Finding My Place Page 10
The AUC was the most elite institution in the country. The compact campus stood in the middle of Cairo’s bustling Tahrir Square like a green oasis amid a desert of broken concrete and chaotic traffic. In the centre of the main campus, a fenced tennis court was lined with brightly coloured wicker chairs and tables strewn along the main walkway that connected the library to the cafeteria and made its way around to the main building which housed the administration, main hall and arts building. Next to the tennis courts an expanse of grass bordered by lush palms and well-watered hedges fronted the science building. Across the road from the main campus stood the Falaki campus – a later and more modern addition to the university, which consisted of a number of buildings around a central quadrangle. It was actually quite ugly compared to the palatial architecture of the main campus that integrated elements of Islamic art, with its geometric shapes and repetitive patterns, into the building design.
The Falaki campus also housed the Department of Public Services (DPS), which offered English-language classes and affordable short courses to a broader range of Egyptians from the lower classes. To the rich, entitled students whose parents forked out hundreds of thousands in tuition fees for their spoilt little darlings, the DPS was simply called the Dirty People’s Section.
The high walls surrounding the university weren’t just a cultural barrier, they also protected it from bomb attacks by Muslim zealots for whom the university represented a soft target in their ideological opposition to the West. Stepping through the massive wooden doors that opened into the campus’s main administration building was like stepping onto the set of Beverly Hills, 90210. Nubile young men in shorts and Lacoste polo shirts (the AUC uniform de jour) and pretty young girls with high hair, pink lips and bare skin moved about freely without having to worry about being harassed by cat calls or disapproving glares from old women swathed in black. Males and females sat together smoking, laughing or deep in discussion. Couples held hands, kissed or sat with their arms entwined. These kinds of public displays of affection were not allowed outside the walled sanctuary of the AUC, where the morality police – literally a section of the Egyptian police force dedicated to enforcing moral standards – could arrest a kissing couple for public indecency.
The AUC student body were the sons and daughters of Egypt’s old money – they were the children of ambassadors, politicians, bankers and Arab royalty. They were the A-listers schooled at elite boarding schools in Europe and the United States, or at one of the handful of private language schools in Cairo, where they learned to speak several languages. They lived in sprawling high-rise apartments overlooking the Nile River, or luxury villas in the most upmarket suburbs serviced by housemaids and doormen who wore tarbushes and bowed their heads when greeted. They were driven to and from university in the latest-model Mercedes and called their parents Pappy and Mommy. They spoke with American accents, watched American movies and listened to American music. They carried their entitlement with impudence and scoffed with disgust at anything they labelled baladi – literally traditional, country style.
And then there was me. The only Australian in the entire university. The strange girl with the strange accent who wore her hair messy and rocked up to class wearing tracksuit pants and t-shirts. I stood out like a sore thumb among the girls in their full make-up and designer gear and the preppy boys who said things like ‘cool bananas’ (that was a thing back then and apparently it was very ‘cool bananas’ to say it). But it wasn’t just my exotic twang that set me apart from my classmates. There was so much more: the fact that I didn’t come from one of Egypt’s wealthy families, my family’s lack of connections, the fact that we weren’t lifetime members of one of the prestigious country clubs and that I actually had to work to support myself and pay my own fees.
In the months between finishing my exams and waiting to start university, I managed to get a job teaching English in one of Cairo’s many English-language schools. It paid relatively well – around 300 pounds a month, which was six times the average working wage back then. I gave most of it to my mother to pay for my fees and my upkeep, and was allowed to keep fifty pounds for my own expenses like transport and lunches. It didn’t last long if I took taxis everywhere, so I resorted to taking public transport and getting off a few streets before the university stop to avoid being seen alighting from a bus with all the common people. I started out working at a pretty dubious school or ‘institute’ as it was called for around a year before moving to a more reputable college that paid double the monthly salary I was getting at ‘dodgy brothers’ centre for people who want to read and write English good’. Eventually, I found work at the most reputable English-language teaching centre at the British Council and got a qualification in teaching English as a foreign language. The money was much better and I was able to keep around half of it for myself.
When I could afford it, I bought my first car with my own money. It wasn’t a Mercedes like the other girls had. It wasn’t even a Hyundai. In fact, I kind of doubt it was even really a car – more like a motorised rollerskate. The Zastava 750 was the smallest model made by the Serbian car manufacturer Zavod Crvena. It was called the supermini, but there was nothing super about it. My little Zastava came straight out of the shipping container and was delivered to me with a dark-blue exterior and black plastic interior that melted in the Cairo heat. In order to drive it, I first had to learn how to drive a manual and then had to get an Egyptian licence.
