Archive for category Thoughts & Vents
Inhale and Hold On, Exhale and Let Go
Posted by Arwa Salah Mahmoud in Thoughts & Vents on May 12, 2014
A fragment of my kitchen, or my mind
Wow! I just walked out of my kitchen with some very scary realizations about myself. I’ve had this strong desire to hold time standing still for so long I’m starting to see what my life really looks like inside my head. I’m in one of those gloomy, sorry weeks and I haven’t been clearing anything I use in the kitchen. Coffee mug used? Right where I left it. Next day other coffee mug used? Still there. Tray out? Right where I left it with its corner sticking out the edge of the table. Spoon used? Yes, right next to her sisters in the sink. Day after day with mug after mug and spoon after spoon, and before I’m aware of it I have a disgusting kitchen with piles of ridiculously dismissed items that hadn’t really needed more than a quick rinse to begin with. Now if I try to look for a clean spoon I wouldn’t find one. All would be used.
That is precisely what I do with the life I have outside my kitchen. I hold on to everything, good or bad. Each bad experience, no matter how small or big, comes in, carves something in my gut and sits right there, and I do nothing to clear it. I leave those experiences intact instead of picking them up and working out where they need to be stacked so they could be more useful and less painful. Needless to say, I dig into my brain for one creative thought and can’t find any; all are too busy twirling around old experiences, keeping them alive and simmering.
My kitchen is the perfect visual representation of my mind. And I can’t count the number of times I was advised by close people to let go. Somehow I find this to be the single most challenging uphill task I have to take. Everything around me seems to be screaming at me to get over myself. I see it in that bored look my cat gives me whenever I start to space out and stare emptily at the TV, in the janitor’s snicker when I fuss over the lit cigarettes in front of the elevator, and now it’s crept into my dreams.
Yep, my dreams. Now as I write this the dream I had last night is actually falling into place. I dreamed that my sister and I were waiting for our mother to show up in some mall and she didn’t. I got worried about her but my sister didn’t seem to be as concerned as I was. I checked with my aunt and she didn’t seem concerned either. I was so frustrated that no one was worried, but when I checked with a friend of mine and she seemed to conceal something, I kept pressing her until she walked into a room and came out with my mother. I rushed to her and hugged her, but she didn’t hug me back. Her body was cold, but it wasn’t the kind of cold that works its way through the skin from the weather while the core is still warm; it was that inner, lifeless cold that crept its way out through the skin and to the hand that’s touching it.
My mother was forever gone, and no amount of persistence brought her back to me. I was the only one holding on to something that was no longer there, unlike my sister and my aunt, who had accepted the fact that she was gone and simply let go–or so it seemed in my dream. Holding on to the memory of my mother’s presence in my life has been like taking a deep, satisfying breath of fresh, salty sea air. But because it’s just a memory, the air soon becomes a burden and nothing can relieve me except a powerful exhale. That’s what letting go is like; it’s like a much needed relief of a burden ripping at your chest, and I’ve been living my life with just an inhale.
But seriously now, I’m not sure what this is, to be honest. So before I conclude this particularly pointless post I’m going to go ahead and blame it on Cairo, as I always do with everything that annoys me. So maybe it’s a Cairo thing? Because I look around me at Cairo’s streets and whoa! That is one big grimy, slimy old kitchen that hasn’t been cleared up since the Mamluks. Cairo has layer after layer of history, and on a less romantic note, layer after layer of garbage and abandoned junk either crowding backyards of buildings or creeping into their service stairs, making them nice little hubs for rodents and reptiles. Many people have grown so accustomed to the mess around here that they no longer take notice of it. They’re aware of it, but they just accept it as the sorry reality that is their home city. It creeps into their subconscious and puts them in a bad mood each time they hit the streets, which could explain the road rage and the street fights and the honks. So yeah, Cairo has crept into my subconscious and given me this messy kitchen. And yes of course you’re reading this messy post, because how can I be creative with a mind as overloaded and messy as that kitchen, or as Cairo?
My Granduncle’s Grudge
Posted by Arwa Salah Mahmoud in Thoughts & Vents on May 5, 2014
Fragment of one of the letters
A few days ago I was clearing some old junk in the house and I found a large file with old documents. My father rarely threw away any papers, in fact he used to make dozens of copies of each document he deemed important and put a copy in every drawer and shelf. That way he eliminated the need to search and, of course, he assured quick accessibility in case he ever needed to refer to a certain document for whatever reason. I came across legal documents and slips of old payments made to him or by him, things that dated back to the 1960s and onwards, and in the midst of the piles of paper I found a copy of two letters mailed to us by my granduncle. One letter was for ten pages and the other for five pages and included attachments. Yep. There were legal documents stapled to it, clearly referred to throughout the letter.
The minute I held the letters in my hands flashes of memory came rushing back to me. I remembered myself opening the door and receiving one of those thick, fat envelopes that contained one of the many letters he used to send to us, I remembered the compassionate smile on my father’s face as he read through it (actually in my last memory of such letters my father merely skimmed through the pages), I remembered my grandmother’s face whenever my granduncle was mentioned to her even in passing, and I also remembered that nothing steered her out of a bad mood except a certain anecdote about him which my uncles used every now and then to cheer her up.
