Feels Like Both
When you’re Egyptian, the first thing anyone asks you is what the pyramids are like, even if you’ve never seen them before. And even if you had, you would’ve been too little to remember, even if saying you don’t know makes you feel like a fraud and a liar. But here I am, nine years later, squished in the backseat of an old silver Toyota, three cousins beside me and Maryam on my lap, weaving in and out of tuk-tuks, motorcycles and donkey-drawn carts as we snake through the chaos of Egyptian streets. My nose is pressed against the smudged window, not entirely by choice, and my eyes drink in the scenes that fly past like shards of movie clips faster than my brain can sort them.
A cart full of ripe watermelons. Familiar. A bumper-to-bumper highway. Unfamiliar. Two boys in blue school uniforms chasing each other through a knot of palm trees. Familiar. A man in a spotless suit, standing in the middle of an expanse of white sand. Unfamiliar. A cream coloured masjid surrounded by mango trees. Familiar. Unfamiliar. Familiar. Unfamiliar.
I’m not sure if I was expecting a parking lot, but I shift in my seat when our driver drops us off on an obscure side road beside a small coffee shop, and we spill out onto the asphalt sidewalk. I’m a little nervous in Giza. After two weeks in Cairo, I’m used to our isolated suburban street, lined with faded apartment buildings and young boys playing soccer in the central courtyard. This place, however, is a textbook definition of life. The streets are full of bodies, calling, laughing, selling, playing, breathing, being. The cocktail of sounds and smells is both disorienting and comforting at the same time. A woman sits on the side road, fanning a line of corn on a small coal grill and I wonder if the ears are for sale or if they’re for the two boys in uniform I had seen earlier. As we shuffle down the street, we’re stopped by a group of teenagers my age who hand us pamphlets for a soup kitchen down the road and inform us that they hand out foil packets on Friday nights and that volunteers are always needed and wait, are we tourists? My eldest cousin assures them otherwise. I take one of the pamphlets, even though Giza is 80 minutes by car from our apartment and even though the chances of Mama letting me volunteer alone are close to nothing and even though we’re flying home (back?) in four days.
As street vendors with plastic key chains and small sphinxes mill about, Mama tosses us a look so familiar to me at this point that I don’t need the speech that comes with it. No more English, habaybi. It’s the same look she threw us when we clambered onto the felucca precariously floating on the Nile yesterday and when we went to renew our Egyptian passports at the crowded embassy and when we visited the centertown souk last week and bought cute hand-painted flower pots. I really don’t know why we bother because, despite the thick eyebrows and tan complexion I see mirrored in the bodies around me, and the hijab that for the first time in my life blends me in rather than sticks me out, you can tell from a mile away that I don’t belong. My hesitant step, eyes that roam the buildings and the people, searching for something I cannot remember, the lazy tilt in my voice. The sounds I make are too weak, the letters too limp, the words more like a dusty textbook than a breathing language. Speaking Arabic is pharyngeal exercise; you need to open your throat and close it and twist it and speak from somewhere near your heart. It’s worse for Maryam. Last week, when she tried to buy ice cream from the khushk down the street, the kind that’s so sweet you can feel the sugar grains scratching the roof of your mouth, the vendor asked her where she was from. When she looked at him like he was crazy and said Masr, he chuckled and said yeah, but where are you really from. I still laugh out loud at the irony.
The path to the pyramids is a little daunting, a steep mix of cobblestone and sand dunes. There are two gates leading to the main path and we’re ushered into the one on the right. It takes approximately five minutes of walking before Maryam starts to wail because she can’t be expected to walk this much and look, Baba, there are big bumpy animals and why doesn’t she have bumps and her legs hurt and Baba, can I ride the big bumpy animals. It takes even less time for us to suddenly be on camelback, trotting along like we’re riding a rolling wave, passing a mix of bright-eyed tourists and native Egyptians with small laughing children. A short man with a megawatt grin flocks to us almost immediately and insists on giving us a tour of the grounds. Baba tries to protest, but Egyptians don’t know how to take no for an answer, so twenty minutes later, we’re posing in front of the pyramids for pictures like the tourists we are. The man instructs us to hold our palms outwards like we’re carrying the pyramids, like we’re Atlas carrying the world, and I remember that this is the exact pose that my best friend posted on Instagram after her visit to Egypt last year. She told me later that the man who had been their guide hadn’t returned the phone until they’d paid up and how you couldn’t really blame him because he’s surviving on scarce tourist tips and the hustle that comes with a crushing wage gap. I hold out my palms and smile.
We thank the man for the pictures and continue our trek towards the back of the Great Pyramid. I’ve heard somewhere that there’s a security perimeter around the pyramids, but strangely, there’s nothing and no one. You can walk directly up to their walls and trace their stones like you’re reading the book of your people, until you remember what you’ve forgotten and return to what you’ve long deserted. The worn ragged edges feel strangely familiar as I drag my finger along each groove. I listened to a podcast once where a neuroscientist said that children can’t remember events in their lives before the age of three, but I wonder if a massive change in a child’s life can alter that timeline. Everything before the age of six feels like a faded drunk dream, snatched book scenes from someone else’s life. It’s like swimming in a thick jar of syrup honey; every once in a while, I hit a bubble of sharp focus, like the scent of jasmine by a seaside villa or the cherry red dress I wore at my sixth birthday party. But more often than not, the blurry edges are too runny to catch anything more than fleeting emotion. Familiar. Unfamiliar. Comforting. Disorienting. Foreign. Home. Home. Home. Home.
Sometimes, I think Canada is home because home is the feeling you get when you’re in the middle of Ontario’s woods in the autumn and everything is silent except for the rustle of the leaves and the local blue jay’s insistent call and you’re so still that you can’t separate limb from tree or pulse from earth. But other times, I think maybe Egypt’s home because home is where you deal card decks with your cousins until 4:00 a.m. in the morning and pop coke cans and eat candy bars and no one tells you to go to sleep because you’re all clinging to precious moments of family. I mentioned this to Baba once and he laughed and said they’re both home as though it was the simplest thing in the world, but I don’t think it is.
When we moved to Canada nine years ago, we landed in Ottawa. Two years later, we were in Toronto, and then Montreal, and then Vancouver and now we’re back in Ottawa and I still don’t know which is home. My sixth grade teacher once asked if we were a military family and a friend in fourth grade asked if my family ran a bank robbery ring and if the police were after us and how long had we been running away. We aren’t friends anymore, but I still wonder why she thought that we were running away. I always thought that when you find home, you’re supposed to stay there. And then I remember that emperor penguins travel sixty to a hundred miles every time they breed and they raise their chicks there before returning home and maybe they aren’t running away either. Or maybe it’s all home when you’re living in a great snowy expanse called Antarctica.
The pyramids are massive and imposing. They tower over you and extend towards the skies and their solidity convinces you that if the Earth were to disintegrate in this moment, they would remain standing, free floating in space. The strangest thing about them is how real they are. For nine years, they’ve been a story and a distant claim, a semi-detached proof of my identity. Yet when I’m standing here, flesh to stone, I decide that the stones of the Giza sidewalks and buildings, with cracks that hold gritty dreams and mango stains, are a much better claim to identity. For all their grandiosity, the stones before me are empty of life.
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