Rebelling against time in Cairo

“Am I in love? — Yes, since I’m waiting.” - Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

Leaving the island felt impossible on this particular winter evening, as every Uber I ordered kept canceling my ride. First a Mustafa, then a Bishoy and a Mohamed. I waited on someone, anyone, to take me to a class I was already late for. I learned the reason for the ride-share reluctance after the fourth try: it was the moulid of Sayeda Zeinab. When I finally found myself in a cab, my progress wasn’t much better than during the canceling. The traffic kept getting thicker the closer I got to the classroom in Darb al-Ahmar. The brake lights of buses filled with pious pilgrims blinked off and on: the rhythm of the stop-and-go, illuminating the long wait ahead. Halfway to the destination, we came to a standstill. I decided to walk the rest of the way —y it would be faster that way. And even though I arrived late, the Egyptian artist arrived later. He was always arriving later than I was.

In Cairo, I am always waiting. I wait through, and for, mundane and extraordinary things. Daily, I wait to cross the street. Regularly, I wait for the electricity or water to come back on in my apartment. Every six to nine months, I wait on a rickety bench for my visa renewal at the passport office. As a historian, I wait for archivists to bring me documents overflowing with answers to questions I ask of people no longer with us. I wait on friends and bureaucrats and archivists as they become the agents through which the logic of Cairo time plays itself out. Some days are slow and others are fast, but I am always waiting.

In the Cairos of my past, I waited even more than I do now. In early 2011, my friends and I waited for the president to step down amid the euphoria of the revolution. We went to Tahrir Square, sat on sidewalks, talked with our neighbors and imagined futures that felt on the cusp of coming into being. In 2016, on the grave of these futures that died before they were born, I waited in front of the KFC in that same square for a man who could not love me back. I kept returning to Cairo with great expectations of him choosing me, only to be left in waiting. The square and its adjacent streets are littered with evidence of the hopes and heartbreaks I experienced as I waited. Even as downtown transforms into unrecognizable configurations, my way of defiance is to acknowledge this evidence against time’s forgetting. 

Waiting is more than just passing the time. It is to be time-conscious and it is to be in a state of expectancy. In waiting, you cannot hide your desires– these moments magnify their buoyancy as they race to the surface of your want. Your preference for one outcome over others cannot be denied. And, as such, waiting can be a purgatory of mental torture over the algorithm of possible outcomes. And once whatever it is that we await messianically arrives, we say that it has come to us. Just like the Walrus in Alice in Wonderland, we triumphantly declare: the time has come. This sense of anticipation was one that I held for the artist, hoping that time would arrive for us too.

***

As someone who studies the past, I am obsessed with the matter of time. In the historian’s guild, we argue over how we measure time, how we divide it and analyze its parts, and the way it shapes our understanding of the past and present. We are in the business of talking about time. But this isn’t just a matter of dates of significance or what humans do to pass their rotations around the sun. The stakes over memorizing when Columbus sailed the ocean blue or when Napoleon invaded Russia are not nearly as important as asking what forces made these historical events possible and what legacies we must contend with because they happened. We strive to understand how a Genoese explorer’s location in time contributed to centuries of European colonialization or how a French commander’s hubris had global repercussions that reverberate to the present day. We trace how our conceptual relationship to this unstable unit of measurement alters our behavior and how these behaviors change over time. In other words, it's not just about narrating what we do in time but how we act based on how we think about time. 

Being time-conscious was at the core of how many of our intellectual predecessors articulated and wrote about history. Many of them did so because they believed that history itself was subject to time, that it was going somewhere, and that we move through time together in anticipation for a redemptive moment. Their writings betray a sense of urgency because uncovering when this moment would come was not just an intellectual exercise– it was a matter of life and death.

