To the running: Renewed relations*

Courtesy: Somewhere in Cairo

 

Dear Cairo,

You have given me so much,

taken from me so much,

given me so much.

I remember when I was running a pretty high 2011 FOMO (fear-of-missing-out) fever from afar, how, instead of working on my undergrad assignments, I'd spend hours perusing Mohamed Elshahed's Cairo Observer blog pining for Egypt from St. Louis. One of his pieces stuck with me: "Public Space in Cairo: A Fragmented Archipelago." Green bulky metal. Adorned with gold accents. Ubiquitous. Whether in Cairo, Upper Egypt, or Alexandria, a pedestrian will often find themselves taking the long way around one of these metal fences to reach a shop that was right across from them to begin with. When I saw Mohamed Ismail Shawki selling stickers of the green fence at the 2022 Cairo Art Book Fair, I immediately smiled and took a selfie with it, chuckling.

Much of urban studies literature explores how our bodily movement within the cities we inhabit shapes and is shaped by the logic of the city. But in Egypt, this habitus, the usually subtle but deeply ingrained habits and dispositions of navigating the city are quite overt, shaped by what Shawki calls “green limitations.” Crossing the street in many areas in Egypt is always a game of circumventing these bulky green fences, which have become an urban fixture in many cities, so much so that they blend into the everyday. Most pedestrians don't think twice about their presence. But as Irene Calis, citing Michael Taussig, writes: Sometimes the ordinary ruptures. What was once manageable or perceived as aadi (normal), can suddenly feel oppressive. Like a snug ring you bought in the winter that becomes uncomfortably tight in the summer.

Golden fish

When I first came back to Egypt in 2015, a time when everyone was trying to leave and wondering why in the world I was doing the opposite, my diaspora-colored shades framed my face, which was often full of teeth-filled smiles. Many photo-editing apps allow you to not only add filters, but also to adjust how strongly you want that color shading to be applied. Well, in my case, we're talking 100 percent diaspora-sepia. I'd see the bulky metal, and my vision would go straight to the people casually perched atop them as they ate their shawerma sandwiches, or to those who impressively jump, too impatient to walk all the way around the green barriers to reach a designated crossing area. “He could be a track star,” I remember thinking while witnessing one particularly elegant leap.

Pointing to these casual Cairo moments is not always a gesture of romanticization. After all, these are everyday practices that people engage in to navigate what David Sims called “the logic of a city out of control.” But when it's the only thing you see, we might have a problem.

But what can I say? I both knowingly and unknowingly chose to keep my glasses on, flaneur-ing through Cairo’s streets with my diaspora-sepia filter. During this chapter, Banan was one of the first people I met (chased after, yelling “hey, New Jersey,” because I forgot her name to be exact) who made Cairo start feeling more and more like liminal home-soil; not only because there’s something about meeting diaspora that clicks into an unspoken relationship to wave motion, but also because of her gestures of home that I’ve grown fond of: peeking into my bed-side window from her balcony to say good morning, indulging in balcony color schemes, Ramadan decorations, craftsiness, the little things; running to the balcony at the sound of any hint of drama in the streets (think the Michael Jackson eating popcorn gif), dancing our hearts out at Shubra weddings and Nile felucca rides with her family, caressing my hair after I threw up sick, floating good music into the apartment, sharing our liminal Cairo vignettes, laughing at the thought of our immigrant parents at their first garage sale.

In Emile Habiby’s novel, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, Saeed, the Palestinian main character, is told by his new wife about an “iron chest, full of gold and another family treasure, that is said to be buried in the Mediterranean Sea directly off the shore of a Palestinian village called Tantura, his wife’s birthplace.” His wife’s name is Baqiyya, she who has remained. Baqaya means left-overs, those that have remained. My days spent with Banan felt like a mutual treasure hunt for our diasporic baqaya. Eid al-Adha, 2015: Eid Prayers on the same saha (field) where baba played his first soccer matches in Shibin al-Qanater. Spring of 2016: When Banan and I stirred our spoonfuls of sugar into our shai-bi-laban (milk with tea). And Summer, 2019: Getting ahold of my grandfather’s hand-made sedeery (vests worn under galabeyas) from my last living uncle’s closet before he also passed. My grandfather was a tarzy araby (tailor who made traditional galabeyas) at a time when the tarzy afrangy (tailor who made Western suits) was becoming more popular. I also have a cap he made and can run over each stitch he once hand-wove with my own hands today. I remembered geddoo’s (Grandpa’s) sedeery when I came across Glenn Martin Taylor’s gorgeous spin on Kintsugi via The Jealous Curator: “Kintsugi … with a twist! The ancient Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold has been given a new spin … swapping gold for industrial chains, spools of thread, buttons, twigs and more.”

