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A Foreword on Identity
What does it mean to be Egyptian?
What does it mean to have egyptianness?
What does it mean to have egyptianness?
I aim to ask these questions and answer none.
Part of this project is to better understand my own identity. I don’t have forgone conclusions or final thoughts. I have a point of departure and a series of explorations. Thoughts and veins which go in different directions. Some parallel others tangential others still perpendicular. So much of how I view the world is attached to this duality which I lived with my whole lie. Halfway in America halfway in Egypt. Interestingly I only have a face value understanding of my Egyptian identity. Growing up I ate Egyptian food and went to Egypt every 4 years. It was a very surface level immersion. I understood the struggle of living in a 3rd world country under a dictator and religious oppression only through family. I saw Egyptian culture, art, film, and music only through a limited lens. Like not having glasses while looking at a sign slightly too far away. Always blurry. I never engaged fully; I didn’t know how.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve felt drawn to Egypt. Maybe I want to understands it better to “know where I come from” whatever that means. Maybe I’m drawn to it because I identify it as a thing which sets me apart from others. Something which makes me different. Maybe I’m genuinely interested in the culture. Maybe I fetishize a culture which does not ask to be “researched” or “understood.” Taking advantage of the exotic and foreign as if the culture is obligated to me. As if it owes me something.
I think it’s a mixture of all these things.
I have a nebulous, undefined visual understanding of my Egyptian identity. Over the years I’ve captured the Egyptian as an individual. I’ve photographed the natural beauty, the built environment, the large scale modernization and westernization. But it is all in fleeting moments and images. It is all a scratch in the surface of something I don’t claim to really understand.
Ultimately this project is not a codification of Egyptian cultural identity.
Academic approaches to identity, for me, define identity, so integral to the human experience, in a way which is not reflective of the lived experience of identity. Identity is not simply a series of labels which I and the world use to understand each other . Identity is a larger more complicated thing that is understood fully only through lived experience and can only be approximated, not through labels, but through creative enterprise.
This project is one such creative enterprise
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[1] Egypt
[2] Libya
[3] Sudan
[4] Saudi Arabia
[5] Jordan
[6] Israel-Palestinian Occupied Territories
[7] Syria
[8] Lebanon
[2] Libya
[3] Sudan
[4] Saudi Arabia
[5] Jordan
[6] Israel-Palestinian Occupied Territories
[7] Syria
[8] Lebanon
Capital Cairo
Total Area 1.0875939474e+13 sqft
Population 109, 300, 000
Total Area 1.0875939474e+13 sqft
Population 109, 300, 000
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Map of Greater Cairo
[1] Nile Valley
[2] Nile
[3] Downtown Cairo
[4] Sixth of October
[5] Heliopolis
[6] New Cairo
[7] Ard el-Lewa
[8] Mohandiseen
[9] Bulaq al-Dakrur
[10] Imbaba
[11] Tenth of Ramadan
[2] Nile
[3] Downtown Cairo
[4] Sixth of October
[5] Heliopolis
[6] New Cairo
[7] Ard el-Lewa
[8] Mohandiseen
[9] Bulaq al-Dakrur
[10] Imbaba
[11] Tenth of Ramadan
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I remember
The peach colored tiles
and the yellow racecar
I remember the green heart chairs
The yellow Pikachu shirt
The now red Pikachu shirt
Split head open
...twelve stitches
I remember the church and the preschool which my parents had built
I remember the kitchen ;
the birthdays
the shots, needles and medicine I protested against
the birthdays
the shots, needles and medicine I protested against
I remember one time it hailed
...in Egypt
...in Egypt
I remember getting a fever and covering myself with every blanket in the house, even the towels
I remember the place I come from
Om el Donya is a story of identity
of a country of migrants
of a single migrant
of revolution
of radical modernization
of inept stagnation
of reignited revolution
of spatial representations of identity
of resiliance
of Egypt
of a single migrant
of revolution
of radical modernization
of inept stagnation
of reignited revolution
of spatial representations of identity
of resiliance
of Egypt
What follows is a set of visual representations of spaces and the people in them; the material world and natural world.
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Egyptian King
Cast in stone for eternity.
Stoic in expression.
Stoic in expression.
For a thousand years you’ve stood there staring out at what?
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Egyptian Soldier
He had been reprimanding children messing around by the boats. Placed his gun on the retaining wall and motioned for them to stop. I took the photo
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These are the men, their figures and faces, that I looked up to. The figures and faces I took pride in and longed after. The figures and faces I hid from. The figures and faces which tormented me with torment and anguish in their own eyes. They represent the ideals and nobility of kings but also the trauma and faults of fathers and fatherlands. They are imperfect and broken faces. Wrinkled and cracked faces. Full of scars that never fully healed. They are proud and reselient faces. The same faces, eternilized into limestone thousands of years ago, look out over the desert today. These dark sunkissed faces, which hold a constant disatisfied squint, hide pain and happiness all the same.
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Nile
primordial waters
arid dessert
ancient breeze
the same place thousands of years into the past
//
the same a thousand years to the future
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Embu
"from the water"
a word from ancient Egypt still used today
a remnant of those people and their culture
of our people and our culture
everything came from the water, to the water everything will return
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The souq is an architecture of uncertainties and irregularities. A type of unplanned open air market which lines the streets of Egypt. It doesn’t have a physical building, it’s a temporary spatial moment. The souq is an alive architecture. Souq’s carry spices, clothes, vegetables, toys, fruits, gold, coffee, souvenirs and meats in repeating patterns down Egyptian streets. They are vibrant and bustling urban architectures of intimate localized human interactions. You can watch a man bargaining with a vendor over the price of tomatoes, a hawker pitching the special deal he has for watermelons and countless women and their children shopping for the week’s groceries. It’s not perfect nor pristine from the fruits themselves to the way in which the architecture is organized. There in the street, vendors selling fruit are placed next to vendors selling meat next to vendors selling clothes. Everything is subject to change and in constant flux. One day the watermelon vendor is there the next day he’s a street down the next he’s not there at all.
An [in]formal architecture is a bottom-up process which originates from the people and is built for the people. As a physicals manifestation of the will of the people the souq can be understood as a peoples architecture. As such the souq is a microcosm of the people of the alley. The intricate complexity of each of their lives manifested in the walls and shops of the street.
Snaking winding, through tunnels of dirt and stone. On the water in the alley.
Then to a greater place. The Nile as a souq. Both rivers. The Nile as an observer of Egyptian identity. As a reflector of Egyptian identity. The Nile as the lifeblood of Egypt.
They both meander with no specific end goal. A right turn here leads you to a barbershop. A left turn there takes you towards Alexandria
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Having done this project I’ve thought a lot about my “egyptianness” and how unegyptian I am. How detached I am from that culture and how American I am. My beliefs and morals are founded in predominantly American ideals. They are inline with most of my generation and are incredibly different from Egyptians of my generation and older. Having spent the majority of my life in America I don’t see myself in my parents or cousins.
But then I think about my American friends and I don’t see myself in them either. They approach the world differently from me, they’ve led extremally different lives even though we've grown up with similair cultural influences.