So we went to Cap D’or last night.
I went with a couple women who are staying at my hostel and one of their friends, whom they met while working in Kuwait, joined us for a spell.
I’ve been there once before, I met Essam there a couple weeks ago, and it’s so lovely like a spot in Brooklyn might be: like with an old oak bar-top and enough bar snacks to keep you there.
So the woman who joined us, a resident but not a local Cairene in the traditional respect, is named Madeline and she lives in Maadi where a lot of them live.
And of course I mean ex-pats.
Now Madeline is a goddamned delight. Don’t get me wrong. Seriously, believe me when I tell you that she is the real goddamned deal. But I cannot fucking stand ex-pat culture, particularly when they’re all grouped together in some big, dirty, “foreign” city like Cairo. And as I contemplate whether or not I’m going to leave, looking at the classifieds and finding out that all the short-term rentals are either in Maadi or New Cairo or Zemelek or the new developments on the west side of Giza, I’m not enthused about my options.
Because why would I hole up in Cairo only to be surrounded by a bunch of Americans? I might as well go just go back to the States.
Even the word itself is so goddamned insidious. Like, you can’t suffer admitting you’re an immigrant because you know how horrendously your home country treats immigrants, so you call yourself an ex-pat to distinguish yourself from the rest of ‘them’.
And yeah, I hear you. This word connotes more than simple neo-colonialism, it connotes a certain temporal quality, like you could repatriate at any time. But that’s exactly the thing, though: the option to go home is a privilege so few ex-pats realize for what it is.
I mentioned that Madeline is dope though, right?
I mean, I guess I keep saying that because by and large, in my own extremely anecdotal experience, though Madeline is not, ex-pats are the goddamned worst. Somehow, even though they’ve managed to venture out into the wide world, they’re too frequently even less woke than the folks you might encounter in their home countries. It’s like they’ve left home with the express purpose of fleeing something rather than finding something new, and that thing they’re fleeing is, more often than not, scrutiny.
I’m saying that too many of them couldn’t hack it back in the States or the UK or Australia.
And this is often because they are closed minded, uneducated people who fumbled their way into a degree, yet have routinely failed to learn anything of true importance, particularly when it comes to navigating the people of this world.
And then, AND THEN, they move to some new place where no one asks too many questions, and they’re all shoved into these insular, western neighborhoods where everyone else is in the same boat. And since they never peer through the glass of their little bubble of a life, they never have to question why everyone else who resides there live in a way so disparate from how they do.
Cairo is home to some of the most abject poverty in the whole of the world. And I’m not saying that I’m out engaging with it all the time, but you can’t walk around without seeing it. It’s everywhere. I can see it downtown, which is relatively sterile. In other neighborhoods it’s even more obvious.
So what kind of life are you living there if you can ignore it for years on end? Who the fuck does that make you?
Ignorant?
Blind?
[The answer is a colonizer.]
xoxo–M