Discovering Egypt and thus ... Myself

"Thrown from miles and miles of distance, I feel I have to prepare myself for a landing, terrified I could crack all my bones during the impact with this new land that will be the future me, that will be Cairo. I keep repeating to myself: "Solid, not rigid...Solid, not rigid”. This is how my body has to be when it will reach the soil. This is how my mind has to be when it will break into my future."

I wrote these words on the 18th June 2017, one month before arriving in Cairo.

Today, one year after, I'm about to leave Egypt and I could write the same words: my fear is to go back to what I used to call home and discover that now, for me, is a foreign land.

Old Cairo

The reason why I've decided to embark in this journey, besides the opportunity to be part of Sting’s projects - the Refugees Integration project - was the chance to live in a city like Cairo and to be exposed to the Arabic culture and its religion.

In this historical moment, I grew aware of the importance of witnessing with my own eyes what I used to know only through the distorting lenses of my culture's prejudices, and of taking responsibilities of my own ideas.

Sometimes, I feel the Western world is engaging in a conversation with no intention of truly listening to its counterpart: I thought that this project represented for me a chance to listen directly to this counterpart’s neglected voice.

First of all, observing and questioning the Arabic culture demands to rummage into my roots and question my own culture: living in Cairo has shown me what Egypt is but, without me realising it, it has also been a mirror that reflected myself and the culture I belong to in a different light.

While observing myself and the way I was engaging with Egypt, I struggled to draw a line between me as an individual and me as the product of my society: can a contradiction between the two exist? Where does my individual identity start and where does it end?

Even though this never-ending questioning is the force that has dragged me into and through this experience, I did not come here to look for answers, I came here to learn how to formulate the right questions and how to multiply my curiosity.

I was looking for this perpetual feeling of otherness that you merely experience in a foreign land, a feeling that I would not be able to avoid or reduce. This would allow me to finally understand and measure what being foreigner means. I wanted to understand how deep this label would dig into my identity when I were marked with it. I have learned that this word is not a gentle one. Only rarely, without realising it, do these labels cease to exist, and in these instants what I feel is the deepest communion with the other, a mysterious feeling of belonging to the world.

One year ago, everything in Egypt was unknown and distant to me, and even its main gateway, the language, was barred and inaccessible. Arabic is indeed a river of consonants, a long and uninterrupted sound that, enclosed in writing, becomes an enigmatic and indecipherable drawing. And this is what Egypt has been for me: an enigma to be solved, to be decrypted.

If I think about how to recount this experience, I find my thoughts chasing all my memories of Cairo and I see how this city imposes itself on me and demands that everything revolve around it.

I did not feel welcome. Mostly in the beginning, I used to feel like the bacteria a body is trying to reject.

Through time, my relationship with Cairo has become dichotomic: I felt trapped in a grip that one second envelopes me in the warmest hug and a second later takes my breath away and suffocates me.

Cairo (and Egypt as a whole) requires awareness of its social, political and cultural situation, it requires awareness of how sexual harassment is omnipresent and may bring you to the edge of yourself, of how pollution sometimes can prevent you from walking in the street, and of how the endless deafening traffic noise and its smell may lead you to the point of madness.

Cairo is never vulnerable, it is never bent by the weight of its complexity, never lost, confused, or hesitating. It doesn't bow down to you, it doesn't step back. Cairo is a low and yet powerful coastal tide that grabs and drags and hurls you to the bottom of the sea. And when you are down there, almost out of breath, it comes to save you, lifts you to the top and leaves you there, gasping. However, swallowing you and spitting you out was not intentional. It was all just a coincidence, it was not about you.

If you are aware of all those things, then Cairo will blossom under the eyes of the bystander and show its sweetest soul. It will become the place in which no one would ever deny you help, in which you would be welcome to join family celebrations as if you have always been a part of it.

Cairo becomes the guy that buys the ticket for you because you don’t know how to ask for it in Arabic. It will become the stranger girl that holds your hand till the place you need to reach, protecting you from the crowd of the metro. It will become a peaceful tree-lined avenue in which you can finally breathe fresh, clean air and enjoy the sound of the wind between the tree branches.

In Egypt there is an unbridgeable social gap between the social classes and Islam creates a connection between them and is the ultimate structure that holds this society together. By living in Egypt, I had the chance to learn what the expression “Allah u Akhbar” (sadly associated with moment of death and desperation) actually means. Allah is the biggest, the greatest: bigger than any goal, commitment, concern.

"Allah made this country safe" - Verse from the Quran

It is the backbone of this society, it is its skeleton and its muscles, and every impulse this society receives is the power of this dogma.

