Finding My Place Read online

  11

  Honour

  I once read about a small village in Pakistan where many of its young men were recruited by al-Qaeda for suicide missions. The fathers of these young men proclaimed how proud they were, how honoured they felt, that their sons had ‘sacrificed their own lives’ for some warped ideology – and how, through their sons’ deaths, they had earned the respect of the entire village and were regarded with esteem as the honourable fathers of martyrs. That article made me think long and hard about honour and what it means.

  It strikes me that some people think that honour is all they have in this world. They hold honour so dear, they cherish it, worship it even – yet they do little to earn it for themselves, instead placing their own honour in the hands of others. Where is honour if not in your own heart? Why must people die and kill so that others can claim it? If there is indeed honour in that kind of death, then I choose life.

  As the captain switched on the seatbelt sign and the plane started its descent into Cairo airport, I peered out of the window. All I could see was brown earth and dust. This was my new home. A vast expanse of nothingness – a bland melange of brown and grey. I darted my eyes around, searching desperately for some sign of civilisation – a skyscraper, a building or even the pyramids – where were they? Sensing panic in my eyes, my mother put her hand on my arm and smiled as if to reassure me. But I found little comfort in her attempts to console me because it seemed to me that she was excited and so I was expected to be excited too – for her more than for myself.

  The scene at Cairo airport as we disembarked hit me like a slap in the face with a wet fish – not a nice fish like tuna or swordfish, but one of those disgusting fish that trawl the bottom of the lake and eat duck shit. The sheer volume of people either scurrying about or wandering aimlessly; the lines and lines of humans waiting to get through customs; the yellowed walls and browbeaten floors; the security guards in their rag-tag uniforms limply clasping their rifles – none of this filled me with confidence. I followed my mother’s lead as she pushed and prodded past the crowds to the visa window.

  ‘My daughter is originally from Egypt – born here. We don’t need a visa. Just need you to stamp her Australian passport.’

  The exasperated official in his cheap dusty suit behind the barred windows looked up briefly and then down again. He didn’t look like someone who enjoyed his job. He sighed. ‘Ya Madam,’ he began, and I watched my mother’s face take on that instant look of ‘here we go’ that I had grown accustomed to seeing whenever she prepared for an argument. ‘We can’t process this. You need to pay for a visa. Take the passport and go to the next window for your payment.’

  Oh dear. Not what my mother wanted to hear. This man clearly didn’t know to whom he was speaking.

  ‘I’m telling you my daughter was born here. Born here. Do you understand. That means that she has every right to come into this country without paying for a visa. So I tell you what, you stamp the passport and let us get on our way.’ As predicted, an argument ensued. As predicted, my mother won.

  We finally made our way out of the airport and flagged down a taxi. It was daytime – it could have been morning, afternoon or perhaps early evening – whichever way the Cairo traffic was nothing short of utter chaos. Traffic was stacked like little Matchbox cars dumped haphazardly out of a child’s toy box in the middle of the floor. I switched off the noise of honking cars, motorcycle engines and music blaring from passing taxi cabs, and pressed my forehead against the window. As we drove down the main road out of the airport and towards Giza, I saw armed soldiers stationed every few metres or so – I wasn’t too sure what they were meant to be guarding, and judging by the looks on their faces, neither were they. I saw men walking arm in arm along the street stepping up and down the pavement and balancing precariously along the fragmented kerbing. I was impressed that Egypt was so progressive that gay men could so openly show their affection for one another in public. Even in Australia, such public displays of affection were still frowned upon. Then my mother leaned over and told me that it was customary in Egypt for men to walk arm in arm or even hold hands – apparently, it’s a Middle Eastern thing. I watched as women with two, three and even four children in tow navigated the traffic and marvelled at how they managed to stop the flow of cars so they could cross safely – like mother ducks leading their ducklings all in a row. I took in the sights of the street vendors with their trailers piled high with their wares: corn on the cob grilled over a coal-fired barbecue; koshari (a traditional Egyptian dish of rice, pasta and lentils served with a rich tomato sauce) and felafel. I searched the crowds for young women who looked like me or dressed like me – desperately seeking a reflection of myself in a place that seemed so unfamiliar but that should have been familiar.

