Cairo, the 14th August, 2009
“Being stalked or the fine art of swallowing frogs”
*** Unless you´re a foreigner married to another foreigner – working with another foreigners in an also foreigner company surrounded by foreigner friends – you cannot really protect yourself from the wonders and awful bits of life in Egypt.
Being exposed to egyptian and arabic people´s daily reality has so much to teach you. You learn from different mentalities, religions, points of view, ways of thinking, acting, valuing and even feeling (this one blows my mind as I thought there was only ONE kind of human heart ). It can also be devastating, disarming and so hard that you question, even if for short moments of total confusion, if all you learnt it was right and wrong isn´t, in the end, just a mistake your parents taught you.
Who´s right?! Who is more able to validate and pronounce this or that attitude as ethically valid or invalid? None of us grabs the ultimate flag of “all knowledge”. No one has all the right answers or the right to think that, in some ways, we hold the wisest logic.
It can all get very confusing…
I, sometimes, think that our bodies (in particular our brains, skin and hearts) are composed from different cells, chemicals and strange elements familiar to doctors and anatomists but ever more a mystery to “normal” people like me.
I have a lot of trouble understanding how so often a brother hurts, betrays and steals from another brother (I´ve seen it here more than anywhere in the world), how men use women and women use men with no shame or sense of guilt, how “love” is such an empty word in most people´s mouths and how even children seem to be so repressed and conditioned they will start to stare hungrily at your breasts from the age of three!
I try to not to judge. I really do. And yet it´s so damn difficult not to.
Whenever I´m interviewed about my life and work in Egypt and a journalist asks me what´s the biggest challenge I´ve had to face during the whole experience, my answer is usually quick and 100% sure of itself:
“Not to become a rock.” This is the maximum challenge and my biggest fear: due to so many disappointments and exposure to human wickedness, I can clearly see that becoming a heartless bitch – or a rock, if you want to sound more diplomatic – it´s a MAJOR thing.
Growing in my career, keeping myself physically and mentally sane and living 24 hours per day in a country where everybody seems to have gone berserk without becoming one of the many cynical, greedy, sick, heartless and soulless women and men I meet everyday is the most difficult thing in the world and a path to greater humanity or…disaster.
*** Today I cried really hard like I didn´t cry for such a long time. After a while of so many surprises – great and awful – and disappointment after disappointment, it seems that the internal machine which produces your tears simply dries.
You swallow frogs after frogs because life goes on and you can´t stop just because you´re hurt, you try to accept that this is just the way human beings are: imperfect, illogical, way too much fragile…
And, at some point, your body seems to tell you: your lot of tears just expired. You´re cried all your tears and now you´re dry.
What a terrible thing to happen…like a part of your ability to express feelings just dried up like a raisin under the desert sun.
*** After arriving home from a day of “baladi” shopping with my assistant, I finally discovered that my tears hadn´t expired. They were plentiful and ready to explode.
They did.
***This was supposed to be a quiet shopping afternoon in some “baladi” markets of Cairo. We went for fabrics (doing some of my own dance dresses! Yeah!), embroidery materials, “accessoires”, shoes and fresh vegies (I´m a wide kind of shopper).
The shopping route was Old Maadi market, “Ukala” (main fabric market on the Corniche il Shobra) and “Hussein” ( the zone of the famous market of “Khan el Khalili”).
I was careful enough to choose a cloth that allowed me to breath and not faint from the extreme August heat and yet humble and covered enough to drag the minimum attention from both men and women whom I knew would be staring, talking about, harassing and, even better, stalking me and my assistant on or commercial peregrination.
*** I thought about dressing my Saudi “abbaya” but then remembered that it works the other way around: if I dress the “abbaya” to cover myself and avoid people´s staring and harassing, I end up being toughly bothered and treated as a vamp, a hungry seductress and, allas, a prostitute.
I chose a pair of jeans and a large t-shirt but couldn´t bring myself to criticize my own egyptian assistant when she appeared at my own fresh as a portuguese lettuce wearing lycra pants and a tiger printed tight shirt from where you could easily guess the shape of her breasts and even her nipples.
“Aren´t egyptian women usually more aware of the importance of dressing discreetly ?!”
Foreigners are the ones to whom people usually point their fingers when it comes to physical exposure. I just can´t understand all these contractions, 24 hours/day!
*** I could have told my assistant to return home and put on something that wouldn´t put us into troubles but I was running out of time and I didn´t want to sound like an old grandma trying to protect another lady´s moral standards.
