On Cairo Traffic

Cairo traffic is at times one of the most maddening aspects of this city, but to me it is also one of the most endearing.  It is crazy and disorganized, but it flows, and when you look close enough, you pick up the rhythm.  It's there in the foot traffic as well as the car traffic and where the two overlap and blend into each other seamlessly without either slowing down.

Despite a dearth of traffic lights, signs, markings, most of Cairo's traffic functions smoothly thanks mostly to the shared understanding of how things work.  It's like a free market of transportation, the anarcho-capitalist approach to intra-urban movement.  Let people regulate themselves and figure out what works best, and they do an ok job.  Perhaps that explains why most major intersections will often have regularly dressed men and boys directing traffic during high-volume times of day. (Unless maybe they're being paid for it as a job and just don't have a dress-code?)  Learning to walk here, like in any city, is a new experience for those who have never been to Cairo, but once you get it, you not only can navigate bustling and shifting crowds, but you feel more at ease in the city.

The fundamental rule is, as best I can understand it, just go.  Go where you are going and do not stop.  Go where you are going and get there by the most direct you can think of.  Just go.

Correlated to that one rule in one way or another, there are plenty of things to understand when traversing the city.  For cars not restricted to staying consistently in any one lane or under any apparent speed limit, communication is key.  A larger set of driving communication tool is required.  Egyptian drivers use hazard lights liberally as signs of slowing down abruptly (for speed bumps, chasm-like potholes, stopping and asking for directions etc.), and blinkers are used to signal big upcoming turns to cars behind (as it should be in the States).  At night, there is a whole morse-code-like system to using your headlights to signal a range of emotions or intentions to other drivers.  One or two flashes are a warning of an upcoming change or an announcement of your presence.  Three or four flashes is often a sign of displeasure.  The disconcerting down side of this one is that at night sometimes cabs will drive with there headlights turned off, only using the lights for communication purposes.

And then there is the horn.  The horn is possibly the most important means of communication in a driver's arsenal.  It is to be used at any and all hours of the day.  It is that important.  After all, when the rule of driving is to just go, the style of driving is decidedly more forward-looking.  Drivers are focusing more on getting there from here.  They can't be bothered with looking around all the time.  So how are they made aware of another car coming alongside?  The other car has already given them a short little honk to alert them of their presence, just as they are doing the same to the drivers around them.  Because really, why limit our sensory input to the visual when driving?  At the un-traffic lighted, blind cross-sections in the night time, this is also how cars alert any cars on the cross streets that they are coming.

Now, you may somehow know about young Egyptians' penchant for listening to their music really loudly (ok, well now you know), so how do they hear the horns all the time, you ask?  Well many Egyptians adapt by getting newer, louder, more obnoxious horns.  There is actually a street of Cairo where they only sell custom annoying-ass car horns.  All manner of noises can be heard, but a particularly popular one is the one that sounds like an ambulance siren...

And to many of the driving habits of Cairenes, there is an analogue for foot traffic.  For example, to the car's honk, there is the pedestrian's hiss.  Like the honk, the hiss is just a means of getting attention.  Sometimes they can mean "I'm coming up behind you with something heavy and need you to get out of the way," sometimes they can mean "hey cab driver, pull over, we'd like a ride," or sometimes just "hey foreigner, come talk to me and entertain me and let me practice my English."  Though none are inherently meant to be impolite or insulting, as hissing is considered in America, the latter certainly toes the line, and because the various hisses mostly sound the same at first, it carries with it a hint of mockery that most foreigners find quite annoying.

What's more, pedestrians move in thye same way the drive: direct and unheeding of obstacles, be they moving or stationary.  When crossing the street into the endless, oncoming traffic (you sure don't wait for a break) it is smooth and predictable as you and the cars simply judge each other's speed, adjusting so that both of you can avoid stopping at all costs.  When walking on the sidewalks, people freely step on and off into the road to keep walking at their desired pace.  In fact, since the sidewalks are often similar to lunar landscapes people opt to walk more in the streets than on the sidewalks.

In driving and walking both, the dodging and weaving through your fellow travelers often results in a number of daily bumps, jostles, scrapes, minor collisions, crashes, etc. but as the basic rule holds, more often than not the concerned parties are off and going again as soon as they can.  They forget about the contusions and keep on going.  The ust keep going.