My granduncle held a grudge against my father and my uncles for so many years and died before he ever got over it. I never fully understood what the problem was, it had started long before I was born and I grew up merely overhearing conversations about it with repetitive references to certain people – clearly villains – that I had never met and curses to others I knew for something appalling they had apparently said at some unfortunate hour. Near the last years of his life that problem was clearly all he could think about. So he bombarded my father with lengthy phone calls and fortified them with those meticulously detailed, highlighted, subtitled, page numbered and cross-referenced letters.
I held the copy in my hand and studied the handwriting; it was neat but also very shaken. Based on the dates I could tell that he was in his late eighties when he wrote them. That is about a time in which he didn’t always recognize close people, yet he could certainly remember in detail what happened 20 years earlier. I tried to make sense of what I was reading, but since I hadn’t been in on the origin of the problem, the letters, to me, were at an advanced level; there was no way I could understand what he was talking about without sufficient background information. In fact, reading on, I could tell that there was more than one problem, things that had to do with a house, with a cemetery, and lots, lots of conspiracies. There were stories inside stories and there were cows and buffalos involved:
My mother became very ill and she had three requests from me:
1. That I should not bury her in the village but instead bury her in the city with the Gizans [residents of Giza, a suburb of Cairo]. 2. She had a share with in a buffalo with Abo Hammad’s children, that I should give the buffalo to Hamdy [my uncle] because he was a student of medicine and administered her shots. 3. She shared a cow with Haj Hindy, that I should give the cow to my sister Saniya because she was poor … I did what she asked and sold the cow … and gave the buffalo to Hamdy…
I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed as hard as I did when I read that paragraph. To me, the entire letter, despite how organized it was, made absolutely no sense. I knew that there was some well structured logic in there, but no one could possibly decipher it except those who were physically present around the time all those things happened.
What puzzled me, however, was the fact that my father actually got out of his way to make a copy of those letters. What on earth was he thinking? But each time I remember my grandmother laughing at that anecdote I can’t help concluding that the copies were probably intended to travel to my four uncles and three aunts. For discussion, you think? Of course not. Probably just for laughs. I know that he eventually became a major source of entertainment for the family.
My granduncle was a very athletic English teacher who always took pride in the fact that he participated in the 1936 Berlin olympics. He also boasted – sometimes condescendingly – that he was the one who introduced my father to my mother, whom he referred to as a Saudi princess (she was the daughter of a school principal in Medina, but who was checking?)
Sadly, my granduncle’s daughters grew apart from us, but recently we’ve been making efforts to communicate. The only thing that makes me think about him and my father with peace is that my father was right there holding his hand when he was on his deathbed, and that his daughters never stopped checking in on my father during his illness, and that he was elated when he saw them just a few days before he passed away himself.
And this is in spite of what my granduncle had written in one of the two letters classifying major wars, subtitling it “The Longest War”:
The First World War (1914-1918) lasted for four years and was among world countries
The Second World War (1939-1945) lasted for five years and was also among world countries
The Gulf War between Iran and Iraq (1980-1988) lasted for eight years
But the war between the Abdel Fattah family and their cousins began ten years ago and hasn’t ended until now …
As wise and foreseeing as the elderly can be, I’m glad that my granduncle was wrong about that last war he mentioned. Those who remain among us from the old, turbulent days, my cousins and my father’s cousins have nothing but laughter and loving, endearing thoughts about my granduncle, his grudge and of course his letters!
Unlived Lives, Unanswered What Ifs
Posted by Arwa Salah Mahmoud in Thoughts & Vents on April 28, 2014
Did I ever tell you about the time when I was 7 years old and was left alone on a plane heading to Ottawa?
I was flying to Montreal with my parents and friends of the family. We were seated in front rows and our friends – whose daughter was at my age – were in the back, so I spent the entire flight sitting with them. When the plane landed I decided to go back to the front to find my parents and remind my mother of my little bag. I went up to my seat and found that my parents had already left the plane – trusting that I was leaving with their friends – and I went back to my friend’s family and found that they had left too. The door was closing and the flight attendants were buckling up in preparation for the final stretch to Ottawa. In shock and despair I tried to meet my new fate and go back to my old seat, but I began to cry. I got up, ran to the flight attendant and with a quivering voice I said “I want to go down.” She was shocked. “Where are your parents?” she asked, “Did they leave you in the bathroom?” The story was too complicated for me to explain in the midst of my gasps and yelps. So I just repeated my request. Soon I was let out of the plane and taken in a nice car to the terminal, where I found my mother a weeping wreck and my father trying to book a flight to Ottawa.
It was the most traumatizing experience of my life then.
Years later, as the hormones began to rage and I became an angry 14 year old wondering why oh why my father wouldn’t let me go down to the nightclub with my friends, I began to wonder what would have happened if I really had gone to Ottawa and begun a new life of my own (ignoring the fact that there existed authorities that wouldn’t let a 7 year old just “be” on her own and a father who would come get me a couple of hours later).
When I was 16 I considered running away with my cousin and finding a new life in America. The reason was that I was offended and insulted that my father objected to the presumptuous dance we did on the roof of the house, right next to the water storage tank (which is usually placed on the highest point in the roof). I had no visa to the US and there was no way I could apply for one alone at 16. Yet still I asked myself later what if I did run away then? Who, or rather what, would I have become?
I spent a good deal of my life asking these kinds of questions to myself, and I still catch myself doing this every now and then.
What if I did marry the stalker who knew where I lived and knew every member of my family and had the guts to walk into my father’s office and ask for my hand in marriage?