*** The thing is I am in a combative mode most of the time. While in Egypt, I feel like whenever I´m in public, all my antennas should be working and I take the role of protector of my own safety and the safety of anyone who happens to be with me, even if that person is an egyptian lady used to the streets and its people much more than me.
*** My assistant, from her own side, didn´t bother being by my side as I acted on the male role of protector and safety guardian for me and for her tiger tight shirt…
She was still smiling broadly and rolling her hips in contentment when we returned home.
I was about to explode. As soon as she left and I started opening the shopping bags, my well hidden tears just exploded into bursts and bursts of frustration, rage and pure exhaustion.
*** During our market googling, we ended up buying most of the stuff we needed but I had to fight (even physically) to several men whom verbally harassed me (and her famous “tiger shirt”), stalked me and followed me for long, painful lengths of time. I´m not talking about one, two or three men. I am talking about dozens of “all ages” men who even dared to walk side by side with me whispering obscenities into my ears.
I wanted to ignore them and yet, at some point, I could not. My assistant, as any regular woman, felt flattered or/and afraid. She didn´t open her mouth and I suspect that being my side and feeling I had her back covered had a lot to do with it.
By logic – my own logic, again… - the egyptian lady would protect me (the foreigner) and make sure that I felt the less uncomfortable. That didn´t happen.
Feeling totally exposed and unprotected, I naturally took on the role I am used to practice on a daily basis and became the “man” of the whole picture.
*** The most enerving thing about the stalking and the sexual harassing is that men do not expect the women to defend themselves or answer them in a negative tone. In their heads, they have the right to harass you, stalk you, even touch you because you´re walking in the street without a man by your man (so…you´re asking for it!) but, if you answer and defend yourself, they can really take it badly and turn against you.
*** I lost the account of how many men I had to punch and threaten during this shopping treap. Some turned against me and I had to be more violent than them in order to be left in peace. I couldn´t cry – as I felt like doing so many times – or show any sign of weakness. That would be a great disaster with real consequences.
My egyptian assistant watched the scary movie in a totally zen mood as if she was walking on the clouds and between the singing birds.
*** I am not an aggressive person by nature. Therefore, having to act upon these men/wild animals with such violence is, more than to them, an stressful even to me. It´s such a depressing thing having to mistreat and taking another men´s mistreatments.
For every meter I walked, there was some sexual remark, someone trying to touch me, another one trying to fit into my walking rhythm to initiate a conversation.
To top over the whole stressful afternoon, we stopped in a gas station and, while my assistant was getting us cold drinks from inside, a Saudi guy stopped his car and dared to come to me and play the typical arabic Don Juan role (Oh, Goooooddd…..not now!!!).
***Did I know how beautiful I was. Yes, I know, thanks. Did I know he would do anything to be just 5 minutes in my company. No, thanks. Did I know he had never seen such a beautiful woman like me? Good for you, pal! If he could just get my contact so that he could invite me for dinner…Dream on, sick babe…
I let him talk – blah, blah, blah – looking at the sky with an expression I was sure of saying: “F…off, you looser!” and yet he didn´t quit (arabic men´s persistence, amazing!). He kept delivering me the pseudo-poetic phrases I have listened a million times and, at some point, there was just a background noise in my mind with no clear words or anyone specific in it. I took off. It was just too much to handle after this afternoon.
“Please just shut up and go away.”- I told him in a what it must have been my most exhausted tone of voice.
He continued persistently and didn´t show any sign of quitting. I looked around searching for my assistant who seemed to have travelled to Brazil to get us the damned chilled drinks. No one in the gas station intervened or asked if this man was bothering me. He was clearly a big shot, a “pasha” with money and we know that “pashas” with money are never interrupted in this country.
I swallowed dry saliva. I pushed my sun glasses towards my face. I gave myself one or two seconds to regain strength and then I shout at him, really shout at him:
“GO AWAY. I AM NOT INTERESTED. JUST GO AWAY.”
To this last resource intervention the Saudi man exploded into my face as if I had deeply offended his mother. He told me there was no use for me to be so rude and that I couldn´t talk to him like that.
What?!
*** Well…What can I say?! We might as well have been in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia (where both mentality and official laws put women in the same status of cows or bellow them) but we were in my crazy, impossible and also loved Cairo on the year 2009!!! How can this still happen?!
***I held my tears and run for my assistant – with or without the drinks – dreaming about arriving home and being allowed to breath without any man jumping over me.
*** My tear reservatoire was not dry after all.
It´s good to know that (oh, the good side of every tragedy!).