And for the most part, it works.  It is a system built on centuries of people piling up in this city and figuring out how to get around fastest for themselves, because they had no one to tell them.  The comparative lawlessness of the traffic requires everyone to be paying attention.  Sure, sometimes terrifyingly, I see Egyptian drivers texting as they barrel down poorly-lit, busy streets across cross-sections, but mostly I think Egyptians are actually better drivers than the majority of Americans.

Unfortunately, Cairo is a city choking on its population (see the link on the right entitled "Urban Harmony" for a really interesting take by an Egyptian student from Princeton University on Cairo's urban planning in light of a rather superficial government-sponsored urban planning competition).  With nearly 20 million people, there are just too many people, and so accidents are inevitable.  Even with the rather respectable metro system (although it is starting to smell pretty atrocious in this heat) that huge numbers of Cairenes use every day, the streets are just a mess.  The government is trying to decentralize the city by building up the suburbs of "New Cairo" (where AUC's new campus was), but it's not nearly enough yet.

And so perhaps it is because of this obstacle that I am so enamored with Cairo's traffic situation.  Because it works so much of the time.  Sure there are endemic traffic jams, and certainly car accidents and deaths on a regular basis, but nowhere near what the average American would think upon first being plopped down here.  To navigate the streets of Cairo safely, you only have to remember the basic rules.  Don't let bumps bother you.  Pay attention to all your senses when making your journeys.  And most of all, just keep going.

Because, as I learned yet again staying out past the weakly enforced curfew the last few nights, Cairo never stops going.

.......

Speaking of Egyptians getting up and going, here are my best pictures from Friday's protest.  A new Egyptian friend of mine that I was with in the morning knew of a ninth floor apartment on the square that  pretty much let anyone come in and look out from the balcony.  Besides the weirdness of just walking into this stranger's apartment already peopled with a few dozen or so people who clearly didn't know each other, and of the half-naked (maybe fully?), obese Egyptian owner sitting behind a desk as people tramped in and out, it was great to see the demonstrations from above.

The organizers had called for another million-man march, and while there were certainly tens of thousands, I got the feeling that many of the people there were just there to witness the event more than to convey a political message.  There were typed up demands being handed out, but I don't think they're universally accepted ones.  The movements here need more direction I feel.  The night before they were fighting over whether to chant "down with the defense minister," or "down with the regime."  But at the least, the movement is still mobilizing and will not tolerate being trampled on by the military government, and they are maintaining their peaceful methods, retaining what I believe is their best source of moral legitimacy in the process.

Being Female in Cairo

This is taken from a facebook note of an American female friend who has been living in Cairo for almost two years now.  The body of it is from a blog that I've never heard of, and while I don't really understand the first references, this is the best thing I've ever read about the experience of being female--especially as a non-Egyptian--in Cairo.  I've included my friend's introduction because I think it provides a great illustration of exactly what the author says about the effects of living in cities where female sexuality is looked down upon.

Being in Cairo can be frustrating for me as a guy, but it's nothing compared to what the girls I know here go through.  Cairo really grates on the girls I know living here, (Americans and Egyptians alike often times).  Even for the ones who have fallen in love with the city, it is a constant struggle not to let the harassment and sexism of it weigh them down.  This article explains it all perfectly.

*              *              *              *              *

On Street Harassment
by Chelsea    May 23, 2011 at 7:16am
"Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning." - AN
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I lament that most men I know (and love and respect) won't continue reading upon seeing the following words: bitch-face and feminism - today's real "F" word. Don't be that (predictable) guy.

I urge you to read through.

The author has eloquence that I can't come by, particularly after I've exploded at friends when they disparagingly express concern as I become more confrontational with grabbers, pssssst-ers, air-lickers and the like.

Regular suggestions of ways that I can better avoid street harassment escalates conversations to that same level of confrontation, because hypervigilance against that ideology on the street cannot be divorced from that same ideology when it's spouted from a familiar face.

Without realizing it, this suggestion (making even more changes to how I dress, where I live, walking alone, even smiling in public) makes harassment my personal responsibility - as if somehow, I could stack the deck to not be harassed, or not as much, or harassed in a more preferable way.

Annie covers it all - from identity, to relationships, to the simultaneous love and challenges of the city.

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Don’t Let The City Destroy Our Agency

May 19th, 2011

Annie Rebekah Gardner listens to “The City” on repeat as she maintains her bitch-face and barrels on down the street.

