It may seem like a funny coincidence that just as the Lenten season begins, my new life in Egypt is starting to regain some of the comforts I had to give up during the past month. I know I have repeatedly complained vaguely about my unsatisfactory 'internet situation', and I've been here long enough to know that a new 'situation' could easily develop within the next few minutes, or days, or months, but at the risk of jinxing myself I do want to celebrate this: Caitlin and I have internet in our apartment! The coverage is still a little uneven between the two of us (the wireless works for her, doesn't for me), but I am finally able to do my internet business from home, without worrying about the life of my laptop battery or the closing hours and ridiculous security protocol of the Alexandria library.
Now that I have internet, of course, I feel overwhelmed. How can I possibly 'catch up' with everything that's happened, not happened, and mis-happened over the past month? How many of the entries that I promised I would write can I even remember, let alone organize? Maybe it is time to take a step back and try to find a 'big picture.'
I've said repeatedly in conversation and emails (and even quoted myself as saying here) that I love Egypt. Yet in all the craziness, I've really only had time to relate a few 'amusing' anecdotes that do more to show why I might have trouble adjusting to life in Alexandria and Egypt, than to show why I feel coming here was a right decision. They certainly don't explain why I am considering coming back next fall. So maybe it is time for a feel-good, self-indulgent, why-I-want-to-stay-in-Egypt-long-enough-to-know-it-better post. Consider yourselves warned.
Reason #1: Beginnings
I've been trying fruitlessly not to romanticize Egypt--Masr--since before I got here. I told myself that I would take everything, absolutely everything, just exactly as it was, no more, no less. But Masr is too huge, too old, and too complex a place and a concept to experience without feeling something...something a lot like romance. And to make a huge, but I believe accurate, generalization: the culture, the music, the art here are all extremely emotive. Masr inspires laughter, love, and even anger or fear...but it honestly doesn't make sense to live in Masr without getting carried away.
The feeling that most often carries me away is the feeling of origins. This is true for several reasons, some personal and some historical. Masr sometimes calls herself 'Omm al-Doniya' or Mother of the World, mother of civilization. I don't need to give a lesson in Ancient Egyptian history to explain that one. But it is not just that old-ness that touches me...knowing I am at the source, now, after almost twenty years of museum halls, tours, exhibits.
As I mentioned in my first post, my name has Persian and Arabic roots, and tends to get 'taken back' here. To me, my name is a very important part of my identity. I have never met anyone with the same name, and I have been able to see my name and my self as almost inseparable, rather than one being representative of the other. And as someone who believes (whether I acknowledge it or not) that everything has a reason, a meaning, I have always connected ideas about my name to ideas about my self. For example, my name's real-life source was a book (now out of print) that my mother read. She liked the name, and the fact that in the book (called Jessamy, by Barbara Sleight), Jessamy was the name of all the eldest daughters. For years--and, honestly, even now--I (have) believed that this has influenced the nature of my attraction to literary and creative worlds and perhaps, even, to ideas of tradition and inheritance. I may see myself as a character in a story (for better or worse) because that is where the first idea of me and my name came from.
In this context, Masr has a huge influence on my identity and self-exploration. I almost feel that I am exploring the secret roots of my name, one of the places that had to exist for even that first character to have been invented (I personally think that Jessamy came to English through Arabic and not directly from Persian, because my little crackpot linguist self thinks that the Y to J transformation came through Spanish, which I then tie to Arab connections with Spain...no fussing about details from me, haha). It is also curious to find myself suddenly in a place where my name is almost normal (some people have even reminded me of that singer from the Persian Gulf, Hussein al-Jassmy, who I originally picked up as proof that Arabs *could* pronounce my name correctly, not as Yasmeen), and every time I meet someone new I find myself getting another lecture about its roots.
