Ashabi

Our joke was to call him “ashabi,” “my friend.” Or, at least, it was my joke when I first visited Egypt in 2005 to work with a group of artists and writers to form Meena, our bilingual Arabic/English literary series. My friend, Khaled, to whom I’m now married, and I were trying to create a much-needed “port of entry” between our cultures (“meena” means “port” in Arabic). Of the many culture shocks I experienced on that first visit, one of the most persistent was the omnipresence of Hosni Mubarak’s huge face. His gush was plastered everywhere: on street corners, train stations, brick walls by a market. He was inescapable. And he always looked, to me, like he was smelling something. Something, maybe, not so pleasant. Perhaps it was the whiff of revolution that would erupt years later. It translated as a look of indignation, even disgust, and I found this face, and its pervasiveness, extremely disconcerting. In the U.S., we don’t usually see such in-your-face images of our leaders except at election time, when they are not yet our leaders.

The other writers and I would meet for hours upon hours in coffee shops, smoking shisha, drinking tea or sweet, black coffee, in order to iron out our translations and decide on the order of what would be our first issue. Because the face would accompany us wherever we met, I began to mention it, uncomfortably, as if to try to nod to an uninvited and annoying member of the group in order to get an explanation. Or to see if anyone else noticed. It was somehow understood that we did not mention his name a lot, or directly reference the pervasive hatred of him. My instincts led me to come up with a code name, hence “ashabi,” as in “oh, I see ashabi has come to join us,” or “it seems things smell bad for ashabi, here, too.” I don’t know that anyone thought it was funny but me, but my actual friends played along.

I realize, now, that it was nervous humor. I was uncomfortable. My animal instincts sensed the danger represented by this forced encounter with such a hated man. And he was, as he is now, pretty much universally hated. I wondered how someone could not know that. Or how one could know that he was hated and somehow want to stir that emotion on a constant basis by waving it, quite literally, in people’s faces. Silly, naïve me. I had never been to a dictatorship before. And, though my best friend/now husband had suffered as a journalist there and, in fact, left because of the repression, though my new friends were all, in some way, involved in some kind of activism and resistance to the status quo, I just didn’t get it. I thought of dictatorships as gray, cold countries where people peered nervously from cracks in doors, not U.S. allies visited by Americans and Europeans for luxury vacations.

Though I knew, logically, that elections were rigged and that martial law was a constant reality, I could not line that up with the outrageous outpourings of generosity, humor and artistic expression I encountered every moment. Thus, I was hurt and perplexed when I heard that one of the artists I had met was suspicious that I was a spy working for my government. Perhaps more people thought this, but he was honest enough to let me know. It took a while to earn his trust, to show him (and maybe others) that I was genuinely interested in sharing a dialogue, in rendering Arabic voices into English.

Now I see how pervasive the fear was, how deeply the people were pitted against one another and how it was actually a natural suspicion for someone who was unaccustomed to not only free expression but genuine interest in Egypt’s living people and not just the ancient artifacts. Now I see that the quiet conversations, punctuated by laughter, which happened over the puffs of smoke and steam of tea and under the watchful eye of “ashabi,” were the prelude to this huge explosion unfolding before our eyes: the revolution that will birth a new Egypt. And I was privileged to be invited to the table.