I squealed with glee when I read Emily Manuel’s piece about Patrick Wolf’s song “The City” in Tiger Beatdown, mostly because this man’s music affords me so much nostalgic joy. (Just ask a certain editor here at Canonball about how we choreographed a dance to“The Magic Position” during summer 2007, a summer of eternal youth and hedonism and friendship and happiness. Novel forthcoming!)

Manuel speaks to the problematic of being queer in The City, the simultaneous freedoms and restrictions that come with it:

The city is at once hostile and home to queer love. Every one of us knows how city space—and especially suburban space—is almost entirely heterosexual, that it demands we regulate how we hold ourselves, how we touch our lovers, what we can say and do and when.

I am a mostly hetero lady, so I cannot speak to the queer urban experience beyond what I hear from friends — being leered at for holding hands with a girlfriend even in the queer-friendly urban confines of San Francisco, for instance — but what particularly struck me about this meditation on the urban space and how it interacts with and affects love and expressions therein was that feeling of oppression, the feeling where your long-time home is not your own because of others’ attempts to dictate your choices and your actions.

A week or two ago, over steaks, I was with a lady friend and a man friend, and the topic turned, as it often does, to dating and girls who love boys and this kind of thing, and the man friend made this extremely crucial real talk remark, largely specific to dating in Cairo, but maybe applicable anywhere that there is excessive street harassment and structural sexism (read: everywhere, really). He pointed out that one reason we single ladies are so neurotic and seemingly not datable is because in our day-to-day, in our enduring the constant leers and vulgarities of almost every dude on the street (but not carpet-maker dude! I love you and your motorcycle and your craftsmanship, carpet-maker dude! Same to you, Maged of Stella Bar. Swoon, swoon, swoon.), we make huge efforts to desexualize ourselves and our bodies, to, as best we can, make ourselves invisible to the male gaze. Brittany Julious does a phenomenal job of expressing this lack of sexual agency in a recent post on This Recording:
The reality of getting older was not that I craved sexiness less, but that I recognized my sexualized being was beginning to be enough. Not that I am particularly beautiful or attractive, but that just existing warranted attention — usually lascivious, definitely unwarranted — from the men around me.
Yes, this is it. I could be in niqab, or I could be in the tiniest of booty shorts, and in either instance I would walk two blocks and be subject to the rudest of advances and commentaries. We are women and we exist in this male-dominated urban space, and even in our homes we only open the door to men we know, and we grow ever-resentful of our male companions and their ability to go where they want, when they want, dressed however they want. Our revenge fantasies become the stuff of Quentin Tarantino’s nightmares, and when the dude we’re making out with asks why so self-deprecating, obviously we’re beautiful, and sexy, and tra-la-la, all we can do is shrug and smoke our cigarette.

The week before I moved to Cairo, I sat in my room with my mom as we sorted my clothes into two piles: appropriate for Cairo, not appropriate for Cairo. The woman’s a seasoned professional when it comes to strategic dressing, this from a lifetime spent abroad in Pakistan and Egypt. “This will be okay for fancy parties,” she said, as she picked up my favorite black dress. “So long as you take a taxi there.” I felt frustrated and overwhelmed. I felt like the whole of my sartorial identity was in this discarded pile of sequined hot-pants and neon rompers. I looked at it and started crying, and my mother chided me. “Your identity isn’t just in your clothes, you know,” she said gently, but she understood. This sundress, that pair of high heels. I was trading them in for t-shirts and acid-washed jeans. I was going to deflect harassment by looking as boyish as possible (which, by the way, doesn’t work).

A lady in Cairo knows that no matter your dress, you will at some point fall victim to unwanted attention. Within three days of arrival, I had already had my ass grabbed by an eight-year-old (an eight-year-old!). I’ve gotten used to walking quickly; male companions observe that I barrel through crowds, that I “walk like a dude,” that I scowl. Male companions, both home and abroad, also observe a newborn hostility in me. The slightest touch or innuendo that would have made me guffaw two years ago now will get your throat ripped out. When I meet new dudes I avoid eye contact. After one or two dates, I disengage from contact. The short skirts that had come to define my peculiar style are now layered over leggings, but only on days when I feel like being scandalous. I’ve almost always — since high school, anyway — dressed to stand out, but nowadays this sartorial desire is far outweighed by the discomfort I associate with standing out and the impossible dream of blending in. The reality is that as deviants — deviant ladies, deviant queers, deviant what-have-you — there is no “blending in” in a world of jeers and cat-calls.

