Only a Fool Cleans the Fuul Pot

Goodbye Egypt

2008-09-27T11:00:00.004+02:00

When I said goodbye to Cairo it was early summer. The city’s outdoor produce markets were burgeoning with the deeply purple plums and prickly pear cactus fruits that appear at the start of the hot season, the nights were still cool enough for rambling conversations over shisha pipes in an outdoor café, and the flame trees on my quiet residential street in the Mohandiseen neighborhood had recently erupted in bursts of crimson flowers.

Nearly three months have passed since I left Egypt. As the Gulf Air jet soared swiftly eastward on that July day—toward Mecca, toward the heart of Arabia, two hours further from home on the dial of a clock—I watched Egypt disappear below me, a coffee-colored wilderness of sand and mountains baked in the glow of the setting sun. At that point I’d lived in the Middle East for more than fifteen months, all told, and I was proud of the knowledge I’d acquired of the customs and traditions of this region. I was proud of the Arabic I spoke and the ease with which I had learned to argue with taxi drivers, haggle over prices with vendors, and walk the many invisible tightropes of being a foreign white woman in a conservative Muslim society. But as I turned my imagination toward what lay ahead, all of this and more—Cairo’s several thousand crumbling minarets, its frenetic traffic, its dusty alleyways perpetually abuzz with life—began to recede, already a thing of the past.

Now I live in the United Arab Emirates, that tiny, hypermodern, petrodollar sheikhdom where 80 percent of residents are foreign-born and the other 20 percent, only one generation removed from tent-dwelling Bedouins, race their Mercedes SUVs down the six-lane highways at 115 mph and act as if the worth of a human being can be measured by the size of his or her wallet. Life is cushy here, and I would be lying if I said it would be easy for me to trade in the little luxuries of life available to me in Abu Dhabi—a spacious, well-furnished apartment, a car to drive, real American drip coffee in the morning, Western clothing stores, the freedom to go where I please unmolested by stares and catcalls—to return to Cairo.

There are moments when I catch myself yearning for Egypt, and the way that every morning there I rose to greet the world with shoulders braced for a challenge, and every night I went to sleep pumped up by what I had accomplished. Here I have neither of those feelings, and without them my joie de vivre has dwindled somewhat, and with it, my motivation to maintain this blog. I can hardly expect my readers to be interested in my life when I can sometimes barely muster the will to be interested in it myself.

But perhaps I’ll try anyway, and that will be the real challenge.

East Delta Traveling

2008-06-15T18:50:00.003+03:00

It wouldn't get light, and it still wouldn't...and then suddenly it did. First a flush of rose started at the lip of the sky where the teeth of the mountains bit sharply into it and crept slowly upward, like flames lapping inside the dark skull of the heavens. Then the acacia trees, tow-headed, twisted figures stooped in the lee of the mountains, bowed into focus one by one, flinging long shadows onto the shale. Creatures seemed to skitter among the tumble of boulders lining the road, and I wondered what sorts of animals lived out here--foxes? hyenas?--but in the trembling dawn light it was impossible to be sure. In all likelihood it was nothing more than my imagination that made me think I saw a flash of ears, a pair of beady eyes, a tail whisking behind a pedestal of broken rock.

And so our bus rocketed south down the highway, while the driver, a dimple-armed fatso crammed into a generic blue uniform too small for his generous body, smoked his thirtieth cigarette out the open window and drove carelessly, his free hand groping the clutch like it was some part of a woman. I met his eyes in the mirror and he smiled at me, a girl traveling alone in the Sinai in cutoff jeans and reddened by the sun, rims of salt crystalized around her toenails. He reached back to hand me a tea-stained leaf of a British tabloid discarded on the bus by a previous English-speaking traveler. Alf shokr, I told him, a thousand thanks. The lead story was about a man beaten to death for cutting in line at a supermarket in London. Shopper slain in tragic queue quarrel, read the headline.

I unearthed a half-eaten bag of crumbled chips from my backpack and ate them one by one as the road uncurled unhurriedly before us.

Caution! Gulf Arabs Live Here!

2008-06-04T19:11:00.004+03:00

I've relocated to a new neighborhood for my final five weeks in Cairo. Far away from the clamor and freneticism of downtown, Mohandiseen--whose name means 'the engineers'--is a modestly upscale residential district that sprung up in the 1960s and 70s to accommodate the swelling middle class of the Nasser era. My apartment is on the top floor of a five-story walk-up, on a small street canopied with drooping trees that right now are positively aflame with brilliant crimson flowers. Two blocks from me is one of Mohandiseen's major thoroughfares, a wide, showy boulevard lined with Western-style restaurants and swanky boutiques selling everything from shoes to furniture to lingerie.

The view from the balcony of my new apartment.

Mohandiseen, though a youngster compared to the venerable old neighborhoods that comprise much of Cairo, has already carved a niche for itself in the city's geosocial makeup. Each year from June to August, Mohandiseen plays host to scores of wealthy vacationers from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and elsewhere in the Gulf, who come to Cairo to escape the punishing heat of summer in the Arabian Peninsula and to take advantage of the comparative freedom of Egyptian society to shop, eat out in mixed-gender groups, go to the movies, dance in nightclubs, and gamble at Cairo's several foreigners-only casinos. Indeed, Mohandiseen is famous for its ‘furnished flats,’ fully equipped apartments in some of the neighborhood’s ritzier quarters that are rented out on a short-term basis during the summer months and which cater especially to Arab tourists, offering them a level of privacy and comfort above that of a hotel--albeit for two or three times the going rate during the rest of the year.

Contrary to what you might expect, however, these visitors from the conservative heartland of Islam are not highly regarded by most Egyptians. Reputed to use their time in Cairo to frequent brothels, consume large amounts of alcohol, and generally engage in moral debauchery, Arab tourists (particularly the men, who--with their long white robes and heavy Gulf accents--stand out here like creatures from another planet) are a source of amusement for some Egyptians and a cause of concern for others. “While Mohandiseen was known as the favorite place for Arabs to rent apartments,” American anthropologist Lisa Wynn writes in Pyramids and Nightclubs (2008), “several Mohandiseen property owners told me that they refused to rent to Arab tourists because of the scandals it cause with neighbors…. [They] were popularly said to drink, hold wild parties, and bring women back to their apartments, which gave a bad name to the apartment and building.”

Whenever I pose the question Why do so many tourists from the Gulf come to Cairo during the summer? to my Egyptian friends, the answers I receive invariably support Wynn’s findings. Wynn goes on to argue in her study that for the most part the assumptions that Egyptians hold about Arab tourists are incorrect, and that in fact the majority of Arabs travel here with their families and have never seen, nor desire to see, the inside of a Cairene whorehouse. So why do Egyptians persist in stereotyping Arab tourists as sexual predators and reprobates, despite ample evidence to the contrary?

It is my belief that such perceptions are the product of wounded pride. Egyptian civilization has a long and illustrious history dating back thousands of years, whereas most cities in the Gulf are less than a century old; yet modern Egyptians are an impoverished and degraded lot, while Gulf Arabs, who only a generation ago were tent-dwellers whose principal mode of transport was the camel, are living large on the financial windfall of their booming oil wealth. Is it any surprise that Egyptians resent the Arab tourists who materialize on their streets each summer, clanking with gold beneath their traditional Bedouin garb? Economic realities leave them no choice but to welcome these visitors to their country, but behind their backs, Egyptians relish the chance to impugn their moral characters at every opportunity:

Can you believe, my friend was approached by a Saudi in Costa Coffee last night, he asked her to come home with him that very minute!

Yesterday I saw a Gulfie guy walking with a prostitute, I could tell they'd both had a lot to drink...they could hardly stand up straight. I wonder how much he was paying her?

Never go to the Hard Rock Cafe during the summer, that's where the Saudi men hang out.

Yes, I've really heard all these things. And next will be, Don't move to Mohandiseen in June! You'll be harassed by Arabs every time you set foot outside your apartment! You know they don't wear anything under those robes of theirs, don't you...?

Fil Mish Mish

2008-05-25T16:48:00.005+03:00

I've just purchased a little sack of apricots from a man outside my building. He squats on the curb each day in sandals and a gallabiya and sells his fruits out of a woven cane basket, weighing it in a pair of rusty kilogram scales. Sometimes he has cantaloupes, which here have flesh of a light mint color instead of the orange we're used to; other days it's peaches. Today he was peddling apricots, their furry golden faces still smudged with pollen and earth.

Because apricots appear in the markets across Egypt for such a short time each year, Egyptians use the expression with the apricots (fil mish mish) to mean that something will most likely never come to pass, roughly the same way that we might use the English saying when pigs fly.

Today was living proof that even apricots in Egypt are not beyond the realm of possibility.

Saudi Bans Alcohol in Five-Star Cairo Hotel

2008-05-03T23:15:00.003+03:00

The Saudi Arabian owner of the Grand Hyatt in Cairo announced last week that his hotel, home to the Hard Rock Cafe, will stop serving alcohol on the premises, after dumping out an estimated LE 8 million worth of liquor in front of a crowd of shocked onlookers. It sounds like the tabloids, but it's true. Read more here.

