Locked down in Cairo, I'm forced to confront my past – and see it with fresh eyes
From noon till sunset, the Cairo skies are dotted with kites. The schools have been shut for months now, and so the children began to fly kites. The few green spaces in the city are closed, the usually clogged streets and pavements less crowded, but the skies grow busier every day.
It all happened quickly here. I was in Cairo when the first cases of coronavirus were identified on cruise ships in March. There were no drawnout deliberations over whether to lock down or not, no appeals from scientists. Once it was confirmed that Covid-19 was in the country, the government imposed a partial lockdown and closed the airports.
In the first few weeks it felt like the country was trying to find its bearings, with Cairo, a densely populated city, adjusting to living at half the pace. No one was sure what was open, what activities were allowed, or even how enforceable the restrictions were. All restaurants and cafes were ordered to close, but if I walked down a narrow side street away from the more policed thoroughfares, I would stumble across a hole-in-thewall cafe, where the regulars carried on smoking and drinking.
I have walked a lot since the lockdown started. Cairo is a city I know well. I went to university here, and visited various family members who have lived and studied here over the years. But this is the longest period I have spent in the city for more than two decades, and my walks traced the footsteps of those earlier times. Every day I would pass my old university dorms, corner shops I used to buy snacks from, cafes, student hangouts, all now shuttered.
So much of the old city I knew still exists, but it is now overgrown with ivy, its walls cracked, spaces claimed by cats and the accumulated debris of decades. So many of the grand old houses I used to gawp at as a teenager, their
windows flickering with antique chandeliers, their marble Ottoman pillars glistening in the sunlight, are now abandoned wrecks. The windows are black and hollow, their entrances agape and empty. Too expensive to tear down, too dilapidated to renovate.
But no matter how unsalvageable they appear to passersby, these empty shells are fiercely protected by live-in custodians – against what I am never sure. There is nothing worth stealing. Having returned to a city so different to the one I left, I couldn’t help but think that this was a metaphor. That here was a Cairo, an Egypt that was for ever lost – to corruption, to failed revolution, to the decamping of the better-off to newer parts of the city, and to impoverishment – its carcass still tenaciously guarded, waiting for a resurrection.
What is left of the city is trying, and sometimes succeeding, to fight a pandemic in circumstances where millions don’t have the option to socially distance and where the health system cannot sustain the onslaught.
A sort of older, more accomplished sibling to Sudan, the country of my birth, Egypt has always been to me, and many other Sudanese who can afford it, a refuge. It has always punched above its weight in terms of education and medical care. And it was doing so again, with the little resources it had. While I wrote about the UK, where people were still bickering about lockdown and flattening the sombrero, here billboards were being put up and text messages sent telling us to stay home.
But it’s an impossible task. The city continued to teem. Streets were transformed into parking lots as couples who could no longer meet in public venues went on furtive dates in their cars. The “corona couples” is how they are jokingly referred to.
During Ramadan, group prayers that couldn’t take place in mosques just migrated to the pavement. The fasting month was the most difficult period of lockdown. As they did all over the world, the rich tasked the poor with the fulfilment of their needs. Key workers masked up and brought the world to those who were sheltering, then retreated to gather outside with their own. To see a maximalist city like Cairo shrink was disorienting, but to see it happen during Ramadan brought on a sense of profound sadness. The cancelling of the communal aspects of those 30 days for the first time in generations brought home just how much the virus had hijacked normal life.
The lockdown got stricter at some point, with a curfew that started at 6pm, and so I walked in the early mornings. As life got smaller, as the number of cases began to rise, as family members and friends fell ill, it began to feel like there was less and less room to coexist with the sense of calamity. One could only lean into it, into the grief, and the inevitability of loss.
My time in Cairo when I was younger was an unhappy one, and it was an experience that remained with me. I remember being so impatient to grow up, to be free, to plot a path away from a restrictive home and intrusive family.
Now, under the shadow of the pandemic, all that I had wanted to escape seemed to represent precious comfort. As I walked through my old life again and again, I felt like I was haunting myself, or that my old self was haunting me, I wasn’t sure which. And while I took stock of all the losses, my own and those of a country I loved, the kites seemed to increase in number, soar higher and more audaciously over the skies of Cairo. I thought I had plotted a straight path, but the path turned out to be a circle.
• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
my sexuality. I stumbled upon a lot of terms and one of them was “nonbinary”. At the time, I didn’t really understand it. And I thought, OK, if I feel like it one day, maybe I’ll look it up again. After two years, I was like, OK, this feeling that I don’t identify as either a man or a woman is more intense.
The internet had a big role in me discovering myself. Online, I felt understood. I felt helped. I feel like the internet tells us stuff that we can’t learn in real life. People never hesitated to explain stuff to me even if I asked the dumbest questions. I know some people have some classes [about gender and sexuality], but where I live, we only have class about safe ways to have sex, basically. We don’t talk about sexuality.
I haven’t come out to my family. My family’s supportive, but I’m scared to tell them about it [in case] in a couple of years I don’t feel like calling myself non-binary any more and I have to do the whole thing again. With some of my friends, I was just like, Do you know what non-binary is? If they know, I’ll tell them I’m non-binary, and they’re like, oh, cool. If they don’t know, I’ll explain it and tell them I like to be called River instead of whatever you called me before.
I’ve never had the experience of coming out to someone who didn’t agree with me. There are some people in my class that don’t know about me being non-binary, and I’m pretty sure if I told them they would start insulting me.
A lot of the hate that comes to the non-binary community is from people trying to regulate how you identify. They’re like, oh, you can’t identify like this because you were born like that. Well, it’s my body. It’s my identity. It’s how I feel. It’s not how you feel.
Ellie, 13, Oregon: ‘Nobody has told me I’m too young to know I’m nonbinary’
My family is extremely queer. I’ve grown up with so many gay aunts and I’ve been to so many weddings and I’ve been really fortunate to be in a situation where it was always OK to be me. I’ve known for a while now that I wasn’t quite in the gender binary. I wasn’t sure what the word was for a long time until I started getting into the internet and seeing people saying, like, “I am nonbinary” or “I’m gender-fluid”. So I investigated and realized that using they/ them pronouns works the best for me.
Because I was 11 when I came out, most of my friends didn’t know the word. They weren’t online, they were a lot more immature then, and I think that really affected how they viewed it. But my closest friends, of course, were just like, oh, yeah, OK.
Nobody has told me I’m too young to know I’m non-binary, but I watch a lot of YouTube videos of younger people coming out and people comment, oh, you’re too young to know.
And I do my best not to turn the hate back on them. It does make me feel kind of invalidated, even if it’s not directed at me.
One of the things that has made me feel really supported online is fandoms. I discovered that other people were like me through fandoms. I found Harry Potter fan fiction and some of the people who write it had “they/them” in their bio online. It was the closest thing to representation I had.
Eventually I ended up watching shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and that really showed me that I had a bigger community out there that supported everyone. And that made me feel really happy.