 © Tavis Cockburn
|
Walking Like an Egyptian Click to read Click to |
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© Tavis Cockburn
|
Walking Like an Egyptian Click to read Click to |
Walking Like
an Egyptian
I am from LA, but for the last three months I have dreamed of the pyramids. My
greatest fantasy has always been to become Princess of the entire Arab world like I was
when I played Princess Badr al-Budur in "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp." When I
boarded a plane bound for Cairo I thought my fantasies would dissipate. I was wrong.
I slipped into an aisle seat. I was wearing a leopard print dress. My body felt like Cheez Whiz and my mind like Swiss. The man sitting beside me possessed a cow-like voice and his body was attached to the hairiest arms I had ever seen. He was wearing an egg-yolk yellow sports shirt and beige slacks, his pudgy face framed by thick, brown hair. He had a wide grin, and you could stick a quarter between his two front teeth. After a polite nod I stashed the sterilized pillow behind my head and attempted to rest. The pillow quickly became an Arabian Prince with whom I’ve mingled saliva time and again in my dreams.
Later, I was entertaining another fantasy: a school of sting rays attacked as I was scuba diving with my prince in Ras Mohammed at the Egypt-Israeli border. The stewardess broke my reverie with her lecture on the oxygen mask. I flipped through the pages of Vogue. Christi Turlington and Cindy Crawford on every other page. In swimsuits their breasts popped out like the two step-pyramids at Giza. Split Tooth leaned over my shoulder and stabbed the magazine with his finger. "This one very nice!" Christi in a cobalt blue leather miniskirt and jacket. I handed him the magazine, and he offered me his hand, "My name is Magdee."
"Magdil?"
"No. Magdee! Magdee! I show you." He unlocked his briefcase and grabbed his business card. He handed it to me.
"Magdee?"
"Yes, that is correct. And your name?"
"Sara."
"Ah, Sara! Arabic name in Qur’an!" He pronounced my name correctly on the first attempt, unlike most Americans.
"You Arabic girl?"
"My father is Egyptian."
"You visit him?"
I explained to him that my father was the only one of his family who had emigrated to America. At twenty-one, I was going to Egypt to visit the rest of my family for the first time.
I didn’t catch a wink due to Magdee’s incessant chatter, and before I knew it we had landed in Cairo. In the airport lobby I strained to see past glass doors smudgy with cigarette smoke. On the other side I saw hundreds of faces with bovine eyes as brown as mine. These images were all too familiar—I had seen them in my dreams. Poking out of the crowd I spotted a slip of crumpled paper waving in the air. The man who was waving it bellowed my name, "Sara Nabil Rashad. Sara Nabil Rashad."
I squeezed through the crowd to find a bulbous mass of flesh accompanied by a head, two arms, and two legs. "Hello. I am Sara Nabil Rashad."
"You?"
"Yes."
He inspected the slip of paper, rubbed his prune-like forehead then continued to bellow my name. He sounded like an auctioneer.
The crowd dissipated, so I made another attempt at convincing him. "Hi! I am Sara Rashad. Nabil is my father. Who are you?"
"OK, Sara!" The auctioneer pushed me away, and a new influx of travelers—robust and pungent—flattened me against a wall. All I could see was the auctioneer’s arm waving in the air and his shiny head.
Plowing my way through the frantic crowd, I tugged on the auctioneer’s left sleeve until I received his complete attention. "Excuse me, sir! I am Sara Rashad!" I jabbed my fingers into my chest. "Were you sent to collect me?"
"You?" The last thing he was expecting was a woman draped in leopard print. "OK, Sara!" He traipsed his eyes through the airport lobby one last time. "Passport?" I hunted for it in my backpack. He smiled at me, a look of total disbelief. He had the raunchiest teeth I have ever seen.