City Mouse in the Country

2008-05-01T16:03:00.002+03:00

Cairo is home to a quarter of Egypt’s 80 million inhabitants. It is the industrial capital, the seat of government, and the cultural and commercial heart of the nation, a sprawling metropolis known affectionately to Egyptians simply as ‘Masr,’ the same name they use for their country as a whole. Yet Egypt is a big place: 1 million square kilometers of desert and arid mountains dotted with towns and cities, most of them perched on the coast (Mediterranean, Gulfs of Aqaba and Suez, Red Sea) or hugging the long, sinuous twist of the Nile River.

In the twelve months I have lived here, I have spent little time in the vast swathes of the country outside of Cairo. So when a friend of mine invited me to spend a day with him at his home in Beni Suef, a city of about 200,000 that lies two hours south of Cairo along the road to Luxor, it was with an eye toward correcting this deficiency that I boarded a crowded microbus at eight a.m. on a Saturday morning—bolstered by a breakfast of hot fuul sandwiches and a banana—and embarked on my first real visit to ‘the rest’ of Egypt.

My friend Mohamed met me on the main road through central Beni Suef and we went immediately to a juice shop for glasses of fresh orange juice, pressed while we waited and served to us room temperature while we sat in plastic chairs on the sidewalk just outside. A pair of preteen girls, curious at the sight of a Western girl unabashedly sipping juice in the sleepy Beni Suef sunshine, approached us, giggling, and asked Mohamed if he was Egyptian. His nationality was obvious; what they really wanted to know was by what stroke of luck he came to be sitting with one of the only American females they had ever seen in their city. Was I a chat-room bride whose precious U.S. passport would be his ticket out of Egypt? Or a hapless tourist who had stumbled off the train to the Valley of Kings six hours too early? That we could simply be friends—of different sexes, from different countries, and speaking different languages, yet neither of us trying to exploit the other—was an idea they couldn’t fathom.

Our next stop was the Monastery of the Virgin Mary, a solid whitewashed complex built on the spot where Mary is said to have stopped to rest during her flight out of Egypt. A devout Muslim and a lifelong agnostic, we prowled as respectfully as two non-Christians could through one of the holier sites of New Testament lore, perusing pamphlets of Coptic doctrine in the bookstore and tiptoeing among the pews in the crumbling, weather-beaten old church. On holidays, the still-active nunnery at one side of the complex plays host to pilgrims from Cairo and local worshipers alike, and in the evenings the Coptic youth of Beni Suef congregates on the outdoor patio overlooking the Nile to drink tea and soda and socialize. Christians account for about a tenth of Beni Suef’s population, roughly the same percentage as in Egypt as a whole, and I got the impression from Mohamed that his tolerant attitude toward them and their holy places is somewhat of a rarity among the Muslim majority in the city. The antipathy goes both ways, too: as long as we were in the monastery grounds, I made sure not to call Mohamed by name, for fear that the hospitality of the people working there would evaporate when they discovered his religious background and we would be asked to leave. A Christian named Mohamed? Not likely.

After paying a fisherman five pounds to row us across the river in his boat and spending an hour hiking through fields of wheat and strawberries on the other side, we caught a cab to Mohamed’s family’s apartment, where his mother had kindly prepared a generous lunch for us of boiled potatoes and beef, an assortment of grape leaves, zucchinis, and peppers stuffed with spiced rice, soup, bread, and a cold salad of tomatoes and parsley, topped off with fresh strawberry juice for dessert. In typical Beni Suef style, we ate sitting on the floor, using the pieces of chewy, whole-wheat pita to scoop up the food instead of silverware. His younger sister and his parents seemed pleased to have me, his father, a law professor, telling me repeatedly how much he’d enjoyed visiting Washington, D.C. on his sole trip to the U.S. thirty years ago and his sister shyly trying out her English on me to ask, of all things, if I’d voted for Clinton or Obama in the primaries. Her own preference was for Obama, whom she refused to believe is not in fact a Muslim no matter how earnestly I tried to persuade her otherwise (according to a friend of mine in Haifa, the Israelis are also convinced that Obama harbors Islamic sympathies, and for that reason are actively campaigning among the Americans living abroad in Israel to vote for Clinton—for once the Middle East is waging its wars by proxy through our politicians instead of the other way around).

I caught a train home later that evening, and a mere hour-and-a-half later was back in Cairo among the screeching car horns and pushing throngs of Cairenes, having already begun to miss the urban life.

Egyptians: Born to Be Inefficient?

2008-04-18T16:27:00.006+02:00

I don’t believe that people are genetically disposed toward certain personal characteristics. Despite stereotypes that claim otherwise, I’ve never seen scientific evidence suggesting that any race is biologically lazy, emotional, good at math or dancing, organized, disorganized, intuitively sporty or entrepreneurial. Sure, the customs, the priorities, or the history of a given culture can bestow its constituents with these traits. Cultures that place a premium on education coupled with self-discipline might produce more than an average number of engineers, doctors, and physicists, while those whose traditions value physical movement as an important part of social participation might turn out singers, dancers, and men and women with an ear for rhythm. But this is upbringing, not genes. Nurture, not nature.

Having these views, why did I find myself surprised last week to stumble across a heated debate between two coworkers about how to make the AUC Press warehouse function most efficiently? Let me backtrack for a moment and note that AUC Press is, in my opinion, run with extraordinary efficiency by Egyptian standards. The director sits in the center of a web of command with one thread connecting him to the head of each of the departments (promotion, production, sales, editorial, accounting), who in turn hold threads linking them to their underlings, each of whom is saddled with a set of non-overlapping responsibilities. Yes, there are times when the web falls apart and department heads lose track of what’s going on beneath them. There are lapses in the carefully constructed checks-and-balances system that result in slip-ups like the one last fall, where hundreds of gold-foiled invitations to a prestigious literary award ceremony were mailed with ‘Please RVSP’ written on them. But occasional mistakes can happen in the best-managed businesses, in America as well as here.

So why the caveat ‘by Egyptian standards?’ The purpose of tacking on this modifier is to suggest two things: first, that Egyptian businesses in general tend not to be run efficiently, and second, that because it is in Egypt, AUC Press faces obstacles that companies located in other countries don’t.

Egyptians like to dance, but can they get things done?

As to the first point, it is a fact corroborated by experts and anecdotal experience alike. Transparency International ranked Egypt 105th in its corruption perceptions index for 2007, tied with Djibouti, Bolivia, and Burkina Faso and just above Eritrea and Rwanda. A simple trip to the visa office to extend my visa last October turned into a two-week process involving six separate visits and hours of waiting around in a hot, crowded room while the bureaucrats on the other side of the windows shuffled papers and drank tea. My boss long ago stopped going in person to renew his driver’s license, since without an insider contact it can take days, and on top of that foreigners are often charged exorbitant renewal fees for phony traffic violations; now he has an Egyptian friend who works at the licensing office do it for him.

As for the second point, the Press’ location within the greater framework of the Egyptian business world means that, whatever its own successes, it is limited by the failures of the companies around it. The cream-colored paper used to print novels in other parts of the globe because it’s easier on the eyes isn’t available here, so the Press is stuck with regular white. The laborious censorship screening that imported books undergo at the clearinghouse in Alexandria often delays their arrival in Cairo by weeks, and sometimes without a phone call from the director to a well-placed official they would be held up indefinitely. Four-color printing presses don’t exist in Egypt, so color pages must be printed on less sophisticated single-color presses or sent abroad. The list goes on.

When it comes to business, ‘Egyptian standards’ mean delays, complications, and poor-quality products, the results of a poisonous blend of corruption, mismanagement, and weak infrastructure that plagues many developing countries. Yet to lay the blame wholly on these three factors suggests that what exists here is a situation of otherwise competent people unable to overcome the hurdles imposed on them from above. But the problem runs deeper than that, extending beyond a few wrenches thrown into the wheels and cogs of daily operation to what seems like a fundamental lack of the very concept of efficiency. Which is why I was so surprised to find two of my Egyptian coworkers arguing about the best way to organize the books in the AUC Press warehouse. Is it better to do it by ISBN number, or to forget ISBNs and create a grid mapping the entire facility so that books don’t need to be shifted every time new titles arrive?

I can see pros and cons to both options, but that’s not the point. After having almost convinced myself that I was on the wrong side of the nature vs. nurture dispute and admitted that Egyptians might, in fact, be inherently inefficient, I find myself back where I started. No, they’re not innately, biologically inefficient, they’re just the products of a profoundly inefficient culture.

