Revisiting Egypt

 A friend of me told me last night that she'd just read my entire blog (so far), which delighted me to no end, and surprised me; she also mentioned she was expecting to see some reflection here about the Egyptian situation, which makes a lot of sense.  I've wanted to say something myself.  The trouble is, I haven't known what to say, because my perspective is primarily personal, not political.

Politically, of course, there is way too much to say.  It's a whole blog, a whole book, a whole bookshelf.  It's amazing and astounding and moving and shocking and beautiful, and it makes me, in a way, very jealous.  They just went and did it.  No one really knows where it is going to go next, but things are ddefinitely not the same as they were, and it was in the direction of actual freedom (not what people usually get, which is the illusion of freedom, and which is much harder to rebel against).  These are also a people who have been under foreign rule, of some sort or another, for almost a couple unbroken millennia.  This thing that has happened in the world, in Cairo, is essentially wholly new, in many ways.  I'll leave the political part at that.

Here is my personal experience: I heard an inkling - God knows where, did I see something online? - very early on, when it was a just a tiny sidebar, right at the very beginning.  I posted something on Facebook - like, I am thinking about my friends in Cairo and hoping they are safe - and the responses, at that time, were of the "Why?  What's happening in Cairo?" nature. From there, it blossomed.  I wasn't glued to any TV screens, but the pictures people posted on Facebook moved me.  Did I recognize places I had stood?  I did.  Did I scan the faces of those Egyptians to see if I recognized anyone?  I did (although, no, I didn't actually see anyone I knew). 

But I saw a people I knew, a land I knew.  I know I was only there for a week.  I am aware of that, and realize it's rather silly - and probably arrogant - to pass myself off as some sort of expert on Egypt, as someone who has anything unique to say about it all due to a week-long visit.  But, if you've read other blog posts, you know, I threw myself into this trip with a gusto and fascination few non-scholars do.  I learned some Arabic, I studied hieroglyphics, I read some political background histories, I read fictional accounts, and I dreamed about a a red stone I would find for the trip, which later turned out - in real life, when I found it - to be this fossilized remain from Africa, millions of years ago, and named after the Unknown god Aman.  I was wholly, fully into Egypt.

And when I was there, I was also fully engaged.  But once I was home, and recovered from that peculiar Egyptian flu, I moved on.  I took that knowledge about my trip and what I had learned and felt, and folded into the rest of my life, and went merrily on.  I forgot much of my Arabic.  This isn't unusual - I am like this.  It is in my nature to absorb things quickly, and forget them as quickly.  I fancy I am living "in the moment" but it's just how I operate really, now more so than before.  It seems to increase, this ability to expand, experience, expound and then exit. 

The things I experience, however, become a part of me, as Egypt is.  I did think of the people I met as my friends.  I was worried about Ayman, when I heard.  I worried about his family - with tourism stopped, how was he living?  I thought about all the taxi drivers and waiters and guides and shopkeepers who taught me Arabic, and I wondered how they were.  Were they out in the streets?  Were they safe?  Were they sympathetic?  Radical?  Were they - still alive?  Yes, you have to wonder that.

I also thought of the land itself, and all those guilded places I went, reserved for the tourists with money, and wondered what those places were like now.  I saw my father last weekend, with whom I'd traveled - it had been at his prompting, his organization, a trip he'd wanted to do all his life, and was finally, at age 70, doing.  We are close but live 500 miles apart, and yet we were still curbside at LAX when Egypt came up.  He said, "I think of our cruise ship, all those ships, just docked, and I wonder how Ayman is surviving."

Why, I have wondered a lot recently, should it matter that I visited a country just months before their revolution?  It's like when someone dies and people say, "But I just saw them."  Well, of course - things happen in linear time: you see someone, and then they move on to other things.  You visit Egypt, and then they spontaneously and fantastically and historically revolt, and do it via Facebook and Twitter, of all things!  But it does seem to matter.  It does.

My roommate T said, "Think of the Butterfly Effect.  You've got to, in some small way, feel like you are responsible for it.  What if you'd never gone?  Would things have happened the same way?  What if you going there, and being there, was somehow crucial to what happened?"  Well, I don't see how, but that's the point of the Butterfly Effect - you don't see how, but everything really is intimately connected. 