Driving in Egypt is not for the faint-hearted. There are no road rules – none. The traffic lights that exist stand like archaic reminders of a fleeting moment in history when the Egyptian authorities had a thought bubble that twenty-one million cars in a thirty-kilometre radius might be manageable. Navigating Cairo’s traffic is a feat requiring dexterity and flawless reflexes to avoid motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians, stray cats, wayward dogs and the occasional donkey (actually, donkeys weren’t that uncommon). Despite this, it is well documented that the Egyptian driver’s licence exam is among the easiest in the world. The day I went for the test I had none of the nerves that niggled at me when I was seventeen and taking my driving exam in Australia. The test was conducted in the car park of the Department of Transport and consisted of driving forward, turning to the right and then reversing. That was it. That was the sum of the display of technical driving skill the Egyptian authorities deemed necessary for navigating Cairo traffic.
Having passed with flying colours, I made my way to the office to receive my newly minted Egyptian driver’s licence. Sitting on a rusted chair and waiting for my name to be called, I noticed a middle-aged woman sitting in the corner with tears streaming down her face. Judging by her wailing, I got the distinct impression that some great calamity had befallen this poor woman, and being a nosy parker I edged closer to find out what it was. ‘Please, sir,’ she managed to shriek between gasps, ‘I can’t go home without a licence. Please show some mercy. This is my seventh time.’
I collected my licence and drove my little Zastava home, confident that the Egyptian transport department was doing its best to make sure that my life was not left in the hands of the seven-time loser.
My self-driven Zastava attracted a lot of attention when I rolled up to the doors of the AUC, but not for the right reasons. People laughed openly and took a lot of joy in teasing me about my little car. So I found a sticker and proudly displayed it on my bumper. It read ‘Don’t laugh. At least I own it.’ It was my own way of sticking the middle finger to the institution that I was never going to be fully admitted into.
Parking at the university was managed by the unofficial parking attendant known in Arabic as the sayes. The sayes at the AUC were among the best paid in all of Egypt, charging fifty pounds a week to relieve rich kids of their father’s Mercedes-Benz for the day. Rumour had it that Mansour the sayes at the main gate was secretly a millionaire who had made his fortune by maintaining his monopoly at the AUC. Mansour manoeuvred cars in and out of parking spaces so tight that the cars lined u
p resembled screaming teens in the mosh pit of a Nirvana concert. Every morning I would drop off my little Zastava with Mansour and head through the giant wooden doors, greeting the security guards on my way. Every afternoon I would wait at the gates while Mansour fumbled through his massive collection of car keys, find mine, and then send one of his assistants (his brothers) to fetch my car.
Three years after I left the AUC and Cairo for good, Mansour the sayes was killed in a bomb attack – a failed assassination attempt on an Egyptian minister by members of the Islamic Jihad. His senseless death was my first connection, albeit with several degrees of separation, to a theme that would eventually become my vocation.
* * *
As the years passed, I gradually assimilated into the elite world of my peers and classmates. I adapted to being an AUCian and became one of those girls that people whispered about on the street. ‘There goes one of those American University girls,’ they would say, ‘look at how they dress.’ The young girls would look admiringly at the ways we flouted tradition through our Western clothing and streaked hair and our walk. No matter where you were, you could tell an AUC girl by her walk. There was something about it – like a confident strut and a click in the heels that said ‘we are free because we are rich’. We laughed loudly and giggled openly, while our less fortunate peers walked obediently within the shadows of the walls. And yet, I shared more in common with those girls on the outside than they would ever know. At home, my parents continued their strict restrictions, believing it was the best they could do for their leftover daughter. I was not permitted to go to the house parties and late-night events that all my university colleagues went to, though I found creative ways to lie to my parents and go anyway. To my liberal friends who took their freedom for granted, the kinds of restrictions my parents placed on me belonged in lower-class alleyways and working-class suburbs – a world they never took the time to know.
Experiences of the AUC have been documented by some of its more famous alumni – among them the late scholar Edward Said in his autobiography Out of Place. But the one which captured my attention is Ihsan Abdel Quddous’s novel Ana Hurra (I Am Free) written in 1952. The book was made into a popular film scripted by Naguib Mahfouz in the late 1950s. There are many parallels between my life at AUC and that of Amina, the novel’s rebellious young middle-class protagonist. Amina, like me, did not come from the elite class. She attended a middle-class public school in one of Cairo’s crowded suburbs. She talked her conservative family into letting her attend the AUC and saw her attendance there as a path to the kind of social mobility that would eventually free her from the shackles of middle-class morality that stifled her. Amina’s first encounter with her new liberal environment resulted in culture shock and she, like me, gradually became accustomed to the AUC. While Amina fought to attend AUC in the hopes of finding her freedom, I was there because mine had been taken away.