صباح الخير يا مصر

2008-04-14T09:14:00.004+02:00

A typical morning in the life of Anna Ziajka:

- Wake up when cell phone alarm goes off at 7:15. Hit the snooze. Hit the snooze again. Finally get up eighteen minutes later.
- Head to bathroom. While brushing teeth, turn on hot water in sink. Turn on hot water in shower. Walk to second bathroom, continuing to brush teeth along the way, and turn on hot water in sink. Wait for water heater to light. Turn off hot water. Return to first bathroom. Shower.
- Dry off and head to my room. Dress in semi-dark. Open shutters only when fully clothed (once a pair of little boys spotted me dressing from the rooftop of the building across the street and didn't budge from the spot for the rest of the morning). Do makeup, dry hair, put on shoes.
- Fetch liter jug of fresh mango juice from the fridge and pour myself a glass. Mmm.... Rinse glass after drinking to discourage flies. Leave apartment.
- Walk down two flights of stairs to catch elevator. Get out on ground floor and tiptoe past sleeping doorman. If he wakes up, engage in perfunctory "good-morning-how-are-you" routine. If he doesn't, thank my lucky stars and slip out of the building very, very quietly.
- Head toward work. Pass woman and child selling bread and vegetables (right now it's lettuce) on the sidewalk. Wish her good morning. Pass Christian grocer who I don't patronize because he charges twenty-five piastres (cents) more for a bottle of water than the Muslim grocer across the street. Wish him good morning. Pass curbside coffeeshop. Act like I don't hear when at least one man lifts his lips from his sheesha pipe to call me abyad (white) or eshta (cream). Pass young man on bicycle peddling gas tanks. Arrive at corner of Tahrir Street.
- Inch out into Tahrir Street. Wait for speeding taxis to pass. Cross halfway. Dodge swaying, overcrowded bus belching diesel exhaust. Look left to make sure there are no cars driving in reverse on the one-way street. Cross the rest of the way.
- Walk half-block to alley. Avoid passing too close to the ta'miya (falafel) shop where the servers hassle foreign girls. Round corner into alley. Take a deep breath to smell the sausages frying at the sausages-and-eggs-and-hotdog-buns stall.
- Scoot briskly down alley. Pass two men sleeping in their pickup. Pass small girl gathering glass soda bottles from the trash heap. Pass perfume shops and tiny electronic stores not yet open for business. Pass improvised mornings-only ta'miya stand operated by an astonishingly beautiful woman in a headscarf. Take another deep breath to smell the fava bean mash frying in hot oil. Pass group of policemen waiting in line to buy ta'miya. Act like I don't see them staring at me as I walk by.
- Pass McDonald's and turn corner onto Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Avoid puddles of water on the sidewalk from shopowners mopping their front stoops.
- Arrive at office and go inside. Wish security guard good morning. Take the elevator three floors up (if it's not broken) or walk up three flights of stairs (if it is). Sit down at my desk in the editorial department and turn on computer.

And here I am.

2008-04-06T23:17:00.001+02:00

I just heard from someone who talked to a girl in the youth arm of Kifaya--a longstanding opposition movement here in Egypt whose name means 'enough'--that four people were killed in the riots in Mahalla al-Kobra today, one of them a nine-year-old boy. She said that the government moved efficiently throughout the day to arrest organizers at a speed that left them scrambling to maintain a coherent presence, fueling perceptions here and in the foreign media that the protests were poorly attended.

A Day of Strikes in Egypt

2008-04-06T16:27:00.011+02:00

As tree branches trembled, shutters flapped, and the sky turned sooty yellow, signaling the approach of yet another spring sandstorm, an uncharacteristic hush lay over the streets of downtown Cairo. For the last week, organizers from several prominent opposition parties have been using a covert campaign of emails and Facebook postings, text messages and word of mouth, to call on the Egyptian public to take a stand against the harsh circumstances of life here and a government that seems either unwilling or unable to improve them.

"God willing, we will make a strike on the 6th of April as a protest against the excessive increase in prices and an increase in wages that does not keep pace with it...," reads the opening of a lengthy eight-article manifesto in Arabic on a Facebook page belonging to one of the organizers. Invitations to view the page were sent to more than 3,100 people.

In Cairo today, the question on everyone's mind was: Was anything going to happen? The government certainly seemed to think so, or at least, it wasn't taking any chances. Trucks overflowing with black-clad soldiers sat parked at every major intersection near the country's central government headquarters, the Mugamma', while police in riot gear were stationed three-deep in nearby Tahrir Square.

Among ordinary Egyptians, who often talk longingly of change but shy away from any action that could endanger them or their families, nerves were on edge. Some people refused to leave their homes, while others played it safe by keeping well away from the volatile city center. In 1977, at least seventy people were killed and the Shepheard's Hotel burned to the ground during three days of riots after President Sadat slashed subsidies on bread and other basic commodities.

Now and in 1977, bread is a hot-button issue in Egypt.

Media coverage about the nature and the extent of the strikes is conflicting. The Associated Press reported that several thousand workers in the northern industrial town of Mahalla al-Kobra, home to the nation's largest textile factory and the site of a week-long sit-in to protest low wages last fall, attacked police with bricks, leading to at least fifty arrests. In Cairo, according to the AP, students at two major public universities showed their solidarity by skipping classes and shouting slogans in support of the workers. The Emirates-based Gulf News, however, called today's strikes "lackluster" and quoted sources saying that workers at the factory in Mahalla al-Kobra scrapped plans to protest after reaching a deal with managers.

By nightfall, life in downtown Cairo had returned to normal. Merchants whose shops were shuttered either in protest or in fear had reopened for business, and the flow of traffic had resumed its usual frenetic pace. As always seems to be the case here, nothing had changed. A few arrests and broken bones later, Egypt is back to where it started: poor, unhappy, and seemingly unable to do anything about it.

College Is Over--Now What?

2008-04-03T17:45:00.006+02:00

Everyone has heard of the post-college slump. Moving back home and holing up like a medieval hermit in the basement of the house you grew up in, dragging your hairy, unwashed, PJ-clad self upstairs only when your parents tell you that if you want to live under their roof again you have to participate in family dinners. Renting an apartment in the cheapest possible neighborhood of the same big city where all of your college friends moved to and spending your days surfing the Craigslist job postings and your nights recreating college life in any of the numerous bars near you where, even though you have been twenty-one for more than a year, you still find it occasionally thrilling that they actually serve you alcohol. Segueing straight from graduation into a plummy job at your dad's company, where the pay is decent, the chances of being fired are nil, and the idea that this could become your life makes you gag. Finally moving in with your college sweetheart, realizing that life in the real world is a lot harder than you expected and that your sweetheart has peculiar personal habits and a disturbing lack of regard for cleanliness, and fighting all the time, and then fighting some more.

Although I've fallen victim to, or come close to succumbing to, the dreaded slump in all of its permutations since I left college, at least I left the country. Post-college slump in Egypt? Never! As malaria has no place in Siberia, so the post-college slump--disease of pampered, commitment-phobic, American upper-middle-class youths--has no place in a third-world Muslim country. Wrong! You can take the American upper-middle-class youths out of America, but you can't save them from the slump. We park ourselves in front of the TV and bemoan our lack of professional direction. We drink too much. We go to stupid parties, pretend to have a good time, and then spend the next day hungover and wondering why all the parties here are lame. We think we are lame, and worry that we are fundamentally lazy, and complain that we are bored. We flirt with members of the opposite sex, enter into casual and unfulfilling relationships with them, and then justify leaving them by saying that by this point in life, you shouldn't date anyone you can never see yourself marrying.

It's Thursday night, the first night of the weekend here in Egypt. Why am I sitting at home contemplating the post-college slump instead of tossing on a cute outfit, having a few drinks with some of my fellow American ex-pats, and hitting the party circuit?

Well actually, if truth be told, I'm just waiting for my ride.

Let Them Eat Bread

2008-03-30T17:10:00.008+02:00

My pension is LE 194, which is good as pensions go. But this money is not enough for anything. We spend it during the first week of the month, and then we borrow from whoever will lend to us for the rest of the month.

I have five daughters and one son. All the girls were married and living with their husbands, but the youngest got divorced a year ago and is now living with us together with her three children. She does not work, but sometimes gets a job altering dresses and then we have enough to get us through a day or two. My son is married and lives with us. I had to agree. His mother and I gave up our room: He lives in it with his wife and two kids. My wife and I, together with my daughter and her kids, sleep in the living room. We get by, alhamdulillah.

My son is a good craftsman, but is moody sometimes. He keeps quitting jobs, so one month he makes money and two or three months he does not. We have to make this pension last, which is becoming more and more difficult every day. Prices are increasing all the time. The money is barely enough to keep us eating bread.

I hope the ration card works. I have an old one, and am working on getting new ones for my grandchildren. We really need the government’s help. It must remember the masses, the public.

We love the President, may God grant him good health. Please tell him to remember us. I am sure he would not agree to what is happening to us.

http://egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=7876

Did you hear that, Hosni Mubarak?

Innocents Abroad

2008-03-28T10:31:00.016+02:00

As anyone who has ever walked through downtown Cairo's Tahrir Square on a sunny afternoon or dared to make the hassle-fraught trip to the Giza pyramids can tell you, the tourist industry in Egypt is large, boisterous, and in-your-face. In 2007, according to data provided by Egypt's Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, almost 7 million tourists passed through the country. The greatest number came from Europe, riding high on the windfall of the strong Euro, which finished last year at a rate of 8 to 1 against the Egyptian pound. East Asian tourism boomed, increasing 40 percent from 2006 to 2007; today during the height of the tourist season, Koreans and Japanese armed with cameras and parasols flood Luxor by the busload. Arabs from the Gulf mingle freely with Americans and Africans.

