I took my first step outside and the flowing, thoughtfully dyed fabric of my bazaar-bought scarf was caught by a short burst of dry, desert wind as I instinctively wrapped it around myself. The loose fabric hung off my shoulders, and my outfit–previously perfectly coordinated–was accented with bright colors and foreign designs. It was inconsequentially transformative. I went from being an American to being something else; from the moment I stepped outside into the thick Cairene air I became a medley of cultures, obvious in the mismatched styles I wore and the way I noticed every casual morning scene of chaos surrounding me in Midan Tahrir. I blended into the scenery: women in colorful hijabs and matching ensembles, men in their khakis and fake American branded clothing, and unveiled women like myself–trying to coalesce into the crowd with our strategically worn scarves. This was the start of all of my days in the Midan, Wust el Balad (downtown) was calming, rejuvenating, almost beautiful in its disarray. Life was balanced. It felt like home, like I matched the picture on my Egyptian ID. I felt like my name was نادين, rather than my Latin letter-ed alter ego. Now that I’m back home in Evanston, this timeless image is my most pervasive memory.
Today, I regurgitated this image and I cried; I could not articulate why. The tears running down my cheeks each fell with an ambiguous purpose, every one governed by a fear that an idealized love will dissipate like a crowd besieged with tear gas. The crowds gathering in the streets of Cairo are all there for the communal goals of freedom and liberation from an oppressive regime. Scripted irony in Midan Tahrir, the Liberation Square where I once stood dressed in scarves, saw a clash of forces: the police and the people, the young dressed in bullet-proof plastic and the young dressed in flags and armed with a patience that has simply run out. Watching this scene unfold from an inescapable distance was heartbreaking.
I am a citizen of Egypt and of the United States. Just like that, two different passports, two lives, two families, two presidents, two languages, my life as a citizen is an endless list of ‘two’s. I try to make sense of this by being Egyptian-American: an impossible simultaneous citizen of two worlds. This term, Egyptian-American, means nothing and everything. Who can I, as someone who only identifies because of summer vacations and the language I speak at home, claim to know what it means to be Egyptian in Egypt? However, we–my fellow first generation sons and daughters of immigrants and I–are the face of Egypt abroad, and it is our love and commitment toward the wellbeing of baladna, our country, that validates us.
That hyphen holds so much impossible meaning to me; it is the only thing literally connecting my two identities. Somehow these horizontally arranged black pixels connect other vertically arranged black pixels on my laptop screen. These pixels are oblivious to the weight they hold, the words are connected in paper so easily; but what does it mean to be a citizen of both identities? This unassuming hyphen mandates that there is some kind of EgyptoAmerican spectrum and I am a dot along its continuum. I believed this until I found myself struggling with an identity crisis abroad; the two cultures are incompatible in almost every form. I couldn’t fit in with my Egyptian friends and family members—I love them, they love me, and we are forever entangled in an unconditional bond of family (be it formal or informal). But with them I could not act like myself, I could not talk about the real things happening in my life, and I could not show my discomfort without being judged for the obvious reason why I might feel that way. Unfortunately, the square block that I am does not fit into either the triangular or the circular holes— not to mention that it hurts to be shoved in like that. I’ve assimilated to American culture, but I feel similarly uncomfortable; constantly defending my morals, my position on relationships, my justifications of hijabs, burkas, and modern-day Islamic thought all take a toll on my ability to melt into this supposed melting pot. I’ve crystallized at the basin of this cast-iron saucepan and I stand apart; I’m a little harder to scrape off too.
So, why is it that if my identity is so ‘neither this nor that’ do I feel so sad when I reflect on my parents’ homeland in flux? I have yet to fully understand that, but I see now that it has everything to do with the shadow of a hope. Egypt is a shadow of a place I adore. To shed light on what’s hiding behind the literal and figurative cloud of smog I have to first accept that I don’t know Egypt. I can’t know Egypt; only the non-hyphenated could, possibly. I feel grief when I can’t be there rejoicing and suffering with my people, but it isn’t my lack of allegiance that prevents me from being present. Rather, it is my allegiances to life on the other side of those linear pixels. Cairo is a point on my grid, a trajectory: somewhere distant that I can always draw a line to. Take away my pen, run the ink dry, fade the lines of my graph paper and I feel great loss for my intangible attachment. The tears that prompted this essay have long since dried up, yet the sensation that something I love, along with my dual-identity, is eroding before my very eyes is relentlessly inundating.
In my time spent in Cairo, I experienced what it feels like to be suspended between two spheres of life. Now, I am forced to reevaluate what it means to be a citizen, to share an identity with a population, to relate unconditionally to a plight. Identity is abstract, and it is often conflicted. Exploring how it feels to color and exist outside the lines of a nation’s border is jarring. It helps to know that this idea we all define ourselves by, citizenship, is not a given. What makes up the fabric of a conflicted identity?
Salaam and peace,
Nadine
No comments:
Post a Comment