Aswan was an Upper Egyptian border town facing Nubia, the ancient region that stretched down to Khartoum. Its southern part was the biblical kingdom of Cush famous for the stunning array of pyramids at its capital, Meroe. Greek cartographers included Nubia in the region they labeled Ethiopia. To this day the name is a simple warning to would-be travelers/tourists/invaders. From Greek, Ethiopia means “to burn the face.” In the summer months on average, highs in Aswan top Cairo by ten degrees, Alexandria by twenty. But every winter in Aswan I imagine weather forecasters are all smiles: day after day with highs in the low seventies.
It took mere minutes on the pleasant riverfront to feel guilt again, and a restlessness that I hid from Masha. Was this what I’d wanted to do in Egypt, lounging in the green leather armchairs of a Hitchcock set-worthy café car, en route to ancient tourist sites? Tourism had left but the tours remained, and there was no real discovery in following these timeworn grooves.
Racist politics had redefined modern Egypt here in the name of progress. In 1899, the British broke ground on the Aswan Low Dam, submerging Nubian territories again and again in two enlargements over the following decades. When Prime Minister Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered the High Dam built at Aswan in the 1960s and 1970s, immense amounts of farmland were drowned in the rising waters of the great river. Life magazine reported in 1966:
This stupendous project was conceived to increase Egypt’s cultivable land by one third, double her electric power output, and change the very climate of the Nile Valley. It also would inundate more than 5,000 square miles of a veritable open air museum, rich beyond a curator’s dream in art and artifacts, tombs and temples.
The Nubian people were struck an irremediable blow, and they have not forgotten. The three hundred-mile-long man-made lake that filled behind the Aswan Dam is called, aptly, Lake Nasser. Sudanese refer to their small portion of the reservoir as Lake Nubia.
A short drive away up and over the dam, at the loading dock to the tourist extravaganza at Philae (Fee-a-luh), a trio of Nubian men sat along a stone wall. Philae itself had to be dismantled and relocated, in tens of thousands of pieces of heavy syenite (granitelike rock named for Aswan), to nearby higher ground. The men shook their head at Nasser’s memory, pained.
It is generally easy to note this distinction: ethnic “Egyptians” look Semitic, like other Arabs and Jews; Nubians look African. In Nasser’s flurry of nationalization, Egypt was taken from the king for the people. But when it came time to unify the empowered “people,” religious and ethnic minorities were forced to pull the short straw: the disproportionately Coptic bourgeoisie lost its economic and political standing; Nubians, among others, were ignored altogether. The waters rose unchecked, and theirs was deemed a worthwhile sacrifice by those it never affected.
But aside from the “five-star” ferry boats sulking in their moorings, every sign of conflict was hidden. On the sail of a wooden felucca roped to the docks, Bob Marley grinned with a lion over a map of Saharan Africa.
Just minutes off the train, we followed a kind-enough-looking hawker to the water’s edge to meet his felucca captain. Ahmed was half Nubian, half Sa‘idi. He wore all white and walked barefoot across the planks of his felucca. Under a dark mustache, stubble covered a sharp jaw. While we bargained with the boss, Ahmed disappeared to find food for our short journey and low-quality Egyptian weed. Then, the “organizer” took his large half of our fee, and disappeared.
A felucca can be rented for days or a week for a slow journey up the Nile. For us, away from the constant screeching of Cairene streets, Ahmed’s felucca—bought by his father—was paradise. Before night fell and Masha and I clung together to steal each other’s warmth, we played backgammon on the deck, smelled the river in the sun, drank tea, and drank tea and drank tea.
When it was nearly dark, we docked on the silent east bank and Ahmed began to cook rice.
Stars poked through. Aswan has a population of less than three hundred thousand—greater Cairo has twenty million. In Cairo, sometimes, it is hard to see the sky.