Would that I had some kind of solution to the problem of street harassment, or the psychological effects of never feeling wholly safe in your own home. The closest I get is by the holy trinity of dark glasses, loud music, and violent thoughts, but these aren’t sustainable because they begin to affect my interpersonal relationships. Street harassment doesn’t make life any easier for dudes, either. Sorry, dudes I know and love. It’s not you. But it’s not me, either. This is where joyous, raucous, youthful music comes in, though. Blasting Patrick Wolf on my headphones does little to deflect unwanted hollering, but somehow it is spirit-raising and skip-inducing.

“The City” is a joyous anthem against repression, a call to arms of sorts. The City — for me it’s Cairo, for you maybe it’s New York, or Kabul, or London, or Delhi — is in so many ways a liberating, electrifying, joyful space (just walk down Shari’a Sherif at sunset, and you’ll see what I mean), but in so many ways it still exists to berate and mock our own sexuality, our own agency. I love Patrick Wolf because he expresses, with urgency, the need to disallow The City’s repressive norms from affecting and destroying our own agencies.

Original blog online here.

Reasons for Optimism

Perhaps in contrast to my post from yesterday (this the freelance journalist thing is giving me a lot of free time...), I wanted to write something a little less dour.  While on one hand there are many worrying things going on here in Egypt, there are still great people with great goals that I do believe are not out of reach.

February 28th cover of Time Magazine. Noor, pictured second from the left

There is a short little piece in the Guardian today by Noor Ayman Noor, the son of two very important Egyptian politicians, Gameela Ismail and Ayman Noor, and the piece (you can also listen to him interviewed along side a few other interesting Egyptians, one of whom is apparently pro-Mubarak, here) reminded me of a story about Noor (the son) that illustrates what kind of guy he is. Noor, who is the same age as me, was very active during the revolution despite having previously been very turned off of politics before the revolution.  On the second day of the revolution Noor was arrested in Tahrir and thrown in the back of a truck with 44 other protesters.  Among the beaten, bloodied captives happened to be a reporter from the Guardian who managed to tape an audio-only interview of sorts with Noor and the others in the darkness of the van as they were transported to what they would later find out was a prison in the middle of the desert.

At several points in the long, suffocatingly hot drive, the Security forces stopped and demanded Noor get out of the truck and leave the others.  He was to be released, they said.  They gave no reason, but being such a prominent son, it would look especially bad for the security regime to have arrested him, so they planned to let him go.  Rather than taking the escape route though, Noor refused to leave until they were all released, saying "either I leave with everyone else or I stay with everyone else; it would be cowardice to do anything else. That's just the way I was raised."  Maybe he knew nothing bad could happen to him thanks to his celebrity parents, but in such a harrowing situation, with his countrymen bleeding, fainting, and terrified all around him, I have to guess he couldn't have really known that.

I happen to have met and hung out with Noor a couple times, thanks to a mutual friend, and he genuinely seems like an intelligent, kind, funny guy.  But then again he is just the kind of Arab we westerners like to see, young, good-looking, speaks fluent English, plays in a rock band, etc.  Hence his inclusion on the cover of Time magazine in February shown above.  I like a lot of what he has to say about a lot of things going on in Egypt, but sometimes I fear that is just because I find him so easy to identify with?  Do I just want to like hi because he provides me with funny status updates on facebook that I sometimes understand?

Maybe, maybe not.  But when he says things like this, I find it hard not to like the guy:

"As time progresses we're reminded that the most difficult battle in this war we call a revolution wasn't the battle to bring down Mubarak, but rather the battle to bring to an end the corruption in society itself. Not corruption in the sense of embezzling money, but rather the corruption of our political, social and cultural values that has sadly been instilled in all of us over the past half century....

Sectarian tension is an obstacle we will face; people have lived under such harsh conditions for so many years that they've had nothing to lean on other than their faith. And when you have nothing but your faith this leads to fundamentalism and extremism. I strongly believe that if the current government takes the proper steps to address the issue hand in hand with the Egyptian people, if they develop the country and show Egyptians that there are clear-cut plans and alternative paths to change, then we can avoid violence. We should be working on a concept of citizenship that is not divided by religion."

