My friend Lamisse posts a picture on my Facebook wall, captioned:
i guess if i was gonna spot your doppelganger in cairo, its only fitting she’s looking at books haha. miss u love u <3
For half a second I think I’m looking at a picture of myself before I remember I haven’t been in Cairo since last January, well over a year ago. The woman in the picture’s mouth is a bit smaller than mine and her nose is a little straighter, but otherwise the resemblance is uncanny. I respost it to Instagram.
Lamisse spotted me in Cairo and I swear if I didn’t know for certain I wasn’t in Cairo yesterday I’d think I’d spotted me too.
A Palestinian friend comments that she has a doppelganger in Palestine as well. Do we all just have doppelgangers back home? she writes.
‘Home’ for me is Melbourne, not Cairo, but I laugh and reply: What if we’re all in some kind of Sliding Doors situation where we have other copies of ourselves living the lives we would have if our families hadn’t had to migrate?
Hours later the question gnaws at me. What if, though? If my parents hadn’t migrated to Australia, would I be living that woman’s life, browsing books stacked on tables in the middle of a Cairo market?
♦
January 2017. Incoming passenger card, Question 11: Were you in Africa, South/Central America or the Caribbean in the last 6 days?
I circle Africa and take my filled-in card to the Border Control officer at Tullamarine Airport.
“Which country were you in?” he asks.
“Egypt.”
He rolls his eyes at me—literally rolls his eyes, like he’s frustrated at me for wasting his time—and scribbles out my answer, changing my Yes to a No before waving me through.
I’m furious. Where, exactly, does he think Egypt is?
I bare my teeth at him in what he probably takes to be a smile and head towards the exit. I’m not looking for trouble here.
♦
I was born in Australia. My father decided to migrate here in 1988, and brought my mother and my then-5-year-old sister with him. I’m not sure why he chose Australia or why he wanted to migrate in the first place; he left my mother three months after my twin and I were born so I never got to ask him about it. I want to ask my mother, maybe talk to her about what coming here was like and how she survived with no English, no formal education, no job and no husband to help her with the small child and two babies he had fathered, but she doesn’t like to talk about that time and I don’t like to reopen old wounds. All I know is we ended up in one of the Housing Commission walk-up flats in Carlton and that’s where I grew up.
Back then, in 1989, Carlton—or at least the estates where we lived—was affectionately called a ghetto; today, it’s a hipster and WASP dream (in the late 1930s, it was a literal slum).
Location, location, gentrification.
My family was relocated from the building we’d lived in for 16 years because of the six hundred million dollar Housing Redevelopment project: “Bulldozing public housing on inner-city estates and rebuilding it alongside private apartments to create a better ‘social mix’,” as Clay Lucas wrote in The Age, a move that “instead concentrated disadvantage while rewarding developers and the state government, research has found”.
In 2015 I drive down Rathdowne Street with a carfull of acquaintances, looking at my old street with nostalgia and a deep sense of loss. I hate the new buildings. Nothing about the street is recognisable anymore. I open my mouth to point out where my old building used to stand, but one of the (white) people in the car beats me to talking.
“It’s so shit they let all these dole bludgers live here for free.”
She turns to her boyfriend. “We been looking to buy a place and we can’t even afford this suburb it’s so expensive, but they just give them out free to all the fucken druggies and blacks and refos here.”
He nods and agrees with her.
I think about the size of the flat my family lived in. The kitchen alone at my current workplace is almost bigger than it was. I remember the mould on the walls that the Housing Commission never bothered with no matter how many times we asked them to fix it. I remember the times we were broken into, the time my mother had her expensive-on-a-Centrelink-income sewing machine stolen and there was nothing the police would do about it.
Our flat was on the first floor of a four-storey walk-up, but even being on the first floor my mother had to walk up the significant flight of stairs with arthritis in both her knees several times a day for 16 years because the building wasn’t accessible. More if it was a laundry day, because the communal washing machine was another floor up.
I think about our upstairs neighbour, a Lebanese woman and one of my mother’s first friends in Australia, who worked like a dog until she could afford to start her own business and move out of Commission housing.
I think about how my siblings and I all started working the minute we were legally old enough to so we didn’t have to ask our mother for pocket money when we knew she didn’t have much to spare. How we successfully scrambled our way through school and TAFE and university without the benefit of parents who could help us with our homework or pay for private tutoring. I think about how proud my mother looked at our graduation ceremonies.