The last night’s feast of KFC was all that had sustained us for our day of floating luxury, about the price of a midrange hotel. Ahmed laid out plates of food on a floral plastic mat: brown rice, thick wedges of fresh bread, chopped vegetables in a light tomato sauce. And then, as if it were the symbol of all things right and true in this world, he produced a plate of fried chicken. Breaded, crisp but juicy, soft and succulent and falling off the bone like manna from Louisville. We ate rapturously from clean metal bowls with metal spoons, praising Ahmed through facefuls.
“Mmmmmmph!” I said.
“It’s just chicken,” he said, and said again.
And then we retreated into his compartment in the shallow hull of the boat to digest. Ahmed slept here, in a space hardly tall enough to sit in, but warmer than outside by two full seasons. He told riddles, illustrated in patterns of broken matchsticks. Then, he rolled an enormous joint.
“Some days I don’t smoke. When I’m coming to the felucca here, little money, I bring some like this. I leave it with us.” Hashish, which he liked more, could be five times more expensive. He brought weed wrapped in newspaper. There were none of the benefits of American science; it was less potent and more crumbly and less green. The purchase came in long, loose clusters called “fingers.” Ahmed looked for matches. The only light in the hull came from a small candle, and the match flame flickering against his face. “This is Bob Marley,” he said. He sucked in and waved the match out with a swish. “Bob Marley smoke big cigarette.”
It was cold over the river, and Masha and I shivered to uneasy sleep on the deck, clasping each other for heat.
Even in my sleep, I could feel that there were no more paychecks coming. I’d quit the job because I thought the best decisions were the scariest ones—that safety nets made Truth harder to find. It’s an old trick, fusing destruction with creation: If I give something up, shouldn’t it come with something?
That had been my blind bargain—that doing the unnerving thing would be rewarded, the way a plunge in cold water wins freshness, clarity, a rush of warmth. The way flirtation with danger earns newly leased life.
I had come to the Middle East with a strong desire to connect, and a job to root me to the place. And now, at the heart of the revolution, I was a tourist—a fucking tourist!—unrooted from mission, and unrooted from the job that made that mission less desperate. But no, it was good, and I was with the girl I loved, and I was cold, and it felt good when the breeze died and I could stretch the blanket over our feet.
At 3:30 in the morning, Ahmed had brought us safely back to the west bank of the Nile to join a van convoy pointed south for the temple complex at Abu Simbel, fifteen miles from the Sudanese border. Each convoy is accompanied by police, they say, for security concerns.
Masha was happy here. The new southern landscapes helped thicken our understandings of the region we’d wanted to connect to through the language. And sometimes when I hid my antsiness from her, I lost sight of it. Together with her, it was all too easy to occupy the middle space where tourism fits, between stillness and adventure. I let myself mold to her shape, and together we yin-yanged smoothly across the desert.
Before dawn we crossed the Tropic of Cancer. Thirty-three centuries ago Ramses II—of (historically uncertifiable) Exodus fame—had a pair of humongous temples hewn from the sandstone cliffs at Abu Simbel. Man-made Lake Nasser threatened to crest the cofferdams, and the god-king and his favorite wife Nefertari prepared to hold their breath.
A row of twenty-two baboons looked down from the frieze of the Great Temple. One baboon-headed god, Hapy, is the protector of the lungs.
In last-minute desperation, international planners descended on Abu Simbel. Rescue teams hustled to pump water away from the monuments and masons labored around the clock, dicing the entire complex into blocks weighing up to thirty-three tons. When they finished, twenty-five million pounds of stone had been heaved to dry land, two hundred feet higher
and several hundred back from the water’s edge. All of the crowned figures of Ramses are safe. He is now well positioned behind excited Japanese girls making peace signs, the breathtaking view of the lake on a sunny morning and a loud American screaming that he had been swindled by the entrance ticket’s “Tour Guide Fee.”
Modernity threatened and saved the temples. The original stone is refashioned on a conical base of cement. Everything you see is ancient and real, and everything holding it up is modern technology.
