Searching for a Contemporary, Familiar Middle East

by christie bahna

I can tell you’re Egyptian when you turn to the side, because everyone knows that Egyptians only have profiles,” Danny—one of my best friends on the planet, who also happens to be Jewish—jests.

I get it. I get it. Ancient Egyptian ruins always depicted the human form as a profile. Fantastic. The Arab-Jew jokes are endless, and his multiple references to Anubis or the irony of our friendship are always appreciated. I sincerely don’t mind it, as he is one of the most decent and intelligent people I know; he shares my belief that the best way to deconstruct stereotypes is to critique their flawed logic via exaggeration, parody, and not-so-subtle humor. Yet it was not until college that I discovered how some people actually manage to possess such naiveté—the very ignorance that Danny I could mock and repudiate without end.

I’ve gotten a lot of different reactions to the fact that I’m Egyptian. “Do they still have Pharaoh’s? Ha Ha!” or “So I guess you walk like an Egyptian?” Always amusing. I really must remind myself to write that thank you letter to The Bangles for making my years in grade school somewhat of a living hell. The most common response is either a vague reference to the pyramids or an immediate interrogation about my views on terrorism or “the current crisis” in the Middle East (because there is only one).¹

I learned to laugh it off, but the more I thought about it, the more I grew to realize that my identity as an Egyptian-American is somewhat problematic: I have the comical misfortune of belonging to a culture that is either permanently located in the past—ancient, primitive, mystical, obsolete—or situated in the future as part of the larger, looming threat that “Arab-ness” poses to countries that aren’t so sinfully undemocratic, ill-intentioned, and Islamic. While I don’t necessarily wake up every morning to an identity crisis, I do struggle to avoid essentialism of what is “truly American” or “truly Arab” when negotiating my dual identity. In the last issue, Yaman Salahi said it best: “we don’t even know what Arabs are.” I’d like to add that we can’t really know what Arabs (or Americans, or Arab-Americans etc.) are without departing from crude reifications of culture; in order to transcend the ostensible Arab/ American dialectic, it is absolutely necessary to resituate “Arab” in a modern context.

I am both Egyptian and American. I am neither Egyptian nor American.

I can’t help but think about a question that Dubois asked a hundred years ago when confronted by the tension of his own incongruous identity: How does it feel to be a problem?²

The Arab is a problem for America—for many reasons (most of which are discussed in this magazine). I suppose the reason I am most concerned with entails the perfunctory association of Egypt—substitute with Arab or East—with either the distant past (i.e. the pyramids³) or the future (i.e. a ticking time bomb of terror or a menace that is ambiguously rescheduled for “one of these days”). In other words, how can we render the site of Arab-American identity in “the now” if the existence of a healthy, human, and contemporary Egypt/Arab is consistently denied? Can we exist outside the context of art history or national security?

Of course I am not the first to ask these questions; Said (more than adequately) articulated the polarization of East and West as well as the construction of the former as weak, effeminate, and obsessed with the ways of the past. I suppose what interests and amazes me the most is how Orientalist rhetoric has managed to persist in everyday interaction under the clever guise of praise (be it ambiguous); a kind of “neo-Orientalism,” if you will. While many consider it a lovely compliment to applaud my “exoticness” or to thank me for the pyramids, I find it offensive and racist (in a humorous sort of way). Keeping a culture in the past is a way of keeping it down, and the word “exotic,” despite its allegedly positive connotation, should be reacquainted with its distant rhetorical cousins, “alien” and “foreign.⁴” I personally think that the word should be reserved strictly for food—for example “an exotic medley of herbs and spices!” I’d be okay with that usage.

When all is said and done, I carry a pretty huge grain of salt with me everywhere I go.⁵ Sometimes you just have to sit back, relax (preferably with an Oum Kalthoum record and a tall glass of Pyramid Ale), and laugh at your exotic self and the ignorance that surrounds you. I have tried to depart from the rhetoric of racial injury and the typical “angry ethnic editorial.” I’m not angry or full of hatred. I am just trying to (1) locate part of my identity in the present and (2) avoid a barrage of thinly veiled Orientalist compliments at the post office. I do not claim to have any solutions; but perhaps an increase in discourse that does recognize these issues will resuscitate Egypt’s relevance to the present and, more broadly, bring the notion of a contemporary, well-intentioned Arab
out of a state of constant denial. I’m sorry. I meant “de-Nile.”

Footnotes:
1 Alright, I am going to give the human race some credit. There are a lot of people who would never say such things… but every now and then, it hits me, and I want to do something. Nothing dramatic. Maybe just light myself on fire.

2 Not too good, actually.

3 I’m not saying that the automatic association of Egypt with the pyramids makes you racist. I’m simply drawing attention to the fact that ancient architecture need not be the only thing countries like Egypt have to offer the world. I know of few people who automatically think “Stonehenge!” upon any mention of England.

4“Sexy” will not be invited to this awkward family reunion.

5As you can tell by my footnotes, it’s actually quite heavy.

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Christie Bahna is an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley.