How can you be given to understand?
…How can you be given to understand? To truly understand, I mean; to understand within your very being. For geography, history, and the city, the metropolis, are all lined up in support behind you, and at the end of the day – and come what may – this, here, is your world. But it is not my world, or it is my world only by means of adoption, to the extent that it can adopt me. For it is not strange to me; I am the one who is strange, foreign to it. Any amount of arrogance, of disregard for those gestures, sometimes complimentary and sometimes discriminatory, clad in a curiosity that might be malicious or might be perfectly innocent, doesn’t change the issue in the slightest. I still bear my blood, my faith, and all of these passports – Egyptian, Arab, Muslim – stamped by everything I imagine others to have been taught to imagine about that place I came from; through jokes and offhand comments and the caricatures in newspaper cartoons, and disbelief that it is not very different for all its differences. I go out to buy bread or milk from the grocer’s carrying about the full load of that unfortunate heritage, acting as if I must dress for a soiree, must don my most precious jewelry for a bicycle jaunt in the countryside. I know well that the flaw lies in me. I know that it is up to me to strip myself of my identity, or to act as though I am nothing more than an individual without ties – that I have no family, no nation, no memory, and no longing for a place that was unquestionably my world. In my status as unattached individual, those jokes would not injure me, and no amount of teasing would touch me. The bigoted and the limited would not afflict me. Why should their words have any effect on me, anyway? No one forced me under threat of penance to come here, so why should I force anyone to bear the consequences of my feelings?
from Leaves of Narcissus by Somaya Ramadan
translated by Marilyn Booth