While the larger temple has the king’s wife carved in miniature, on both sides of the entrance to the Small Temple, a full-size Nefertari is carved between statues of her husband. For the first time, the only documented case in pharaonic art, the queen is equal in size. Perhaps this design somehow served Ramses’s own vanity—Even my queen is bigger than all of you Nubians! Perhaps he bucked the mold out of egotism, or politics or love. Comparisons came easily as Masha and I basked hand in hand. As it is for any anxious boy made more whole in partnership, the power of my girlfriend was a testament to my own strength: The more equal we were, the more of me there was. Her smarts were our smarts, her beauty was our beauty, her jokes were our jokes that we shared and let us be aloof from the seriousness of the world.
But to build us up I had to subscribe to our sameness, even though we wanted different things from this place. No part of her needed to make things difficult, while half of me was tense for feeling no tension.
After noon, temperatures climbed with the tempers of the grumpy and our van convoy prepared to leave. Distant sand turned to mirrors in the shuddering heat. Soon, the drivers turned their engines off again, and we learned we weren’t going anywhere.
For two hours, there was “roadwork” along the single highway back to Aswan. Our vanful sat courteously fanning themselves, better prepared with snacks and sustenance than Masha and I ever were. We dug the dregs from a plastic bag of tiny Ghirardelli chocolates her mom had given her, like the most aristocratic of table scraps.
In Arabic, our driver told me that there were protests. Workers were striking somewhere and obstructing traffic, and someone had decided to keep the foreigners sheltered. All of the drivers were doing this.
“What did he say?” a Japanese man asked me from the backseat.
I hesitated. “We should be going soon.”
I lied to keep the borders drawn. To hide information from the backseat in order to declare my loyalty: not a tourist. No, I wasn’t part of his group—cameras-around-necks, waiting to be chaperoned. But of course I was. Masha and I held hands in the convoy. And when the desperation of the year’s appetite for understanding became the desperation of an hour’s quest for a sandwich, I forgot the point again. I delighted in that starvation, a clear problem with a clear fix. I often kept myself hungry on purpose just for this—so that despite all uncertainty, there would always be a simple solution for a base desire.
With Masha, if I ever let myself, I could truly be at ease. That scared me more than anything—to feel okay when I was so close to others in revolt. To choose blindness, numbness, pleasure even, instead of truth. How could I be growing without pain?
I settled into uneasy sleep against the van window, dreaming of falafel and fried chicken, and of the hungers that I could sate in a sitting.
FROM: MASHA
SUBJECT: (NO SUBJECT)
WED AT 1:19 AM
I’m not demanding you quit your job, I’m not demanding you come to American for me, I’m not demanding anything. All I’m asking for is to be taken into consideration. Maybe you are . . . I just want you around. I’m sorry if I’m making you feel like shit because i actually want a relationship with you. That’s it. I just don’t feel like you are taking me into account at all. That’s fine, you’re 22, you should be able to make these decisions for you and I understand that.
CHAPTER 12
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YEMEN
WAA-OWW!
I THOUGHT I’D KNOWN what restless meant, but the minute my contract at NYUAD expired, the bottom dropped all the way out. Almost as soon as I set foot back in my apartment in the Emirates, I rented a car the size of a teacup and raced in a skinny circle through all seven emirates, sleeping in the driver’s seat leaned back and eating baked beans cold from the can. I hadn’t let myself believe it, but that contract had kept me intact, defending the value of each day no matter how I spent it. Now, I could justify my wandering only with discovery.
I was completely unscrewed now, back in an apartment that served no greater purpose than to hold spare shoes and cutlery. Neal was on January term leave from the university and felt hemmed in by the city. Together, we set our eyes on a place with unclear visa restrictions and a reputation as the region’s time capsule, isolated from the Gulf by money and dialect and money—Yemen has yet to achieve membership in the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes the other six states on the Arabian Peninsula. It was the kind of set-apart place I hoped would let me feel like the photographer who first stood on the moon and watched the Earth rise. In my state of blankness, Yemen was the capital.