When Saeed, from Habiby’s novel, keeps taking his son to the shore of Tantura to “dive for the buried treasure,” his son begins naggingly asking Saeed what exactly it is they were looking for, to which Saeed responds: “the golden fish.”

I was living those first two sepia-filtered treasure-hunting years feeling both incredibly at home with Banan in my every day, but also knowing that she and I would most likely part ways at the end of it. It’s a familiar relational dynamic in post-2013 Cairo, a precarious sensibility, like knowing you’re at a home that will be tugged from beneath you. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way; many of us are lucky to have that one friend who is home and radical hospitality. Banan is this friend to almost everyone she meets. And I know that a huge number of us were counting our alhamdulillahs for having her with us, however briefly, for teaching us the art of mixing sugar in with the spices and of weaving shared Cairo families, of lifting each other up. I feel like everyone slipped into their best and most caring and communal self around you, Banan. And it taught me so much about what is worth prioritizing — what keeps us (emphasis on collective) going.

Hang in there, laundry

But lessons take a while to sink in, usually a few rounds over; not that anything is predictively linear. Lessons are also often context-dependent. And when Banan left to go back to Jersey after we had both finished our AUC chapters, and I began doing difficult fieldwork research in Cairo, I felt my care collectives slip between my fingers. My sepia filter gradually faded, until my glasses broke off altogether. And suddenly, all I could see were the green limitations everywhere, caving in on me, from all sides. Being dramatic here, but the image of a mime trapped in a glass box resonates.

I also felt myself lose aspects of my voice that made me me. What do you say to yourself and to others after a heart-crushing string of arrests? After nights spent thinking of friends sleeping in the cold behind bars? The green and gold limitations were no longer a metaphor. They were limiting — physically and emotionally, soul-crushing and disorienting. Palestinians have long ago theorized the sejn sgheer (small prison) as a mere microcosm of the sejn kbeer (large prison). And though the former is its own type of beast that I have no firsthand experience with, living in Cairo showed me how the latter, the larger carceral logic weaved into our everyday urban landscapes, can close in on you from all sides.

Former Palestinian prisoners would often tell me that they were at risk of having their eyesight deteriorate, due to not having access to windows or adequate yard time where they could look at the world and all it had to offer from a distance. That also resonated. In hindsight, I realized that for a good amount of time, my vision and capacity to fully take in my surroundings had deteriorated. I was navigating a Cairo seemingly overtaken by fog, endless endless fog. And at several points, in that insidiously dangerous haze, reality and its distortions seem inseparable. What is a real threat and what is not, when so much of the violence around us is arbitrary?

There's a moment when you step out of a hot shower, and the bathroom mirror is so thoroughly steamed over that you cannot see your reflection. Wiping it down with the palms of your hands only makes things worse. Faced with this loss of my mirror-self, I began to echo a refrain that I realized was not uncommon among Cairenes seeking an escape from it all: Cairo, no more. The world became black and white. To do away with this fog, its distortions and its ensuing paranoia, one had to do away with the city and its mazework altogether. This paranoia-induced filter can feel like a bottomless pit where the answers become more and more extreme: not only to leave Cairo. But to never come back.

As if the body does not "keep the score" of city-scapes and all their relations (Bessel van der Kolk). As if we are not all the cities and people that "we have ever known," and do not "carry them at every border that we cross" (Michael Ondaatje). But then again, the image of oneself standing in front of a steam-covered mirror, hair dripping onto the floor, whispers a Rilke-infused suggestion. It’s a frustrating one, as the quote goes, of being patient toward "everything unsolved in [our] hearts" and trying to love the locked rooms “like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.”