It is easy how the Egyptian economy benefits from tourism. Foreigners eat at expensive restaurants, spending up to fifteen times on a single dish what Egyptians spend on an entire dinner without blinking an eye. Alcohol, unaffordable for most locals at the vast majority of bars in Cairo, is consumed by tourists in large quantities despite being pretty much the only thing in this country that is sold at Western prices. For an hourly wage plus tips, guides will drive you into the desert in a jeep, sail you up the Nile on a felucca, buy carpets and perfume for you at the bazaars, and take you for sunset camel rides. Hotels offer convenient (and for the foreign wallet, inexpensive) all-inclusive deals that provide lodging, three meals a day, a translator to accompany you on your excursions, a spa to help you relax after a long day of battling traffic and haggling for souvenirs, and anything else your heart desires. This is a third-world nation with a staggering unemployment problem, and almost any service is available for a price, from cigarettes delivered straight to your hotel room to a personal coiffeur to style your hair before a night on the town. Egypt, which is home to some the world's most famous antiquities but boasts few natural resources, relies on the flow of foreign currencies that tourists pump into the economy on an annual basis as one of its main sources of revenue.

A more interesting question is what the tourists themselves get out of the experience. Why do people travel to Egypt? Some come to broaden their horizons, citing lofty ideas of cultural pluralism and a desire to 'see other places' to justify trekking all the way out here to the northeastern tip of Africa. Others come chasing childhood dreams of King Tut and hieroglyphs and are surprised to find themselves in a Muslim country of 80 million where the ruler is a modern military autocrat and Arabic, not Egyptian, is the national language. Still others come to vacation, fleeing Cairo immediately for the lush beaches and hopping club scene of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Egypt is a hard place to get to know. Westerners traveling to other Western countries can ease themselves in on the shared commonalities of history and tradition, and even Asia, with its mass consumption of Western pop culture and well-organized tourist apparatus, poses less of a challenge. Without doubt, the majority of the 7 million tourists last year left Egypt having barely scratched the surface of what this country is all about. So why do they come here? Is it just to say they've done it? To regale friends back home with photos of pharaonic monuments that have been photographed millions of times before? To better enjoy the comforts of home after having been deprived of them for several interesting-but-stressful weeks on the road?

After all, there's no place like home.

The Return of the Fuul Pot

2008-03-26T17:40:00.003+02:00

To anyone who has searched cyberspace repeatedly for the next installment of Only a Fool Cleans the Fuul Pot only to be disappointed...I apologize.

To anyone who got tired of wondering when this recalcitrant blogger would get her act together and stopped reading...you are fully justified in doing so.

The reasons for my absence are the following:

1. Laziness, pure and simple. That's the ugly and unflattering truth of it.
2. I've been busy. I had visitors in town for most of February, after which I myself was away traveling.
3. I developed a temporary psychological aversion to blogging, deciding that only tourists and study abroad students (two types of people that I abhor being mistaken for, despite having at various points in the past been both) delight in delivering pithy observations about the country they're living in to their friends back home.

As I prepare to take up my virtual pen once more and resume the self-indulgent process of scrawling my thoughts across the blogosphere, I ask you to please bear with me as I attempt to find the words to do justice to a country that--in defiance of my continued efforts to tame and understand it--still never fails to surprise me.

Resistant Translation and the Language of Hegemony

2007-12-24T20:02:00.000+02:00

Today's world of liberal academia, hypersensitized to the demands of cultural relativism and political correctness, abounds with theories that aim to situate the dominant white Western identity in relation to the non-white Other. In this framework, a nebulous yet very present sense of culpability for the perceived crimes of our ancestors coupled with an acute awareness of the pitfalls of cultural exchange make any attempt at dialogue between Us and Them a risky endeavor, requiring us to tread carefully lest we find ourselves guilty of false assumptions, accidental racism, or the perpetuation of outmoded supremacist norms.

Dr. Martha Cutter, a specialist in multiethnic literature studies in the graduate English Department at Kent State University, contends in her 2005 book Lost and Found in Translation that "there is a trope of cultural and linguistic translation...[that] involves transcoding ethnicity, transmigrating the ethnic tongue into the English language, and renovating the language of hegemony.... [T]ranslation typifies, then, a remaking of not only language but also racial, generational, and cultural identities." In response to concerns raised by Cutter and other liberal academics over the ramifications of translating non-Western texts into the dominant Western language of English comes the idea of "resistant translation," which maintains that English renderings of non-Western texts should be characterized by a degree of awkwardness and a lack of fluidity sufficient to remind readers of the cultural divide separating the book in front of them from its original version. The stilted nature of these translations will force readers to acknowledge the complexity of the translation process, and by extension will serve to suggest the intricate underlay of anthropological assumptions, cultural appropriations, and power differentials attendant in the act of cross-cultural exchange.

In the latest development in the ongoing debate over modes of translation, a panel of academics at this year's annual MESA conference suggested that the notion of resistant translation ought to be applied to literature translated from Arabic to English--exactly the sort of literature published by AUC Press. Translating between English and Arabic is a perennially challenging and at times frustrating endeavor. No matter how skilled the translator or how fluid the language of the Arabic original, there will inevitably be certain turns of phrase, idiosyncrasies, and colloquial expressions that simply don't have neat equivalents in English. This is the reality of all translation to some extent, yet where Arabic-to-English translation is concerned the lack of straightforward parallels between the two languages has historically been a particular obstacle. In light of this, the idea of intentionally complicating the process still further strikes me as at best redundant, and at worst detrimental to an already-problematic situation. Do the academics at MESA really believe that the best way to foster an acceptable attitude among Western readers toward Arab culture is by making it even more inaccessible than it already is? I do think it's necessary to acknowledge that translation can be a form of cultural appropriation, and to treat it as such with a certain amount of caution, but to be so afraid of betraying our lofty liberal ideals that we intentionally obfuscate and confuse seems self-defeating and out of touch with reality, a product of the worst tendencies of liberal academia.

The Decline of Downtown

2007-12-04T00:01:00.000+02:00

Cairo’s downtown—the area centered on the quadruple squares of Talaat Harb, Tahrir, Ramses, and Attaba—was never designed to be anything but a downtown. Conceived by Muhammad Ali’s grandson Ismail (who ruled Egypt from 1863-1879) as an oriental version of Paris’ centre-ville, Ismail's ambitious plan called for a landscape of formal gardens, wide boulevards, and grand department stores, interspersed with European-style coffee shops and bars where well-dressed men and women could come together to relax, drink alcohol, and enjoy themselves late into the night.

The early 20th century saw Cairo swell with foreigners seeking adventure or a change of climate, and the downtown expanded accordingly to include financial centers, consulates, and elegant residences suitable for the native elite and visiting foreign dignitaries alike. As most of the larger garden areas in Ismail's original blueprint were gradually abandoned in favor of multi-storied apartment buildings capable of accommodating the growing population, downtown began to assume its modern face—an eclectic mix of Parisian and oriental architecture with livable space maximized by high-rise hotels and apartments.

So what happened? More recent years have not been kind to downtown. The population has declined since Ismail’s era, as those who could afford it moved elsewhere to escape the pollution, noise, and perpetual traffic that plague the city center. The aristocrats who formerly patronized its shops, restaurants, bars, and movie theaters now prefer to spend their leisure time in ritzy Western-style cafes in Zamalek or out for a late-night dinner and drinks in Mohandiseen. Talaat Harb Square's modest clothing boutiques pale in comparison to the extravagant City Stars mall in Heliopolis, which boasts European brands at European prices, a food court complete with Panda Express and Fuddruckers, and one of the the only three Starbucks in the country (I confess to having once trekked out to City Stars solely for a grande nonfat latte). By comparison, Sednaoui, the old-time department store occupying one whole side of the Talaat Harb Square, employs about five sales representatives for each customer who comes through its doors; its decor is shabby, its products are underwhelming in their outmoded and poorly organized plenitude.

It is no wonder that upper-class Cairenes speak about downtown with such obvious dislike. At once an embarrassing testament to how far Egypt has fallen since its glory days and a painful reminder of the mismanagement and lack of foresight that have cost its people so much in the years since Nasser's grand but ill-conceived revolution, downtown poses a problem to anyone trying to claim Cairo as a place defined by City Stars and posh European cafes. Because frankly, it isn't this sort of place at all, but would it really be Cairo anymore if it were?

'Twas the Month Before Christmas

2007-11-30T15:05:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow is the first day of December, but I wouldn't know it if the desktop calendar on my computer didn't keep insisting--obstinately, and despite all evidence to the contrary--that this is so. The sun is shining, the air is a balmy 72 degrees, and the usual overabundance of holiday cheer, so noxious and gag-inducing in the U.S., is conspicuously lacking. Conspicuously lacking at least to this American girl, who never realized how much she counted on the yearly appearance of mass-produced festive spirit to let her know that Christmas is just around the corner. As many times as I've rolled my eyes at the tinsel and plastic evergreen bedecking supermarkets and drugstore aisles, angrily shut off the car radio at the first jolly strains of "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" (I hate contemporary Christmas music--I hate the exclamation points in the title of "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!," the pseudo-multiculturalism of "Feliz Navidad," and any Christmas song written after 1995; I absolutely to not want to rock around my Christmas tree or hear Celine Dion, James Taylor, or any former American Idol contestant sing a jazz-lite rendition of "Silent Night."), as often as I've railed against Hallmark, Macy's, and shopping mall Santas for ruining the Christmas season, I miss the way America does December.

To be sure, Christmas can be found in Cairo. A few nurseries in the foreigner-heavy Zamalek neighborhood have begun selling potted poinsettias and miniature fake Christmas trees, and we recently hung a string of colored lights left over from Ramadan in our apartment in a vague stab at creating a holidayish atmosphere. But in a country without a) snow, b) Hallmark, or c) a Christian majority, it's hard to believe that Christmas is really on the way. I'll simply have to trust that it is, and that the halls of my homeland are appropriately decked even though I can't see them, and that even as I sit here, children all over the United States of America are getting fat on chocolate advent calendars and mailing anxious requests for iPods to the North Pole.