In 1994, four decades after Abdel Quddous penned his sharp critique of middle-class patriarchy, the book was reproduced for a broader Arab audience and included many changes to the descriptions of Amina’s defiant character, portraying her as silly and misguided instead of stubborn and rebellious. Her final utterance in the original version was a declaration of her own agency: ‘I am free’ were the words Abdel Quddous chose for his mid-century heroine. The modern ‘Arab appeal’ version tagged on the following words: ‘She imagined in her ignorance, that marriage was a hindrance, and she lived a dissolute and depraved life because of her false idea of freedom.’
Since leaving the AUC, I’ve returned several times and the security guards at the door have always welcomed me with a knowing smile. ‘It’s good to see you back, Madam. We’ve missed you.’
‘Do you remember me? Is it possible?’
‘Of course we remember you,’ they’d respond politely. ‘Welcome, welcome home.’
The last time I was there was after the Egyptian revolution of January 2011 that saw millions of Egyptians flood into Tahrir Square to overthrow President Mubarak. The university has since moved to a newly built campus in a modern compound on the outskirts of Cairo. Its walls no longer veil the private worlds of Cairo’s elite or hide the secrets of the well-heeled gentry. They now tell the story of disappointment – of a revolution that toppled a dictator and installed a religious zealot and then a military ruler, while the blood of Egypt’s youth stained her streets – sacrificed for a dream of freedom that was neither false nor imagined. The walls are ridden with bullet holes and street art depicting the lives of the young revolutionaries like modern-day hieroglyphics that tell stories of glorious battles or journeys to the afterlife. And right there, on the walls of the main campus is the browned bloodstain that is all that is left of Mansour the sayes.
13
Private Lives
I started out with a sense of pragmatism. I was going to study economics – a degree that would put me in good stead for a future job in a global company or perhaps a stable position as a public servant somewhere back home. In my freshman year at university, I selected all the subjects that would count towards my new goal to be an economist. I wondered how my high school economics teacher, Mr Leigo, would react when I told him that I was majoring in economics. Surely, he would be surprised that one of his most disruptive students – the one he used to say could talk underwater with a meat pie in her mouth – actually chose to study economics. Yes. Economics was a sensible choice and one that my parents approved of.
By the end of my freshman year, however, I had decided that economics was as boring as batshit – actually, maybe even more boring. I can’t say I agonised over the decision to change my degree – I was probably more relieved than anything else. I figured that if I was going to spend the next three years studying, then I was going to study something I enjoyed. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made, and to this day, I continue to counsel young people to study what they love and deal with the practicalities later. After all, a university education isn’t always a ticket to a high-paying job – nor should it necessarily be. I prefer to value my years at university (and there were plenty more to come) for the skills I learned that have been far more useful than any information I studied. I can’t recall all the books I read, but I know how to approach a piece of literature with a critical eye.
In my freshman year, I had taken introductory courses in almost all of the faculties that the AUC offered – there weren’t very many to choose from, but there was an eclectic mix of subjects that included archaeology (interesting but too narrow), history (boring), communications (shallow), science (ugh) and comparative literature. I loved my literature classes. The faculty was so small that the classes were held in small seminar rooms, where we sat around a heavy wooden table, smoking cigarettes and analysing the symbolism in the works of artists as diverse as Whitman, Camus, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Stein and Sartre. The lecturers were silver-haired professors from Oxford and Cambridge who paced up and down the seminar room talking into the air and occasionally gazing out the window.
I didn’t think too much of the modern American authors and I’d pretty much had my fill of Shakespeare during my school years, but I fell in love with the works of the Europeans that we studied in translation. I found myself drawn to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, about a man who wakes up one morning to find he has transformed into a disgusting cockroach-like insect. The young man becomes the object of his family’s dishonour and lives out his days in isolation in his own home, racked by feelings of guilt, inadequacy and shame. It felt familiar.
My parents weren’t too happy with my decision to change course and study English and comparative literature with a minor in theatre arts. Mum looked at me curiously when I informed her. ‘What do you mean? Do you think you’re going to be an actress? We don’t have any actresses in this family.’ Dad, the artist, was more sympathetic and better understood the value of studying the arts. It was easy to convince them that I didn’t need to study for a degree to get a job, firstly because I was already workin
g as an English teacher, and secondly because I would probably marry a doctor like my sister, or an engineer and never have to work anyway. I might even score myself the golden prize of attracting a surgeon! Who needs an education when you’re married to a surgeon, right?
Education is important to Egyptians. For some, it is seen as a pathway to social mobility. But to the poor masses, the lack of access to higher education is just a reminder of the class and social divide that keeps them in their station. Poverty is intergenerational. The son of a doorman can look forward to becoming a doorman, though he may dream of becoming a doctor. So much untapped talent resides in the holes in the walls tucked away on the ground floors of the buildings where the children of millionaires sip coffee and listen to Madonna in their parents’ penthouse apartments.