His father is running for President this year, but frankly I not-so-secretly look forward to the day that Noor makes his own entrance into politics.  It's important to remember, even as sectarian differences and specters of extremism seem to be making inroads into Egyptian society, that this is also what the Egyptian Revolution has set free in this country.  Egyptians like Noor (and my housemate, who is another story), once disillusioned, intelligent Egyptians planning to leave the country as soon as they could, now are deeply wrapped up in the well-being of their new country.  That is pretty neat, I say.

"Egyptians are rarely in a hurry, but they should get busy now."

I'm feeling especially historical today (let's study!), hence the following post's plethora of links (the only thing better than footnotes!).

Wall near Tahrir.  The Arabic literally says "live the revolution."

Yesterday an article by long-time resident of Egypt and British* American correspondent, Maria Golia, was published in what is quickly becoming my favorite english-language news source about Egypt, called "Responsibility in post-revolution Egypt." I wanted to talk about it here because the article strikes me as such a dead-on analysis of what needs to happen in Egypt. It's an apt analysis of Egyptian affairs on the macro-level--something we all know I love writing about, but which I am sometimes hesitant to do as an amateur observer--so I felt like I found in this piece both a confirmation and an elaboration on a lot of things I have been thinking about post-revolution Egypt.

*(Note: I originally misread Ms. Golia's bio on Al-Masry Al Youm to mean she was British.  I have since been informed, she is in fact American.)

The article's thesis might be summed up in the author's remark about an oft-heard motivational saying repeated throughout the revolution:

"The popular slogan ‘raise your head, you are Egyptian’ sums it up, but only works if it’s examined and expressed not just in Friday demos but every interaction."  

The phrase, "raise your head, you are Egyptian" not only invoked Egyptians' sense of tarnished pride in their national heritage, but, more importantly, it does so inclusively.  "Egyptians" were all those people whose heads had been held down by the oppression, complacency and nihilism of the Mubarak era.  Muslims and Christians, aetheists and agnostics, extremists and moderates--all had suffered under his rule.  It was in that unity that the revolution ultimately succeeded.  In short, it is this inclusivity--or really the lack of exclusivity--that is the responsibility that Golia is calling for in the article's title, and it is this above all that resonates with my own beliefs and observations about Egypt.

The demonstration last Friday.

My unmistakable affection for this country has long been tempered by the contradiction in the ways Egyptians treat those around them.  There was always a huge divide in how they treated those around them and those unfamiliar to them.  Egyptians are incredibly warm and unbelievably generous with those they are close to, and the thing that many foreigners are completely unprepared for is how quickly and easily one can achieve that closeness with Egyptians.  In shops for instance, with only the slightest of conversational overtures, I have time and time again gone from being just another target for swindling to favored customer being shown great respect as I sip tea and engage in conversation about heavy political and religious topics.  Similarly, the first times I meet Egyptians there is often just the slightest air of disdain detectable in their demeanor towards me, not because of some prejudice or anti-Americanism, but because quite a few of the American tourists most Egyptians meet are, frankly, uninformed, to say the least.  I'm no expert on all things Egyptian certainly, but I'm working on it, and after a short conversation or a second meeting, that wall quickly drops as they see that I am not just another condescending tourist passing through what I see as a faded civilization.  But Egyptians do not just treat tourists and foreigners with this default sort of disdain and distrust, so too with their fellow Egyptians at times.

Indeed, I recently read another story by an Egyptian whose friend in the Egyptian army claimed neither he nor his fellow soldiers could allow themselves to have political opinions.  The soldier explained this by saying, essentially, "if I am a member of the Wafd party, and the soldier next to me is a National Democrat, how can I trust him to guard my side?"  Now, as I've said before, ideally, I'm one who believes that we ought to be able empathize with and trust our fellow human beings simply for their being our fellow human beings blah blah blah.  In practice, I certainly have not always succeeded in that, so I can easily understand how that might not be the case here either.  But just as the author lamented, one can't help but read that anecdote and wonder how a society could be so divided by its beliefs that its citizens could not overcome their differences to protect their countrymen's lives in battle.  It is just one story, but it is indicative of some, if not all Egyptians' feelings.

