our apartment a lovely dinner party with our collective Egyptian and American friends, bringing together the disparate groups of people Sarah and I are aggressively trying to befriend. My attempted contribution to this potluck extravaganza was roz belaban, a common Egyptian dessert made with rice, sugar, rosewater, and cinnamon. Despite my best culinary efforts, my Egyptian friends were not impressed: the consistency was all wrong. That's what I get, I suppose, for believing I can wing Egyptian recipes in the total absence of measuring cups. Aside from this failure, I felt afterward that I really have found a community of wonderful friends here, a good balance between fellow expats with whom I can share the experience of exploring and adapting to this city, and fun, smart, and likeminded Egyptian friends. Nevertheless, as I've noted before, the truth remains that I will leave after a year or so, passing out of most of my local friends' real lives (though probably not virtual ones). And so it's inevitable at times to feel like a temporary fixture, to wonder how close one can become in a year before going one's own way back home and their lives move on here.
Two Fridays ago, (I know, I've gotten pretty backed up here), the art space Dar 1718 hosted an event for World Peace Day full of vendors selling handmade artisan crafts (the trendy kind), and young Egyptians were sprawled out on the grass to listen to a long lineup of young soft rock bands and English-speaking dudes with guitars. Blocking out the immense heaps of cat-infested garbage piled up just beyond the exit, I could imagine for a couple hours that I was at any outdoor concert in an American park. This was really relaxing. I sometimes feel that there is a taboo among expats here and maybe in other developing countries about talking much about things you really miss about home - food, geography, comfort in the streets, etc. It can be embarrassing to admit that you haven't seamlessly gone native, or nearly so -- or, in conversations with Egyptians, it just feels annoying on our part to be making comparisons.
International Peace Day at Darb 1718
Sometimes I am able to laugh. "You are a white cat," I had one man hiss at me recently. What? Yeah, I think the pith of that one got lost in translation. Another day, though, I wore a button-down Oxford shirt, intending to look business casual for my internship. I guess I looked even more foreign than usual, because probably 10 people, many of them women rather than men, shouting the word agnabeyya (foreigner) at me in the street or pointing me out to their parents/friends/spouses. This visible foreignness is linked, of course, to an ambivalence toward any kind of public presence, particularly on social issues. Ninety-nine percent of the time, this isn't our business anyway. But the recent anti-harassment campaigns are another matter, and at the invitation of local organizers, several of us carefully participated in a small-ish "vigil" outside the Presidential Palace in Heliopolis. Sponsored in part by Haraket Basma, which I wrote about earlier, this event boasted 500 RSVPs on Facebook, though only about 40 appeared in person. The current goal of the anti-harassment movement is a law acknowledging it as a crime. The immediate motivator for the vigil, though, was the killing of an 18-year-old girl in Asyut just a few days earlier (Iman Mostafa Mohamed) after she responded to a local man who was harassing her. He shot her. (The man has apparently now been arrested.) The sign I was given read: "Faynak faynak ya Morsi, el taharrosh ba'a ayny aynak," which means approximately: Where are you, where are you, Morsi? Harassment is completely obvious [to everyone]. We stood spaced out along the high-traffic road by the palace and the Heliopolis Club, and received mostly stares. "Ahla sawra fel donya!" shouted one passerby to me, sympathetic but perhaps for the wrong reasons - "The most beautiful revolution in the world". One car stopped to boo and give us a thumbs down, an inexplicable reaction to the subject as far as I could tell. At least one stopped to give encouragement, though most people were willing to roll down their windows and take a look at our pamphlet. One husky older woman, in galabeyya and hegab, passed by chance with her teenage daughters. I was the first demonstrator she encountered, but when I responded in my accent, she cut me off with a sharp "agnabeyya!" One of the organizers, a charismatic young man, spoke with her, and she was skeptical. Was this really necessary? she wanted to know. Could the president make up a law by himself? If not, why were we at the palace? Suddenly she turned back to me. So where's she from? she asked the organizer with suspicion in her voice. Originally from America, but I live in Egypt, I responded. Amreeka, Amreeka. So then what about the film insulting the Prophet?! Of course this issue has not died. I don't agree with the sentiments expressed in the film, I told her, not going into more detail. Was I really going to agree that it was an ingenious idea to attack the embassy? Violence isn't good either, though, I said vaguely, still trying to disengage. She wasn't convinced.