Being patient. Giving time for the steam to air itself out — like a load of laundry hanging to dry on a cold winter day. "Hang in there, Laundry," Doaa Gamil's photography series reminds us.

And ever so gradually, so imperceptibly, the fog begins to thin out. And the sepia filter switch reappears, so that on the days when the city greets you with its absurdist concertos, you can take a mental snapshot of the moment and look at it (and back on it) through whatever shading or filter of your choosing. Whatever background music.

Like Swan Lake overlaid against a video of everyday street loiterers on a mildly flooded day in a city infrastructurally out of control, with people acrobatically splashing the mini-cairo street lakes away. Because when Cairo gives you puddles, on some days you just go with it and splash along with your friends.

Coming home

I was telling a good friend, Feras, that this phase of falling in love with Cairo again is a familiar feeling; like coming home to myself in all the familiar senses of the selves I carry throughout my constant metamorphosis. And suddenly, you feel yourself wanting to dance to that favorite song in your room again, feeling your heart "grow several sizes" when the beat drops again, in the words of another friend, Karim.

And it might be Khalil Gibran-poems-cliché, but the music really does echo in all the room that the moments of rupture have hollowed within you. Nay and Rababa echo sorts of magic. Have you ever seen videos of people drugged up before their wisdom teeth are pulled out? I'm thinking of that one viral video with the guy whose anesthesia-filtered realization that he has a dad! And a mom! And two sisters waiting for him at home post-op! How that all fills him with a renewed sense of incredulous joy for the world, that Eve Sedgwick would probably applaud as “reparative.”

While battling terminal cancer, Sedgwick unpacked the endlessly suspicious and critical bent in the academic worlds in which she had spent most of her life, distinguishing what she calls the academic tendency toward a paranoid “hermeneutics of suspicion” from a more reparative “hermeneutics of surprise.” Sedgwick builds on the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who defines psychic inner worlds as oscillating between two modes of relationality: (i) the paranoid/schizoid position and (ii) the depressive position. The emphasis on oscillation is key. Rather than defining paranoia as a distinct and separate stage, Klein relates paranoia as an impermanent position in constant pendulum-like motion, moving back and forth, to and from the depressive position and the affect of deep pessimism it sometimes entails.

But within the worlds that deep pessimism proposes, a multiplicity of possibilities can be set in motion. It is a “uniquely spacious rubric,” as Sedgwick writes in a subsequent piece of hers titled “Teaching/Depression.” The depressive position, despite its name, encompasses both “the preconditions of severe depression and also the resources for surviving, repairing, and moving far beyond that depression.”

The second position (the paranoid position), according to Sedgwick, is too consumed by a self-reiterating anticipation of dangers posed by “part-objects.” Building on Klein (who builds on and departs from Freud), Sedgwick unpacks how a key aspect of splitting the world (and oneself) into part-objects is seeing these parts as “exclusively good or bad,” black and white. Meanwhile, the depressive position tries to “repair the murderous part-objects into something like a whole” that comforts and nourishes oneself. The depressive position is “an anxiety-mitigating achievement” whose threshold involves the “foundational, authentically difficult understanding that good and bad tend to be inseparable at every level.” In this way, the reparative mode of the depressive pessoptimist position necessarily leaves room for assembling good-or-bad part-objects into something whole — a complicated and imperfect melange. The reparative mode also moves us beyond anticipated outcomes and gives us room for surprise. Richard Hofstadter echoes this sentiment in a seminal piece (canonized by those who write about paranoia and conspiracy) on “the Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Paranoia, Hofstader argues, does not leave room for recognizing that things might not happen the way we expect. Unlike Hofstadter, however, Sedgwick places the reparative mode (which is always and forever ingrained within the depressive position) not in stark opposition to but rather in an oscillatory motion with the paranoid.