Of course, this also means that Masr is making me see myself as more of a fictional character than ever before. Jessamy Part 2. Or "Jessamy" (the word) gets de-colonized. I always have to laugh when I think about a white American girl de-colonizing her name. I think that's the only reason I even have that idea in the first place...to laugh at it. :D
The third, and maybe most important beginning, is a religious one. I don't talk very much about my religious feelings, mostly because I am still in the process of hashing them all out, but one of the major results of my Middle Eastern Studies...studies...has been a real cementing of the feeling that all the Abrahamic faiths (and personally I think more than these) do worship the same God, and beyond that, the incredible closeness between these religions.
Sometimes this comes out as language. Although our Arabic textbook hinted that Christians would be more likely use to use the word 'rub' or Lord than 'allah' for God, I've found this to be emphatically untrue as far as conversation is concerned. Arabic is full of 'allah', full of 'thank god's and 'god willing's, and god bless yous and god keep yous etc. And Christians say them just the same way as Muslims do, rather than having some kind of 'special version.' That's not saying that there aren't some language differences, and Christians do use a different word for God in church services (as far as I've been told)...but there isn't any sense that Muslims own the Arabic language more so than Christians do (*Jews in and of Egypt deserve their own entry at some later point...it's too long, complicated, and sad a story to just stick in here). If someone ever seemed offended at my saying 'inshallah' or 'alhamdulillah', I would probably be offended right back.
I've sort of veered off topic here. My point in bringing up religion was to say that as a minister's daughter, and someone who does take matters of faith seriously (to the point that it kept me from being confirmed in any particular doctrine just because that happened to be the church I was born into/belonged to), there is something very stirring about being in the home of the oldest Christian church in the world: the Coptic church. In fact, we get our word for Egypt from a corrupted version of the word for Copts (correct me if I'm wrong). This is a picture of a Coptic Church on an island in the Nile. There's something about seeing a church in this country that makes me excited and curious...it may just be that they're more beautiful.
Now that I have internet, of course, I feel overwhelmed. How can I possibly 'catch up' with everything that's happened, not happened, and mis-happened over the past month? How many of the entries that I promised I would write can I even remember, let alone organize? Maybe it is time to take a step back and try to find a 'big picture.'
I've said repeatedly in conversation and emails (and even quoted myself as saying here) that I love Egypt. Yet in all the craziness, I've really only had time to relate a few 'amusing' anecdotes that do more to show why I might have trouble adjusting to life in Alexandria and Egypt, than to show why I feel coming here was a right decision. They certainly don't explain why I am considering coming back next fall. So maybe it is time for a feel-good, self-indulgent, why-I-want-to-stay-in-Egypt-long-enough-to-know-it-better post. Consider yourselves warned.
Reason #1: Beginnings
I've been trying fruitlessly not to romanticize Egypt--Masr--since before I got here. I told myself that I would take everything, absolutely everything, just exactly as it was, no more, no less. But Masr is too huge, too old, and too complex a place and a concept to experience without feeling something...something a lot like romance. And to make a huge, but I believe accurate, generalization: the culture, the music, the art here are all extremely emotive. Masr inspires laughter, love, and even anger or fear...but it honestly doesn't make sense to live in Masr without getting carried away.
The feeling that most often carries me away is the feeling of origins. This is true for several reasons, some personal and some historical. Masr sometimes calls herself 'Omm al-Doniya' or Mother of the World, mother of civilization. I don't need to give a lesson in Ancient Egyptian history to explain that one. But it is not just that old-ness that touches me...knowing I am at the source, now, after almost twenty years of museum halls, tours, exhibits.
As I mentioned in my first post, my name has Persian and Arabic roots, and tends to get 'taken back' here. To me, my name is a very important part of my identity. I have never met anyone with the same name, and I have been able to see my name and my self as almost inseparable, rather than one being representative of the other. And as someone who believes (whether I acknowledge it or not) that everything has a reason, a meaning, I have always connected ideas about my name to ideas about my self. For example, my name's real-life source was a book (now out of print) that my mother read. She liked the name, and the fact that in the book (called Jessamy, by Barbara Sleight), Jessamy was the name of all the eldest daughters. For years--and, honestly, even now--I (have) believed that this has influenced the nature of my attraction to literary and creative worlds and perhaps, even, to ideas of tradition and inheritance. I may see myself as a character in a story (for better or worse) because that is where the first idea of me and my name came from.
