“We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.” -kg

Disclaimer: The Egyptian boys in our program have been wonderful exceptions to the men I will talk about. And I hate to have to make these generalizations, but isn’t everyone guilty of subconscious categorization based on personal experiences as we try to make sense of the world? 

—

Egypt.

Egypt Egypt Egypt. Home of the 16 cent hot falafel sandwiches, beautiful Mediterranean sunsets, and pure white desert sands.

To cut through the wholesome, mandatory gratitude (of which I can’t discount but sometimes forget), I need to be a little honest. Lately, I just can’t escape the fact that I’m a woman. Yes, I realize there are far greater injustices than those related to gender, but I just couldn’t bite my tongue on this anymore. 

From the articles we’re reading in FusHa to the films we’re watching in Cinema to the way we commute to and from school every single day, I find I’m constantly reminded that women here (which includes me this year!) do not deserve rights to their own sexuality. A woman’s sexuality is acknowledged as something dangerous and immoral, to be feared by women, to be possessed by men.

It takes a little swallowing to admit the flaws of a place you grow to love (maybe more for the people than the society), but Egypt holds the title for the country with the worst reputation for sexual harassment in the Middle East. If you are a woman, the presence of your female reproductive organs will completely differentiate your experience in Masr from those of the men.

The boys here will sometimes gripe about the constant honking, pollution and crowds. It can get a little annoying, but we all agree it’s tolerable. Cities will be cities. But to choke on the smog of constantly being followed, hissed at, grabbed and chased- is suffocating, wearisome, and very particular to women. The saddest part is that any mention of harassment is always answered by a mild “Maalish” (Forget about it) and the phrase “3ady” - which is translated into an indifferent shrug for “Eh, that’s normal.”

How many times have I begun this blog post and deleted it? Sure, America has its problems too. (Plenty that I don’t understand as a heterosexual, young, literate college graduate from a moderate income family and slightly less racially-disadvantaged minority). But I’ve been a woman in America and I’ve traveled a little bit outside of the states and I will say with full  conviction that I have never felt so exhausted on a day-to-day basis as I do here. Every where I walk, I’m on the defense. Is someone following me again? Is this guy going to grab me? Are these kids going to throw rocks at me? (Or in the case of my roommate, broken plates?) Will they reach out from the tram and grab my ass or in between my legs? In every crowd, there is a threat of being touched. It’s no wonder men and women are separated in places of public transportation.

They recycle the same lame excuses all the time: “Oh, it’s the economy and the social restrictions. Our conservative society forbids men and women to have any type of sexual interaction before marriage and they can’t marry until they are financially stable enough to afford an apartment and guarantee a steady income to start a family. Unemployment rates are high, so just let the men express their sexual frustrations. They’re men. It’s only natural.”

We’re supposed to gobble these justifications right up. On the contrary, sexual harassment has nothing to do with excuses about conservatism and a weak economy. There are plenty of countries just as conservative (whether for religious or non-religious reasons), where men and women are just as separated (or perhaps, even more so), where the economy is suffering just as badly. Yet, somehow, other Middle Eastern countries do not permit sexual harassment to the degree it is tolerated in Egypt. The girls in the program who have studied/worked/lived in Morocco, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, Iraq, Kuwait, and other Arab countries will swear by it. And it just doesn’t come from single men of marrying age. It starts from prepubescent boys (showcasing their masculinity by their ability to threaten women) and it continues into middle-aged or older married men, of every social status.

Repeating these tired excuses also implies that women can’t possibly also be sexual beings with sexual frustrations (of which they are forbidden to even learn about, much less exert over others in a threatening manner). Our language partners don’t even know the very basic definitions of sex and yet, if they ever want to marry, must must must strive to protect their sacred identities as “virgins” - a nebulous, abstract idea they can’t even define. How are they going to protect something they can’t explain and are forbidden to ask about, even in the most biological, scientific way?

Fortunately, they won’t need to. They can just place their trust into the hands of men, who are entitled to take and do with a woman’s sexuality as they please, both inside and outside of marriage. To take the double standard to an entirely different level, there isn’t even a Arabic word for virgin male, only virgin female. The word was never created because the idea was never present. Why would it be of anyone’s concern whether or not a man is a virgin?