“Being stalked or the fine art of swallowing frogs”
*** Unless you´re a foreigner married to another foreigner – working with another foreigners in an also foreigner company surrounded by foreigner friends – you cannot really protect yourself from the wonders and awful bits of life in Egypt.
Being exposed to egyptian and arabic people´s daily reality has so much to teach you. You learn from different mentalities, religions, points of view, ways of thinking, acting, valuing and even feeling (this one blows my mind as I thought there was only ONE kind of human heart ). It can also be devastating, disarming and so hard that you question, even if for short moments of total confusion, if all you learnt it was right and wrong isn´t, in the end, just a mistake your parents taught you.
Who´s right?! Who is more able to validate and pronounce this or that attitude as ethically valid or invalid? None of us grabs the ultimate flag of “all knowledge”. No one has all the right answers or the right to think that, in some ways, we hold the wisest logic.
It can all get very confusing…
I, sometimes, think that our bodies (in particular our brains, skin and hearts) are composed from different cells, chemicals and strange elements familiar to doctors and anatomists but ever more a mystery to “normal” people like me.
I have a lot of trouble understanding how so often a brother hurts, betrays and steals from another brother (I´ve seen it here more than anywhere in the world), how men use women and women use men with no shame or sense of guilt, how “love” is such an empty word in most people´s mouths and how even children seem to be so repressed and conditioned they will start to stare hungrily at your breasts from the age of three!
I try to not to judge. I really do. And yet it´s so damn difficult not to.
Whenever I´m interviewed about my life and work in Egypt and a journalist asks me what´s the biggest challenge I´ve had to face during the whole experience, my answer is usually quick and 100% sure of itself:
“Not to become a rock.” This is the maximum challenge and my biggest fear: due to so many disappointments and exposure to human wickedness, I can clearly see that becoming a heartless bitch – or a rock, if you want to sound more diplomatic – it´s a MAJOR thing.
Growing in my career, keeping myself physically and mentally sane and living 24 hours per day in a country where everybody seems to have gone berserk without becoming one of the many cynical, greedy, sick, heartless and soulless women and men I meet everyday is the most difficult thing in the world and a path to greater humanity or…disaster.
*** Today I cried really hard like I didn´t cry for such a long time. After a while of so many surprises – great and awful – and disappointment after disappointment, it seems that the internal machine which produces your tears simply dries.
You swallow frogs after frogs because life goes on and you can´t stop just because you´re hurt, you try to accept that this is just the way human beings are: imperfect, illogical, way too much fragile…
And, at some point, your body seems to tell you: your lot of tears just expired. You´re cried all your tears and now you´re dry.
What a terrible thing to happen…like a part of your ability to express feelings just dried up like a raisin under the desert sun.
*** After arriving home from a day of “baladi” shopping with my assistant, I finally discovered that my tears hadn´t expired. They were plentiful and ready to explode.
They did.
***This was supposed to be a quiet shopping afternoon in some “baladi” markets of Cairo. We went for fabrics (doing some of my own dance dresses! Yeah!), embroidery materials, “accessoires”, shoes and fresh vegies (I´m a wide kind of shopper).
The shopping route was Old Maadi market, “Ukala” (main fabric market on the Corniche il Shobra) and “Hussein” ( the zone of the famous market of “Khan el Khalili”).
I was careful enough to choose a cloth that allowed me to breath and not faint from the extreme August heat and yet humble and covered enough to drag the minimum attention from both men and women whom I knew would be staring, talking about, harassing and, even better, stalking me and my assistant on or commercial peregrination.
*** I thought about dressing my Saudi “abbaya” but then remembered that it works the other way around: if I dress the “abbaya” to cover myself and avoid people´s staring and harassing, I end up being toughly bothered and treated as a vamp, a hungry seductress and, allas, a prostitute.
I chose a pair of jeans and a large t-shirt but couldn´t bring myself to criticize my own egyptian assistant when she appeared at my own fresh as a portuguese lettuce wearing lycra pants and a tiger printed tight shirt from where you could easily guess the shape of her breasts and even her nipples.
“Aren´t egyptian women usually more aware of the importance of dressing discreetly ?!”
Foreigners are the ones to whom people usually point their fingers when it comes to physical exposure. I just can´t understand all these contractions, 24 hours/day!
*** I could have told my assistant to return home and put on something that wouldn´t put us into troubles but I was running out of time and I didn´t want to sound like an old grandma trying to protect another lady´s moral standards.