Once in 2012, when I was working at the YMCA Accommodation on Lygon Street as a receptionist—an accommodation directly beside and behind some of the Commission buildings—one of the white Australian residents remarked casually mid-conversation that the migrants in the flats were all dirty, loud rats who should be put in a corner and shot. I think he thought I was Spanish. I couldn’t say a word because I was new to the job and had already listened to my supervisor say horrible things to me about Muslims the week before. I think she thought I was Coptic. I went home crying both days.
I think about all this as I drive and clench my fists around the steering wheel, hating this white woman for reminding me I don’t belong here, wondering why I let her in my car, fighting the urge to let loose and scream at her till my voice is hoarse.
She can’t see any of this. All she sees is prime real estate that, as a white Australian, she feels entitled to. The rest of us should be hidden away somewhere, not seen or heard, just quietly grateful to our “real Australian” overlords for the privilege.
♦
In highschool a classmate affectionately calls me a sand n—. It’s the first time I’ve heard the term, and I’m more confused by it than anything else.
“We’re Arabs, so we’re not n—s, we’re sand n—s,” she explains.
I look it up on Urban Dictionary. Noun; a person of Middle Eastern descent due to the various desert regions there.
Or, if you change the ‘er’ to an ‘a’ at the end: A middle eastern brotha down with da homies.
But I’m not Middle Eastern. I’m North African.
“Egypt’s basically in the Middle East. If you were black then you’d be African.”
♦
In 2014 Rupert Murdoch takes to Twitter to defend the whitewashing of Egyptians in the film Exodus: Gods and Kings:
I’m not on Twitter in 2014, so I make my snide comments in a Facebook post.
“So Rupert Murdoch finally answered a question that’s been bugging me: am I white? Turns out yes, all Egyptians are! Thanks Rupert Murdoch, you’re a hero.”
I wasn’t about to let someone so far removed from my reality like Murdoch define me. But he’s not the only one thinking it. Last month an Indian woman looked at me with serious confusion and said, “But you’re brown?” when I told her I wasn’t Indian but Egyptian; in 2009 a POC friend told me that I was technically white since Arabs are part of the Caucasian race.
♦
An article is published in 2017: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC’S DNA ANALYSIS CONCLUDES THAT EGYPTIANS ARE ONLY 17% ARAB.
National Geographic answers the age-old question of whether Egyptians are genetically Arab or North African? Can you guess how much of Egyptians genetic makeup is North African? The results will surprise you.
Ancestry.com and DNA testing is all the hype lately. I joke with friends that ever since ‘diversity’ became the new hip trend, white people are lining up to claim the >1% ‘diverse’ DNA they think will make them more interesting.
Ancestry.com even boasts this on their website; in their AncestryDNA section they showcase some ‘real-life discoveries’, including this gem:
Australian Ali Clemesha thought she knew her ethnic background, but her DNA results revealed so much more with some exotic surprises.
Clemesha, self-described “typical looking Aussie girl, a blonde, blue eyed, surfer who grew up in the Eastern Suburbs” was shocked to discover she “was a small percentage North African”.
Things that make you go hmmm.
But when my twin brother suggests we split the costs of getting a genetic test, I consider it. I want desperately to settle the question, once and for all, of whether I am ethnically African, Arab or Other.
According to Genographic Project: Reference Populations, Egyptians are generally 68% North African, but this reference population is based on native Egyptians and we have no idea if we count as native. We were born in Australia. We have no way of telling how we fit into those numbers: does our individual DNA lean more towards that 68%, or are we above that average 17% Arab DNA?
Are we more of the coloniser, or of the colonised?
Ultimately, we don’t get the test, because it’s a waste of time and money and we’re not so flush we can throw $99 down our identity crisis drain. It’s common knowledge that these spit tests are not nearly as accurate as they market themselves to be; an Ancestry.com test can’t possibly tell me who my ancestors were.
♦
What does Africa look like? I search for traces of Africa in my face, in my hands, in my body. Last year I contemplated taking a trip to India and was confronted by a question on the visa application: What recognisable features do you have?
I thought about it for a while before settling on curly hair, big lips, glasses. My hair is my mother’s, my lips my father’s. The glasses are mine.
I look mostly like my mother. I have her height, her cheekbones. Is Africa in my mother? She’s the source of my cultural markings: my language, my (admittedly underused) sense of filial obligation, my tendency to take my shoes off inside any house and overfeed my guests.
