My relationship to Egypt is neither simple nor new. From La Goulette, where I grew up and lived in Tunisia, my relationship to Egyptian music, dialect and cinema was established. I have visited Egypt before and spent about a month here, but tourism and communication via Twitter are quite different from studying and living there. Previous experiences acquired through impressions or perceptions formed through media are not enough. Here there are new boundaries that touch reality and separate figurative ideas from real life.
My relationship to Egypt is neither simple nor new. From La Goulette, where I grew up and lived in Tunisia, my relationship to Egyptian music, dialect and cinema was established. I have visited Egypt before and spent about a month here, but tourism and communication via Twitter are quite different from studying and living there. Previous experiences acquired through impressions or perceptions formed through media are not enough. Here there are new boundaries that touch reality and separate figurative ideas from real life.
My decision to join the Institute of African Studies of the University of Cairo is also linked to an adventure at the academic level, exploring political studies to improve my media awareness. I took this decision after the Arab revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia produced a political situation that needs to be carefully studied. Having been encouraged by Egyptian friends, I took my suitcase and traveled. My journalist friend working in the same media project between Egypt and Tunisia received me.
My friend resides in the popular area of Shubra El-Kheima, northeast of Cairo. Since arriving to Cairo and being greeted by her husband and two children at the airport, my friend has spared no effort in facilitating my transition here.
The right attire
The first test in adapting to my new situation has been my clothes; specifically, deciding what to wear to a friend’s birthday the following day.
We looked through my clothes, piece by piece, and I was confused. Though my clothes were somewhat conservative for our popular area in Tunisia, my friend, after an hour of sorting through my clothes, according to Egyptian specifications, chose a dress unsuitable to soirees, and we had to make some adjustments to cover up more of my body. I got fed up and almost decided not to go as I had to restrict myself in this way.
I am not naive. I’m from Tunisia, and I used to discuss with everyone the phenomenon of sexual harassment, which has grown widespread in Egypt in recent years. I came in its high season, namely the holidays.
My friend, a leftist journalist, warned me and drew my attention to a set of things to be avoided, and she told me how she had been harassed in an anti-harassment demonstration in which she had been participating. Nevertheless, I did not expect that I would be a victim myself, only three days after I arrived.
More complex than lust
I was walking along a street downtown when a motorcycle carrying three young people attacked me. They quickly and savagely touched my body in broad daylight and in front of other passersby. I shouted, but nobody helped me. Crying, I called my friend. She told me to move away from the place immediately and take a taxi to her job.
On the way, I looked at myself in the taxi’s rearview mirror. In Tunisia, there is verbal harassment with ugly words or hurting signals, but for the first time, I understood what victims meant when they narrated what happened to them. It is an act of sadistic revenge that is not actually linked to lust. Lust may be the title, but the issue is much deeper, more complex and much worse.
As a Tunisian who came from a small rebel country to a large rebel one, what were the new limits with a state that loves historical bureaucratic tyranny? I do not claim here that Tunisian citizens’ attitude toward their state is fair, but waiting in a line with hundreds of people at the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, while the competent employee talks on the phone and torments people who need every minute in a country where each step of transaction process takes a day, is new and different. Silently, people waited for the employee while they were despaired of changing the humiliating treatment by public services, and I was with them.
In the Tunisian Embassy, the staff welcomed me and asked me to sit in an air-conditioned hall where employees were silently processing papers. However, at the end of the hall, there was a locked door. When a Tunisian employee opened it to receive visa applications from Egyptians, he changed his tongue, speaking the language of Pharaonic repression, “Line up! This is an embassy, not a market.” Egyptians were in an external hall with nothing but a ceiling fan and a metal door. It seemed like a warehouse storing goods in bulk.
Between these two scenes, there are other subsidiary limits; the university administration and staff welcome Tunisians who have come to Cairo to study, a hospitality almost amounting to pride, or simple people who are so polite in daily dealings that they gently call me ‘Ms.’, a word I never heard in Tunisia. Simple Egyptians resemble what we have learned about Egypt.
Settling in
The search for a home was another threshold to understand the new limits here. My specifications of a resident as well as my limited budget and understanding of the public sphere in Egypt, required that I search at the border between popular areas, where people often do not understand the idea of a single Tunisian women living alone, and rich areas, where everyone often connives as long as you pay for social prestige. I was confused by these limits.
“You live alone! No! We accommodate families only!” Many house owners told me that being a single female implies doubts in behavior. Those who disregarded this requirement, were well mannered or longing for renting the apartment, often imposed rules: “As you know, you are not allowed to receive anybody to avoid gossip and trouble.” Those who professionally disregarded all of these introductions were unfortunately supporters of the former regime.
The owner of the last apartment received us in his office, which had a big picture of Ahmed Shafik, a former presidential candidate. While referring to the picture, he repeated that he was not a Muslim Brotherhood member or one of the ‘Tahrir boys’. His did not make me feel comfortable, but he was the only one who comfortably received my questions about the neighborhood and neighbors’ relationships with each other. Having met so many brokers, I confined my requirement to non-interaction in my life by any neighbor, whether through observation or evaluation. Even though I didn’t like that owner, his guarantee of these specifications made me overlook his political attitude, which opposed my principals and purposes.
People have so far had their impression about me, either through my appearance, where they gape at me in public transport that I rarely use, or through my nationality, which reduces misunderstandings somewhat, and is a starting point for a comparison between the two revolutions.
However, it is cruel that formalism and objectification reach a degree that I feel afraid of my name. I discovered it by chance when I was hospitalized, after I had food poisoning during my early attempts to adapt to Egyptian food. In the hospital reception, a friend pronounced my name as ‘Khuloud’, rather than ‘Khaoula’. I noticed for the first time that they wrote my name as my Egyptians friends used to call me or introduce me to others. They had previously told me that the masculine form of my name – ‘Khaoul’ – in colloquial Egyptian dialect meant “homosexual.” Nevertheless, they changed my name in the hospital, because it is apparently embarrassing even to those who say it in a serious situation.
These impressions might be hasty, or maybe I am sensitive to any artificial or procedural limit, due to my expatriation. I may later discover new and more complex limits, but during the first two weeks in Egypt, I discovered defined limits that I could not imagine, though I know them in advance.
Hearing about those limits is one thing, but being touched on my body, skin, eyes and heart is a totally different and new experience. I was not shocked a lot. Whenever I remove a limit, I become more determined to remove the imagined ones by destroying them, not adapting to them. I am the only one who has the right to set limits to the world around me, and the world, whether in Egypt or Tunisia, is a map in which I refuse not to be a guide along a new road.