*** The thing is I am in a combative mode most of the time. While in Egypt, I feel like whenever I´m in public, all my antennas should be working and I take the role of protector of my own safety and the safety of anyone who happens to be with me, even if that person is an egyptian lady used to the streets and its people much more than me.
*** My assistant, from her own side, didn´t bother being by my side as I acted on the male role of protector and safety guardian for me and for her tiger tight shirt…
She was still smiling broadly and rolling her hips in contentment when we returned home.
I was about to explode. As soon as she left and I started opening the shopping bags, my well hidden tears just exploded into bursts and bursts of frustration, rage and pure exhaustion.
*** During our market googling, we ended up buying most of the stuff we needed but I had to fight (even physically) to several men whom verbally harassed me (and her famous “tiger shirt”), stalked me and followed me for long, painful lengths of time. I´m not talking about one, two or three men. I am talking about dozens of “all ages” men who even dared to walk side by side with me whispering obscenities into my ears.
I wanted to ignore them and yet, at some point, I could not. My assistant, as any regular woman, felt flattered or/and afraid. She didn´t open her mouth and I suspect that being my side and feeling I had her back covered had a lot to do with it.
By logic – my own logic, again… - the egyptian lady would protect me (the foreigner) and make sure that I felt the less uncomfortable. That didn´t happen.
Feeling totally exposed and unprotected, I naturally took on the role I am used to practice on a daily basis and became the “man” of the whole picture.
*** The most enerving thing about the stalking and the sexual harassing is that men do not expect the women to defend themselves or answer them in a negative tone. In their heads, they have the right to harass you, stalk you, even touch you because you´re walking in the street without a man by your man (so…you´re asking for it!) but, if you answer and defend yourself, they can really take it badly and turn against you.
*** I lost the account of how many men I had to punch and threaten during this shopping treap. Some turned against me and I had to be more violent than them in order to be left in peace. I couldn´t cry – as I felt like doing so many times – or show any sign of weakness. That would be a great disaster with real consequences.
My egyptian assistant watched the scary movie in a totally zen mood as if she was walking on the clouds and between the singing birds.
*** I am not an aggressive person by nature. Therefore, having to act upon these men/wild animals with such violence is, more than to them, an stressful even to me. It´s such a depressing thing having to mistreat and taking another men´s mistreatments.
For every meter I walked, there was some sexual remark, someone trying to touch me, another one trying to fit into my walking rhythm to initiate a conversation.
To top over the whole stressful afternoon, we stopped in a gas station and, while my assistant was getting us cold drinks from inside, a Saudi guy stopped his car and dared to come to me and play the typical arabic Don Juan role (Oh, Goooooddd…..not now!!!).
***Did I know how beautiful I was. Yes, I know, thanks. Did I know he would do anything to be just 5 minutes in my company. No, thanks. Did I know he had never seen such a beautiful woman like me? Good for you, pal! If he could just get my contact so that he could invite me for dinner…Dream on, sick babe…
I let him talk – blah, blah, blah – looking at the sky with an expression I was sure of saying: “F…off, you looser!” and yet he didn´t quit (arabic men´s persistence, amazing!). He kept delivering me the pseudo-poetic phrases I have listened a million times and, at some point, there was just a background noise in my mind with no clear words or anyone specific in it. I took off. It was just too much to handle after this afternoon.
“Please just shut up and go away.”- I told him in a what it must have been my most exhausted tone of voice.
He continued persistently and didn´t show any sign of quitting. I looked around searching for my assistant who seemed to have travelled to Brazil to get us the damned chilled drinks. No one in the gas station intervened or asked if this man was bothering me. He was clearly a big shot, a “pasha” with money and we know that “pashas” with money are never interrupted in this country.
I swallowed dry saliva. I pushed my sun glasses towards my face. I gave myself one or two seconds to regain strength and then I shout at him, really shout at him:
“GO AWAY. I AM NOT INTERESTED. JUST GO AWAY.”
To this last resource intervention the Saudi man exploded into my face as if I had deeply offended his mother. He told me there was no use for me to be so rude and that I couldn´t talk to him like that.
What?!
*** Well…What can I say?! We might as well have been in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia (where both mentality and official laws put women in the same status of cows or bellow them) but we were in my crazy, impossible and also loved Cairo on the year 2009!!! How can this still happen?!
***I held my tears and run for my assistant – with or without the drinks – dreaming about arriving home and being allowed to breath without any man jumping over me.
*** My tear reservatoire was not dry after all.
It´s good to know that (oh, the good side of every tragedy!).
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