Mending Bridges

One of the things I am hoping this journey (blog project) will help me with is mending my relationship with Cairo; reconciling all the ways in which it left me hurt, with all the beautiful things it made possible, including an eventful childhood and an incredibly awake mind (at least enough to continuously overwhelm me).

One comment I regularly receive is that I complain a lot about Egypt as if I mourn my luck for having been born there and carry that nationality. In writing this, I hope to mainly challenge myself. To work through the way I express my feelings towards Egypt. I do not mourn being Egyptian, I do not feel proud, either. To me, it is a fact of life that I thought I was living with well. However, since the revolution, and the beginning of my travels, the meaning of being an Egyptian has been forever changing. Sometimes generating envy for others who enjoy freedoms I do not, like travelling anywhere any time, and bluntly saying what they think about the state of their country and worlds. Other times, which I have to admit are more prevailing and daily-life-relevant I am eternally grateful for certain aspects of my upbringing that provided me with a big, close extended family, and an understanding of human connection and closeness that is so much more difficult for me with most non-Egyptians. Still, being Egyptian, with the inherent inclination to respond sarcastically to nasty situations and being uncontrollably satirical towards life, I have been lucky enough to still make connections, with non-Egyptians that make me very much content.

My relationship with Cairo was not very complicated until 2011 — and for most of it. The early days of the revolution indeed brought many things to life. I related to it in a classical way, a troubled home that I love unconditionally and would like to try and make better. Moving away was not an option. Because, when your home is struggling, you stay and you try to work on things. And these were my thoughts as I chose my jobs and daily activities.

I believe the breaking point for me was the first presidential elections. While the first round was exciting, full of options and a political atmosphere resembling that of the US — the one the world is most familiar with (you know, scandals and ridiculous TV interviews, and an overwhelmingly confusing media coverage. Nonetheless, it was still very much political life). It all fell apart in the second round when I first learned the very hard way how personal and emotional politics actually is. Families and friends started fighting on a whole new level, severing ties and opening up the doors widely for horrid ugliness.

Shortly after, I started my runaway dance. It would be an insulting reductionism to say that was all it took. Years of confusion, political, personal and most importantly social, followed. In those years, I developed a fear of what Cairo was doing to me and many of my friends as our political humour became painfully specific, often targeting groups of people and very often specific individuals. The streets we took every day were tainted with blood, bridges and squares that witnessed violence were literal drives down a painful memory lane. In fact, I don’t recall anyone having anything positive to say about any political groups- and at the time I perceived this as a good thing, this is how I understood being critical. But our reality was beyond our words most of the time.

I remember meeting a friend I had not seen in a very long time and being very excited to see him. In the time we weren’t able to meet he had gotten married, started applying for work abroad and was “invited” to a police station and advised to be careful about where he goes and who he meets. He was informed that until further notice, he as well as everyone he meets, are of interest to the state, at least for a while. This invitation was, in fact, an act of kindness, since the officer on whose list he was, actually liked him.

I also remember not knowing how to feel, and not wanting to leave the house for a while after. But days pass and you forget — or the feelings subside and you stop caring — but suffice to say, whatever little safety I was still feeling in Cairo had quickly disappeared. And this incident hardly became an uncommon one; being watched has also become a fact of life.

Up until 2015, I had experienced so much that whatever feelings I had taken for granted towards Egypt were gone. In that time, I had worked as a journalist and researcher focusing on health and education — and journalism itself. Whatever hope I had drowned into the scenes of cats running down hospital corridors already crammed with people on the floors and beds and twenty-year-old schools still under construction while the headmaster drives in with a fancy car; not to mention the overthinking of the logistical details and time and place for having an honest conversation.

Whatever love I had for Cairo was vanishing and late night rides across the notoriously long October Bridge, views from Al-Mokattam and any other activity that used to make me feel better completely lost their effect.

I still took solace in my daily interactions, felt immense gratitude for friends and colleagues who shared and understood my daily struggles and for the longest time lived off their faith and resolve to not only make life work but to make the best out of it. This love, this period, this war between the devastating power and unmatchable strength of Cairo left me exhausted. I wanted to leave, but by the end of 2015 it wasn’t a desperate need anymore, though, I wanted the break and made peace with the possibility that it might not come soon.

