Wanderlust (6 page)

There were other things we noticed only at first, before we accepted them as a part of daily life. Then they got harder to describe, the way it's hard to describe what it feels like to breathe air.

One of the first things was the presence of men with guns. They wore the black uniforms of the Egyptian military and had automatic weapons slung around their chests—AK-47s, we thought, but mainly because that was the only automatic weapon we'd ever heard of. The soldiers were posted at the airport and outside big hotels, embassies, and government buildings, their faces usually scowling or stony, though sometimes you glimpsed one having a quick laugh with another over a cigarette, and then they seemed soft and human. Sometimes they trundled past by the truckload. Max Weber floated back to me from Poli Sci 101: A “state” is an entity with a successful monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. The soldiers were posted at the gates to our campus, where, that first time Michelle and I entered, we eyed them apprehensively, wondering if they had authority over us. But they ignored us, for where could two tall, pale, disheveled girls belong but at the university? We didn't understand our relative power yet. To me the surly, black-clad men with guns looked menacing. But they were listless cogs in a dictatorship; they wouldn't help me, but I was too rich and foreign to be worth troubling much. It would create a hassle. I quickly inferred that I was exempt from fearing them, and embraced my special status without a second thought.

The government bullied the soldiers, the soldiers bullied the people, the people bullied each other and the visitors from foreign lands. I didn't understand much about it, this way of treating people, this fear that went straight to the top. I felt it immediately, though, the first day when we stepped into Tahrir Square and the tormenting began. It came mostly in the form of demanding, accusing, or insinuating words, and sometimes in the form of a stroke or a pinch. The assault on my sense of self felt violent, even when no physical contact was involved. It was a shock administered in slow motion, in tiny cuts, absorbed in phases. It never went away, not as long as I traveled in places that were Arab or Muslim or poor or oppressed. It's the way of half the world.

At first it startled. Some of the calls were staccato, like gunfire, stopping as quickly as they started but leaving me wondering when they would start again. Some were more ingratiating. Some men avoided the possibility that I might walk off by falling into step beside me at just my pace. They sped up when I sped up and slowed down when I slowed down, like comical, sinister mimes. These ones talked more softly and correctly in their handling of English.

There was begging, some by cripples, some made that way for profit. I read Naguib Mahfouz's novel
Palace Walk
that fall, where I learned that there was such a thing as a cripple maker. I couldn't have imagined this on my own. A man outside the touristed Khan al Khalili rested his legless torso on a small wheeled platform and pushed himself along with his hands; he was always there.

There were sales pitches. The vendors, like the beggars, were egalitarian in their choice of targets; money came from men as well as women. Boys of twelve at the Pyramids were wilier than
American used car salesmen, determining at a glance which member of a couple wielded influence, shifting fluidly into Japanese. Academics have spent too much time trying to explain objectification, considering that there's an easy way to make white, Western men understand: You just have to go out in public somewhere poor. You become a thing. Your conscious and unique self becomes irrelevant, as a thousand eyes try to figure out how to best tap your wealth. And objectification begets objectification. The harassers become an undifferentiated mass themselves, made up of identical things that torment.

There's a special hell reserved for foreign women. The catcalls came ineloquently in English—“I want fuck you”—and mellifluously in Arabic, where they were all food-related: Foreign women quickly learned the words for banana, strawberry, honey, and cream. My first reaction was to try to answer the calls, human to human. Someone addressed me; I owed them a reply. A “no, thank you,” as I moved on. But “no, thank you” was taken as an opening, an opportunity for persuasion. And so as early as that first day I began to ignore them, or rather try to give the appearance of ignoring them, since I hadn't yet learned how to be unaware.

The guidebooks, the literature, the how-to-deal-with-Egypt memos from my university, the people who'd been here, all agreed: Female visitors should dress modestly, with arms and legs covered. This, it was suggested, would “show respect” for Muslims and their culture, and cut down on sexual harassment. I couldn't have been more game. The summer before I left, biding my time in Vancouver, I sewed two long sack dresses from the same pattern. They would have been ideal for members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They had long sleeves and fell past midcalf, and were roomy enough to fit two of me in each. One was
a black-and-white check, and the other made of thick white cotton, a mistake given the ambient sand and exhaust that permeates Cairo's air, turning white to dun. My bigger mistake, though, was misunderstanding the dresses themselves. I was approaching the risk of harassment as a problem that could be solved. I thought I understood. I thought the obsession with female modesty across this whole stretch of the planet must exist because it worked. “Working,” to my mind, meant something to do with my own well-being, with the well-being of women, things I supposed mattered. All the veils and dresses and covered arms might be an inconvenience, but I was willing to be inconvenienced in exchange for comfort and safety. I thought clothing could protect me the way guardrails prevent falls, or seat belts cut down on death. Problem, solution. But it didn't work that way. I could drape my body in fabric, but I remained visibly female and foreign. I couldn't eliminate my height, my light skin and blond hair, or all the little things I took so for granted that I forgot they marked me: the backpack for my books, the natural fabrics, the engineered shoes.