A Christmas display at a Zamalek supermarket:

Thanksgiving in Cairo

2007-11-23T13:17:00.000+02:00

Lying here on the couch in my pjs in a Friday-afternoon, post-leftover-pie-eating stupor, I'm here to report that our first-ever Thanksgiving in Egypt was a success. My roommate Emilie and I spent the better part of yesterday at our friend Patrick's apartment cooking, and despite never having hosted Thanksgiving dinner sans parents before, we managed to pull it off admirably. It was unconventional (the turkey was thawed in the bathtub), fraught with unexpected difficulties (it took us many days of combing ex-pat grocery stores to find a single $10 can of pumpkin), and nearly disastrous (the cigarette lighter that exploded on the manually lighting gas stove), but when all ten of us--seven Americans and three Egyptians--sat down together to eat turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, green beans, yams, and pumpkin pie, I've gotta say, Uncle Sam would've been proud.

My stomach still feels uncomfortably stretched from packing it so very full of food last night, which--however unpleasant--is how one's stomach is supposed to feel the day after Thanksgiving, and my head is throbbing dully from the quantities of wine I consumed to wash down the aforementioned turkey. In the time-honored tradition of nursing one's holiday-related physical ailments for all they're worth, I've spent the morning watching a John Cusack movie on TV while nibbling on cold leftovers and rehashing last night's gossip with Emilie. There's is a particular self-indulgent frame of mind that is the special province of the holiday season, where we generously hand ourselves a carte blanche to overeat, overdrink, and neglect our personal hygiene. I feel myself slipping into it now. Already the apple pie is calling to me from the fridge, enticing me to cut myself just one more modest sliver, and how well it would go with a square of that white cheddar we bought for omelets last weekend! If only we had a microwave. Our apartment is a dump, I haven't showered since yesterday morning, and I'm seriously considering going back to bed. The holidays have surely, even in Egypt, a country that celebrates neither Thanksgiving nor Christmas, begun.

Here's something to think about: Does anyone actually like turkey? We're coerced yearly by the purveyors of mass-market American traditionalism into forcing ourselves to eat something none of us enjoys...doesn't anyone but me find this worrisome?

The Backstreet Boys from Baghdad

2007-11-16T17:20:00.000+02:00

You'd better believe it. The following excerpt from an article published in the online British newspaper the Telegraph in April, 2006, illustrates just one difficulty of being a boy band from Iraq:

They scraped together the money to record a single, but "the only radio station that would play Western songs was run by Saddam's son Uday", explains Art Hartounian, who plays keyboards and sings. "They refused to play our song unless we made a song for Saddam's birthday. You faced such things at that time."

Oh yes. And there's more to be found here on the Telegraph website. Quit playing games with my heart, you strapping young hotties from Saddam-land.

Bring the Israelis to AUC

2007-11-11T17:19:00.000+02:00

The usually apathetic AUC student body is up in arms over reports that the university is seeking to normalize relations with Israel. Rumors that the AUC administration has invited a delegation of Israeli academics to campus, is considering adding an Israeli professor to its faculty, and may begin allowing study abroad exchanges with Israeli institutions of higher education--allegations that have been circulated in the national press--are galvanizing students to take action and stand up for what they believe in.

"Ahmed Abou Laban, an AUC alumnus who had often organized sit-ins, protests, and donation campaigns in support of political and humanitarian causes, was invited to help students set an action plan to protest Israelis at AUC," reported the AUC student newspaper The Caravan on Nov. 4. "The students will push for a written policy to not allow Israelis at AUC, said Abou Laban. On the other hand, if the administration votes for normalization with Israeli scholars, students will resort to sit-ins, strikes and communication with the local and international media."

Oh the irony of it. After hearing AUC students widely profess their disengagement from political issues and their belief that activism is futile and change happens only with time, if at all (and with a president like Mubarak running the country for past twenty-five years, who can blame them?), all this talk of sit-ins and and policymaking would be refreshing, were it for a different cause. This is the language of revolution, of self-empowerment and youthful optimism, and for it to come from the cigarette-sucking mouths of bored, Gucci-clad Egyptian désenchantés is an occurrence worth noting. And yet they are arming themselves for the same tired battle that the Arabs have been fruitlessly, stubbornly fighting for more than a generation, this Trojan War that these days is more about wounded pride than about stolen land or the disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people.

The president of AUC sent out a campus-wide email today assuring us all that the rumors are fallacious and that the university remains "an independent, non-sectarian, apolitical educational institution...[that] does not take positions on political or religious issues." It is not the task of any university, nor should it be, to espouse a particular set of beliefs, much less foist ideologies or dogmas on its students. But to go all the way in the other direction, to loudly and publicly disavow debate in such absolutist terms, is a betrayal of the fundamental role of an educational institution. What better forum than a university to host dialogue between sworn enemies, a nonpartisan no-man's-land where life-and-death issues can be discussed in thoroughly safe, academic terms? To be worthy of the mantle of premier university in the Middle East, AUC needs to overcome its fear of controversy and its limiting situation in an authoritarian state.

The current brouhaha shows us what a few well-placed rumors can do to stir even the most disaffected youths into action. I'd like to see what would happen if next semester brought with it a posse of poli sci professors straight off the plane from Tel Aviv.

MTV in the Middle East

2007-11-07T18:50:00.000+02:00

I’ve never seen a culture so obsessed with music videos. America a few years back—the era when MTV host Ananda Lewis was a role model for legions of pubescent YM readers, and Eminem rapped I go to TRL, look how many hugs I get so everyone knew just how great he was—was nothing compared to the Middle East of 2007. Forget fundamentalist Islam and homemade car bombs; music videos are what people here are devoting their energy to these days. Seven of the first twenty channels on my TV play music videos, ranging from the hip, glossy, ad-filled Melody Hits station to the more old fashioned Nojoom, which features men in traditional Arab garb playing the ‘oud (an Arab guitar).

Melody Hits, which broadcasts all over the Arabic-speaking world from the Gulf to Morocco, is a study in what happens when a conservative popular culture decides to become cool. Sure, the quick cuts, supersaturated color palette, and stylish production values are imported from MTV, but the videos are uniquely and very purposefully of their place. The music itself is distinctively Middle Eastern, favoring Arabic scales (think the Aladdin soundtrack) and throbbing drumbeats interspersed with flutes and jangling tambourines. Rarely do you find a singer too in love with soft-focus close-ups of their own face to bust a move; these divas, male and female alike, shake their hips, stick out their butts, and dance their way across the screen with skills that would put most American pop stars (Britney, for one) to shame.

Not that these music videos should necessarily be taken for reflections of reality in the Arab world. For one thing, after watching Melody Hits you would be left with the mistaken impression that most women here are light-skinned (apparently being pale is the ticket to fame), have long hair and big eyes, and wear formfitting clothing that reveals their back and shoulders. The women are pretty, to be sure, but frighteningly homogeneous, as if their faces all came from the same plastic surgeon. The men are more varied and not as uniformly attractive, but their look is always identical: dark gelled hair, open-neck shirt showing a V of tanned chest, one or two pieces of artfully placed jewelry on the throat or wrist.

My current favorite video is by the Lebanese singer Carole Samaha for her song "Adwa2 El Shohra." It's catchy, whether or not you understand what she's saying. And ain't she nice to look at?

Bayn al-lughatayn...Between Two Languages

2007-10-31T19:31:00.000+02:00

The more comfortable I become as a bilingual speaker of both Arabic and English, the more difficult it is for me to express myself. My experience is comparable to that of small children who are raised in two-language households, an upbringing that often delays their linguistic development so that when their monolingual peers are already stringing together words to make complete sentences, they are still struggling to combine nouns and adjectives.

I had a teacher in high school who was Swedish and married to an American-Israeli man, and when they had a baby boy they decided that she would speak to him in Swedish and her husband would speak to him in English with occasional dashes of Hebrew thrown in. Their son was every bit as bright as any baby, but he spoke later and with more errors than is considered average for children his age. Of course, multilingual babies catch up to the norm eventually, and when they get older they have the advantage of being natively comfortable with more than one language--a useful skill to have.

As I imagine was the case for my teacher's son, I often feel caught between two languages. My grasp of Arabic is not quite comprehensive enough to convey everything I want to say without difficulty or hesitation, but English is limited by its inability to give voice to the fact of being in Egypt that informs every action, thought, and desire of my day-to-day existence. I am so wholly, totally, obsessively focused on language here that I've become hypersensitive to every word that comes out of my mouth: Is the language I've chosen to speak appropriate to my audience? Is what I'm saying accurately conveying the meaning I want it to? If I am being misunderstood, is it for reasons of vocabulary (English vocabulary that's too complicated for my Egyptian conversation partner; Arabic vocabulary that's incorrect or lacking), cultural or situational reasons (saying the wrong thing at the wrong time), or reasons of pronunciation and/or diction (saying the right thing but mispronouncing it)?