In the passport control area, white plastic paddle fans sliced two-month-old air. The flies weren’t even dizzy. Men lit up cigarettes at the rate of two per minute. The silver-green, gritty tile floor was a storehouse of ash, cigarette butts, and peasant women crouched down to rest. Saudis stood in long, white floor-length gowns—garments that resembled tailored bed sheets. Their wives in black body-bags sat hip-to-hip on the green and blue plastic chairs. They were covered by black muslin except for a tiny slit for eyes. Children bounced on their mothers’ stomachs or grabbed at their heels. The medley of Arab dialects, cigarette smoke, and body odor became more powerful minute by minute. My head spun. The auctioneer grabbed my hand, yanking me through the crowd. I tightened my grasp and kept pace.
We arrived at a green-gray room. Another official—especially rude and unintelligent—was speaking on the phone in loud, guttural tones. The auctioneer escorted me to the plastic chairs against the wall. The auctioneer left, and this new, featherheaded official stared at me. I was obviously overdressed for the occasion. He continued to stare. The minutes passed like a snail crossing the street. "Did somebody call for me?"
"I no understand."
"Did Samir Rashad ask you to take care of me?"
"Yes, don’t worry. You must sit. OK! No problems!"
"Who called for me?"
"Sami Nagira Mustafa called. Chief of Police." Oh great! Tomorrow’s headlines: American woman wearing jungle clothes is arrested in Cairo airport. I asked a dozen more questions and received oblique answers. I was at the man’s mercy. I was losing it.
I tried to modulate my breathing. Tears welled up in my eyes. At last, the auctioneer returned with my passport and tossed it on the desk.
"OK! Come with me, Sara!" He grabbed my hand and a few minutes later, in baggage claim, I watched the last of the bags pass on the conveyor belt.
"My bags! They’re not here."
"No? They will come," said the attendant. If there were a flood the Egyptians would still be smiling. The conveyor belt already had made four complete cycles. The crew unloaded stray baggage. Still no sign of my maroon suitcases. I filled out paperwork.
The crocodile in my throat continued snapping at my vocal chords. I couldn’t speak. I returned the paperwork, then sat in a row of plastic chairs.
"Miss . . . you need taxi?" asked an official. He disappeared into the back office. I stared at the stragglers from my plane and swallowed my tears. There was one man left. He offered me a cigarette. After smoking it, I swung my pack over my shoulder, pulled down my skirt, and recharged my demeanor.
I pushed open the steel double-doors and wandered into a crowd full of waves, smiles, cigarettes, and hand-drawn signs. Hundreds of faces that resembled my own stared back at me. Then I saw an apparition. My father? The man was holding a cardboard sign with my name on it. I pushed my way through the crowd and tossed my arms around the stranger—my father’s brother. People lunged toward me from all directions! Somebody prodded my left shoulder. I turned my head to find a five-foot-tall woman supported by a cane, Nanny Zuba! I bent down to hug her. Children galloped toward me and pulled me down to offer their love. A boy close to my age grabbed my backpack and introduced himself as my cousin Basheer. He asked about the rest of my luggage.
"They lost it," I said. Basheer laughed. A security guard approached and informed us that my bags had been found in London and would arrive in two days. We left for home in several cars. The city of Cairo stretched out across the blackness of the sky.
When I finally fell asleep, it was the deepest sleep I had experienced in three months. In the morning I wandered downstairs. A robust woman rushed towards me with a cup of Turkish coffee. Her name was Hoda. She had lived with the family as house maid for over ten years. As I took the first sip, the doorbell rang. Cousins, aunts, uncles, and their children surrounded me, grabbed my cheeks, and showered me with kisses. We sat down on couches. Abdelbaie, one of my nine uncles, teaches about Islam in remote villages throughout Egypt. "Do you know the story of the Qur’an?" he said.
"No," I replied. Everyone else had heard the story many times before. As we spoke, the kids started playing and the women began their own conversations.
"It’s your history! You must know it!" He proceeded to describe the creation of the world as it is depicted in the Qur’an.