Among these predecessors were the German Marxists of the interwar period who were preoccupied with the dialectics of history as a tool to harken social change. As fascism began to grip Europe, pushing the continent to the brink of what would be another catastrophic war, these intellectuals stressed that complacent thinking contributed to complacent political action stunting the ‘progress’ of history toward freedom. Walter Benjamin, a key German-Jewish thinker of the period, wrote his Theses on History in 1939 as he evaded capture from the expanding Nazi control. While moving between Spain, France, Denmark and Portugal, he wrote against the very forces that drove him into an itinerant exile. Theses was a critique on the real, material consequences of misconceptions of history– consequences he experienced in the most visceral way– but it was also a challenge: how much longer must we wait for freedom? How can we stop or alter this state of waiting? 

One of Benjamin’s contributions to this topic centered on the idea of time’s becoming – the anticipation of its arrival and the liminal experience of living in this in-betweenness. He argued that any intellectual worth their salt would not simply wait in atrophy for this ‘coming,’ but would wield agency with their words in pursuit of their freedom. And as he waited – first for the revolution, then for emancipation, and lastly for safe passage to a place that would not give him up to the concentration camps – he fought with his words to convince us to rebel against waiting. On September 25, 1940, even with his Theses unfinished, Benjamin decided when the time would come. He died in Portbou in Catalonia awaiting a transit visa that arrived shortly after the morphine took his body into another metric of time. 

***

I thought about Benjamin’s call to rebel against wait as I spent most of last year waiting for a Cairene artist who was never on time. I thought about it as I kept repeatedly glancing at doors, longing for that moment of recognition when he would walk in, since I was always the one who arrived first. I waited for him on our first, second, and third date. I waited for him at a bar in Barcelona over the summer. I waited for him at a cafe in his own neighborhood in Cairo to travel to the Red Sea in early fall. 

But the first time I waited for him was on the floor of that classroom in Darb al-Ahmar—where we met months before— on the night of the Sayeda’s festival. Even though I arrived late, he came nearly an hour after with a smile from ear to ear sheepishly apologizing for the tardiness that would become habitual but that, in time, I would always forgive. 

For months, we spent dim-lit hours in this classroom deeply engaged in discussing the ways nations, societies and individuals remember and forget. It was a class on archives and historical memory in the Middle East, and we were living in a Cairo disappearing before our eyes. We speculated on how to capture frantic erasure, as green spaces across the city were destroyed to make way for bridges, historical cemeteries bulldozed to widen roads for urban sprawl, and monuments erected to forge expedient histories to cover up inconvenient pasts. 

As we discussed the contemporary politics of these contentious pasts, I started to take notice of his eyes — framed by thick-rimmed glasses — and how they would betray his convictions before he even voiced them. His face gave away the internal processing of his intervention as he chimed in to advocate for a particular project or point out how a heritage initiative was laden with neoliberal or co-optation tactics. He mediated this engagement with an irresistible smile that would reconfigure his face into an even more beautiful version of itself. It was a characteristic I anticipated weekly, almost willing it into being, as he lit up in spirited rebellion against the erasure of time.

After weeks of waiting for his smiles, I decided to ask him out for a beer at my favorite bar. A small part of me hoped he wasn’t as interesting as I thought, but, after half an hour of waiting for him to arrive, he ended up being more fascinating than I could have imagined. And this was key — imagination — as I learned that his own work as an artist leaned into the potential of thinking speculatively about the past and how it can inform our present. In the months that followed, I embraced this ethos at bars and parties where we discussed cultural erasure in Cairo, as I wrote my dissertation with inspiration from his favorite sci-fi recommendations, and as I engaged the folklore references in his art to creatively interpret and cope with the rapid changes in the city.

And then, I let imagination mediate questions I had about us as I lingered in wait for him. There was the waiting at the start of dates, yes, but, at other times, I waited for him even when I was with him. I waited for that third Stella to hit and for the music to invite him to dance like a teenage girl who gradually realizes she’s quite pretty — bashful at first and then recklessly moving to whatever song comes on next. I would wait after jokes he found particularly funny for the wrinkles to collect at the corners of his eyes as he let his chuckle become a hearty laugh. 