During my first trip home, I realized my break wasn’t long enough. Having to sneak a friend out of the country, knowing you might never see him again, being certain his journey is about to get unimaginably harder is not easy to deal with. Neither is being faced with the reality of the news of disappearances and random arrests.

I came back to Europe with the resolve to live in Rome like Romans do… or live in Amsterdam as if I’ve always been there. I was going to try and not be weighed down by the residue of my last few years in Cairo, and I was not going to sulk in the guilt of having managed to get away. Two things I am yet to achieve.

Of course, the latter bit wasn’t a hard commitment given I have to validate that I deserve to stay here every ten seconds. It didn’t help my relationship to Egypt and it still doesn’t when I go to a foreign office and get treated like a liar until proven otherwise — that my sovereign government isn’t respectable enough for me as a citizen to earn decent treatment abroad. But well, colonialism has the eternal role in that, so let’s not walk down that road.

But I took that break. I took it while renewing my passport and visas — I treated everything like a fact of life irrelevant of Egypt. It became this faraway place that only exists in the news that I don’t necessarily have to follow. I avoided talking with friends about their struggles that would awaken my own wounds. I made sure they know I love them and as much as I would have loved to be able to be there for them my weakness in the face of their ongoing reality became clear. I focused my studying on less personal things and I didn’t go home for almost a year, not in person and not once even in my head. I let the guilt of having abandoned a cause and a big group of loved ones cook silently inside — along with my compassion for Egypt. For the longest time, it was Egypt that was killing my empathy and making vulnerability just too much to handle.

In that time, my wounds stopped aching, they were covered in the everyday mess of being in a million new places, with a million new people, and the only reality about me was that I was not from anywhere around here. Eventually, I stopped blaming Egypt — or having come from there –for the state I am in and the messiness of my life and the lives of those around me. In fact, it became irrelevant whose fault it was. Perhaps, this could be seen as giving up, and maybe it is. The guilt is tiring, though; the search for someone to blame is exhausting because we all know who is to blame, it hasn’t done much to change the situation.

But it is also beyond the guilt or the blame, or any emotion, positive or negative, I could have towards Egypt. The fact is I am Egyptian, and complicating the way I relate to this fact is what makes me who I am. The revolution is how I got my politics; how I realized how important it is to be political and how healthy it is to sometimes consciously choose not to be. What I have gone through in those years in Cairo might have scarred me for life, but they also woke me up to who I have always been. Because of the revolution, I am a writer, I am an anthropologist, I work on Human Security issues, I am an academic, I am a feminist, I am able to connect to things and people that I would have never been able to relate to if not for those few years. I have an appreciation for life, for friendship, for family — things I used to take for granted — and for freedom that I could not have possibly understood having grown up the way I did.

And having lived abroad those past few years, and despite the difficulties, I now know that things do not have to be the way they are in Egypt. Things should not have gotten this bad and should stop getting worse. In the last few years, I have attempted to build distance from revolutionary Cairo. But this week, Egypt is regularly making international news, and recently, I started getting increasingly emotional again towards news from home. Not only have I failed to create a distance between me and Egypt — I realize now I do not actually want that distance. I just do not know what to do about it yet — so until then, I will continue to have a complicated relationship with Cairo, and I will strengthen my complicated relationship with Amsterdam. Because complex relationships are ones who build us, who awaken us and who keep us curious about the world and critical of it. I can’t do much about being Egyptian, but I will forever want to stay curious and critical of what that means to me.

Related posts:

The Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS), taking place today and tomorrow in San Francisco, is gathering leaders from around the world representing businesses, states and regions, cities, and other…

As a software engineer, you’re probably aware of the importance of staying up to date with the latest trends and technologies in your field. But despite your best intentions, you may find yourself…

When planning for your crowdfunding campaign page, an important consideration is the different text limits, and size limits on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Each platform has different requirements, and…