  By the time we arrived at Aunt Habiba’s house in Giza, I was exhausted from the long flight followed by the sensory overload of the long drive from the airport. The taxi had driven past a dirty creek where children clothed in rags played in the stagnant water, and turned down a narrow dirt laneway lined with dilapidated apartment blocks three or four storeys tall. It stopped just outside a three-storey block across from an open-air cafe, where old men sat on rusted chairs around rustic wooden tables drinking coffee and sucking flavoured tobacco from long tubes attached to ornate glass bottles half-filled with dirty brown water. The entrance to the building was framed in discoloured granite that matched the tepid yellow sandstone of the walls. Bare concrete stairs wound their way to where my aunt lived with my five cousins in one of the two-bedroom first-floor apartments that overlooked the street.

  Two of my male cousins stumbled out of the building to help us unload the car. They seemed to know who my mother was and embraced her as you do when you greet a relative or friend who you haven’t seen for years. I smiled at them and followed them up the stairs to the green doors that opened up to my aunt and three female cousins waiting to greet us. My mother hugged her older sister amid squeals of delight and compliments showered upon her nieces and strings of kisses planted on cheeks with gusto. I hugged my aunt, whom I had never met, and kissed the cousins I had never seen, trying to remember their names.

  For the next eight weeks my mother and I shared a double bed crammed into the corner of one of the bedrooms, while my cousins and aunt slept wherever was convenient in the other bedroom or sitting room. I met my uncle, my mother’s brother, and his children and grandchildren and my other cousins, who were married with their own families. I rode camels in the desert just beyond the pyramids, visited the world-famous Egyptian Museum and strolled down the banks of the Nile River. I had my hair cut and ironed straight, my eyebrows plucked and my nails painted because apparently curly hair, dark skin and bushy eyebrows were considered ugly in Egypt, even in the 1980s when women in Australia were spending millions of dollars on perms, tans and eyebrow implants (okay, maybe not eyebrow implants). I learned about traditional Egyptian dishes and managed to get my tongue around some common phrases. I observed my female cousins for hints on how I was supposed to behave and who I was supposed to be. I packed away my short skirts, took to wearing jackets to cover my arms and wore layers to ensure that my clothes were not see-through. In eight short weeks, I transformed myself into a version of me that fit into my new surrounds – like an iguana blending perfectly into my exotic environment.

  Sometime before 1984 turned into 1985, my Higher School Certificate results arrived. My hard work had paid off and I had earned a place at Sydney University studying law – my first choice. But by then it was made clear to me that those dreams belonged to a different person – not the person I was expected to become. My trip to Egypt was not some coming-of-age, self-discovery tour like you see in the movies or read about in romantic novels. I was not here to eat, pray or love. I was sent here by my parents to be their anchor to the country they had left behind and now yearned to return to. I, or rather my honour (ergo their honour), was going to be their reason for coming back. Now that my sister had paved the
way and set the example of the ‘good’ daughter, I was expected to follow – to get married and claim my place in the shadows. It’s difficult to explain this without sounding bitter. I wasn’t bitter about it at the time. I just accepted that it was the way things were and that I would have to navigate my way through it just as I had navigated my way through expectations and perceptions through my childhood and adolescence. I can’t say that I fully understood the whys and what fors of my parents’ decisions, but I had come to accept them for what they were – expressions of their fears and, in their own ways, of their love.

  Resolving to pursue a university education regardless of my circumstances, I took my high school results to the American University in Cairo (AUC), which offered US university degrees across various disciplines. My mother accompanied me to the appointment with the university registrar, who told me that my Australian Higher School Certificate did not qualify me for a local scholarship to the university. I could attend but would have to pay full fees at the exorbitant rate charged for international students in US dollars. I knew that my university education was not worth the tens of thousands of dollars to my parents, even if it was my salvation from the horrible fate of the street sweeper. My only option was to sit for a British General Certificate of Education and try to apply to the university the next year. I was heartbroken. Shattered. Mortified. After all my hard work in the year of being invisible, I was back to square one.

