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He leans in close and says, "Wahid." His
dark-brown eyes are beautiful, too beautiful not to stare into, but he
wants me to
look at his mouth. His name is Hanny, he's only twenty-one, and he won't
let me have what I need until I repeat after him.
"Wahid," I say.
It's not good enough, so he doesn't give me what's in his hand: the eggplant. He makes me repeat the word again. To say wahid correctly — the word means "one" in Arabic — the "h" must be breathy, like you're fogging up a mirror. When Hanny says it, it's like he's exhaling sex.
Hanny works at my local produce market in Cairo. Ever
since I arrived a few months ago, he's been teaching me Arabic.
He
makes
me
say
the
numbers and names right — khamsa tamahtiim, talata basal — before
he'll charge me for my purchase. His sly, sexy eyes fluster me, as does the fact
that he's twenty-one. (I'm thirty-six.) I had wanted to seduce him for a long
time, before I finally realized I couldn't figure out how. So I gave up. It's
precisely what Egypt wanted me to do.
Having grown up in Pennsylvania as a product of Catholic
grade
school, Catholic high school, Catholic mass every Sunday and still-persistent
Catholic
guilt,
I thought
I knew
something about being suffused with religion. As a girl, I was a prude; I lost
my virginity late.
For a while afterward, I mostly had sex just
to see what it was like — it had been such an unknown quantity. But
once I moved to Egypt for a journalism job I found on the Internet, I realized
how mild my bout with religion had been.
Here, a kiss is enough to merit gasps.
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Egypt isn't just a country of Muslims but a Muslim country, and the distinction
looms large. Church and state overlap; morality — namely drinking, gambling,
and sex — is legislated. If your passport says you're Egyptian, you can't
set foot in one of Cairo's cheerless casinos. If you're an Egyptian couple and
can't prove you're married, you can't rent a hotel room. And where laws don't
apply, society steps in. It's right there between Hanny and me, between every
anxious, horny teenage boy and girl in Egypt who can't be seen in public holding
hands, between every horny adult male and female, each of whom is likely
still stuck with the sweaty-palmed anxiety they never got over in their teens.
Islam forbids sex outside of marriage, but unlike
in Christianity, the faithful still do something about it. Just as in an Edith
Wharton
novel — think Lily Bart's omnipresent tormentors in The
House of Mirth — society is a pervasive, relentless enforcer of sexual
mores. A kiss here is enough to merit gasps. When an American friend of mine
walks down her street in jeans and a long-sleeve blouse, a neighborhood man
regularly hisses at her, "Cover yourself!" Sex scenes are clipped out of American
movies by state censors, and subtitles are manipulated to reinforce dominant
values. In the recent Hannibal Lecter flick Red Dragon, Emily Watson's
blind, naïve character asks serial murderer Ralph Fiennes if he wants to join
her for a cup of coffee. "Would you like to come up for an alcoholic drink?" is
what flashes across the bottom of the screen in Arabic. The logic is that she
clearly wants sex, and one bad thing naturally goes hand in hand with another.
Society conspires to make it difficult for a man
and a woman even to be alone together. Single adults live with their parents. "You
stay with your family until you get married," one Egyptian co-worker in her late
twenties told me. "Egypt will never, ever accept anything different. Ever." If
you're a foreigner living alone, or a married person whose spouse isn't at home,
it's scandalous to let someone of the opposite sex come into your apartment.
When I first signed a lease in an upscale Cairo neighborhood that's popular with Westerners, my sweet older landlady instructed me not to open
the
door if
a man
from the
gas or electric company came by with a bill. Then, to make sure I understood,
she repeated it in Arabic to my bilingual real estate agent, who said it again
to me in English.
The bawab is the most tangible sign of sexual
surveillance in Egypt, a system that begins at home. |
When the electric-company man does come around with my bill, he is escorted to
my door by the public representative of the Egyptian sexual surveillance system:
my bawab.