In Cairo, you are always late. But even when I was running late, he was lagging even further behind. I tried in vain to rein in my feelings for him and meet him on his unknown timeline. But I allowed myself to hope. I told myself this was all a matter of time: just another 30 minutes before he arrives to the bar, a week until I see him next, another month before he realizes that he wants me too. I didn’t just wait for his physical presence. I waited for his heart to catch up with the rest of his body.

The last time I saw him I remember thinking to myself: did we learn nothing in that classroom? After three weeks of not hearing from him, I decided to stop waiting. It was a chilly November night when I asked to meet. Questions began to unravel from the tightly wound space of what had been my imaginative wonder: Where did you go? Didn’t you miss me? Do I mean anything to you? A few months earlier when I fell ill — he playfully chastised me for not letting him know and he came over to offer tender gestures of care. I felt that maybe now I could trust him with my vulnerability. In recalling this, I asked: Were you not waiting alongside me? Perhaps we moved at different speeds, but weren’t we in the same queue? 

He told me he didn’t know. He told me he wasn’t sure. 

I could see him internally debating with himself, but, by now, I knew his face couldn’t lie even if he could. I struggled to understand how someone could spend so much intimate time with another person and have no certainty about what it meant to them? I recalled all those moments when his eyes would turn serious and he would take off his glasses and grab the part on the back of my neck that would make me become unconscious of time altogether. The only time I met him in reluctance was when he was about to leave and my body begged him to stay: just another minute, another playful glance, one more kiss. 

But not this time — instead, my heart broke to see him let us become part of the past. I didn’t get answers about why he was willing to let me go. Did I just spend half a year in Cairo waiting for the end of something before it even started? As I rushed out of his apartment in tears to wait for the elevator, he only stopped to ask me if he could text me later that week. I looked at his eyes and said yes, knowing that I would wait for a text that would never come. 

***

To wait is to harbor hope. I felt this as I held my breath, looking expectantly at doors across Cairo. As Benjamin believed, I awaited a coming I was sure was on its way. It’s just stuck in traffic. But don’t worry, he’ll be there in 30 minutes. Just a week. Maybe a month. Another six months. You even tell yourself that you are not waiting. You busy yourself with distractions from the cruel fact that time is passing without the arrival of the object of your wait. And then, you realize how conscious of time you are, like starting a running routine where five minutes feels like forever and your cardiovascular system reminds you of how slow seconds pass. You can’t hold your breath anymore. Your muscles need oxygen. But this harbored hope keeps holding onto the slightest possibility of seeing its countenance, even as your body fights you to let go at the expense of its hurt or peril.

And when you wait for love, you feel time at its most molecular level. You feel it when you don’t want to. It creeps up on you in your most joyous moments when your insides whisper: don’t you wish he was here? It screams at you during your quietest times – at night before bed or at your waking when you remember what you spent your sleep trying to forget. You want to be late if you can’t be on time, but when you are in love you are always waiting. 

Cairo is a place where people hate to wait but it is a city that forces you into that itinerant state. It's deeply counterintuitive because signs clutter the streets that read, literally, “waiting is forbidden,” reminding cars that you cannot stall in front of buildings. In elevators, hand-written messages read "remember God,” in deep admonishment, in case you forget who and where you are. You must wait even though its forbidden and you must remember even though you want to forget. 

And so, the city taunts me with the artist’s specter as he joins the ghosts of my waitings past to challenge me with a question: why did you wait? With him, I thought I wasn’t asking as the interwar intellectuals did about how much longer must I wait for freedom, but how much longer must I wait for love? Yet, I realize that the questions are connected and the solutions are one in the same. As Benjamin argued, the key is in our role over harkening time’s arrival—that, even if we must wait, we should not do so idly. From asking the artist out for the first time to asking him for answers at the end was my act of rebellion against waiting in Cairo. And with these words in pursuit of love, I refuse to forget, just as he and I discussed in that classroom all those months ago.