What if I hadn’t put on the Muslim headscarf at 22? What if I hadn’t taken it off at 39?
What if I hadn’t taken my editing job in Cairo and went after what I wanted and applied to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government after I finished my studies in AUC? What if I got accepted then? I would have never left Boston, that’s for sure, but what would my life have been now? What would my problems be? Would I have had time to clack away on my keyboard or would I have been too busy lecturing and writing academic books and brushing shoulders with policy makers?
What if I did accept that job offer I got on Aljazeera when I was 30 and moved to Qatar? Perhaps I would have continued on in my career as an editor, and I certainly would have had a very different world around me, shaping my view of everything.
What if I wasn’t so intimidated by the UK’s old quarantine laws for incoming pets and put my cat in there for 6 months and found a job in London when I had the chance? (Yes I’m one of those crazy cat women that let their cats run their lives, but in truth I think my cat was and still is just an excuse).
What if I did convert to Shiism when I considered it?
What if I did tell that self-righteous jerk exactly what I thought of him?
What if I did go out to dinner with that Canadian stranger on the plane?
Many times when the world takes on a shade just a little bit darker than the usual dark I find myself asking these questions and wondering about those alternative lives I could have had. My mind works them out perfectly in my head that I think of them more as parallel lives of parallel selves I already am. Each of those lives does fulfill a bit of me, or perhaps they fulfill the me I was in different phases of my life.
But in the midst of all of this I seem to forget the life I did have.
I didn’t walk away from my family at a young age, I stayed with my parents till the last day of their lives doing the best I could to be good to them. I stayed in my country and became more rooted in the culture and more comfortable with its oddities. I stayed in my job and through it I was exposed to a world I may never have gotten the chance to see. I got close to Muslim Brotherhood members and was exposed to their thought. I got to speak in front of the Danish editor who commissioned the cartoon that offended millions of Muslims worldwide and looked him in the eye, and I got to see the other side of the coin too. I met Hizbullah fighters, commanders, slept in their villages, had their coffee, shared their dishes, and heard inside stories of the 2006 war on the Lebanese south. I ran away from tear gas with a fearless friend I only met because I chose to stay in this life. I thought, I considered and I reconsidered until I became the person I am today. I had first hand experience about everything I talk so passionately about because, thankfully, I’ve seen stuff. That to me is worth a thousand books written on theories, based on theories, and protected by the comfortable bubble of assumptions and secondhand knowledge.
I felt the suffocation of my job, my life, the message I thought I was carrying to the world. I got disenchanted with it all and went and climbed Kilimanjaro, then went to the Himalayas, then the Andes. And somewhere in the middle of this I went to Florence and stole six perfect shots of David with my own camera right under the guards’ noses.
I may not have been able to reflect on all of this if I’d chosen to take any of the different life paths that presented themselves to me. Much of what I went through gave me pain, but I don’t believe I would have learned anything if it hadn’t.
So I know it sounds miserably cliché, but really, I just wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Oh Those Leaping Frogs!
Posted by Arwa Salah Mahmoud in Thoughts & Vents on April 21, 2014
“When I’m idle, my mind tends to stray and to turn little worries into issues of international importance.”
That’s what my best friend wrote yesterday on her blog. She has taken her bike and started a solo two month journey across Europe and I think about her everyday. She now has a problem with her bike and can’t find anyone to fix it until she’s on the road again, so she realized that she has no choice but to take a chance and hope for the best, hope that the bike will hold until she’s reached her destination or managed somehow to find a place that can help her with it. That is no easy exercise for her but, like I said, she has no other choice.
It’s the need to get going and continue, that constant dynamic movement that pushes us forward, whether literal towards a certain destination or metaphorical towards a dream in our lives, that makes it hard to think of too many options. It narrows everything down to the need to keep going with the hope that things will figure themselves out later. That’s what focusing is all about. It forces us to take the first choice we have, and we realize that if we don’t take it, we’d be forever caught in an abyss of blurry possibilities that don’t really have all the answers. Like she said in her blogpost, it’s the idleness that turns little thoughts and concerns into larger issues.
That is precisely my problem. Except that they don’t only turn into “issues of international importance,” they turn into melodramatic, scifi, crime and horror scenarios and they drive away my sleep.
I’ve always had this problem, but recently it’s been so powerful it’s turned into full anxiety fits that led me to finally admit that I have a condition. Once a thought or fear hits me it doesn’t matter how many people I’m with or how much fun I’m having. I lose the ability to interact and I’m suddenly surrounded by an invisible dome of doom that lands on top of me with a loud thump, encapsulating me in its walls. I stop hearing anything outside my head. I don’t even see anything I’m looking at.
I’ve had this condition for over a year now, and I’ve had it over the most trivial things and the not so trivial things. Generally it has taught me that no amount of thinking, anticipating, or fearing anything can solve potential trouble, because things – either problems or their solutions – can come to you from the least expected direction. Systematic planning beforehand and doing things the right way should suffice, because really, none of the little frogs that leap around in my brain are in any way legitimate concerns that can actually shield me from problems if I were to pay attention to them. I need to teach myself to just do what I gotta do and move on, just like my friend did this morning. She’s on the road right now as I write this and I really pray things turn out OK for her. I know they will, because she decided to handle this the right way.