Paranoia is one of two enduring positions, not a stage that you can totally overcome or progress from. Sedgwick expands upon Klein to remind us of this back-and-forth:

It is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices. And if the paranoid or the depressive positions operate on a smaller scale than the level of individual typology, they operate also on a larger: that of shared histories, emergent communities, and the weaving of intertextual discourse ... No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture — even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.

That reparative practices, embedded within the depressive position, are in a constant back-and-forth with paranoia helps us make sense of a “doubleness of being,” albeit different than the one Taussig originally coined: how within the same worlds of paranoid overthinking amid ongoing happenings in Egypt, there are everyday city-whispers beckoning us into seemingly unexpected spaces of repair. This is what “ordinary sacredness” means to me –a term my undergraduate professor Bob Hansman would use while guiding us along his walking tours of St. Louis, as we passed countless vacant lots in an archetypal midwestern city characterized by post-industrial urban decay. Bob called his course “Community Building, Building Community.”

To this (to ordinary sacredness), perhaps Jonathan Scott would chime in with the title of his literary critique: “The Miracle of Emile Habiby’s Pessoptmist.” To me, there are many miracles. There is the miracle of the Palestinian characters in the novel who remained in Haifa amid the impossible odds the Israeli occupation stacked against them. There is the miracle of being able to hold pessimism and optimism contrapuntally. The pessoptimist, he writes, is one who “[doesn’t] differentiate between optimism and pessimism” and is “quite at a loss” as to which of the two characterizes them. And there is the miracle of the reception of the 1989 English translation of the novel:^[1] how The Pessoptimist’s literary troping, which fused daily sorrows with “side-splitting sarcasm” reverberated among more than five million readers in the diaspora, despite the novel being rooted in the story of Palestinians who remained in historic Palestine. Scott’s brilliant literary analysis attributes the novel’s ability to transcend to a diasporic readership to the rhythmic structure of the narrative which unfolds in ways that are emblematic of Palestinian self-irony in popular narration as well as the West African figure of the trickster and the African American blues impulse. Habiby’s “circumstantial politicization of everyday life” proceeds as follows: “Narrating a terrible hardship and another insupportable loss … dropp[ing], lugubriously, a ‘pessoptimist’ word of wisdom, followed incongruously by a wickedly funny one-liner.”

While reading Scott’s own reading of pessoptimism, I could hear the perverse laughter echoing in the Addameer office in Ramallah where I conducted MA fieldwork in 2016. How, while working on Bilal Kayed’s hunger-strike campaign to elevate his call for freedom from administrative detention, office mate Laith would start bickering with Shahd across from me, with the sharpest humor that would become a daily dose of relief from the heaviness of our work. Shahd had tossed a comment full of snarkiness at Laith who had just sneezed, to which he had clapped back, "Oh shut up. Instead of sending me blessings?! I could have died,” he dramatized in the hyperbolic way he was known for. “I hope you get arrested," he snickered, "so we can make you a nice poster." The ensuing laughter was always so perverse, but so needed — and always lined with a daily rhythm that only repeated wicked giggling would help me come to terms with: pessoptimism was no stranger here.

Reading Habiby vis-a-vis Scott, I also kept visualizing the absurd string of photos taken by my former colleagues at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal rights, where I worked between 2017 and 2019: How the executive director at the time, Gasser, very randomly decided to hang up a painting of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-Un, beside which many coworkers proceeded to pose for pictures. It’s a memory that came to mind while reading Scott’s recounting of the comic centerpiece of Habiby’s novel:

The image of Saeed, in June 1967, waving from the top of his house in Haifa a white sheet after having just heard an order on the Arabic-language broadcast of Radio Israel for the "defeated Arabs" to surrender to Israel begs the question of Saeed's mental stability. At the same time, the perspicacious self-irony that always accompanies any evidence for Saeed's ostensible mental problems makes it impossible to draw the conclusion if he is crazy or a jaded fool. This is especially the case with the story of his waving the white sheet, which he immediately qualifies by saying, "This order somewhat confused me: to which 'defeated Arabs' was the announcer referring? Those defeated in this war or those defeated by the treaty of Rhodes?". Saeed's craziness is a crucial part of his tricksterism, since he is simply trying, after all, to return home after having been momentarily displaced. What any sane person would do. His craziness is his ironic refusal to accept that he is now, by Jewish law in Palestine, an illegal human being on his own soil.