As it sunk in that the deluge wouldn't stop, my initial energy dissipated and panic set in. People followed me, sometimes closely and muttering, sometimes at a distance; I became paranoid and wondered if I was followed all the time. We experimented with tactics: We tried grabbing the hands of our male friends, thinking a faux boyfriend might defray it all, but American college boys were not seen as deterrents—indeed, their friendship with foreign girls increased their popularity. We tried fake wedding bands and stories of fake husbands. We tried shaming them: yelling “Hey, what are you doing,” when a hand grazed our behinds. Shouting vented my building anger, but that was all it did. Nothing worked.

My reactions changed. Like in an Impressionist painting, discrete elements of the barrage came in and out of focus. Sometimes it was a wall of sound, whereas sometimes a comment caught my attention and lodged in my mind, to be mulled over at length and never forgotten. Someone shouted
“arousa”
from a passing truck; I thought the word meant “bride.” I tried to decipher this; an Egyptian friend explained that the word for “bride” also meant “doll.” I understood that I was a generic object, that the shouts and whispers were sprayed out on anyone of my kind, and yet I couldn't help but take them personally. This is the trauma inflicted by categorization.

A foreign woman in a public place wasn't a person in Cairo. As for other women, I knew only anecdotes. Every now and then a story spread of a groping or a rape on a public bus. Cairo's shiny new subway included an exclusive women's car, to help prevent such events. The rich women, like our classmates at AUC, had their ways of coping. They avoided public space. They rode in cars. They hung out on campus, where the gardens and courtyards were enclosed by high walls, or in their sheltered homes in Zamalek or Maadi or Heliopolis, or at the private country clubs where they could run, swim, and dine away from the prying eyes of the
fellaheen
. They didn't wear Mormon frocks. On our first day of class I realized yet another way in which my dresses were a mistake. AUC was studded with boys and girls in real designer jeans and sunglasses. The girls wore heels. They hung out on the broad platform in front of the library gossiping about holidays in France; they'd studied Sartre in high school. Mostly they smoked Marlboro Reds, distinguishing them from the
hoi polloi
outside the gates who smoked Cleopatras. One or two boys, cool enough to get away with it, went fashionably slumming and smoked the people's cigarette, held between silverringed fingers. I vaguely wished for entrée into their milieu but
sensed I didn't have the background for it; no year-abroad student was known to have pulled this off.

I sent the Mormon dresses and the rest of my carefully planned, intentionally drab wardrobe to the back of the closet, for use on nonschool days. This left me with jeans. An American friend took me to the Benetton store in Maadi, where a sweater cost a month's food. I blended in a little more on campus; this was the best I could hope for. Michelle, to my exasperation, kept wearing her Birkenstocks to school.

The rich Egyptians could go behind high walls, but outside of campus we foreigners didn't have access to private places to do the things we thought of as public activities. Moreover we thought of the streets as both an obligation and a right. The obligation: We were here to see the place, and had some idea that the real Egypt wasn't in a country club. It would be
wrong
of us to see only the rich. We saw the extreme stratification as soon as we arrived on campus, saw that the lives of the wealthy and the poor intersected only as master and servant. We immediately abhorred this state of affairs, and resolved not to embrace it. None of us would keep that resolution. Instead we'd learn that as middle-class North Americans we were also part of a global class, and that class was stronger than any of us.

As for the right: We thought that public space belonged to us. We thought it ought to be a safe commons, where strangers were equal. We were confronted with the fact that this idea wasn't universal. I was supposed to know that, had studied the various forms of social structure. But as I was learning with religion and government and sexism, study got you only a tiny way toward understanding.

I felt the difference in the structure of things. You can guess the value a culture places on public space by the architecture. One that
builds high walls facing the outside world, with high windows and closed doors, isn't much concerned with the quality of public space. A culture that builds porches and yards, open to the world for all to see, is one that values and embraces the commons. In talking about public space and equality, I'm describing the milieu in which I grew up. It was the water in which I swam, so I couldn't have described it until it was taken away. I took it away from myself: I didn't have to go to Cairo but I did. This fusillade of reality was what I'd pursued.

As with the guns, we talked about the harassment at first. We never said we were outraged, never talked about how it made us feel, never wondered out loud what it was doing to our heads. We wanted to be tougher than that, because if we weren't tough, we'd have to go home. We talked about the harassment as an annoyance. Making it an annoyance reduced and contained it. We talked strategy at first, talked rings and long pants and fake boyfriends, when we still thought strategy would work. We found private ways to contend. I braced myself every time I left the house, prepared my mind to keep the asteroids out. I learned to move briskly and always as though I knew where I was going, to never ever make eye contact with a male between the ages of five and eighty-five, and to filter the torrent, distinguishing salacious invitations from honest advisories. This filtration of bad from good, as though we could separate smoke from a heady hit of nicotine, was the trick: If you shut yourself away too much, you shut out the whole world, and there were delightful things here too. There was hospitality and humor, wizened skippers plying the Nile, the calm of the desert on the edge of town. It was a lesson in splitting off self from self, on how to hive a hard shell away from one's core and keep the two apart. If I didn't dissociate this way, putting away the harassment as a tiny part of my existence, it would have overwhelmed me. And to pack it away was a kind of
triumph. I felt a bullheaded determination not to let it get the better of me. I thought I would be a coward if I ran home to a more comfortable place.

The panic subsided. We observed that mostly we were not physically harmed; this was the new bar by which we measured the world. We'd submitted. We stopped talking about the men, just as we'd stopped talking about the poverty and the guns. There was nothing new to observe, nothing to be done.

chapter six