I was saying my good-byes to people I knew and didn’t, people I liked and didn’t, as they flitted between the two buildings on the university’s temporary campus. It seemed strange to everyone that I’d leave now, as the school had started to settle into its routine, as our expat cohort was finally finding its footing and the beaches beckoned. Brittany understood the urge; she was an anthropologist who studied Yemen and gushed about it at the wooden table outside the cafeteria where I seemed to be holding casual court. “I went overland once all the way south by taxis,” Brittany said. “I went alone in Peugots, completely alone in 1999, as a woman, in Peugots filled with men, from Sanaa to Taiz and Ibb and Hudeidah and Aden.”
She would entrust Neal and me later with two copies of her thick book intended for a friend, an outspoken journalist in Somaliland. All we had was his name, but if we found ourselves in Somalia’s secessionist province across the water from Yemen, she said, it would be lovely if we could seek him out. We said sure.
Like everyone I had ever met who had been to Yemen, she oozed with knowledge and opinion about the place, and wonder. No one returned from Yemen unaffected. “You might want to do the things that in any other place you would consider touristy,” she said. “Everything is off the beaten track at this point.”
Jamal, a freshman from the Yemeni capital, found me at the table. We’d met first at the weekend where potential students flew in for a last round of the admissions process; Jamal had arrived a week early to escape the violence in Sanaa. “I was in the airplane and I looked down, and you could see these beautiful flower-like formations around all the gas stations that went out for miles and miles and miles. People just waiting for gas.”
Yemen retreated into the otherworldly partly because the world wouldn’t have it. “It’s kind of like a fetishized place, which is . . . cool,” he said. “Even Yemenis fetishize it, so we don’t want to live anywhere else.” It was poetic and lovely, but with a fat caveat: “Except, if they open like visa situation here. Then everybody would move to the Gulf.”
When it was time to come to school, he did have visa troubles with the UAE. “So I ran to the ambassador’s house and was like, ‘Please give me a visa quick, I need to go to university.’ ” It worked. I loved that kind of administrative mushiness—not for what it revealed about the power of elites, but for showing how a connection between single people could cut through chaos. There was still the promise of discovery through little collisions with one another.
There was that promise, and then there was the planning to make that promise bear fruit. Before taking off for uncertain places, I sought advice most intently from nearby sources. Even though some of them told me not to go, the Pashtun tailors down the block had given me useful advice and clothes for my days in Afghanistan. Iman had picked sandals for me to wear in Pakistan. These meetings gave me a kind of confidence simply by rev
ealing something tangible in my blank predictions—they are from there, so there is a place. And there was always the jitter-reducing province of preparation for its own sake, despite how little preparation I really accomplished. If I was still answering a twelve-year-old’s questions, I had to stay as much like him as I could. I didn’t buy guidebooks or cram regional history or stockpile toiletries I might not find abroad. And if I went on travel forums to measure the off-ness of a city’s limits, I looked for threads that suggested even the faintest possibility (and always found it) that the door was still open, and took that tiny hope as good enough.
It was unconscious sleight of mind to maintain the place’s mystery, all while distracting myself from the kind of true fear that would keep me away from an airport. I titrated my ignorance to keep me just afraid enough. Travel without fear is nothing, as Camus liked to say, or said once.
The flat winter sun beat down hard around the umbrella and Jamal prepared me with useful Yemeni dialect: qabili, “tribal matters,” rubta, “a bundle (of qat, the stimulant shrub),” muftahin, “chillin’.” This was practically everything I packed in my head.
Before that, this was all that I knew (and I knew it then in even less detail): on October 12, 2000, a boat rigged with explosives detonated against the hull of the USS Cole, moored in the Aden harbor. Yemen materialized instantly in the public consciousness of the United States. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility and, after September 11, the Yemeni government began to cooperate with the War on Terror, accepting in return tens of millions of dollars (and rising) in military aid.
Arabic students from American universities began to flock to Yemen in small, adventurous numbers. Yemen, now uncovered, was the place for unspoiled immersion.
The Arab Spring and the government’s abusive reaction put all of this on hold.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 23