A few months before a particularly pernicious government crackdown on EIPR, Gasser put up another visual, this time a sign on his office door: “Strategic Denial Zone.”

When I gradually clawed myself out of my Cairo-sorrows hole and began revisiting downtown again in the sun, I felt like I was on wisdom-teeth-removal anesthesia. "Gosh, these buildings are just GORGEOUS," I gawked at the Khedivial street-scapes, to which friends Soph and Megan snorted: "You need to get out of New Cairo more.” It was a soul-feeding mix of laughter and downtown buildings and dense urban life poems that cities can compress in such a small space. And with time, the gratitude continued to echo deeper and deeper, so much so that I began calling this phase of my Cairo life my reparative Cairo chapter. According to Karim, this version of myself (cackling extroverted laughter and all) is giving high-key unhinged. “It really is,” Alya cracked up. “Unhinged or pessoptimist?” Habiby might jab back, to which I would shrug and reference the pendulum motion between paranoid and depressive positions. And the (not so) subtle madness of the upswing toward the latter and its reparative modes. The takeaway is that even when interspersed with days of non-linear grieving and equally deep sadness, I still manage to find daily pockets of warm reverberations. Some examples:

• Walking around and ignoring the security body-scanners at mall entrances and exchanging smile-waves with the security guard while doing that — everyone perfectly content with what is happening.
• Living in the same country as Wegz.
• Knowing my KFC is “halal.” It just hits differently.
• How, when the streets flood from the mildest amount of rain, people in Alexandria build these mini-makeshift bridges out of nearby bricks and haphazard planks of wood to cross above the river-streams from one sidewalk curb to the next and collectively survive the recurring mild-rain apocalypses. The day must carry on, apocalypse aside. It's the mini-apocalypse assemblages for me.
• Stopping while walking along the Nile corniche on my way home, pausing, reaching for my headphones, and playing whatever teleporting music my inner worlds need from past chapters, because cities can layer up like that, sedimenting into the people we’re perpetually becoming. Sediments or palimpsests? Both? You get me.
• Random pedestrians who tell me to gtfo of the car already so they can just park for me (in my defense, Cairo parking can be an Olympic sport).
• The words of fake encouragement I get from the sayis (a common urban figure in Egypt who informally takes on the role of providing valet parking on any street corner) as he helps me parallel park, thinking, “God, give me patience,” but instead, he says, “Impressive, you could really get your license tomorrow!”
• Honestly, just all the street loiterers and their (over)eagerness to help a girl out.
• Tantes who try to make non-French words sound French.
• And the friendships. The ones that withstood the pendulum swaying between paranoid and depressive (pessoptimist) positions while navigating the small and large Egyptian prisons. And, also, the friendships that did not withstand the fog. The ones that taught me love, nonetheless, before hollowing parts of my insides, leaving room for new loves and friendships to echo. And echo.

In my 20s, I never could relate to the concept of equanimity. Isn’t that just repressing grief, anger, exhilaration and all things deeply emotional? But Cairo friendships taught me otherwise — how to lean into the moments of heart-ache as deeply as you do those of belly-ache (from laughter). And with time, how living into the pendulum rhythm (knowing there will always be a back-and-forth) can help you take on the next cycle-to-come from a place of higher awareness. Like moving upward in a spiral, you go through similar experiences, but from a vantage of a more zoomed-out view. Hands curled up into radical vulnerability fists. Armed with the lessons for how to weather the storms to come from a place of deeply entrusting life. Trusting that it will continue to hold blessings for us all. Most often in small ordinarily sacred ways.