I feel like my tongue is swollen from all this passive trying-to-understand-instead-of-critique-it patience, but to give you a basic idea of what it’s like if you’re a woman, you can expect some mix of the following based on your preferred method of transportation:

Want to get some exercise? If you walk, you’re hear barks that you’re a slut, whore, or prostitute. A few “Where are you from?”s and angrier “Hey! Come back!”s when you ignore them. Prices yelled behind you or slurred into your ears. Cars that might follow you, men that might roll down their windows, testing to see if you look over. Maybe, if they’re feeling macho, they’ll step out, grab you, and try to force you into their car (just like a group of men did to my friend Sana at 3 p.m. in the bright, sunlit afternoon). You can scream for help, but sometimes no one else is really that interested.

Want to play safe? Take a taxi. Warning though- they might drive you into an alleyway, pull their seats back, to reach behind to snatch your legs (just like a man did to my friend Muna at 9 p.m. after a birthday party). You can run out and if you’re lucky like Muna, he won’t chase you.

Want to seek comfort of other women? Trust public transport. However, a man might approach you as you wait at the tram stop. Maybe he’ll take out his penis, shamelessly use you to help him masturbate, and glare at you at move (just like a man did to me on a cheerful Monday morning). You can shame him, but the other women around you aren’t likely to do anything. So what do you do?

Maybe hearing about it happening to other women makes you angry. Maybe you imagine all the things you would’ve said or done if you were in these situations, but then, it actually happens to you. At first, it’s a shock; you find yourself at a loss for how to react. But then, after days and days and days and days of the same abuse and no response from the society when you try to fight back, you eventually just run out of energy. You literally run out of the energy to be offended or angry anymore. 

I was late to class that morning and e-mailed my teacher my apologies. I told her I wasn’t able to focus because my mind was still distraught and I explained why. She, a respectable, older, married, veiled Egyptian woman,  replied that “Unfortunately, the level of sexual harassment has only increased after the revolution.” And she said she understood, because she,  a respectable, older, married, veiled Egyptian woman, was a victim of the exact same thing (public masturbation), just a few days ago.

“3ady” - “It’s normal”.

I wonder, is this just another one of those “cultural adaptations” I have to make? To me, the presence of sexual harassment, absence of sexual education, and powerful shame of female sexuality keeps these women in a jail cell of fear. Sexual harassment is nothing more than a manifestation of the socially accepted male/female power dynamic and an effective way to exercise control over the weaker half of the population. I can’t speak on behalf of the Egyptian women here, but every day, I find my patience wearing a little thinner and am more aware of the many freedoms I have to toss just to live here as a woman.

I’m here for a year. But God bless the women that have to continue to put up with this every single day.

Hello hello dear dear friends.

I’ve been without the internet for a few weeks, so it’s been a while since I’ve written. Life’s a little hectic these days, in the good, refreshing way.

Today marks the year-long anniversary since Mubarak stepped down. I can still remember hearing about his resignation in my apartment on Rio Grande St., reading the news, sipping on a mug of cinnamon hot cocoa. It was still cold in February and we had plans to gather at the capitol later that evening for celebrations. It’s so strange how much can change in just a year – so strange that no one could’ve predicted last year in Tahrir what would happen in the next 12 months and so strange that we (I and so many of you guys in this “transitional stage”), couldn’t have predicted what would happen to us. I’m thinking about all of you scattered around Texas and the rest of the US and abroad, working or traveling or pursuing higher education or getting married. Are you all where you want to be and planning to go where you want to go? Is this how you always imagined your life to be?

I’m asking this question because Katie visited me this past week and is now nestled in a hostel bed in Cairo, recovering from a case of the infamous Welcome-to-Egypt diarrhea blues (Sorry Katie, but it happens to all of us!). It was her visit that really prompted me to ask this question and to write this post, because I feel now, maybe more so than ever, really far away from you guys.

Thanks for your messages during the past weeks. I promise things are a lot calmer here than the video clips they broadcast, so quit your worrying :). It’s been an interesting past few weeks from the anniversary of the January 25th beginning of the revolution to anniversary of the February 11th victory of Mubarak’s resignation. But if you ask the people on the streets, the revolution is a work in progress and far from over. The shabaab are just as insistent as ever that the military hand over power to a civilian rule before the decided date. They’re even more insistent after the soccer match last week, where 74 people were killed as the military blatantly watched, doing nothing to stop the violence. There is a sentiment amongst Egyptians that the violence was planned and instigated by the police as an effort to raise anxiety amongst citizens. Perhaps the goal was to market the military as a stable, protective, and authoritative force, something a prematurely post-revolution country needs in this time. By creating this envelope of uncertainty, you can discourage support from those organizing more protests and marches. But Tahrir Square clamors on, looking as stubbornly stable as always- a little quieter but still standing, tents and all.

