Voices

Cairo: A young girl on her father's shoulders during a friday demonstration in November

One year ago today, tens of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets to occupy Tahrir Square. One year ago today, I was sitting in my Evanston apartment lamenting having to walk down icy streets to class. I was enrolled in a writing course at the time––Writing for Social Change––with a professor that urged us to write about issues that compelled us to action, about issues that needed attention and needed words to mobilize the effort. I began the course in early January with a dizzy purpose: do I write about The Sanjeevani Project, and our efforts in rural education? Do I write about my complicated road to medicine and public health? My first few pieces were scattered, voiceless, failing to move even myself.

In the early morning hours of January 25th, I found myself glued to Al-Jazeera's Cairo-based live-stream online. My words took a different form. I wrote about my identity, I wrote about how it felt to be a removed Egyptian citizen. My time in Cairo––split between summers growing up and study abroad­––were transformative, to say the very least. I developed a strong identity, but one that was equally attached to the United States. I identify as an Egyptian-American, but there is no American blood in me––only sentiment. Since moving to Cairo, I've allowed myself to flirt, court, and fall deeply in love with the fertile, dusty land that I will always be attached to. I am working on strengthening my attachments to this country, to feel––and really be––more Egyptian, to understand cultural quirks that glazed over in my 22 years, to embrace them; I knew that I needed to live here.

January 25^th, 2011­––even through my computer screen­––shook me by the shoulders. It shook everyone by the shoulders. I wasn't just moved by the revolution, and by the epic change that unity in a cause can inspire, but by the fact that I wasn't there, and the emotions that bubbled up accordingly. I was upset, almost irrationally. I was upset that I called myself Egyptian all of this time, yet I lived my life comfortably and still found myself able to resent Hosni Mubarak's tyrannical rule over the Egyptian people for his personal benefit. What right did I have to be enraged? What had the largely fraudulent Egyptian government ever done to hurt me? To hinder my goals? Nothing. I knew, though, that this was more my parent's legacy than it was mine. I knew that it was because of Egypt's failings that they sought a new life in a new, foreign land. It was because of my mother and my father's sweat that I was given such a blessed life. “I have been selfish”, I thought.

I came back to understand the conflicts, to know deeply the issues and to not only be aware, but to feel. Feeling, for me, is what is most important. I have been here almost five months, and feeling is dictating my days. I feel like I should speak Arabic, when English is also appropriate. I feel betrayed when I am seen as just a woman. I feel disturbed when my Egyptian legitimacy is questioned because of my American upbringing. I feel heartbreak when I cannot find the words in my language to express myself.

And so this has been my quest, one year ago the revolution inspired my eyes to well up with tears. Today, on the anniversary of the revolution that changed the world's perception of the power a people can have over their fate, I am contemplating the salty tears that have long since dried. I know why I came, and I know why this country is filled with more passion than I could have imagined. Oppression has met its match: voices.

Voices carry far and long, voices are echoed through no-longer dismissed media like Twitter, Facebook, texting. The voices that have been yelling for decades are being heard. And today, we celebrate, honor, and respect those voices. The bodies of many of these voices have been buried, have been issued false death certificates, have been held in prison for their words. But there are more voices, and they will never stop yelling. They will never stop chanting. They will never stop carrying flags, painting the faces of their children with red, white, and black stripes, and they will never again accept becoming inure to oppressive suffering.

This is what the revolution is about to me. “Mish ana masry?” Am I not Egyptian? My taxi driver dismissively said to me yesterday when I asked if he was going down to Tahrir. Today is not for a list of goals. Today is not for celebrating the overthrow of a tyrannical President. Today is for honoring the voices that dared to speak. Today is for being Egyptian.

The revolution lives within each of us. Today, I will go down to Tahrir, eat sweet potatoes, carry a flag, and get my face painted. Today is my chance to be more than a diaspora Egyptian living a comfortable life in my comfortable bed in a snowy suburban university town, today I am here. Today, I will be another body in the mass bobbing of heads on TV channels everywhere. I realize now that, although the past is unchangeable and I cannot pretend like I was here in 2011, I needed to feel the pain that came with being removed in order to bring me back. The importance may be little more than symbolic, but I am here this time not only for myself, but to share––to be another voice.

January in Evanston: Timelessly Egyptian memories

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