In this context, Masr has a huge influence on my identity and self-exploration. I almost feel that I am exploring the secret roots of my name, one of the places that had to exist for even that first character to have been invented (I personally think that Jessamy came to English through Arabic and not directly from Persian, because my little crackpot linguist self thinks that the Y to J transformation came through Spanish, which I then tie to Arab connections with Spain...no fussing about details from me, haha). It is also curious to find myself suddenly in a place where my name is almost normal (some people have even reminded me of that singer from the Persian Gulf, Hussein al-Jassmy, who I originally picked up as proof that Arabs *could* pronounce my name correctly, not as Yasmeen), and every time I meet someone new I find myself getting another lecture about its roots.
Of course, this also means that Masr is making me see myself as more of a fictional character than ever before. Jessamy Part 2. Or "Jessamy" (the word) gets de-colonized. I always have to laugh when I think about a white American girl de-colonizing her name. I think that's the only reason I even have that idea in the first place...to laugh at it. :D
The third, and maybe most important beginning, is a religious one. I don't talk very much about my religious feelings, mostly because I am still in the process of hashing them all out, but one of the major results of my Middle Eastern Studies...studies...has been a real cementing of the feeling that all the Abrahamic faiths (and personally I think more than these) do worship the same God, and beyond that, the incredible closeness between these religions.
Sometimes this comes out as language. Although our Arabic textbook hinted that Christians would be more likely use to use the word 'rub' or Lord than 'allah' for God, I've found this to be emphatically untrue as far as conversation is concerned. Arabic is full of 'allah', full of 'thank god's and 'god willing's, and god bless yous and god keep yous etc. And Christians say them just the same way as Muslims do, rather than having some kind of 'special version.' That's not saying that there aren't some language differences, and Christians do use a different word for God in church services (as far as I've been told)...but there isn't any sense that Muslims own the Arabic language more so than Christians do (*Jews in and of Egypt deserve their own entry at some later point...it's too long, complicated, and sad a story to just stick in here). If someone ever seemed offended at my saying 'inshallah' or 'alhamdulillah', I would probably be offended right back.
I've sort of veered off topic here. My point in bringing up religion was to say that as a minister's daughter, and someone who does take matters of faith seriously (to the point that it kept me from being confirmed in any particular doctrine just because that happened to be the church I was born into/belonged to), there is something very stirring about being in the home of the oldest Christian church in the world: the Coptic church. In fact, we get our word for Egypt from a corrupted version of the word for Copts (correct me if I'm wrong). This is a picture of a Coptic Church on an island in the Nile. There's something about seeing a church in this country that makes me excited and curious...it may just be that they're more beautiful.
This isn't one of the most beautiful churches I've seen...though pretty much all of the churches I've seen here have been gorgeous. Sometimes the architecture makes me feel that connection between faiths even more strongly; more than a few of the churches I've seen look like mosques with crosses stuck on the top.
This brings me to Reason #2: Visuals
Unfortunately, some continued technical difficulties with my camera have kept me from sharing this experience as I would have wished, but I often feel that I experience Alexandria and Egypt most strongly as an artist and an appreciator of art. Alexandria is a very colorful city, from clothing, to cars (especially those made-up chevrolets), to the boats in the harbor, to the murals and tiles in the tunnels, to the strange cartoonish artwork and disney characters that seem to populate many of its walls. Even the strange experience I had being dragged into a sort of seedy performance of 'Sufi whirling derwish' (the package deal!) on the stuffy airless bottom floor of a Nile cruise boat in Cairo touched me as an experience of color.
No comments:
Post a Comment