Hosting a visitor this week has also made me feel subconsciously both a part of and responsible for this place. I find myself apologetic for the trash or harassment, eager to explain what the graffiti means, and excited to direct walking routes so we pass by the best bakeries and juice bars along the Med. It’s like we finally signed the adoption papers in a gradual, sneaky and unexpected way.

And I remembered again why we fall in love with places. Because we feel happy and we remember times and places where we felt as we did. And I remembered why we fall in love with foreign places, temporary places. Because they give us so much and expect so little - meaning these places know nothing of us and who we are supposed to be, and in a land of strangers, we are so free to be exactly as we are, exactly as we are right now.

A close friend wrote me about a type of ambivalence that accompanies traveling and living abroad. Someone once warned him against this ambivalence, against the danger of falling in love with places far from home and the charm of nestling into the everyday comforts of life on the other side of the hill. He was cautioned to be aware about how much we leave of ourselves in other places, because there is always the possibility we will never return to or find home. I think the idea is that we will always be in a state of longing and missing, no matter where we are, since so much of us and what we love- is scattered. It’s an interesting idea for our generation, which I identify as a one that is adventure-hungry, change-seeking, and multi-experience-oriented. The more variety the better (or maybe that is just you guys?).

It also makes me think a lot about love. In the generations before us, I don’t imagine people fell in love as often as we do. Everything now seems so disposable from the things we purchase to the communities we build around us- different cities, different experiences, different people to know and love. And all of a sudden, it’s not unusual to live, cook, sleep and become physically and emotionally intimate with someone else (or even many someone elses) before finally getting married. And afterwards, it’s not unusual to divorce in the name of dissatisfaction and then to just as easily, simply remarry. But every time we let ourselves love someone else, we are a little more scattered because a part of us is always with that person, always in that place. Is this the price we pay for a plaguing fear of commitment and settling down until we’ve wrung out all our ambitions and accomplished all we want to accomplish? Are we destined then, to have a little less of ourselves to finally give in the end? Depending on who you ask, it could also be a wonderful thing- to have the chance to fall in love with different people and places so many times in our lives.

Our world is so much more open than that of our parents. More information and more accessibility translates into more opportunities to always search for something better, more exciting, challenging, and fulfilling. The conventional ideal of finding a nice job, husband and family seems suddenly stale, wilted. That makes me a little sad. I wonder sometimes where these ideas come from. Where do we learn what makes us happy? And how did we choose the lives we’re leading?

I also can’t stop thinking lately about how privileged we are. I think about the dock workers on strike during our cruise down Luxor/Aswan and how we joked about their strike as interference into our vacation. I had a long talk with a friend about how convenient it is for us to turn a blind eye to everyone else outside of our personal lives. Why should we care about their struggle for labor rights? We want to cruise past the bridge, so to us, the strike is nothing more than a disturbance. Do we think about the people who had to strike so that we could have minimum wages and safety regulations in the US?

It’s too easy to forget that someone had to fight for us too. And it’s too easy to stand still in a world that works in our favor as those who are already privileged to an education and open information and the opportunities to learn how to read and argue and ask questions. Most of us don’t even have an idea what it’s to be of a background where we had to grow up supporting our families, without the time and resources to invest in ourselves. We have no idea what it’s like to be of a socially unaccepted religious minority, or what it’s like to be a girl in Siwa who can’t go out without her husband’s permission, much less show her face in public. If we’re straight, we don’t understand homophobia. We don’t experience sexism or racism to the degree it exists in other places. Do we think about the all the people who can be legally persecuted for their faiths? Or denied movement because of their nationalities? Our generation of Americans has everything laid out for us like a feast. But it wasn’t our generation that fought for those civil liberties – for opportunities for women to work and go to school. Someone else did that for us. We’re just sunbathing in the fruit of their efforts. But a lot of people all over the world are still struggling for the lives we take for granted every day. We are so damn lucky. 