The amusing part is what happens in the long run after you’ve been subjecting yourself to these frogs for long. I feel that the universe begins to mock me, because there’s no better way of reminding me that I have no control over everything except with humor. Here’s an example: Recently I decided to go on a trip near the red sea and take my cat. I’m staying in a nice place with a little garden and I know that my cat loves the outdoors. I always obsess whenever he’s not confined within the safety of his home that something might strike him; a snake, a dog, another cat, a car. Yet I let him out into the open anyway because I know how much he loves it and he was so happy, sniffing one tree and rubbing himself in the sand under another. Then guess where the danger comes from? The sky. Two crows decided to hover above him like they just found a feast. So I grabbed him as fast as I could and went inside.
Crows.
I’ve been worried too much from things on the ground I didn’t see danger coming from the sky. I found myself spending a good part of my trip – both me and my niece – researching and discussing the mysterious life of crows, how intelligent they are and why they would wanna take a bash at a poor cat that only wants to rub itself in sand and chase flies. The conversation for a good part of the trip has, of course, been mostly about crows. I definitely never thought crows would grab my attention at any point in my life, let alone take my horrified imagination to terrifying scenes of two crows grabbing my kitty by the collar and flying away with him while I scream and run hysterically after them to no avail when suddenly, to my ultimate terror, they drop him to the lagoon when they realize he’s too heavy and my voice chokes while I swim and swim and fail to save him. My mind started racing with thoughts on what to do. Take away his collar is something I actually considered.
Apart from that, there’s also the mush my brain becomes from all the over leaping the frogs do. Here’s another embarrassing example: Because my cat is old, I find myself watching him very closely for any signs of health problems. Two days ago while I was clearing his litter I reassured myself that his feces is a beautiful shade of brown. “Beautiful.” I actually said that my cat’s poop is a “beautiful” brown. Oh the things I catch myself saying in my head! And by the way I’m clearly not a doctor, so I have no way of knowing what shade of brown exactly should a cat’s poop be for me to call it beautiful (not that a sane doctor would say “beautiful as opposed to, say, “healthy”?) I have no knowledge and no means to apply that knowledge. I just have little frogs that leap around in my head.
And yes of course, I have been idle. I haven’t been working for the past four years and I’ve been spending too much time on my own. It’s no surprise that I turn into this.
I walked out of the bathroom thinking, wow how would a normal person react? I’d say the first thing they’d say is thank God she has no children. There’s a reason for everything and this definitely is it. I couldn’t possibly bring up a human into this world if I were to go in after they’re done with their business and check out the color of their stuff in the toilet.
So I clearly need to snap out of this. I need to be a normal person again that assigns just the right amount of concern or emotion to each problem. Actually I need to be a person that knows how to identify an actual problem as opposed to a minute earth vibration caused by a frog’s happy landing after a not so welcome leap.
The Art of Showing Up
Posted by Arwa Salah Mahmoud in Thoughts & Vents on April 14, 2014
I have nothing to write. I’ve been rolling ideas around in my head and my thoughts are just fragmented and kind of shy. They skitter away the minute I pay attention and try to figure out where they might take me. They don’t seem to want to take me anywhere. Just teasers.
I sat for an hour and a half with my coach yesterday spilling lots of things at her I don’t think she expected for the session, and I love how somehow she managed to get all the weird little parts together and set me a very challenging assignment. She said, everyday you pick one victim and spill one quirky thing about yourself to them. That way, she said, you can shut your saboteur up and kill that ego that’s been standing in your way for so long. I accepted the challenge and started wondering who that could be, and surprisingly some opportunities did present themselves. I got an unexpected phone call from an old friend in Qatar, but the conversation was way too sober for me to suddenly do that. Or maybe once again, my ego took over like it always does.
I could actually finish the entire assignment of the week in this one blog post and spill it out to the world at once, but it wouldn’t be too well constructed. I’d be taking you from bad energy and evil spirits to mysterious scents and a little unseen lump in my knee that I think is bone cancer. Why would you wanna go there? Or why would I take you there and risk my image as a sane, composed person?
Before that session began I thought to myself I had nothing to say to her. I wasn’t doing anything in the direction she was taking me. It was a very distracted week. But I decided that I was going to show up anyway and say whatever the hell comes to my mind. Just as I’m doing now.
We get so many moments in our lives where motivation goes down to a little below zero. You stop and start wondering what the point is. You’ve been doing this for so long over and over and nothing ever happens. But I realized that things don’t happen suddenly, they tiptoe in one tiny step at a time you have to step back and see the larger picture to realize they’re here. They also don’t happen because of how well we do things or whether or not we’re able to perfect our performance. They happen because of our persistence. On some workouts I move with the speed of pregnant turtle. My body feels so heavy, so goddamn heavy I look and feel clumsy and I get driven to tears in the middle of the workout but I don’t stop. OK sometimes I do, but it becomes a very dark day so I try to avoid that. I just realized that I have to start letting go of my obsessive desire to do things right, or even ever reaching my goal. I lower my expectations and I persist. Doing things out of habit always makes me feel grateful that I showed up, because I feel better at the end of the session of whatever it was I was supposed to be doing.
So here I am challenging my ego and the evil annoying editor looking behind my shoulder and snickering as I write this. I don’t even know why I called this an “art.” Actually I do, I couldn’t think of any other word. Maybe it is an art although now it just hit me. It’s more of a struggle, really. The Struggle of Showing Up? Nah. “Art” is prettier.