At the end of the evening, despite the low turnout, I did feel that participating in this vigil was empowering. In a city where this kind of activism does have a new oomph in the aftermath of the revolution and the issues very real to all of us, there's a sense (real or imagine) that rather small efforts can and do reach the news and spread quickly. Here's a video from the vigil from Al Hayat TV. (It's in Arabic, but you can get the idea. All the foreigners are friends from CASA, and I make a brief cameo at 2:58.)
On a very sobering note, however, this very positive and somewhat cathartic experience was paired with the reading of a deeply troubling book called Aswat (Voices) for class. Written around 1970 by Soliman Fayad, the book recounts the mostly true story of an Egyptian man who returns to the village he left as child, this time with his chic French wife in tow. At first, the villagers are entranced by Simone, making every effort to beautify the streets and shops before her arrival and guiding her around. When her husband leaves on a short trip to Cairo, though, the village women begin gossiping about her differences. She doesn't shave all her body hair. She walks around by herself. She drank wine with one of the men. She'll want to raise the children as Christians. And, most importantly, she is not circumcised. This, in the minds of the women, including her mother-in-law, naturally means that she is a woman with loose morals and uncontrollable desires who will be a liability to her husband. While Simone naively sits in her room writing letters and listening to music, the women come in and kidnap her. Then they forcibly circumcise her with scissors. She accidentally bleeds to death. I repeat this story in graphic detail because of the force with which it hit many of us. It was very well-written, and in my mind a good choice for our class, but not because it was easy for us to get through. Of course it is an extreme case. (Although, I should note, that about 97% of Egyptian women, Muslim and Christian alike, have undergone FGM, so that part of it is not extreme at all. Both the head Sheikh of Al-Azhar and the late Coptic Pope Shenouda decreed that the practice does not have religious foundations, but it is incredibly ingrained in the culture, as in much of Africa.) As one of my classmates pointed out, what was so unsettling about this depiction of "the I and the other" was that the seemingly small misunderstandings and judgments between the village women and Simone that lead to the final tragedy are the very kinds of things that we encounter here every day.
Against the background of Morsi and Obama's speeches at the UN General Assembly last week, notably addressing their difference in opinion on free speech, we went in search of ways in which we might try to close these gaps rather than reaffirm them. A few friends and I went last Thursday to the U.S. Embassy's weekly screening of the West Wing. Once one gets past all the tanks (and leering soldiers), the embassy is a neat and rather sterile place with lots of trite American flag art on the walls. The screening was in the Information Resource Center (IRC), which is a library for people to learn about America through books, movies, posters, you name it. It is unclear to me whether people actually do this. Do they really want to know about America so badly that they will navigate anti-riot barricades and numerous passport controls? Anyway, there were about 20 young Egyptian men in the screening room. At the front was the embassy's junior public diplomacy officer. We watched a few minutes of an episode about the fictional presidential race. A hand shot up. What's New Hampshire? The show did not have subtitles, which proved to be pretty difficult for a lot of the audience. A precocious teenager who later befriended us, however, had the answer to every question. He had been a participant in the embassy's Election Challenge (something like that), which offered a free trip to the U.S. to the team that best presented the American elections system to other Egyptians. For the rest of the show, then, the diplomat stopped periodically to explain things like "conventions" and "the debt ceiling." Then the giant poster paper came out for "abortion" and "separation of church and state", since at the end of the episode the moderate Republican candidate tells the media to stop asking him about religion. The FSO tried to explain that while the audience might think that Americans are not religious people at all, this tends to be true more in large cities than small towns... Family values! shouted someone from the audience. Generally, although the screening is clearly intended to teach American values, it seemed that many people were there to practice their English. Afterward, about six young guys crowded around us, eager for language partners. A few of them walked us back to the metro at Tahrir, and happened across another anti-harassment protest along the Nile. The woman in charge came over to us to present some pamphlets, and suddenly we were surrounded by a bunch of shining lights from TV cameras as I chattered like a fool to her in Arabic. She demanded to know, rhetorically, if a law against harassment existed in the U.S. I told her it did, but I couldn't really say what the penalties were because it wasn't something I ever worried about when going out in the street. She declared victory -- See, it's not like this in America! she said. But I felt ambivalent: Rotana TV had wanted to interview me, contrasting the state of harassment in the two countries. I said no, because I felt I was getting myself into dangerous waters. What good does it do to have an American in Egypt talking about how much better we are (when it comes to this issue)? It could be terribly misconstrued.
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