"It's hard to unlearn."

13 October 2008

“It’s hard to unlearn.”

“Squinting hard through my smudgy, cheap-seat window, Cairo began to emerge from the dark; a vast ocean of light spread across a milk-chocolate landscape. The desert gave way to gathering assembly of low-lying buildings and the city grew in dimension, seemingly chasing the snaking green Nile…”
– from http://www.lonelyplanet.com/travelstories/article/myfirst24hourscairo_0307#

I look up from the paper in my hand as one of my teachers explains, “It’s hard to unlearn traveler’s discourse.” My academic director has passed around the above excerpt called “My First 24 Hours: Cairo” from Lonely Planet’s travel stories. Does this sort of thinking (Eurocentric-here’s what happened to me in the exotic East) creep into my blog writing? I haven’t updated my blog in a while, and I’m already overwhelmed with somehow conveying al-Badia and Mesr (Egypt) to you – especially Mesr with all its romanticized, ancient Egypt discourse.

Only travelers who cannot see past the dirty surface squint through “cheap-seat” windows and imagine that the city emerges from “the dark”; the only troublesome darkness in Cairo is our ignorance about it and the rest of Africa and the Middle East, that lingering idea of the “dark continent” in Western consciousness. No oceans of light threaten confectionary landscapes, as tasty as a chocolate desert would be. Only tourists passing through a city feel that it grows in dimension to the point of bewilderment; for those who linger, whether as traveler-wanderers or as residents, the city does not expand but implodes, reemerging, recreating Cairo again and again, full of color and light – overpopulated and polluted at 25 million people on 4% of the land, yes – but full of life. Egypt is “Umm al-Dunia”, the “Mother of Life” in the Middle East for those who will rest on her lap and listen to her teachings. Only Orientalists chase after mysterious green snakes; the wanderer and student of Umm al-Dunia drifts down the gentle river in a faluka with no destination, nothing specific to see as mandated by a travel guide book, but everything to observe. We can leave the cultural dissection to the Egyptologists and “pyramidiots” who wish to embalm “ancient Egypt” and bury with it any hope of understanding the process of modernization in Egypt. So if you were anticipating tales of a snaking green Nile, of mummies in museums, of sheesha and sufi mystics, of bartering and of belly-dancers, then you had better read some other blog. (For those interested, I recommend the ethnography Pyramids and Nightclubs about tourism in Egypt.) And yes, I finally rode a camel.

*****

After Cairo, Amman suddenly seemed small, slow and familiar; we traveled the same route from the airport to Abdoun as we had over one month ago. I recalled some of the thoughts, hopes and apprehensions of that night; the desert lay just beyond the reach of the street lamps streaming past in golden, dreamy hues. The chilly air poured in through the taxi windows on the way home; it was far too late to call anyone. As I fumbled with the key in the keyhole, I realized the family set of keys was inserted in the other side, blocking my key; no one was expecting me at 1:30am. With no one lamenting my departure in Egypt and no one to welcome me home to Jordan, I felt displaced as I rang the doorbell to my own “home”. A few minutes later, I sat on my bed in my dark bedroom in Amman listening to the silence, and I began to process it all, mentally reaching out into the darkness as I had when I first dipped my fingertips into the murky Nile…

(More about al-Badia and Egypt to come tomorrow, inshallah.)