Rwanda Slaps Me in the Face and Grins
Posted by Arwa Salah Mahmoud in Thoughts & Vents on April 7, 2014
Two nights ago I watched a video posted by a friend on Facebook of three little Arab girls with solemn faces, cloaked in black, sitting stiffly on a couch and singing about the length of a girl’s skirt as protection from the eyes of young men, her careful, slow walk as the best cover of her body, and her hijab as the “ideal” crown on her head. The three young expressionless faces chanted on how happy that girl was that she’d covered her ‘awrah, her nakedness, her intimate parts, her whatever you may call it. There’s no actual word for it in English.
The following morning I woke up with bloated fingers, puffy eyes and half a brain (from pizza, not the video), browsed with one hand and held my coffee in the other when suddenly National Geographic informed me that, twenty years on after the genocide, women in Rwanda now have majority seats in the parliament, and that in fact by achieving that in 2008 Rwanda was the first country ever.
Now the expressionless face was mine.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m very happy and inspired that Rwanda is quickly getting up on its feet and seems to most definitely be on the right track. It’s just that the dichotomy hit me a bit hard since I clearly hadn’t had enough time to recover from that traumatic video of the night before.
This is not a post typically making unfounded comparisons or misinformed bla bla bla. It’s also not an attack on Islamic dress code as I don’t see the Islam that I know anywhere in that abusive video (and it would take a lot more space than this post for me to explain why). This is just a passing rant of a person once described by a close friend that she’d chosen to stay aboard a sinking ship.
I don’t know much about Rwanda, this article could be showing a very narrow side of things. It could be, of course, but it’s there and it can’t be based on nothing. There’s an Egyptian proverb that says “There’s no smoke without fire,” so surely this article must be based on something? How about the fact that women hold a majority of seats in the parliament?
According to National Geographic, that percentage of women is very small given that the majority live in rural areas with limited or no education. But that small percentage made it to the parliament, dammit! So those people have got to be doing something right.
And that’s Rwanda. You know what Rwanda was to a lot of Egyptians especially during the horrible days of the genocide? As much as there was widespread sympathy over what they were going through there was also racist jokes over the contamination of the Nile because of the dumping of the bodies in thousands. You see, we’re known among the Arab world to joke our troubles away and we’re known to be the most hilarious nation with unbeatable jokes, but that multitude of jokes also has an excess of ill-tasted, sometimes sick, punchlines that come out more as insults than innocent entertainment.
‘Cause that’s what we do. We slouch around in our own filth and love ourselves so much we think no nation can ever be greater and point fingers at other countries’ mishaps.
Rwanda is a proud example that a weak, recovering state does not have to be inefficient if it is smart. Because of its inability to penetrate it has empowered the local communities. Rwanda has something called “community-policing committees” which is a group of people empowered to help maintain law and order in their respective communities. Those people are actually trained by the police to prevent crimes and protect women and children from violence.
Our state is neither weak nor recovering. I’m going to forget about all the big words and just put it in couch and popcorn language. Our state has the force of a hurricane and it doesn’t hesitate to use it when angered. It’s also lazy, old, quite grumpy, and stupid. So in the early days of the January 25th uprising it acted “wounded” and “upset” and disappeared off the streets after driving over people and shooting a bunch of others in the chest and the head. It left us to fend for ourselves, so the closest we got to those police committees was of our own efforts. Residents of all neighborhoods created their own guarding units and took shifts protecting streets and property and even directing traffic.
As for the women, our notorious streets harassment record actually skyrocketed, so another version of these committees was created and continues to operate, a purely grassroots initiative to spot and prevent street harassment of women, either by helping the victim file a case against the aggressors or just shooing the fellows out of the way after giving them a good tongue lashing. Our problem, however, is that once these committees have caught the transgressors there’s a very fragile system to take them to in order to effectuate already existing anti-harassment laws. The overriding culture that it is essentially the woman’s fault clouds many of the officers’ judgment, and the woman often finds herself presented with narrow options and threatened to tarnish her own reputation if she wishes to proceed with the case. So our individual efforts to create a sense of security, accountability, and just simply some sanity in the public space go almost completely unsupported by the state.
And just like the rest of the Arab world, the misogynistic, hormone injected view of women continues to thrive and even gets passed on to generations as I have seen in the video, ruining every woman’s sense of self-worth as a human being before it even begins.
What is it about Rwanda that makes it so on the right track compared to Egypt? The country was reduced to ashes and yet somehow, miraculously, most of those in charge seem to be doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Or does it take a climactic, post-apocalyptic form of destruction like the one Rwanda witnessed for people to come back to their senses and start doing the right thing instead of wasting precious time loving themselves and hating each other? What is that force that keeps dragging us into this dung filled pit? What’s our secret, really?
Empty Spaces and the Cloud Above Me
Posted by Arwa Salah Mahmoud in Thoughts & Vents on March 17, 2014
Do you wake up on certain mornings wondering what in the world you’re still doing here? I do. Certain days and nights go by slowly no matter how busy they are. There’s unseen weight pulling you down, almost literally, and it’s like a smile and a word or two to another person is so much work. I walk around on certain days with a cloud of gloom hovering above me. I call it the memory engine. All this cloud does is shoot down memories of a better past I once had. And the more familiar the places I walk in the more powerful the memories and the thicker the cloud.
