TO THE COUNTRY. (Photo taken 10.14.2011, Faiyum) Ah, blissful contrast to Cairo's urban sprawl, where concrete hovers and sand coats any bursts of green, except for garden-rich Maadi and Zamalak, smog clouds the air, dust accents clothes, cars honk incessantly, people are everywhere, and if you're not choking while trying to breath someone with a cigarette is very likely trying to kill you slowly, in a cab, cafe, in front of you on the sidewalk, if there is a sidewalk. I live across the street from a park in the Mounir neighborhood near the Sayeda Zeinab station, where adorable kids ride a carousel that on some days plays electro shaabi/mahragan music or soulful Fairuz. Cairo is deliciously odd, bursting at the seams with layers of new and old, like an elderly pack-rat's unexamined storage, on every corner there's another beautiful or strange moment I'd love to capture by whipping out my camera. But it's tough to do that these days without angering someone. My love affair through the lens has ended in Egypt over politics and fear. Wandering the streets on Saturdays with an Egyptian interior designer with a knack for coercing wary shopkeepers they should be photographed, I can't help but roll my eyes inward at the question, "Al Jazeera?" My partner found an anecdote for this: make fun. "Yes we are spies, Al Jazeera, Brotherhood and terrorists, here to take photos of you as you __________ (insert innocuous daily activity here)."
I think of this quote from Audre Lorde in "Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name": Night after night we had talked until dawn in this room about language and poetry and love and the good conduct of living. Yet we were strangers. Egypt and me. I have immersed myself in a place, moving here, working here, filming a documentary over years... and yet I have never felt more alone, disoriented, a stranger. In many ways that has been my greatest lesson. When I first landed in 2011 I was reading Paul Cohelo's "The Pilgrimage," and couldn't comprehend how a man so different from me could be articulating my daily battles.
"When you travel, you experience, in a very practical way, the act of rebirth. You confront completely new situations, the day passes more slowly, and on most journeys you don't even understand the language the people speak. So you are like a child out of the womb. You begin to attach much importance to the things around you because your survival depends upon them. You begin to be more accessible to others because they may be able to help you in difficult situations. And you accept any small favor from the gods with great delight, as if it were an episode you would remember for the rest of your life."
(By the way, his books are a religious experience, and his blog is a great guide). When I first experienced Egypt this way, among my first trips out of the city, 60 miles southwest of Cairo, I visited Faiyum, founded around 4000 BC, the oldest city in Egypt and one of the oldest in Africa. Apparently the name comes from the Coptic payom, meaning the "sea" or the "lake," and along with the ancient civilization raised along the lake banks fossils of elephants, monkeys, whales and even dinosaur have been found. On my visit, I watched pottery makers who practice their craft along the banks, their hands caked in brown mud, shaping swiftly large pots they set to dry in the sun. The children watched, fished, wrestled... there was no immediate sign of the issues I would later learn about, a lack of clean water, overpopulation, piles of garbage, poverty, a lack of healthcare – issues that much of Egypt's rural communities continue to suffer. We are all in survival mode, some of us like me possess the privilege of time to think, reflect, even blog about it, while others navigate limitations their entire lives without affording the luxury of their total humanity. I'm confronted daily by the self-imposed oppression of well-off friends here who erect walls with a phrase I never heard growing up in a Muslim household, haram (forbidden). Groundwork for social structure, behavior, interaction, crime and punishment, a human enforced interpretation of religious wrong. I'm blessed to have never been told my limitations in society until I stepped foot outside of my household into it, a new lesson learned every day living in Egypt.