Nationalism can so often be an artificial and dangerous motivation, but there is something undeniably valuable about sharing a cultural milieu that brings people of the same country together. (I know from experience, being able to make jokes about Glenn Beck or hyphy ghost-riding the whip can be a relief when living abroad.)  But for as much as Egyptians pride their country's history and culture, there are differences that still seem insurmountable to them.*  Indeed it was this default distrust that led some now repentant baltageyeen (Mubarak's paid thugs, in this case of the word's use--see this for a great article on how this title really refers to some undefined group that have become the go-to scapegoats for anything in Egyptian politics) to actively fight against the revolution.  Instead of trying to understand what was happening in Tahrir, they assumed the demonstrators were just lawless trouble-makers.

*(For the record, I am not trying to argue that America, on the whole, is actually much better.)

Part of what made the Egyptian Revolution such an amazing event in human history was how it brought this stratified country together.  Such overwhelming national unity is so rare to see anywhere in the world, and it was all the more powerful for this country's size and influence.  But the recent months in Egypt have seriously challenged the inclusive, universalizing spirit of "raise your head up, you are Egyptian."

The Libyan flag flying in Tahrir last Friday. Plenty of Syrian,
Yemeni, Saudi, Palestinian and, of course, Egyptian flags
were seen all over the square that day.

Different groups are now coming forward every day it seems (this site is trying to keep track of them), stepping into the political void trying, indistinguishably, to either jockey for power or be compensated for past wrongs.  The country has been rocked by supposedly Salafist (slash baltagee, of course) attacks on Coptic churches who have supposedly been preventing their followers, on pain of death, from converting to Islam.  At the same time Copts have been protesting almost non-stop against what they see as the government's continuation of a policy of willful ignorance of Muslim persecution of their minority group.  Both religious groups have put forth political parties of a sort to compete in the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections.  Distrust seems on the rise with some.

At the same time, there is growing tension between the military (which produced Mubarak's regime in the first place) and the people.  The cries of "the army and the people, one hand" now erupt more hesitantly, with less certainty.

This huge sign translates "The people want the opening of
the Rafah crossing, permanently and completely" referring
to Egypt's border crossing with Gaza that has been closed
for much of its 32-year history.

What's more, the cries for solidarity with the region's other revolutions in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen, mixed with Egyptians' long pent up urge to support Palestinians more substantively have also led to greater divisions among Egyptians.  Just last Friday I went to Tahrir for Nakba Day protests which had ostensibly been scheduled to celebrate Egyptian unity, but which I saw turn into a disturbingly violent-leaning anti-Israel rally. There were more pro-Egypt and pro-Arab revolution chants than anything else to be sure (like the ones I tweeted), but interspersed with many of them were chants like "defeat Israel," "we will never recognize Israel," and using the exact same phrasing as the recent anti-Mubarak chants, "down with Israel."*  Certainly, this should not be taken as a sign that Egypt wants to attack Israel, nor that most Egyptians would even support violence toward it, but the very fact that they are divided on this is just the point.  Some would, and some wouldn't.  Egyptians are bleeding outside the Israeli embassy when their own revolution is still unfinished.

*I don't want Israel to be the focal point of this post, but I feel like I should say, for clarity's sake, that I am by some people's definition,"anti-Israel" in that I do not support almost any of Israel's policies.  BUT, regardless of Israel's continued atrocities perpetrated against Palestinians on top of what I find to be a really horrendous, disturbing history of Israel's founding that leaves the Jewish state completely in the wrong, I do not support the abolition of the country by violent or even peaceful means.  It is established there now, for better or for worse, and Israeli sons should not be made to pay for the sins of their fathers.  Or, put simply, two wrongs do not make a right.  I just think Israel needs to change just about all of its policies, especially towards Palestinians, and that if it does not, that there should be greater consequences than it has been made to face so far.  Phew.  Ok.  There's that.  Back to Egypt now.

By letting old sectarian differences and foreign policy disagreements linger, Egyptians are giving an opening to forces they may not like to be led by any more than Mubarak.  It is in light of this worry about Egypt's fractious state leaving the country open to something worse that I titled this post with another quote from Golia's piece.  Egyptians need to hurry up and get together again.  Specifically, it's the Egyptians who believe in the need for civil discourse and who would eschew their old differences that need to kick their efforts into high gear.  Not because the Muslim Brotherhood are going to sneak into office and install all of Hamas' most violent members, but even worse: because Egyptians may find that the new leadership is really more or less the same as Mubarak.  It has to start in the everyday interactions, creating a new default where Egyptians treat all of their compatriots in the beginning as generously as they treat those close to them.  This started with the Revolution, and it's from there that Egypt has the chance to set a whole new revolutionary paradigm.  Then Egyptians can go back to not hurrying.