With the illness and death of my father my growing up threw itself on me with a sigh of relief after a long wait at the door. I’d been holding it back and hiding in the protective island my father put me in. Only with him gone did I realize that I had to start doing my own worrying and to start my own thinking of tomorrow. In his last days I was feeling thankful that I had him. I was sorry that he wouldn’t be there for the rest of my days but that at least I had him for some generous time. I was prepared to the idea of losing him, but I wasn’t quite ready to lose him. I now realize that I could never have been and never will be.
But I was neither ready nor prepared for the idea of losing my mother. I wasn’t aware of this until her absence became an actual reality, not just a passing nightmare that wakes me up horrified in the middle of the night and then slips away smoothly in the morning when I hear her preparing her breakfast in the kitchen. With my mother’s sudden death adulthood slapped me in the face. You see, to me there’s a big difference between growing up and adulthood. Growing up is learning to deal with your own problems and facing them on your own, adulthood is practicing it–with all of its dirt–and dealing alone with the scars that never stop marking your eyes, your smile, your heart, and your very soul (That dark dot gets bigger each time you get a strong urge to grab certain people, force them to the ground, and stomp on them repeatedly) until you no longer recognize yourself, or you don’t see the person you expected to become when you were young.
When the two makers and shakers of my life disappeared they left behind a ripping silence. I’ve kept everything in the house just the way they left it as if deep inside me some sorry self thought they might surprise me with a come back and be proud to find everything just the way they liked it. Or maybe somehow, subconsciously, it felt like a betrayal to their memory to change anything. Or maybe it was just my way of staying in their protection, as close as I could get to their physical presence which I still crave. But now I realize how much I’ve suffocated myself with this empty house. The silence and the unchanging place have rendered the absence stark. The morning silence of the kitchen, the couches, the chairs, the arranged picture frames all scream at me day and night that their rightful owners are no longer there, that I’m alone in a house large enough to fit a family, a big happy family. It’s like I’ve created my own memory cage.
I thought that with time this would be over but I was so wrong. All that happened with time is that the pain left my body and mind and hovered above me like a cloud, ready to shoot down memories and sorrow with the slightest provocation; like each time I look to my right side on the couch and not find my mother, or each time I visit a restaurant she liked, or drove down a street my father drove me through a thousand times when I was a child, or hug my uncle and feel my father’s shoulders in his. At times it’s simply whenever my car gives me a hard time; that nasty cloud reminds me that I have to deal with it. On my own.
I don’t know what this is. It’s either making my adulthood more difficult to endure or is, by itself, adulthood’s way of forcing me to let go and move on just to survive.
I wrote about losing my mother a few months after she was gone. Nothing about that feeling has changed, but the reason why I find myself writing this now, after almost four years of her death, is that I think the moment has come for me to let go of everything that’s ever pained me. I’m in a phase in my life now where all the memories and the pain and the losses have somehow turned into a roaring fire inside me. I can’t bear it and I can’t put it out, but I think I can turn it into something good, maybe even great. I think that each one of us can turn our agonies into a positive energy that pushes us forward towards a better life for ourselves, or others, whichever we’re best at. For example, I’ve learned all the wisdom my parents have tried to pass down to me in their life but were only met with my casual dismissal. Somehow everything they used to say now makes all the perfect sense. And you know what else? I lost my art teacher so suddenly only a month after he told me he would make an artist out of me. I never quite believed him when he said it and I whined and complained about how damn hard drawing was. I never sharpened my pencils like he advised. Yet somehow, miraculously, my grief over him produced some work that I know he would be very proud of. And yes I’ve learned to sharpen my pencils. I started doing it with some obsessive religious vigor.
Those two ironies opened my eyes to the good that can come out of loss, or perhaps it was my firsthand experience with how real life works. So I realized that if I continue to lock myself up in an empty space loaded with memories, or tried to hold on to a past long gone as if trying to make time stand still, that fire would burn me up and leave nothing but ashes. There’s no putting it out except by embracing it and using it to move forward. Maybe that’s what all the annoying cliché talk about looking at the full side of the glass or finding the good in everything could actually mean. This isn’t about standing in the middle of tears and forcing a ridiculous, unfelt smile; this is about using the bad to create the good, the ugly to create the beautiful. I’ve decided to let the cloud thicken and hover as it may and to turn its shots into bouts of energy. Somehow, ironically, I’ve realized that it can be a very soothing process.
Dancing, Getting Naked, That’s Nothing!
Posted by Arwa Salah Mahmoud in Thoughts & Vents on March 10, 2014
Hi Keyboard,
Tip tap tick tack clack clack clack… I like the sound you make when I type, but not when others do. Other people’s typing noise annoys me. It tells me that they’re typing away and saying everything while I sit here with a knot in my stomach and a load on my chest. When things crowd up inside it becomes too chaotic to put in words. And the more they pile up the more you feel you’re about to explode.
That’s when music steps in.
I resort back to my traditional treatment. I do it a la 90s Arwa. I turn on the music loud and clear, put on my workout gear, and dance to the beat. I throw myself up in the air and I roll on the floor and I close my eyes and I see nothing. My body takes over and it takes me to places inside my head. One move creates the next and I don’t know which part of the room I’ll be facing after that ambitious twirl.
My cat twitches his ears and sits like Bast staring at me with disdain. Reliable warm lap no longer available. I did want her to get off the couch and chase me around the apartment, but whatever she’s doing now looks stupid and thank God it doesn’t involve me.