Wikipedia refresher, if you need it:

The butterfly effect is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; namely, a small change at one place in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere. Although this may appear to be an esoteric and unusual behavior, it is exhibited by very simple systems: for example, a ball placed at the crest of a hill might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position. The butterfly effect is a common trope in fiction when presenting scenarios involving time travel and with "what if" cases where one storyline diverges at the moment of a seemingly minor event resulting in two significantly different outcomes.


So no, I don't think my going to Egypt had anything to do with their revolution, but the truth is, I DO think it had something to do with it, because it did. Just like the farmer who grew my strawberry has something to do with my great immune system. Not much, but something.  And something is...well, it's something, isn't it?

And there's one thing, which I don't know if I can even describe - it seems like it's inherently racist to explain, but basically, I received a certain vibe when I told people I was going to Egypt.  Reactions like: Really?  Those people, over there, they are crazy.  They are dangerous.  They might kill you.  They might bomb you.  They might see Americans and hurt them.  The real unspoken message was they aren't freedom-loving, like us.  They are barbarian.  They don't understand real things, the real world, they way we (Americans, Westerners, etc) do. 

And that was not my experience.  Yes, they were different, but when that difference was a problem, it was my problem - or, maybe ours, jointly, but certainly not just theirs.  I felt an amazing love coming from them.  I've struggled with this, because of the "meal ticket" aspect; sure, they love Americans, because they love dollars, as any very poor country understandably would.  No one wants to be poor, after all.

But it wasn't just that.  I knew that once I was there, once I started meeting the Egyptians.  Once again, I thank whatever instinct I had that inspired me to learn Arabic, because this was an incredible bridge.  When I was talking to them, in their language - albeit limited, I think I had OK grammar and pronunciation - my experience was not that of separateness, but of connection.  I think of the very old man outside the carpet weaving school who gave me, a fat American, half of his bread, and I want to cry - I wanted to cry when it happened, and I want to cry now. Who is that generous? 

My experience has been that, sadly, American political actions (such as our widespread military bases, just to name one example out of a million) tend to correctly turn non-Americans against us, but to a much lesser degree than Americans ourselves/themselves would turn against others who treated us that way.  Can you imagine foreign military bases on American soil?  People would freak out.  And I'm not even talking about the really bad stuff, like, you know, how we bomb people all the time.  Americans don't get bombed; they bomb others.

And yet, there they were, all those Egyptians I met, and maybe they resented Americans in general, but they didn't resent me.  They saw me as a person, as the person I am.  I think back to after September 11, and how the country went mad in thinking any dark skinned person was dangerous, and here I was, an actual citizen of a country that, to many parts of the world, is dangerous - is, literally, fatal (do we even know how many Iraqis have died in the last decade due to some form of American intervention?) - here I am, an acknowledged member of the dangerous group called America, and how was I treated?  With open arms.  With smiles.  With kindness and tolerance and amazement.  I think of Ayman, saying "Yes, hababi, do you see, how underneath, we all worship the same god?"  Do you see how alike we are under the skin?

And then the Egyptian people go and shock the world with their tenacious pursuit of freedom, and Americans rally in support, and I can't help but wonder at it all.  I already knew they were amazing, and learning they were amazing makes me realize, they are all amazing, people everywhere.  I was scared to go to Egypt. I was.  I had this irrational fear that it was a trip I would never come back from.  I prepared to go like I never do for trips - cleaned up things in a certain way that would make my death more tidy should that happen.  I was scared not because I feared brown people but because Cairo, you know, really does have racially-motivated terrorism.  I mean, it was dangerous.  They just had a revolution!  Those aren't traditionally safe - although this one was indeed impressively non-violent.

I guess what I am saying is, it's good to see this outburst of solidarity.  It's inspiring to see connection travel across the globe.  I was on the forerunner of it all, in some mild, or small way that I never will know the exact parameters of.  I know this is a somewhat boiled down, and simple view; I began by saying the complexities are too huge for me to tackle here, and my ignorance is vast.  I am no expert.  All I know is, I am glad for the people I think of as my friends. I am grateful, yes, that I got to see some sights that may be unavailable for some time - who knows when tourism will be back?  I am grateful we went in the fall, rather than in the early spring as originally planned.  Yes, there's all that.

But really, I'm thinking pretty much every day of Ayman.  If I were a traditionally praying person, I'd be praying, but I do it in my own way.  Because something is happening, and whether we know it or not, we really are all part of it.  I hope things will turn out mashi mashi (okey dokey), and I hope to head back to Egypt one day, and see a new country while I tour the oldest cities on earth.