These are the things on my mind recently as I watch this country rebuild itself. Will all the women who participated in the revolution stand for more political representation than the tiny percentage they currently hold? You can almost inhale the energy lately as things evolve, slowly, but gradually upstream. It’s continuously and contagiously inspiring just to live here and be around it all. Life is incredible.

But I miss you all, I really do. It’s weird, but being able to keep up with this blog helps a little in hopes that we won’t be in completely different places when we do reunite.

A deep breath and many warm hugs.

Love, Laura

Arabic is breath-taking. I learned a word this week that meant, very specifically “to give news of a death” from a poem we read in FusHa. According to the Arabs, you can’t just add on an adjective and call it a day. You can’t just give bad news or sad news or even heart-breaking news- Oh no, that’s not enough. According to the Arabs, to give news of sadness this agonizing deserves its own verb. أنعي has a connotation is deeper than relaying events of a loss; it also expresses what it must feel like to announce a painfully fruitless yearning for someone who is not only loss, but is also forever irretrievable.

Death is such a stunning part of your life. But according to its deep effects on the grief scale used by psychologists, it’s only a few steps up from having your heart broken. After all, to feel a vacancy so deeply and unbearably means that once, there existed and there perished something of equal weight. It bears the aftertaste that once you must have let yourself love someone really fucking hard, that deeply and unbearably, in order to feel that kind of loss.

Oh, Arabic! You’re so ravenously lustful for life, in all its marvel and all its suffering- in all its glorious and dismal entirety. It’s like you took the English language, put it into a sine graph, and multiplied it by 4 so that the curves are as 4 times as high during the wonderful times and 4 times as low during the hard. What a way to choose to live! So much to learn from a language that never holds back.  

I just learned that Euclid was from this very city of Alexandria.

My mind these days:

“Long before the birth of Islam, several of the classical Greek philosophers had associated metaphysical qualities with geometry. The abstract definitions and logical consistency of the subject were seen as pointers to a perfect world underlying gross reality and hence- to the perfection of gods.”

- http://www.ethnomath.org

“God ever geometrizes” - P

Proof of a spiritual crisis in midst of a supra-religious state. “It’s more important to treat one’s fellow man well than to be always praying and fasting and touching one’s head to a prayer mat.” -N. Mahfouz

2 haikus on recent weeks:

And for whom did  you

vote? Army tank? Water jug?

Oud or Fedora?

Illiteracy

Money buys democracy

And we feign surprise.

Camus once optimistically noted, “All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the state.” (or maybe in the power of the corporations who have purchased the power of the state). He, like the peanut-shop owner who sells me dried carob pods down the street, hadn’t too much faith left in government. I wonder about political changes myself sometimes- are they merely superficial shifts from dictator to another?

Nonetheless, a well-deserved congratulations to this country for its first successful (mmm… debatable adjective, I realize) round of elections. If you want the facts we’re getting, I’ll gladly send you our translated foreign news sources. But if you want to know how a predominantly Muslim parliament (representatives from The MB Freedom and Justice Party + The Salafi Nur Party) will change Egypt– well, unfortunately you’ll just have to wait, my dear friends, just as everyone else here is waiting.

What do the constitutional drafters have in mind for the future of Egyptian citizens- economically, socially, personally? Most people say with vague confidence that it’ll probably get a lot worse it gets any better. At least it’ll get better! You can’t argue that in many ways, the relationship between Egypt’s ruled majority and ruling minority has changed for good. The spirit is a little different. But as for what’s to come,“only Allah knows”. Hands up in the air like it’s 1999.

Democracy is already a hard-to-get woman, but real social progress takes even more time and effort and manifests in more subtle ways- amongst the people, not just their politicians.

Mr. Peanut-shop-owner, a self-proclaimed writer and cultural observer, advised me: “If you really want to know what’s going to happen, read what the poets have been saying. Go on now. Read them. You don’t believe me? They’re the ones who have really been watching.”

Tis a long road ahead! Bring your rain boots.

outer world

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/11/20/uk-egypt-protests-tactics-idUKTRE7AJ0WE20111120

http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/516564

5:31 a.m. It’s raining. Precipitation on my window, rubber pellets in Alexandria, fire in Cairo. One new twitter account, two coffees after a long caffeine fast, and three conversations with close friends later- sleep seems so far away.