Pandas, Politics, Protective grain products. Palliteration.

For anyone in Egypt this is all old news, but this is why I say Egyptians have a great sense of humor:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X21mJh6j9i4)

And then there's the whole man behind Omar Suleiman joke that later played off the panda thing:

All you really need to know is that Omar Suleiman is screwed.

(For an unfortunately dry explanation of the Man-Behind-Omar-Suleiman joke that took hold in the days of the revolution before Mubarak stepped down see this.)

And that meme just made me think of another one (which more of you may have seen but now known the origin of) that spread around toward the end of the Egyptian Revolution (is the Revolution over?  Too deep for this post).  It's of a Yemeni protester, and that's all you really need to know.

For the similarly dry explanation see this, but I think it's funny on its own.

Post Script, Goodbye Gifts

As a follow up about the awesomeness of Maha, I thought it would be appropriate to include a translation of the email I just got from her.  The background is that before leaving she had told me I could continue sending her things written in Arabic and she would correct them and help me with my style, so I had sent her a rather long letter written in Arabic for job-search stuff.  After the rewritten version of my message that she provided, she wrote:

Dear D.C.
You've begun to drag your heels now.  Where are the letters you promised me?  Did they not travel with you?  I want you to write me all the time and not be lazy.  Of course I will be happy to correct all of it.
Greetings to you and your family.
Be well.
Maha

Haha.  Harsh.  I thought it was going to be an every-once-in-a-while thing, a privilege which I would not want to abuse.  Apparently she's still giving me homework.  So....free tutoring!  My heart sinks a litle whenever I think about typing all that Arabic up (I'm still really slow), but that's the only way to learn right?  And Maha knows it.

In other news, here's a picture of my Spanish housemate's cat, Rey (King).  He's five-months old, and infinitely cooler than the other devil cat I once lived with.

But most importantly he'll never go into heat.  Full post about yesterday's protests and an update on my living situation coming soon.

Goodbye Gifts

The Shi'a mosque in the old city, popular with Iranian tourists

I wrote nearly this whole post almost two weeks before I left for Cairo, but ended up being too distracted by my conundrum and then my move to finish this post up like I wanted.  Anyway, it started because I felt compelled to write a little bit more about the love side of my love/hate relationship with Syria, because I'd just had a rather lovely experience with my tutor.

I should start with a little background on my wonderful tutor, Maha. This lovable woman in her forties who smiles with her whole face when she smiles and has the gushing, fussy air of a loving Italian grandmother (and indeed she speaks Italian and French fluently), did loads for my fusha (Modern Standard Arabic), especially my speaking and my listening. Not only did she patiently give me council (in Arabic) when she felt I was too distracted by life decisions to discuss my homework, but she always seemed to be as invested in my learning Arabic as I was on my most devoted days.  She told me when I wasn't doing well, and she told me when I was.  And thanks to her honesty, her compliments meant all the more.  Plus she had me over for meals.  

One time she had me and a group of most of her other young students (including my housemate, Philippe) for a breakfast in her brand new apartment.  She had prepared a feast of every traditional Syrian brunch-y type food I had ever been exposed to and more, and we all had a very nice time chatting it up in our respective Arabics.  Maha's apartment was on the 9th floor of an apartment on a hill in one of Damascus's suburbs and the food had been laid out on a table on her balcony overlooking the city in the valley.  It was there I met a stunningly beautiful Dutch-Egyptian girl who got me excited to be moving back to Cairo (this was before I found out about Maryland) by speaking Egyptian with her.  I also ate the most delicious ful (beans, usually with a variety of other stuff mixed in depending on the style) of my life.

Breakfast at Maha's

The other time Maha had me over for a meal was for dinner with her family.  I had been over at Maha's mother's house--where we normally held our lessons-- already because I recently started up a language exchange with my Maha's younger sister to practice my Arabic. Phrased like that, "language exchange" sounds kind of suggestive, but it is just exactly what the name implies. We practice English for an hour and Arabic for another everytime we meet, and it's a good way for both of us to get some practice in. Today had been an especially good meeting as my partner had brought me two CDs loaded with about 400 of some of the most popular Arab pop music hits, so I was especially pleased with my night already. We'd been having our exchanges at 6 o'lock in my mother's house (this is an Arab family after all, and it is not abnormal for people to live with their parents sort of indefinitely), and this time, as we were finishing up, my tutor walked into the room to ask if I would stay for dinner. Of course I said yes, excited about the prospect of a genuine home-cooked arab meal with the whole family even though I was feeling exhausted after a four-hour exchange.