Islam is the magic of Ramadan that bends you with sacrifices and then, every day after the last prayer, turns into the warmest celebration in which everyone is welcome to join each other’s table and share the Iftar. Every day of Ramadan is deprivation, but then, when the last prayer is about to be diffused across the city by the Muezzin, this fatigue turns into abundance and generosity, into strangers offering you milk, dates and water in the streets.

The spontaneity of the gesture of giving food for free in the middle of the street tells something about the sweetness of Cairo. It tells about the love for community, the pride of celebrating Islam, the strength of belonging to it.

During this year in Egypt, I had the chance to travel in many places and get an idea of how diverse this country is. Going out of Cairo and visiting other countries in the Middle East, made my understanding of Egypt wider and clearer: I often heard Egyptians say that Cairo doesn’t have an identity. I actually think Cairo has a very distinctive character and it is important not to think that its features and its

identity reflect those of Egypt.

I arrived in southern Sinai after countless military checkpoints, and there I have cleaned my mind with air full of salt and sand. Sinai dazzled me with the bright, deep blue of its waters and the majesty of its mountains. The western desert, instead, was for me an endless, stunning space.

During my life in Cairo, collaborating with the two refugee schools and trying to adjust made me realise how my lack of knowledge of Egypt’s modern history and education was preventing me from a full, deep understanding both of the place I was living in and of the field of work I was contributing to.

This is the reason why I decided to take a course on the history of modern education in Egypt at Cairo Institute of Liberal science and Art. Not only did this course fulfil my need of understanding Egyptian historical and educational background, but I also acquired a different perspective on everything I was experiencing and approaching.

I thus started to see history as a dynamic process of discovery and interpretation, a multi-layered phenomenon: different points of view are not a dangerous anomaly but a natural cultural phenomenon within a permanent process of formation and reformation.

I realised how colonialism and European influence have left a deep mark – that can still be seen – interfering, improving and even destroying Egypt.

Education, as an isolated process in which children acquire a set of instructions and self-discipline, was born in Egypt in the 19th century. Before this moment, the learning process was not separated from life itself. The education drew a line between things themselves and their meaning or structure.

Before the birth of modern schooling, the Kuttab (a basic school of Islamic education), usually attached to a Mosque, was the only place that had the role of “educating”. Here, children used to memorize the Quran.

When modern schooling was born, under Ali Mubarak, it aimed at imposing order and discipline. These two features were the hallmark of a new form of political power, a power that served the system of private landownership and production for the European market and that was established in the Ismail period (1860).

In 1867-1868 Ali Mubarak, on his return from Paris, acquired a palace on Darb al-Gamamiz, in the heart of Cairo, and established his office and his schools.

The fact that modern schools were located in the center of the city, and thus considered of utmost importance, marked the moment when a new politics of modern state appeared.

Then followed the greatest period of construction and demolition of Cairo since the growth of Mamaluk in 1300s.

The need of building a new city by engraining new sense of order lead to the destruction of the old city: opening up main streets and new arteries, creating squares and opening places.

“The disorder and narrowness of the streets that open boulevards eliminated were considered a principal cause of physical disease and of crime, just as the indiscipline and lack of schooling among their inhabitants was the principal cause of the country’s backwardness. (…) The urban space in which Egyptians moved had become a political matter, material to be “organized”. At the same moment, Egyptian themselves, as they moved through this space, became similar material, their minds and bodies thought to need discipline and training. The space, the minds, and the bodies all materialised at the same moment, in a common economy of order and discipline.” - Timothy Mitchell, "Colonising Egypt"

While the new schooling system introduced in the 19th century had been intended to firstly produce an army and improve the technicians associated with it, now schooling wanted to produce the individual citizen. In this perspective, while earlier order and discipline were the ultimate objective of education, they then became the means through which to educate future citizens.

As a part of the same process of “education”, the government also began the publication of journals, newspapers and books.

Studying the depth of the interaction between politics and the education in the building of a new state, highlighted the importance of questioning education itself.

I realised that, while dealing with schools, we are investigating a political matter and not just because of the huge influence that the education system has on the state, but also because education itself already involves a relationship of power between the student and the teacher.

Carrying this huge responsibility, I believe that education has the aim to teach how to ask the right questions and navigate through the complexity of the answer.

As I’ve said in the very beginning of my writing, my curiosity played a key role in my volunteering project and in this year spent here in Egypt. This desire of knowledge slowly turned into what I believe are the right questions: a good start to understand every experience I lived in the most intense year of my life.

- Mara, EVS volunteer at Sting