The protests grew messier today. The streets are fuller, the gas stronger, the casualties higher. In light of the ruling military’s recently announced changes, thousands organized protests for November 18^th, many of which became dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The protesters overtook Tahrir Square in Cairo and we watched as thousands from our balcony marched in Alexandria, taping posters in a rush before the November 28^th elections. All citizens must vote or pay a 500 EGP fine, though many do not fully support any of the candidates. When the Freedom and Justice Party (now officially representative of the MB) left the protesters, liberal young activists remained, demanding that the military discard the new declarations  which would give them unfair favors in judicial court, spending budgets, and pre-constitutional supervision.

My roommates, friends and favorite shopkeepers ensured us that we had nothing to worry about, but then the first casualty happened last night in Alex. Several more were killed and hundreds injured in Cairo and today the numbers are even higher as people tweet, begging for doctors and medical aid.

I would attach the videos and articles, but there are so many. And there is already so much happening right there in America with you guys; I know your minds are full right now and I appreciate you thinking of me. I’m staying safe and I don’t believe as foreigners that we have any place in the protests. I think it’s incredibly disrespectful to jump in when changes like this happen and feign that we can fathom the struggle, as Americans, with safe evacuation planes, waiting to scoop us away the minute anything threatens one of our precious US lives. 

The revolution is far from over. Mubarak’s face has left the scene but the military has perpetuated the violence. There is thick worry that the MB, though unpopular with the educated and the general majority of Egyptians, will win the parliamentary elections. And though there is hope and there are people dying for the right to rebuild Egypt with clean, fair, and honest elections, others are more cynical, claiming that the MB will win the victory despite any efforts in the upcoming week.

inner world

unedited superfluous thoughts from personal journal on Thursday, Nov. 17, before the protests began:

This is a crazy place, an interesting place, but honestly, I love it.

This is real life and we just returned from Siwa where I learned how to play beats around the campfire on empty jars of date moonshine. A few miles out, the land is still so untouched, undiscovered, unpolluted. Around the camp, there was nothing but sand dunes for miles and miles. There’s something very virgin, very intriguingly pure and magical about the desert.

I want to focus on the political changes of this country, but I’m so overwhelmed by how much and how quickly I’m falling in love with this place that my senses are too occupied for the rational mind to reign.

It’s been rainy and beautiful all week. I’m sitting at a café, starting out at the street on a busy Thursday (the weekends here are Friday and Saturday). Yellow taxis, frustrated pedestrians, shimmering puddles, bundled friends in wooly scarfs. I feel time seeping through my fingers. It’s November already and I can’t stop thinking about how I’m going to deal with the withdrawal when we leave.

It’s overwhelming sometimes, you know? To feel things. I feel like words give us so little clay to mold and I can’t ever articulate this rush of unbearable wonder. It still shocks me sometimes just to be alive: to live and breathe dirty traffic pollution and walk by the sea and indulge my ears in slurred Arabic letters- to paint and to write and to touch everything. Touching makes life so real, so tangible, so breath-takingly  close. I’m overindulging my epicurean tendencies, I know, but it’s been so long since I’ve felt so engaged. I feel like I’m just swirling through life sometimes, that I might swirl away with a big gust of wind and I’d be okay with that. I just feel so damn fulfilled and so damn in awe, in adoration; there is this warm part radiating out of me but I feel cold, tense, my blood is chilly and I shudder thinking about what a fucking crazy thing it is just to be alive, how dizzying it is to be here, in entirety, and to remember things from the past, to imagine things in the future, and to love things in the present.

Gah that’s it- it’s that gross, gushy feeling- I feel so smitten and grateful, that we’ve (me and this place, this country, these people, this language) have somehow climbed a silly little sand dune and crossed my fears of intimacy (my fears that distance would always dictate beauty, that entirety would show me too many flaws, that I would always be jailed by ideals and therefore unable to appreciate the tails side of the penny). But now, I’m understanding more, and every day, I feel more deeply attached to this experience, this year, more anxious about what it will be like to leave. What will it be like to leave these people and to leave continuously good conversation, to leave an impossible bubble of Arabic-lovers, who read, and care about the world, and can take a joke without academic pretentions? I am fully aware and conscious I’m taking every minute for granted, but I feel like I can’t appreciate it any more or else I’d explode. Sometimes it’s just too much just to feel everything at once; sometimes I have to distract myself from life itself or else my body physically wouldn’t know how to operate on such emotional blessings.  

“To live is so startling that it hardly leaves time for anything else.” – Emily Dickinson