How do you kill the social self in you? You see, my social self isn’t the decent smiling hello-how-are-you-today kind. Social self here is the mask I used to put on when I’m with most people I used to know. With every beat their faces flash at me. I wonder what they’d think of me if they saw me. And somehow the thought of them elates me, because finally I’m having an honest moment. I’m being the person within. I took off the mask, shed the layers the years have carefully stitched around my edges since I was 19. Layer after layer after layer of social selves that coexisted together like it was the most natural thing in the world to be all of that and still find your real self at the end of the day as you crawl into bed.
I’m still struggling with words, Keyboard, so give me a chance.
I have so much unfinished words I’ve written that my social selves won’t let me share. And whenever I try to write something new they take me back to my unfinished work and hook me there. They’ve got me by the scruff of the neck.
Wow I’m so rusty! It feels weird sharing this. It’s like doing the dance while everyone is watching.
But if people were to matter then those social selves are not going anywhere. You see, it takes a bit to be able to stand naked to the world. But to my credit, whenever the world’s instilled thoughts became too much for me to handle and began to choke me I’ve tried to shock it with a daring plunge. Some were good decisions and some weren’t. In some I was truly naked and in others I was a new social self only in hiding. But I’ve always taken a plunge approach to change in my life. With time I’ve discovered that those plunges are my reset button. That’s just what I do when things are really, really jammed in my head.
Recently I’ve discovered that that fear of standing naked to the world with nothing on to define you has crippled me all my life. The inevitable social question of “what do you do” had to be filled instantly with something, anything, or it’s death to me. Most people filled it up with answers like “I teach, I write, I make, I sell…” For years now I’ve had no answer to that question. My classic answer was “I used to…” for quite some time until I discovered how sad it was.
Still can’t get naked?
Watch me crawl on the floor now to the sound of those drums and you’ll get your answer.
Of course I can! My naked answer is “Nothing.”
My nothing is filled with so many possibilities that I find it liberating. It’s the closest I can get to the fresh child who believed she could become a figure skater, or the teenager who wanted to run off on a motorcycle with a custom made boyfriend, or the 20 year old who wanted to start a career in film making. It’s the richest I can ever be, because it is mine the way I want it to be. It’s nobody else’s and it’s definitely no longer what someone wants it to be. Behind the nothing that everyone sees – that vain social nothing that shames people – is the fresh, soothing silence of a new beginning.
And I know that I have to do this dance, naked, in front of that same condescending world, to put an eternal shield on my beginning.
Election Day, Revolution Blues, and a Bitter Coffee
Posted by Arwa Salah Mahmoud in Thoughts & Vents on June 16, 2012
I never thought the day would come when a year and a half after the revolution people would be rushing to the polls to elect a new president while I sit home and sip my coffee. I have to say that coffee never tasted so bitter.
On May 23 I went down and I voted for president. I was skeptical of those who chose the boycott. Yes the system was imperfect, but here was a chance and we had to grab it. I was full of hope and overwhelmed with memories of everything that we went through trying to bring down a 30 year old corrupt regime–only to discover less than a month after the president stepped down that the fight was in fact against a 60 year old military rule.
I still had hope because I believed in the man I was voting for. I had asked his representatives direct questions on how he proposed to rid the country of the military handcuffs and they had clear, concise, answers.
Today the second round of elections brings before us a military man with a history of corruption vs a Muslim Brotherhood man. Logic dictates to anyone who cares about the revolution that the man to vote for should be the second. Everyone knew that it was a tough but necessary choice. Some Egyptians abroad took pictures of themselves in front of the voting stations squeezing a lemon on their heads. It’s an Egyptian saying that if you have to gulp someone you can’t really take you squeeze a lemon on yourself and take them anyway.
Facts which further proved that the military was not up to a clean election were unraveling before us everyday. Lawyers’ appeals to enact a law drafted by parliament to ban old regime figures from participating in the election fell on the deaf ears of the constitutional court. And to top it, two days ago the military swept the institutions of the country clean. The parliament was dissolved, the military police were granted free action in the streets with civilians – and with the help of the judiciary – and the committee to draft the constitution was from now on going to be appointed by the military. In other words, the military was no longer ashamed to show us who’s the real boss of us. They’re coming out straight in the open and telling us, in our faces, that we don’t exist.
Uproar from most of the country’s activists and intellectual demanded from the brotherhood to withdraw officially in protest and to surround the parliament building with all of its members and to protest the blatant attack on legitimacy in the country. It became clear to everyone that we’re heading up against a dead end with a huge wall the size of the mountains of Moria! But do the brotherhood stand up to the magnitude of the catastrophe? Do they grab what may be their last chance of creating a united front and winning millions of people on their side? Oh no. They choose to walk on to the wall, dragging the whole country behind them, announcing that their way is the only way. Their way is the revolution. That will do nothing short of further stapling their role in Egypt’s history since the fall of Mubarak as pure pigheadedness. One that is actually stapling us all up that frightful wall.
And once again, the emotional blackmail resumes as if nothing happened. “Abstention from voting is a vote to the military man.” “Abstention from voting is surrender.” “Vote for the revolution.” And my favorite “Save the revolution!”
In the parliamentary elections that talk scared me. When the second round was between a brotherhood member and a salafi member, I rushed to vote for the brotherhood. I had to save the revolution. I had to save my country. I helped put up a man that was part of a majority in a parliament that let us all down, and not necessarily by choice, but by the mere fact that it was a powerless parliament under the military junta. And now the junta have flexed their muscles and roared and swept it away altogether.
And I’m now expected to believe that the next president will actually have powers.