It feels good to be mini-love-momenting with Cairo all over again, to be reminded of E.B. White’s quote that “the city is like poetry: it compresses all life into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.” Thank you, Cairo, for giving me so many people and spaces and moments that keep reminding me that “the search for love persists against great odds,” as Bell Hooks’ framed graffiti photo read. Much like St. Louis, you taught me that nothing is black and white, that a city can grind your insides with its woes only to fill them back up with its music. With the nay, rababa and blues. With the magic of unexpected encounters. With dancing and road-trip singing to the playlists of my globe criss-crossed childhood. You gave me letters post-stamped from Stillwater to Kafr Sarnaga. You spilled secrets that my bones knew. You gave me breezy winds brushing curls across my face on Kafr Hamza roads. Port Said through baba’s nostalgic eyes. Hand-drawn family trees with geddoo and mama in Dekernes. “You are beautiful,” whispered to Naychelle as she stepped off of the ma’adiyya (Nile ferry) onto Nubia’s Elephantine island. Home-served seafood in Suez along with the most endearing lip-synching travel partner to lighten the windowless microbus ride. Shatt Eskendereya (Alexandria’s coast). Embroidery and khayameya (tent city) finds and all things hand-made.

And with each joy-sorrow pairing, a recurring question about what makes life worthy and possible of living — via Evelyn Glenn: How do we create a caring society? I don’t have final answers, just glimpses; mostly of how caregiving relations are utterly broken by carceral states, state-induced paranoia, borders, capitalist food systems and privatized healthcare. But also, many many moments where people insisted on care amid impossible barriers and burdens: Banan cleaning her grandmother’s apartment. Sophie taking the bus to Tagammu to nudge me out of bed. Daily phone calls from afar that reminded me of the importance of shared routines, and that I am still full of laughter and sass and love for life and what’s to come. Women organizing e'ashas (home-cooked meals)^[2] to feed their imprisoned loved ones. People making trips across borders to visit partners and friends constrained by travel bans. Theorizing and daydreaming about worlds where none of these hardships are necessary, where care is weaved into everyday sociality, where responsibilities are shared collectively, equitably and justly. And Ahmed, for reminding me that Cairo will still love me back, in its own small ways, if I’m willing to let it.

Seashells

All of this only makes my departure all the more bittersweet, cueing an anticipatory nostalgia that resembles the temporal punctuation of anticipatory grief. All the beautiful people weaved into this place and its music, to be parted with, yet again. The other day, I decided to make Shawki's "Renewed Relations" interactive city-scoping publication my “Cairo Countdown” yearbook. Patrick George Zaki was the first to sign, and in exchange, I told him he could pick one of the postcards I bought from the Cairo Art Book Festival by artist Rana el-Nemr. The postcards were from her balcony project capturing how, despite the fact that for many Cairo buildings in popular areas paint being a luxury leaves the red bricks unadorned, residents themselves decide to paint their balconies — usually in all sorts of bright and eclectic colors. “It’s their way of refusing anonymity,” Rana smiled while holding up a collage of the balconies she photographed. Patrick picked one of the balcony postcards and paused: “When I was in arabiyet el tarheelat (the prisoner transport vehicle) on the Ring Road, I would try to catch glimpses of these balconies and all of their colors. I had missed colors while in prison. You don’t see much of them.” In his personal writings this December, Patrick reflected on his own renewed relations to Cairo after two years spent in a Cairo prison: “A full year of freedom. Of walking freely in Cairo’s streets at night and lounging in its ahwas (local coffee shops). A year of opening the apartment door and leaving whenever I please, which was too cruel to bear and to come around.”

Looking through my growing collections of signatures in my “Renewed Relations” yearbook, I remember when I first moved to Cairo seven years ago in 2015. How my parents could not wrap their minds around my wanting to live here for so long, in a place they were so desperate to escape. I remember how I would try to remind them that their diasporic journey, with all its own unique sorrows, provided me with the privilege of return. Of diving for golden fish. And picking up seashell baqaya (remains) of sea organisms that were washed on the shore along the way.