  I registered for the British General Certificate of Education, bought my books, pens and notepaper and worked out a study schedule for the next six months. When my mother returned to Australia, leaving me at my aunt’s house with a small aluminium closet to hold all my belongings and a bed to share with my younger teenage cousin, she knew that her second girl child was now safe and secure in the bosom of her family.

  If Cairo was a colour it would be sepia. That’s how I would describe it. Egypt’s beauty was not in her streets, certainly not here in Sharia Al Ma’awan, not here in the middle-class quarter of Omrania with its burst water pipes, dusty footpaths and street urchins playing in the dirt. No. Egypt’s beauty was in her people – her soul – the common people. Stripped of the veil of colour and movement, the ugliness of Cairo was laid bare.

  I stood on the balcony that adjoined my shared bedroom and looked out over the street. In the early dawn and the smothering heat of the Egyptian summer, the air was thick with a hazy silence shattered by the noisy colours of the people pouring into the street. If I leaned forward far enough over the balcony ledge I could make out the market vendors preparing their fruits and vegetables. There were no air-conditioned supermarkets with shiny trolleys and sweaty tomatoes glistening under fluorescent lights. Here the markets were street corners where mostly poor villagers came to earn their sustenance for the day. They piled their products on upside-down buckets or makeshift tables constructed from pieces of board balanced on piles of bricks.

  The street chimed with the sound of the marketers spruiking their wares and loudly feigning offence at customers who complained that the lettuce was too wilted or the tomatoes too soft. The young boy who tended to the regular customers at the cafe across the road busied himself with tables and chairs in readiness for the day’s business. He shouted out greetings to the passers-by – most of them the neighbourhood men who frequented the cafe in the evenings after a long hot day at work.

  Once a week the gas-bottle man towed his trailer through the street, clanging loudly on a gas bottle and singing out ‘Boootagaaaaaas.’ The familiar alarm brought the women in their house dresses out to their balconies to hail him down so he could exchange the gas bottles that kept their stoves cooking. People jutted in and out of buildings and children ran through the streets, dodging cars that were inching their way to their destinations. Beaten-up cars with dusty hoods lined the footpaths – or what was supposed to be footpaths – parking right up against the walls of the apartment buildings and turning the street into a jagged maze. Occasionally, a wicker basket drifted past on its way up to a third- or fourth-storey window. They say necessity is the mother of all invention and the Egyptians had found a way to do their shopping without leaving their homes or missing their favourite daytime soapie (of which there were many). Long before online shopping became a couch-potato’s dream, Egyptian women lowered baskets tied to rope to be filled with food stuffs or bags of rice and flour, and raised them again through windows or balconies.

  I had been practising my Arabic out of necessity more than anything. My aunt and cousins could hardly speak English and it was much easier for me to take on speaking the tongue I had heard all my life than for the six of them to learn English. I awoke one morning realising that, for the first time in my life, I had dreamed in Arabic. That was the day I decided I was ready to venture out on my own. My aunt was sceptical when I told her I wanted to do the market shopping that day, fearful that I would get lost or be tricked by a dubious vendor into paying more than the going price for a bag of rotten tomatoes. I had been to the market with my aunt enough times to know the rules of engagement. A typical conversation with a market street vendor went something like this:

  Customer: ‘What’s this? Why are the tomatoes so expensive today? Twenty piastres is too much.’

  Vendor: ‘Madam. Peace be upon you. By Allah. That’s not too much. That’s the market price.’

  Customer: ‘But they don’t look fresh. They look old.’

  Vendor (pretending to be offended): ‘No, Madam. They are good. Look.’ (Picks up tomato and turns it around in hand.) ‘Just like honey. I swear.’

  Customer (pretending to be convinced by vendor’s slick sales techniques): ‘Okay. Give me one kilo, but make sure they’re good ones. Don’t give me any from the bottom of the pile. And don’t give me any rotten ones. I want firm tomatoes.’

  Vendor: ‘Yes, Madam. Only one kilo? Why not make it two? I’ll pick the best ones. Just for you. Yallah – two kilos of tomatoes. My best ones.’