What it comes down to is that the only way I can talk comfortably these days is in a mixture of both languages, and so anyone I talk to must have an acceptable grasp of not just one language but two. I've met Americans here who I never would've thought were Americans if they hadn't told me so--that's how much their accent when speaking English has been changed and distorted by the Arabic-based linguistic environment they live in. So if you can't understand my English next time you run into me in the States, my apologies...I couldn't help it.

Rockin It at the Hard Rock

2007-10-26T13:50:00.000+02:00

Through some combination of poor planning, miscommunication, and an overzealous spirit of adventure, my roommate Emilie and I ended up at the Hard Rock Cafe in the wee hours of Friday morning. A refuge both for Westerners and for Arabs with inclinations toward certain forbidden Western practices, the Hard Rock is an obvious target for terrorists and for that reason is one of the places that our friendly American State Department would strongly advise us not to frequent. Not that a terrorist would have an easy time getting in. The cafe and its accompanying discotheque and gift shop are on the ground floor of the massive Grand Hyatt Hotel, a gated, heavily guarded fortress of a building located on an island in the Nile River. As if its sheer size and the AK-47s on prominent display in the arms of its security personnel weren't deterrents enough, above each stall in the restroom hangs a neat metal plaque announcing, "No drugs and no nuclear weapons." A polite reminder that, in case you're thinking of stopping for a quick pee before martyring yourself, you'd better leave your nuclear devices at the door. One shouldn't laugh, but it's hard not to.

The clientele of the Hard Rock are similarly laughable. Largely single males looking for a good time, they prowl the dance floor in the disco in bell-bottom jeans and shiny blazers, foisting themselves on unsuspecting white women who've clearly come to the Hard Rock under the impression that it's a respectable establishment. Feel that hand on your back? That warm breath on your neck? Oh yes, it's one of the delightful Hard Rock regulars trying to make sure you have a good night. I've heard (though this is unsubstantiated) that it's a favorite hangout spot for rich Saudi men looking to pick up prostitutes. The woman in the silver miniskirt and stiletto boots who spent most of night dancing and grinding on top of a table may have been one of these women of ill repute--or a very, very clueless Westerner. For her sake, I almost hope it was the former.

The Fayoum

2007-10-23T14:08:00.001+02:00

Lake Qarun has attracted people to the Fayoum oasis for thousands of years. Since the time of the pharaohs, human beings have been drawn here by the vital, life-sustaining water that stretches from sand to sky as far as the eye can see and promises survival for all living things who make their homes beside it. In this desert land, water is unquantifiably more precious than gold or oil, saffron or amethysts, although all these are found in Egypt as well and are highly prized for their worth to the outside world. But in the desert, it is water that counts.

On a side note (and to gripe yet again about the lack of environmental awareness in Egypt), I'll point out that, as is the case with most natural resources in this country, Lake Qarun has been exploited and abused by the Egyptians who live near it. Soil drainage from the farms on its banks has contaminated the water with organic waste, metals, and pesticides, and over-fishing has depleted what fish population has managed to survive the toxic pollution. A study of the lake published in the International Journal of Environmental Sciences concluded that as "Lake Qarun is a closed basin with a high evaporation rate...[and the] only source of water in the lake is the agricultural and municipal drainage from the surrounding communities...the water quality of Lake Qarun has significantly deteriorated" (Gupta and Abd El-Hamid, 2003). The seagulls that circle overhead are a striking visual reminder of how salty the lake has become; 225 km from the Mediterranean, the typically ocean-dwelling birds are now a common sight here.

Despite the state of Lake Qarun, the surrouding oasis of Fayoum is a peaceful paradise of date palms and clear blue skies, as different from the frenetic, noisy, dusty mass of people that comprises Cairo as can be. The dirt roads that wind among the scattered houses--some simple huts used by the local people, others grand villas where wealthy Cairenes spend their weekends--are trafficked mostly by donkeys, the only motorized vehicles being the occasional battered Toyota pickup carrying farming supplies. Water buffaloes, ubiquitous in rural Egypt, graze among the stands of palm trees.

Whose imagination is not vulnerable to the ideal of the Oasis? A rare green place in a vast desert, a haven of calm and relaxation, a place to shed the cares of life and enjoy a little much-needed vacation. Thirty of my coworkers and I traveled to my boss' house in Fayoum last weekend and spent a day eating, drinking tea, and wandering lazily up and down the roads in search of scenic photo ops and local pottery. Although everyone I was with was Egyptian, they approached Fayoum with the same preconceived notions of the Oasis as I did--and were far less shy about acknowledging them. I was not the one snapping pictures of little boys on donkeys; they were. It was my Egyptian coworkers, not me, who insisted that we visit the pottery shops where Fayoum craftsmen sell their wares, and once we were inside complained loudly within earshot of the proprietors that everything was overpriced. We trooped boldly into peoples' backyards so we could pose with a view of the lake behind us. Cameras swinging, we peered through windows, stepped delicately over the mud on the path, and asked a local man if he would let us ride his horses.

What it turned into was a dichotomy between urban and rural, wealthy and poor, educated and uneducated, tourist and local. It is a dichotomy you expect when Americans visit Egypt, but is more startling when it is Cairenes visiting Fayoum.

The Sinai

2007-10-16T16:29:00.003+02:00

Sinai is the land of discovery. It is the route to the Promised Land, where Isis sought Osiris and the Pharaohs found gold. It is where Moses witnessed the Burning Bush and the Bedouins camped by Crusader forts. Sinai is the meeting point for three great religions, at the crossroads of Africa and Asia.

This is the description of the Sinai found on TourEgypt.net, an online guide to Egypt that tends to flatter the country with saccharine, epic accounts of its sights and culture--take, for instance, its assertion that "Egypt is probably one of the oldest vacation spots. Early Greeks, Romans and others went there just for fun, and to see the wonders of some of mankind's earliest triumphs." I'm tempted to suspect that the Egyptian government has a hand in, or at least veto power over, what goes up on TourEgypt.net, although oddly enough much of the "About Egypt" section has been lifted directly and without citation from the CIA World Factbook.

Still, I have to admit that TourEgypt.net is on the mark when it comes to the Sinai. The Sinai has been stamped by a diverse and often contradictory history. A wasteland of vast sands and scant water, it has nonetheless been inhabited for many thousands of years and is currently home to a dozen different Bedouin tribes; one of the holiest sites in Judaism, where God recognized his covenant with the Israelites in the form of the Ten Commandments, it is today part of a Muslim country and covered with Christian monasteries; best known in the 20th century as a cause of bitter international contention and warfare, it is agriculturally unusable and has few natural resources other than minerals.

In the third month, when the children of Israel were gone forth out of the land of Egypt, the same day came they into the wilderness of Sinai. - Exodus 19:1

The Sinai is not without its share of problems. Its gorgeous beaches on the Gulf of Aqaba attract barely enough tourism to sustain themselves thanks to a spate of terrorist attacks in the last decade (Taba in 2004, Sharm el-Sheikh in 2005, Dahab in 2006), and half-finished hotels, quickly falling into ruin, line the coastal highway. Situated on a peninsula the size of Utah between the Red Sea and the Gulf, the Sinai sits uneasily among its neighboring regions: mainland Egypt to the west (the Dahab bombings were carried out by Sinai Bedouins allegedly protesting President Mubarak's more secular policies), Israel to the north, and Saudi Arabia to the east. From the Basata resort on the eastern coast of the Sinai where I stayed this weekend, you can look across the Gulf at night and see the lights of Eilat in Israel, Aqaba in Jordan, and the small towns among the mountains of Saudi Arabia, all twinkling brightly in the darkness.

I won't go into too much detail about our trip to Basata, except that Basata's an ecolodge that serves only organic food, has bamboo huts instead of rooms, and actually recycles, probably one of the few places in the whole country that does. Our journey there nearly killed us--our taxi driver was going 115 mph the entire time over barely paved, unlit roads--and our journey home took twelve hours owing to an unplanned stop to pick up a mysterious non-Egyptian couple who weren't allowed to leave the Sinai and two flat tires on our bus. More importantly, the sea was warm and blue, the sun was hot, the sand was soft, and bikinis were totally acceptable, even for Egyptians. You gotta love the Sinai.

This Space Is Mine

2007-10-11T16:49:00.000+02:00

Inspired by something a friend of mine in the States said the other day in our online chat, I've been thinking about my position here vis a vis gender. Constructions of gender here are much better defined and therefore much stricter than they are in America. Most importantly for an outsider living in Cairo as I am, the physical space of the city is divided along gender lines, with men occupying the public sphere of the cafes, parks, and sidewalks and women that of the private world of the home. Stopping by a typical coffee shop any evening, one finds exclusively men gathered around the sheeshas and trays of tea; women have no place in the ritually male space of the common cafe. This is not to say that women are never seen in public. To the contrary, the streets are filled with women buying groceries, shopping for clothes, or going about in pairs or groups on unspecified errands to and from the various neighborhoods of the city. There is a crucial difference implied in the way the two genders make use of the public space, however. Men lay claim to portions of the public zone by sitting in it, smoking in it, eating and sleeping in it, etc., marking it as their territory by involving it in traditionally private acts that are more typically linked to the home and thereby transferring to it an associated aura of ownership. Women, on the other hand, traverse the public space but do not stop in it, using it as a means to get from one place to another without attempting to establish any claim over it.

