Egypt, My Beloved

Two years ago, I had my very first American Thanksgiving Dinner in Newton, Mass. Relishing in the glory of finally being able to experience a Thanksgiving like the ones I’d seen in movies, I stuffed my face with turkey, pie, stuffing, mashed potatoes, popovers, and other all-American staples. Being raised in an immigrant household meant that my extended family lived an ocean away, and with no one to gather with, Thanksgiving break for us was just an extra long weekend during which we’d stay home, each in our own separate worlds with a book or a movie or a video game, in silence. I only came to know what a “real” Thanksgiving looked like during college through invitations from various friends. This year, however, I stayed on campus and Thanksgiving break became again an extra long weekend, spent mostly in silence.

Just like the old days, I picked up a book to escape into for the weekend. I’d been recommended Nawal El Saadawi’s memoirs’ by one of my professors during office hours and when he described her as a radical Egyptian feminist exiled from Egypt, I was immediately sold. For the weeks before break, I had been reading “A Daughter of Isis”, her first memoir, in the moments right before sleep. When the break came around, the quiet gave me the opportunity to explore her work beyond the first five pages that I found myself rereading while cocooned in my bed.

In a World Without Prisons

In my sophomore year, the Women’s Center was always a space of comfort and healing. Despite being in the basement of a building, surrounded on all sides by brown-red earth and its darkness, I found beams of light there in hot tea, a collection of books, welcoming smiles, and couches where I could sit and unwind. Take down my guards. Breathe easily. The ground around its walls seem to hug me in rougher moments.

Leading With Love

These past few days, my thoughts have been drowned by the violence of the news — bullets, bomb threats, bodies. Erasure, marginalization, cruelty. While the world falls apart around us, the sadistic laughter coming from the Oval Office seems only to get louder, deafening, almost like shrieks that our ears were not made to process.

As I bear witness, as the videos and headlines and articles and raw pain make their way into my bloodstream, I feel my cells transforming into sparks which fuel the fire that burns inside me. Each tear I see on the news becomes a flare, each story of fear and trauma and pain intensifies the rage. I find some comfort in its warmth; anger is nothing new for me, and the familiar sensations activate the muscle memory from my Semester of Rage, the four months I spent living — breathing, eating, sleeping, advocating, dancing, writing — incensed, embracing the flames fully and allowing them to engulf me. Now, I fall into old patterns, etching dark words into my journal, waking up drenched in sweat, snapping at people I love, melting into hopelessness.

Beyond the Bitter Railing

On sunny days in Harvard Yard, when the light of autumn leaves pop orange, maroon, vibrant yellow, and a fading green, and the tower on Memorial Church reflects bright white back to me, I picture myself in an admissions brochure. Touting an aggressively crimson sweater, I walk slightly stiffly. Around me are piles of dead leaves fallen from shedding male oaks. Posing, I pick up a batch and launch it into the air above me. As the rotting leaves fall around me, I laugh with my chest and smile a little too wide and tilt my head slightly, angling myself for some camera or the people who watch me — a brown face in a sea of white ones.

If all the world’s a stage, Harvard is one too. On my first day here, among other things, I found in my freshman welcome packet some metaphorical script, statements on a “commitment to diversity and inclusion” in pamphlets with people of various shades. Highlighted were the lines I was expected to read out to the world: “Students of color contribute so much to this community …”, “Bridging divides across experiences is vital...”, “There is so much to learn from diversity….” Overwhelmed and confused by its contents and the bustling energy of freshman move-in, I skimmed my lines quickly and threw the script haphazardly onto my dorm room desk, where it would soon get lost amongst syllabi, textbooks, flyers, and the other things I imagined would open new worlds for me.

'Where’s Home For You?'

On Dec. 20, 2016, I exited my last final in Science Center B, ran back to Weld, stuffed one last pair of shoes in my overstuffed suitcase, and hurried to the Harvard Square T stop to catch the Red Line to South Station. Over the course of the next 48 hours, I would find myself in Miami, Frankfurt, and finally in my grandparents’ apartment in Alexandria, Egypt. Teta and Gido greeted us with nectarines and sweet guava fruits, which they had just bought fresh from the vendor who ran a shop right under the balcony in their apartment building. It was the first time my family had stepped foot on Egyptian land since we emigrated to Miami in 2001.

I didn’t remember Egypt at all. I was only three years old when we relocated. It came to me in dreams sometimes, through fractured images of crowded marketplaces selling hijabs and abayas, cold water on my small hands, washing the butter and honey off after stuffing my face with more feteer than my stomach could handle. But in a state of consciousness, the country was a story my parents told me to remind me that the palm-lined streets of Miami, no matter how reminiscent they were of our m0ther land, were not home — not really.