  I left the apartment with my money rolled up tightly in my fist and a plastic bag tied around my wrist and headed towards the market. When I arrived I realised I had forgotten a very important detail. I couldn’t read Arabic. I had no idea how much the tomatoes, cucumbers or onions were – or if I had enough money to buy everything my aunt needed. I stood in front of the tomatoes and stared at the handwritten label advertising the day’s market price, trying to make out the Arabic letters as if just by staring at them I could learn to read. The tomato vendor eyed me with suspicion. Perhaps he thought I was a spy sent from another market to undertake industrial espionage on his precious tomatoes.

  I started walking back to the apartment when I spotted two of the young boys who played in the street. ‘You. Boy. Come here,’ I beckoned. The boys stopped their play, looked at each other and shrugged before making their way over to me. ‘I need you to do me a favour. I need you to go to the market and tell me how much the tomatoes are selling for.’

  They screwed up their noses and raised their eyebrows. ‘Why?’ asked the nosy, smart-arsey one.

  This wasn’t going to be easy. ‘Because I can’t read it.’

  The two little shits started laughing hard. ‘You?’ they guffawed ‘Illiterate? But you look so fancy.’

  ‘Shut up, you walking disaster. I’ll give you a whole pound if you do it.’

  As they skipped away towards the market having received their day’s worth of amusement at the expense of the fancy lady who couldn’t read, I yelled out to them, ‘And check the price of cucumbers and onions too while you’re at it.’

  I bounded through the green double doors of my aunt’s apartment with a bag full of vegetables and a satisfied smile. ‘See, Aunty. I told you I could go to market on my own.’ My cousins crowded around to congratulate me on my successful initiation and praised me for picking the firmest tomatoes and the freshest cucumbers.

  I celebrated my eighteenth birthday in my aunt’s apartment in the company of my cousins and with a store-bought cake. I blew out the candl
es and they sang ‘Heppy Birzday’ (the Egyptian version of ‘Happy Birthday’) in English and Arabic.

  Later that year, I sat for my exams for the British General Certificate of Education. By then, my parents had packed up their life in Australia and my mother left my father to sort things out and came to Egypt with my brother. We rented an apartment in an upmarket suburb and I said goodbye to my aunt and my cousins, who had been my only friends for the past year.

  Although I got good marks in my exams, they were just short of what I needed to get the scholarship start at the AUC in the first semester starting in September 1985. Once again, I left the registrar’s office heartbroken but with the hope that I could be enrolled in the second semester intake for the year. I gave my mother my gold bangles and told her to sell them so that I could pay the deposit that would guarantee me a place at the university.

  In early 1986, I finally started a Bachelor of Arts at the AUC. It was all I had wanted for two long years.

  12

  Ana Hurra – I Am Free

  If my parents thought that sending me to Egypt was going to save the teenage me from sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, they were so wrong. They had left Egypt at a time when middle-class morality tempered the social norms and dictated social relations. Egypt in the late 1980s was a brave new world. The class disparities between rich and poor had grown expansively, giving rise to a middle-class hoi polloi that clung to obsolete traditional values of bygone generations. The poor were, well too poor and often too desperate to afford the kinds of morals that restrained the middle class to which they aspired, and the rich just didn’t need morals and could afford to ignore them. The class disparities are laid out beautifully in the social critiques of popular Egyptian authors like Alaa Al Aswany, whose seminal work, The Yacoubian Building, explores the dynamics of class relations in a single building housing members of Egypt’s elite – the ‘old money’, its nouveau riche and its poor. One of my all-time favourite Egyptian movies is Bitter Day: Sweet Day, which featured the darling of Egyptian cinema Faten Hamama. It revolves around the story of a struggling single mother raising her generation X children, who are trying to manage their own frustrations at the lack of opportunities for social mobility and a way out of poverty. The film was released at a time when I was struggling to grasp the intricacies of class relations and coming to terms with the fact that the social mobility afforded me by my parents’ emigration to Australia, placed me (yet again) in the position of having to precariously straddle two sets of lives and two sets of expectations.