I sat down with the 9 other family members, including my tutor's beloved mother and adorable 2-year old niece (named, if I was understanding the Arabic correctly, "diamond"), and we dug in to the four big dishes of food. There was bright green, lemony tebbouleh salad, traditional yellow "kibseh" rice, a kind of potato-vegetable dish, and meat-stuffed eggplants. The real highlight though was just getting to listen to everyone speak.  

The poorer outskirts of Maha's suburb

This was the first time I had really gotten the chance to sit around and listen to a lot of Syrians speaking with eachother, and I was surprised at how much of the Ammeya I was understanding, despite not having had many actual lessons in it. Nonetheless, my brain and my tongue were feeling pretty sluggish after what had been a double Arabic session with my partner thanks to our previous session having been all in English as I helped her with her C.V. and a cover letter for an embassy job. I was trying real hard to keep up with the conversation, but the whole time I had the distinct feeling that all these Arabic words were just washing over my brain like the tide at the beach. I would register a lot of them and slowly process their definitions, but it was like each one would only trigger a meaning that my brain couldn't quite manage to translate into an actual English word. It was kind of frustrating, but I realized it was also probably a good sign that the words registered a meaning even if I couldn't always verbalize them in English.  When spoken to, I talked a little bit about my going to Egypt and how that wasn't an indication that I hadn't loved my time in ash-Sham (as Syrians call it), but mostly I just tried to listen. 

I was especially curious to learn more about the mother who was a devout Muslim, wearing a hijab and a robe in front of men at all times and what the nature of her relationship was with her more secular children., but instead I ended up playing imaginary telephone for much of the meal with Masa, whose sparkelly name seemed appropriate for her gleeful, sparkly personality. She had a toy cell phone which she carried around in her back pocket and periodically whipped out to pointedly yell "'Alo!" at someone until they responded with some of the usual telephone pleasantries. She seemed to like doing it with me especially because I started responding at first by putting my actual phone to my ear and then moved on to putting up random objects--piece of cake, tissue box, etc.--to my ear and asking what was wrong with my phone as she cackled away.

The night got even better when, as I was about to leave, my tutor accompanied me to the room in which I had left my bag and books. As I gathered up my things, she asked me if I would have room to carry some books to Egypt. She handed me two beautifully bound volumes of political poetry by the legendary Arab poet, Nizar Qabbani, and then proceeded to make me promise they weren't too heavy for me to bring to Egypt and that I wouldn't just leave them behind here. I assumed at first that they were to be books I would bring to a friend of hers in Egypt, but then it became clear she meant them as gifts for me when she switched to English for emphasis to say "these are for you." I was floored. This is a woman who had had me for about ten lessons total, not a one of which I felt like I had been particularly impressive with my Arabic, and she was already giving me a goodbye present.  

The alley next to mine

That was only the latest in a string of recent experiences that have made me realize again how much I had not given Syria a completely fair shake. Many foreigners love Syria for exactly the reasons I had so quickly tired of it: the comforting insularity, the tight-knit foreigner community, the compact city-size. But I hadn't seen some of the other things they had talked about, especially the supposed generosity of Syrians. I had felt that Egyptians were much nicer, because even as they were blatantly trying to cheat you, there was a willingness to sit down and talk with you about at the same time. Syrians seemed closed off to me, distrustful, and always ready to talk behind your back. I experienced much more anti-American sentiment there (always directed at our political policies, never our citizens) and I felt that Syrians were much less polite about it.  But I had started seeing something different in my last month there.


For my last lesson, I struggled to think of what I could give Maha in return for her gift and for all her help.  In the end, I gave her my copy of Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones.  I chose it not only because I love Borges (see my blog's title, as explained in my first post), but because that particular copy had been travelling around with me all over the Middle East and I'd had it since high school when I first read him.  I know my teacher was really excited to give me some of Nizzar Qabbani's poetry, so I wanted to give her someone whose words were equally beautiful.  Plus, there's no way in hell you could find anything by Borges in English in Damascus.

Found this walking my last week in Syria, thought it was beautiful