The physical space of Cairo is one of the most obviously gendered components of life here. The routines that the differing uses of space give rise to have shaped the geography and urban development of the city, while being simultaneously reinforced by socio-cultural and religious preferences so that they solidify into norms of space-usage that are nearly impossible to transgress. Being a foreigner and a woman, I am in many ways exempt from all norms by virtue of my outsider status in Egyptian society, yet on the other hand my femininity often threatens to trump (or does trump) my foreigner label so that I am perceived as a woman first and as an American only secondarily. I've found that when I stick to the streets near my apartment and walk around by myself, particularly when I've been running errands and I'm loaded down with bags of vegetables and kitchen supplies, no one bothers me. At these times, I'm abiding by the accepted rules for public space usage, using the streets only to travel from my home to the stores and back again. On the other hand, when I'm taking my time, stopping often to look around, or standing still entirely, or when I'm with a friend and we're chatting loudly in English and look as though we're tourists of the city rather than residents, the unwanted attention is pervasive and annoying.

Because I defy categorization, I am problematic to the city I live in. I am left floating in a limbo of not-belonging that my American male friends don't have to contend with. Their masculinity entitles them to the public space, while their foreigner status, which might be seen as threatening in the private world of the home, serves on the street to further liberate them from social and religious norms. They are ultimately free to do anything within public Cairo, while I am trapped within the convergence of conflicting paradigms.

Ramadan Kareem

2007-10-09T20:42:00.001+02:00

The end of this week marks the conclusion of Ramadan, the month when the entire Islamic world fasts, prays, and works truncated hours to accommodate its hungry, sleep-deprived citizens. Hungry because they don't eat or drink anything from before sunrise until sundown, and sleep-deprived because in the time between iftar (the fast-breaking dinner after evening prayer) and suhur (the final meal before fasting begins again, usually around 3 or 4 a.m.), they stay up smoking sheesha and drinking tea, juice, and soda, or sitting in front of their televisions watching special Ramadan cartoons and nightly serials. All night, the streets are aglow with hanging aluminum lanterns and strings of colored lightbulbs, and kids run around setting off firecrackers that make sudden alarming bomb-like sounds well into the wee hours of the morning.

I went to an iftar last week in a restaurant on a boat in the Nile. Many of the restaurants in Cairo serve iftar every night during Ramadan, with space at the nicest ones booking up weeks in advance. Traditionally, everyone is seated at tables that are already laid with bowls of salads (hummus, babaghanoug, etc.) and glasses of date juice and apricot juice, but no one can eat until the call to prayer sounds from the mosques. When it does, everyone says a prayer and sips slowly at their juice, this being supposedly the healthiest way for your stomach to end a day of fasting. Then lentil soup is brought, and the salads are eaten with bread, and then a main course of meat, chicken, or fish is served, and finally the meal is capped with an array of desserts including baq lawa, kunafa, and sticky apricot paste, accompanied by tea and coffee.

I attempted to fast on the day I went to iftar, and I managed to get through the entire day from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m. on only two cups of tea, one cup of coffee, and five dates. Not truly a fast, but I felt like I owed some measure of mental acuity to my boss and coworkers that wouldn't have been possible on a wholly empty stomach. I end up de facto fasting until 3 o'clock most days anyway because I'm too self-conscious to eat lunch in front of my well-disciplined, piously lunch-less colleagues. Next week, after eid (the holiday that officially ends Ramadan), I'll start taking the loveliest lunch breaks. Or as the reality will probably be, nibbling a sandwich at my desk because I have too much to do to afford such luxuries as lunch breaks. Remind me again why I'm not getting a salary for this job?

Egypt's Second City

2007-10-06T21:47:00.000+02:00

I returned last night from a trip to Alexandria, the second most important city in Egypt after Cairo. Our Lonely Planet guidebook claims that it's currently making a bid to rival Cairo in certain aspects of art and fine society, attempting to use the cultural cachet of its classical Greek heritage to lure foreign tourists and Egyptians alike to its stately coffeehouses where European intellectuals once debated philosophy over liquor and cups of espresso, its grand hotels along the Mediterranean corniche, and its elegant modern library.

But while it's true that the Alexandria of the pre-revolution days was a thriving cultural center, attracting writers, poets, and thinkers from all over the Mediterranean world, today the coffeehouses stand mostly empty, the grandeur of the hotels is long faded into gloominess and dilapidation, and the library, which opened in 2002 to great celebration and hoopla, has yet to acquire more than a few hundred thousand books of its intended 8 million-volume collection. According to the Lonely Planet, the abrupt nationalization of foreign businesses across Egypt that followed Nasser's ascent to power in 1952 prompted non-Egyptians to flee Alexandria in droves, changing it from a cosmopolitan center of 300,000 with a 40 percent foreign population to an ever-growing city of some 5 million people, many of them rural migrants in search of work.

Egypt is in an interesting predicament because it has only one city of any real importance--Cairo--and that city is hugely overpopulated, home to 20 million people yet capable of supporting only a small fraction of that number. Many Cairenes are left without electricity, city services like gas, running water, and garbage collection, or proper political representation, engendering the growth of slum communities that acquire these necessities instead through bribery and theft. Because everything in the country is centered in Cairo--government, economy, tourism, industry, foreign investment, art, movies, education etc.--there's not much reason for anyone to go anywhere else. The result is massive population problems in Cairo and the relegation of Alexandria to secondary-city status, leaving it a mere shell of an urban center that lacks self-sufficiency and purpose.

As a tourist, though, it was a welcome relief to escape the dust and hassle of Cairo and retreat to quieter, cleaner, better-smelling Alexandria. We spent an afternoon on the beach (in bikinis no less, a privilege we paid 60 LE for) and concluded our stay with an al fresco dinner of hummus, tahina, babaghanoug, pickles, cold potatoes, cheese, and grilled eggplant, followed by fried calamari, grilled sea bass, and red snapper, and finally topped off with sweet mint tea. The boy who waited on us was approximately ten years old, chubby, and wearing an orchestra conductor's vest, god only knows why.

Now I'm back in city number one, in my funky apartment that always smells like gas and has temperamental hot water, an elevator with too much personality, and old women selling fish on the sidewalk outside every day so that the lobby has a perpetually fishy odor. Who wouldn't choose to live in Cairo?

Curry

2007-10-03T21:46:00.000+02:00

Today, wanting badly to buy some curry powder to cook with but not knowing the name for it, I spent several minutes explaining to the man at the spice shop in my local souq (market) that I was looking for a spicy yellow thing that's used in Indian cooking. I smiled, I gestured, I pantomimed eating spicy food. After giving me some puzzled, what-is-this-American-trying-to-say looks, his face brightened. "Ayza kuri?" he asked.

In Egypt, the word for curry is...kuri.

Debating the American Short Story

2007-10-01T20:32:00.002+02:00

The Readers' Comments section of today's New York Times tosses out the following quote by Stephen King, editor of "The Best American Short Stories 2007," for us to chew on: Modern American short stories are, according to King, “show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers.”

The more than a hundred responses that the prompt generated range from impassioned defenses of the contemporary American story (oddly enough, the most oft-cited author in its support is the Canadian Alice Munro) to enthusiastic affirmations of King's sentiments that lay the blame variously on MFA programs, academia, censorship, the Internet, a pervasive acceptance of plagiarism, the decline of literary magazines, and the shrinking working class in the United States. King is accused of small-mindedness and ignorance one moment and hailed as a prophet the next.

Whether we think that King is a thinly disguised imperialist (several readers suggest that his biggest fault as a literary critic is his lack of appreciation for world literature--perhaps they missed the fact that he's talking about the decline of the American short story?) or want to praise him for telling it like it is, the question of what makes good literature continues to be a hotly contested one. As for me, I don't care whether you like American stories or don't like them, or what your personal feelings are for King himself, or whether you're a lifelong Hemingway loyalist or Jhumpa Lahiri's biggest fan. Keep the controversy coming, and American fiction will prosper from it.

A La Mode

2007-09-30T20:37:00.000+02:00

After sifting through my impressions of week one in Cairo, I feel compelled to say something about the issue of clothing. As we all know by this point, Muslim women tend to prefer a more conservative style of dress than what we're used to in the West. It's worth noting, however, that the exact nature of this dress ranges hugely from country to country, and within each country varies still further according to social class. In Egypt, for example, an upper-class Cairo woman might wear a belted tunic of expensive, high-quality fabric over form-fitting jeans and tie the whole ensemble together with a matching scarf pinned somewhat loosely over her hair. A lower-class woman, by contrast, might hide her whole body under a dress of coarse, thick cloth and cover her head with a heavy scarf fastened just under her neck and draping past her waist. The most religious women here, as elsewhere in the Middle East, wear the niqab, the long black head-to-toe veil that allows only their eyes to remain visible.

Fashion is an important mode of self-determination here. Among religious conservatives, clothes serve as a visual marker of a spiritual commitment to a Godly life, one that renounces carnal desire and pledges strict devotion to the guidelines of Islam. For the Egyptian elite, clothes are a badge of financial status, linking them to the West and its attendant notions of privilege and prosperity. One could map the city of Cairo in terms of clothing, delineating frames of physical space by what people wear within them.