We have no constitution, we are clueless as to what the president will be able to do, and we have no answers from the “revolution’s candidate” on what he plans to do in this mess. None of those that will vote for him have any answers. But somehow magically we believe that by moving on with the rest of the herd the military is shooing to the ballots we are saving our revolution.
Sorry. I’m not taking part in this farce. Egypt deserves a lot more than this. And the reason I’m not going to the ballots for a second time is not because neither candidate represents me, but because both candidates will end up subservient to the real boss in this country. A boss that has actually come out in the open after working for so many years in the dark. A boss that has actually used our blood to reign openly, unashamed, taking us back to the dark ages of intelligence police, detention, imprisonment, suspicion.
Sorry. It’s a lot bigger and messier than casting a vote in a ballot. The revolution is much bigger than a puppet helpless candidate that has shown little stamina in the face of catastrophes.
In fact, by now I realize that none of the chosen few politicians who claim to represent the revolution have shown any stamina in the face of catastrophes.
The revolution will never die no matter what the military does and no matter who the president becomes, because it was instilled in the hearts and minds of the youth. And the youth are the future collective mind of this country.
I’m proud to have woken up in time. I’m proud of the revolution. I’m proud of my clean finger. But I’m still not enjoying my coffee.
I Voted for President. It Made Me Remember
Posted by Arwa Salah Mahmoud in Thoughts & Vents on May 23, 2012
No sleep. I toss and turn. I send out a tweet. A buddy in Australia sends me back another tweet. “Get some sleep for at least a couple of hours,” but he knows I probably can’t even if I tried to. This was not supposed to be like this. I was relaxed all along the presidential campaigns. I knew that they would be far from perfect under the rule of the military junta, but I also knew that there was no way out of them if we were to come out of the impasse we’re in.
We’ve gone down the street, we’ve protested, shouted, struggled to get our voices heard, now all that is left for us is to make this vote. We earned it.
I get up in the morning and pour some coffee. Watch the news. Can’t stand the dumb commentary. I need to get ready for a long day, I think to myself. I look at the faces of the people standing in lines on TV. Everyone seems determined and confident. Those are faces of people that will not be fooled.
Ok that’s it. Can’t wait much longer. I get a bottle of cold water and pull on my jeans and off I go.
Streets are all so empty (and by empty here I mean smooth traffic). I take a taxi and I stare out the window but I don’t see much. I’m not in an emotional mood (yet). Suddenly a song I’ve known and loved since childhood starts playing in the radio. “Helwa ya Baladi.” My country, you are beautiful. And bam! Like someone suddenly put on a clip inside my head, completely out of my own will, with scenes from the revolution days.
I remember meeting with my two friends, Nadia and Adel (the latter is the one who tried to tweet me to sleep from Australia) all tense and pretending to have sandwiches under the penetrating eyes of the suspicious state security officers, waiting for the march to join it.
I remember the rising numbers of people in the marches that were everywhere I looked. “The people demand the fall of the regime” roaring everywhere and making my heart beat faster.
I remember the teargas. The suffocating moments where I thought I was going to die. The faces of the three men who came to my rescue and tried to give me water and onions to get rid of the effect.
I remember the sound of the rubber bullets. I remember the injured protesters fighting for their lives in the hospital.
I remember the ruling party’s building on fire. I remember maneuvering to cross the street to reach that tree without getting shot.
I remember the horses and the camels that came rushing into Tahrir trying to whip the protesters out of the square.
I remember the two men in Tahrir who tried to comfort me when I broke down and cried, telling me that it would all be alright. That they were not going to retreat.
I remember the night horrors. The live bullets down in our streets. The men in my family joining their neighbors taking night shifts in the street to protect homes and property.
I remember the minute we heard that Mubarak stepped down. The euphoria, the dancing in the street.
I remember the viciousness of the army in the months that followed. The continued killings and beatings.
I remember the beautiful smiling faces of the people who died.
I start weeping like an pregnant hormonal lady and throw the poor cab driver into a state of bewilderment. I ask for his tissues and blow away until we arrive at the polling station.
I can’t find any lines, I enter the school and find an average line inside, but it wasn’t mine. I didn’t have to stand in any lines. Low voter turn out? I think to myself. I go inside with my red nose and face all puffy. Didn’t get a chance to recuperate from that emotional drive. I take the voting sheet and mark my candidate. I leave.
There are no sirens and there is no music to highlight the drama of the historical moment. A moment that I, at 39, never ever thought I would see. Ever.
I know it would be simplistic of me to think that with these elections we have entered our aspired new era. Far from it. But maybe we’ve taken our first baby step in the middle of a field of land mines and ambushes. Not all the candidates are fresh blood. Some are old faces that have worked closely with the old regime. I don’t trust them. There are things they have done that have helped put Egypt in the sorry state it is in not only domestically, but regionally. Turned it into a shrunken mutilated version of a country that once was. If they win, the very democracy that helped put them there might be jeopardized. And we don’t yet have the system that can protect us from them.
We need a president that will help us build that system. That solid rock hard system that will assure that a corrupt president will be put on trial. If we have that system I don’t care who nominates themselves in the next round.
Thoughts, thoughts rumbling around in my head, beating each other for my attention.
No, we’re not there yet. But we have nothing but our vote so we cast it, hoping that we’ve made the right choice. Now all I can do is pray that the right person for the right moment would win, WHOEVER that person may be.
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