I have a jar of seashells I collected from the Mediterranean shore in Haifa and the Red Sea beaches of Egypt that I keep on my desk. Sometimes, I take out the shells and arrange them into different shapes. Shuffle. And rearrange. I think about my maternal uncle who passed tragically at the age of 11 in ways that broke my family apart several times over. Several generations over. A death that left too many fragments in its wake. Shuffle. Rearrange. In Habiby’s novel, Saeed’s son Walaa uses the recuperated family treasures to finance his participation in the Palestinian resistance movement. Audre Lorde said self-preservation is “an act of political warfare.” Shuffle. Rearrange. Look at these seashells I now carry with me. Everywhere I go. To shuffle and rearrange.

Habiby names the enduring love of Saeed’s life “Yuadd,” which means “to be returned.” Yuadd then names her own daughter Yuadd. I have returned to myself and all the generations I carry so many times over during these seven years in Cairo. And in addition to these seashells in a bottle, and my gedoo’s sedeery, I also have a photo I took from my mother’s family members’ home in the Delta on one particularly painful day of my late uncle’s memory and its ruptures. It is an image of laundry hanging from a balcony across the street. All white. Undergarments worn by a man. Or perhaps a teenager. Another absent presence. Another hanging load, this time visually captured, for me to take with me as I make another journey across the Atlantic.

“How to unravel the fragments of beginnings. How to let go, how not to," Mahtem Shiferraw asks in her poem “Beginnings.” I don't have answers, only musings from my scribbled journal entries, recalling pages from my Lisa Frank diary (the ones with a lock), that I furiously scribbled in while moving between Oklahoma, Cairo and Riyadh as a child.

An ode to taking ownership of all the broken worlds that I straddle. And homes that cave like craters beneath stretched-apart feet. And heels that gear up instinctively for the running. “Maybe I come from running,“ writes Hanif Abdurraqib. “Maybe running is a country.” Maybe running is full of people always trying to run to a place where the ground is not barbed wire, or at least, as they later glean, not barbed in the same way. The ground is barbed everywhere, but the running will always be different, always a different layout to the hopscotch, always a different rhythm to the double dutch. Maybe, it is only in this movement that our heels can heal from one form of footwork across wired carpets, though always gearing up for those to come. To the running that becomes our space-times, and their constant (re)worldings. To the endless grief of the running, but also the ephemeral spaces of healing and re-emerging and becoming. To the running. To the running. To the running.

*After Mohamed Ismail Shawki's "Renewed Relations" interactive city-scoping publication.

^[1] Emile Habiby’s novel The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist was first published in Arabic in 1974 in Haifa.

^[2] Wives and mothers of prisoners in Egypt oftentimes form collectives to organize e’ashas: a rotating system of taking turns to cook home-made meals for a group of their imprisoned loved ones who share the same cell.

References

Abduraqqib, Hanif (2016). The Crown Ain’t Worth Much. Button Poetry Press.

Calis, Irene. (2017). “Routine and rupture: The everyday workings of abyssal (dis)order in the

Palestinian food basket.” American Ethnologist: 44(1): 65-76.

Glenn, Evelyn N. (2000). “Creating a Caring Society” in Contemporary Sociology 29(1), 89-94.

Habiby, Emile. (1989). The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist (English translation). Readers International.

Hofstadter, Richard. (1964). “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in Harper’s Magazine.

hooks, bell, 1952-2021. ( 2000). All About Love : New Visions. New York :William Morrow,

Ondaatje, Michael. (2007). Divisadero. Mclelland and Stweart: Toronto, Ontario.

Rilke, Rainer M. (1993 [1934]) Letters to a Young Poet. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. : New york, N.Y.

Scott, Jonathan. (2010). The Miracle of Emile Habiby’s “Pessoptimist.” College Literature, 37(1), 110–128.

Sedgwick, Eve K. (2003). “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” in Touching Feeling: Affect,

Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham & London: Duke University Press (2006). “Teaching/Depression.” The Scholar and Feminist Online” published by the Barnard Center for Research on Women. 4(2). Retrieved from: https://sfonline.barnard.edu/heilbrun/sedgwick_01.htm

Shiferraw, Mahtem. (2018). Beginnings. Poets.org. Retrieved from: https://poets.org/poem/beginnings

Taussig, Michael (1992). The Nervous System. New York: Routledge

Van der Kolk, Bessel (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

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