Although we may be tempted to think of some of these fashion choices as misguided or disparage the reasons behind them, the obsession with clothing is certainly not unique to the Muslim world. In the U.S., your clothes can instantaneously define you as cool or uncool, a hipster or a jock, a fashionista or a fashion victim, preppy or alternative, too fancy or not fancy enough. The wealth of terms that we use to describe our own fashion-based cultures and subcultures and sub-subcultures is surely a sign of our preoccupation with what we put on our bodies. A map of New York City according to clothing preferences would be at least as informative as a map of Cairo.

For the record: I've read in several reputable sources that baby-doll minidresses and bubble skirts are out this fall and clean lines, pencil skirts, and trapeze jackets are in. Anyone care to comment?

Ashamed to Be American

2007-09-28T16:48:00.000+02:00

I've been thinking about why I've often found myself so ashamed to be an American, especially when traveling abroad. In my experience, this shame is something unique to my generation of American youth, those of us who arrived at an age of global awareness in the post-9/11 world. In a Sept. 26 column analyzing America’s reaction to Ahmadinejad's recent visit to Columbia University, the liberal American political blogger Ezra Klein writes:

"I don't know how to prove this, but my sense is that the dawning realization that we're globally unpopular is having profound effects on the American psyche. There's a lot of talk about how we don't care about what other countries think, but like the kid repeating mantras of self-esteem in the corner of the playground, saying it doesn't make it true." (http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/09/why-we-need-mor.html)

Like me, Klein was born in California in 1984 to liberal, well-educated parents, and like me, he seems to feel a profound sense of unease with America's role on the international stage. The "mantras of self-esteem" that he deems necessary for us to maintain even a fragile sort of self-confidence are something I relate to, as I find myself continually forced to remind myself what is good about America in the face of everything else that I find so much more obviously wrong with it. And like anyone with self-esteem issues, I am often convinced, hopelessly, that the bad outweighs the good.

I'm not sure that anyone who is not of my generation can fully understand this conviction. But keep in mind that as long as I have been politically aware, the United States has been governed by an administration that values displays of bravado over displays of intelligence, that throws nuance and complexity out the window and replaces them with over-simplifications and a black-and-white view of good and evil, that is highly skilled at blindsiding the public with glib answers and rhetoric but completely hapless when it comes to cultural sensitivity or simply admitting its own mistakes. This is the America I know, and it embarrasses me. The gloriously idealistic America of the founding fathers, the militarily and morally victorious America of the post-World War II era--these Americas are lost to a long-ago past. So like a fallen beauty queen, I can only sit in my corner, whisper my mantras, and hope that some day I'll be popular again.

A Normal Kind of Foreign

2007-09-28T12:51:00.000+02:00

As I sit in my sunny living room, drinking sweetened Nescafe with milk and listening to the adhan (the Islamic call to prayer) broadcast from the city's many minarets, I can't help but feel so very normal being here. Normal, in fact, has been the operative word of the last three days, although foreign also comes to mind when taking in the panorama of many-tiered rooftops, satellite dishes, billboards, mosques, laundry, temporary rooftop dwellings, rubble, cats, and office buildings surmounted by Islamic carvings that is visible from my balcony. Egypt is foreign because it is so different from my historical/inherited normal paradigm of the United States, yet its foreignness feels simultaneously normal because I've learned how to operate comfortably in it, thereby creating a new normal paradigm for myself that is entirely Egyptian. I am aware that Egypt's foreignness feels normal to me, if that makes any sense.

Some of this sense of normalcy derives from the fact that I am now living in an apartment downtown instead of in the isolated Western bubble of the American University of Cairo dorm. Situated among corner grocery stores and falafel (ta'amiya) stands, with the sound of taxis roaring through my bedroom night and day and the call of the muezzin loud enough to wake me up in the morning, I feel as though I'm part of the life of Cairo in a way that I wasn't before. I do all my shopping at the stores in my neighborhood, I pay 1150 LE in rent each month to an Egyptian landlord, and I have a job that contributes to the Egyptian economy. Each day I'm earning my right to be here, no longer a pampered American student abroad but a valid member of Cairo society. This knowledge of my newfound position buoys me up with confidence, making it easier to ignore the dirty stares of Egyptian men on the streets and giving me optimism that I will one day completely overcome the language barrier here.

I've thought a lot about what it means to belong, to fit in, to earn my right to exist in a metaphysical sense. Not to conform, but to carve out a place for myself that is both unique and universally accepted, to be liked for who I am and what I bring to the table without altering either of those things to make them more likable.

Maybe one day I'll grow up and stop being so self-indulgently self-absorbed...or maybe not.

Laying Over in Amsterdam

2007-09-27T00:37:00.000+02:00

I arrived in Amsterdam yesterday morning amid the sodden pink skies of a rainy sunrise. I caught a train from the airport into Centraal Station and from there took one of the silly little above-ground electric trams that the Dutch use instead of a subway to the Rijksmuseum. After forking over 10 euros/$14 at the ticket counter, I spent an hour meandering sleepily among blue-and-white Delftware porcelain, romanticized depictions of the Netherlandish countryside, and a nice collection of Rembrandts. Post museum, I meandered more sleepily still through the lovely cobblestoned Amsterdam streets, stopping every once in a while to snap pictures of the canals and dodging sudden rainshowers at every turn. Fortunately I had an umbrella that I stole from the T Street houses when Mike and I moved out, although it was only large enough to shield either my head or my backpack at any given time, not both at once. I tried to alternate for a little while, until I discovered that keeping neither dry all the time meant that both ended up soaked in the end, at which point I gave up on my backpack and defended myself instead.

By sheer luck (certainly not because of my excellent sense of direction), I ended up in front of Anne Frank's house in Westermarkt. The tiny annex in the back of her father's office where she and her family and friends hid out is preserved almost just as it was at the time, minus the furniture. The magazine cut-outs of movie stars that Anne taped to her bedroom walls are still there, exactly as she left them when she and the rest of the annex-dwellers were carted away by Nazi troops to die. To this day no one knows who turned them in. But I'll bet somebody alive today does know, just hasn't said anything about it to anyone, is holding that dark secret somewhere in some country, the knowledge of who betrayed the Frank family in 1944. It seems so unimaginable now, after spending a day in civilized, eminently polite Amsterdam, city of quaint townhouses and canals where everyone rides bikes instead of driving so they don't pollute the environment, that ugly fascism ever ruled here. But yet maybe it doesn't, maybe civil order of one kind can turn into civil order of an entirely different kind more easily than we'd like to think.

I got a delightful lunch at a cafe across the street from the Westerkerk: a mozarella/tomato/pesto/baguette sandwich and beer, followed by coffee, after which I promptly took inspiration from the cat on the booth next to me and fell asleep in my seat, not having slept since leaving New York the afternoon before. I arrived in Cairo last night, cabbed it over to my new apartment with a driver who got utterly lost trying to find my street and deserted me for about twenty minutes at 2 a.m. to ask directions from shop owners, and now here I am. Tomorrow my first order of business is to buy an Egyptian SIM card for my phone; my second is to track down clothes hangers somewhere among the dusty labyrinthine avenues of Cairo. Check out my Amsterdam pictures on Snapfish (see link to the right).

Goodbye New York

2007-09-24T15:17:00.000+02:00

After a week of loafing around here doing nothing of any use to anyone, I'm off to seek my fortunes among camels, palm trees, and pyramids. If this were a Paul Bowles story, I would play the role of a naive Western intellectual who goes traipsing off to the Middle East in search of anthropological enlightenment and a touch of exotic adventure, only to find herself unwittingly mixed up in a dark subculture of cannibalistic Bedouins and ancient barbarism. However, this is not a Paul Bowles story, and from our modern perspective of educated liberalism, we have to condemn the idea of cannibalistic Bedouins as being the product of stereotype and imperialist ignorance (rather than acknowledging any possibility that Bowles might be telling the truth). Instead, we'll take a more humanist view of things, and say that the Egyptians are people just like us, and despite linguistic and cultural barriers, our more-similar-than-different human identities will facilitate communication.

The Fable of the Fuul Pot

2007-09-22T22:11:00.000+02:00

Every morning on the streets of Cairo you can see the men gathering at their local fuul stands to catch up on news, relax before another (typically low-stress) day at work, and chow down on some of Egypt's trademark breakfast food. It's not Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but these plates of hot gooey fava beans garnished with slices of hardboiled egg are not a bad way to start your day. If you're thinking of founding your own fuul stand, however (if you have, you're not alone), there's one caveat that you have to be aware of. Beans? Kinda boring. Eggs? You've had 'em before. The secret to dishing up a tasty plate of the famous Egyptian staple is simple: DON'T wash your pot. I know, it sounds like you'll be creating a fertile petri dish for all sorts of scary bacteria to spawn, but the taste of the fuul improves astronomically with an extra week's (or month's) seasoning. The fuul pot, called the qidra al-fuul, acquires a pungent inner skin that lends flavor and complexity to the beans inside it, like an oak cask whose scents permeate the wine aged within it. Thus it is that conventional wisdom says that the fuul merchant, however germ-conscious he may be, should clean his pot as infrequently as possible. Think about the metaphorical implications of the title to this blog, and you'll see why this simple phrase (coined by my friend Thao and I on our last trip to Egypt) is so fascinating. The fuul pot is life, the layer of grime is life's experiences. Cheesy, you say, rolling your eyes. Absolutely. That's Egypt for you. Only a fool cleans the fuul pot.