She taught her children to speak Arabic in our dialect, collected Egyptian films and plays on VHS tapes for us to watch, told us Egyptian folktales for bedtime stories. She cooked us molokhia, kushari, fūl and waraq einab, singing classic Um Kalthoum, Farid El-Atrash and Abdel Halim Hafiz songs as she worked. She made friends with Egyptian families and dragged us to their Eid gatherings at Heidelberg mosque (unofficially known as the Egyptian and Somali mosque) to ensure we grew up with some sense of community. In this way, she inadvertently taught us to understand ourselves in an Australian context.
But for all that, I don’t know how invested my mother is in a sense of place—I think for her, ‘home’ is her family, not a country or a continent. Years ago I asked her if she’d ever consider going back to Egypt permanently, maybe to retire there. She turned to me and asked, “Would you kids come as well?”
When I said probably not, she shrugged and replied, “Well what would be the point, then?”
♦
In 2018 a friend invites me to get involved in a workshop she’s running to help young women from refugee backgrounds develop their business ideas. I decline due to conflicting commitments—I’d taken too many days off my full-time job already and wasn’t out here trying to lose my job. We catch up for dinner later that evening instead.
“How’d it go today?” I ask.
“Great!” she says. “Struggled a bit with the language barriers though.”
“What languages did they speak?”
“African ones, mostly.”
“Oh,” I say. “Shame I couldn’t be there. I speak an African language.”
“Really? Which?”
“Arabic.”
Confusion flits across her face for a moment.
“It’s fairly common in North African countries.”
She smiles. “Languages from the Horn of Africa,” she clarifies.
“Right, ’course.”
I contemplate pointing out that Eritrea, Somalia and Djibouti are in the Horn of Africa: Somalia and Djibouti are members of the Arab League, Eritrea is an observer state of the League, and Arabic is one of the languages spoken in those countries.
But I decide against it. I see her point. Arabic’s not an ‘African language’; it’s not native to the continent, though it has been around for over a thousand years, since the Arabs began colonising the region in the late 7th century.
♦
In early January 2017 I’m on a bus to Giza with my mother and little brother when it suddenly strikes me that while I love the idea of Egypt, I hate the reality of being there.
It’s my third visit, my first as an adult, and it’s the first time I realise that in this overgrown city of 9 million people I feel like each and every one of them recognises me as an interloper.
I don’t belong here.
Although nobody specifically tells me to, I stick to wearing skirts and long jackets, thinking they help me blend in. My mother does specifically ask me to take the ring out of my nose, though, as well as remove the rings from 8 of my 10 ear piercings, and to tie up my hair to tame the curls since I’d refused to get a Keratin treatment before we left Australia. It’s extremely important I don’t shame both her and myself in front of our extended family. Proper girls don’t gallivant about in jeans and t-shirts and multiple piercings; do you want people to think I didn’t raise you right? Why do you insist on looking like street trash?
From my seat on the bus I see crowds of people who look like me. Similar features, various shades of similar colouring. It’s an odd thing to look out of a window and not see an array of whiteness. The traffic is unordered, chaotic: horns blazing, cars weaving all over the place. A body lays prone on a highway—accident victim or homeless person trying to get some rest? It’s hard to tell. There’s so much smog and smoke in the sky the sun itself looks like it’s choking.
I feel like I’m choking, too.
I feel stifled here. I am a shadow of my Australian self. I speak Egyptian well enough to be easily understood but not well enough to show any personality. I struggle to convey my sense of humour in any language other than English, which wouldn’t be important if my cousins and aunts weren’t hilarious. They keep me in stitches and I want to banter along with them but I can’t.
I find myself wishing my twin had come with the rest of the family on this trip; he gets along here much better than I do and I could have taken comfort in his shadow. Instead my little brother is sitting next to me on the bus, as stifled and uncomfortable as I am, and I’m grateful for the camaraderie of that at least. Of all of us he sounds the least Egyptian when he talks, so the entire trip for him has been a chorus of Shut up, don’t talk, if you open your mouth people will know to charge us higher prices.
♦
My mother adds me to a WhatsApp group she’s created, aptly named Silat Rahim (literally, ‘Uterus Link’, meaning: Family Connection). I barely know most of the family members on it but I try to engage anyway. It’s good practice.
My cousin Esraa asks if any of us are on Instagram, but I’ve never seen the word written as ‘إنستا’ before, so I don’t immediately get it. When I ask for clarification I inadvertently sound like I’m poking fun of her use of an English word and the other cousins get in on it.
See what you’ve done! You’ve embarrassed us in front of the foreigners!
Foreigner. Not Australian, not African, not Arab or Egyptian. Foreigner. Now there’s a word that fits.
About the author
Hella Ibrahim is the founder and editorial director of Djed Press.