I had never known the story of the Qur’an. My father has been a ghost throughout most of my life, passing in and out at his convenience, assisting me financially as a way to express his love. We never had a conversation about his past, his life in Egypt, and what brought him to America. That is why I had always dreamed of going to Egypt—to fill in some of these gaps. By being close to people who knew him as a child, who understood his ambitions, I hoped to feel closer to him as well.
During my time there I came to know my father through the men and women of his family—my family, through the crowded city, and through the Egyptian people themselves. The Egyptians I met possessed a vitality which has remained unconquered by famine or foe. In Egypt, you cannot survive without a tenacious sense of humor against the poverty, the corrupt government, the time warp that makes everything happen tomorrow and tomorrow takes a week. Beneath each wizened face lay secrets never whispered. Every Egyptian man and woman was a vessel of a hundred tales that could not be spoken. Still, I learned what I could by documenting every conversation.
For the previous three months I had imagined what Egypt would be like. The reality, it turned out, was different. Egypt was painful, and yet, I now realize, it was my home.
Profile
In 1994 the war in the former Yugoslavia was raging, and a hundred Bosnian refugees had made it as far as Seattle. They came from Serb concentration camps, their bodies marked by torture. Local theatre producer Hanna Eady decided to do a play for his New Image Theatre. He and playwright S.P. Miskowski interviewed the refugees and, two weeks later, S.P. had fashioned a script. Now all they needed was a group of actors, including a woman who could master many parts, quickly. Sara Wt the bill.
Sara was young, beautiful, and full of energy. She had recently graduated from Cornish College of the Arts with a degree in acting, and she also displayed an instinct for the important issues of our time. She wanted to portray the Bosnian conflict on stage. And so it happened: Friday night in Chinatown, the Theater Off Jackson— exposed brick, wood floors. Bosnia opened with a chorus of "Bosno Moja" ("My Bosnia"), and a rousing peasant dance. The play, like the war, was a tangle. Sara portrayed a newspaper reporter for Oblijenski, a waitress, the anchor on Prague radio b94, a Red Cross relief worker, and the playwright herself. At play’s end, the entire cast bowed to Bosnian refugees in the audience. No curtain call? The critics howled. Only Misha Berson of The Seattle Times understood: On the Bosnian war, she wrote, the curtain has not gone down.
Another thing about Sara: market savvy. In March when she first talked to me, Sara was well aware that Bosnia, the play, would flop unless someone developed an audience. So Sara transformed herself into a publicity machine. As a favor to Hanna, I had contacted six media outlets, the pr basics. Sara proceeded to contact thirty more. Who was assisting whom? This woman was total energy.
An audience? When we arrived at the Theatre Off Jackson, the place was packed. KUOW, the local NPR affiliate, had come through for us. The Christian Science Monitor ran a two-page spread, and—what was this? Cameras, movie lights, men in blue jeans shooting video: "McNeil/Lehrer" was here as well. "We’ve been around the country interviewing Bosnian refugees," the producer said. "We came to Seattle today to film one family, and this family happened to attend the play." A coincidence? Or had Sara come with a bonus—the favor of heaven?
Two months after the play, Sara followed by flying to Germany and traveling overland with a filmmaker to the Balkan War itself. Back in Seattle in July, she turned this adventure into reportage for The Stranger, a quirky, sometimes kinky alternative weekly which at the time carried interesting political and cultural coverage and was edited by S.P. Miskowski. That’s Sara. One swipe is never enough. She’s a woman of great energy who always is hungry for more.
—Scott C. Davis
Bio
Sara Nadia Rashad
Place of residence: Los Angeles.
Birthplace: Honolulu.
Grew up in: Hawaii and Alaska.
Education: B.F.A. in theatre from Cornish College of the Arts. Currently enrolled
in M.F.A. program for film production at University of Southern California.
Serial publication: The Stranger—essay.
Current projects: A short 16 mm film dramatization on women in the Arab world. A
screenplay.
Favorite book: Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.
Cravings: Chocolate and travel.
Interests: Digs anthropology and the study of other cultures through narrative
form, whether in film or words.
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