Every residential building in Cairo has a bawab,
or doorman. For $10 a month, he takes out your trash, washes your car, greets
you as you come and go. As a bonus, he monitors your every move. Right
inside
my
building's front door, there's a room the size of a broom closet. There I can
find
my
bawab,
Mahmoud, or
one of
his young sons, Sammy and Akhmed, at any hour of the day. Around
midnight, they lock the front door and put a brick
on the floor behind it. When I come home late at night, even if I manage to
unlock
and
open
the
door quietly,
the brick scrapes along the floor, and I wake the bawab. He emerges
from his post to solemnly, pointedly wish me a good evening. As a result, if
anybody — a family member, a landlord — wanted to know about my habits
and improprieties, a few bills in the bawab's hand would produce any information they wanted.
Marie, an American friend working in Egypt, told
me how, one night her boyfriend phoned around 12. He wanted to see
her; he was in the neighborhood. Knowing that she couldn't invite him
up to her apartment, she snuck out past her sleeping bawab.
Her boyfriend pulled up to the curb a short distance away, and they leaned against
the
car,
talking. A few minutes later, my
friend looked over and saw her bawab sweeping the sidewalk in front
of the
building's
entranceway.
He didn't say anything. He was just there.
The bawab is the most tangible sign of sexual
surveillance in Egypt, a system that begins at home. Because improper behavior
has the ability to "reflect badly" on the family, dates are held at home, under parental
supervision.
Parents have the power to call off their children's weddings. Because the system
is such
an
accepted way of life, it took me a while to register the
reality of it — to understand that, even during my first couple of months
in Cairo — those months of resigned celibacy! — my neighbors and bawab viewed
me as
a slut.
I know an Egyptian woman raised in London who hasn't
spoken to her Egyptian relatives ever since they started calling her a whore — a British whore,
to be precise — for going out to public events such as art openings and
movies
with her boyfriend. "We got married because we just couldn't deal with it anymore," she
told me. One Western-raised Egyptian woman won't go to restaurants with a man
because her family is well known. A date isn't worth the trouble it would cause,
she explains. She tells me of other things that remain deeply hidden to me as
a foreigner: stories of women subjected to prenuptial hymen tests, of female
genital
mutilation.
I work with a thirty-year-old Egyptian woman who's clever and funny. She reads Milan
Kundera and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in English translation and happens to
wear a head scarf. Once when someone suggested that she get a ride home with
a male co-worker, she said flatly, "I couldn't do that. Alone in a car with a
man? No."
Some
women will linger on the streets at night and slip into
the front seat of a random man's car.
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The effect of all these rules isn't exactly surprising. There's a ton of illicit
stuff going on. Although they're expected to stick to public spaces like sidewalks and parks,
couples find places to go for sex. Adults resort to teenage tactics,
making out in dark, parked cars and lying to their parents about where
they were. With few, if any, outlets to meet men, some women will linger on
the streets at night and slip into the front seat of a random man who
pulls up in a nice car. Some women will give a taxi driver a little thrill by
letting him peek behind the veils that cover their faces.
My Catholic upbringing taught me the particularly sweet pleasure of transgression. But transgressing is no fun here, because just about everything I do is forbidden. I break rules I don't even know about. I never thought about how many times I made eye contact with a guy — a friendly "good morning" or a simple acknowledgement that he's sharing the sidewalk with me — until
I stopped doing so in Cairo, where it invites anything from blatant stares to
unwelcome touches. At the same time, I've become an embarrassingly drop-jawed
ogler at any glimpse of sex, whether it be a ludicrous Christina Aguilera video
on a bar's satellite feed or Western tourists kissing in front of a medieval
Islamic fortress, or a sultry, sweaty ad in a French magazine, like the one I
saw the other day which made me literally lightheaded for the rest of the afternoon.
I
never used to be like this.
But I've never before lived in such a restrictive culture.
If you're a liberal in any arena — sexual, political — there's really no movement in Egypt that you can latch onto and support. The reasons are many. For one, Islam spells out very specific rules for women's conduct and rights regarding such things as marriage, divorce and employment. They're widely followed. In addition, most Arab countries see it as a matter of pride not to adopt what they see as loose Western standards. There are academics in Egypt who are feminists, but their main call is for political change. After all, when the country's first female judge was appointed in early 2003, many TV and radio commentators were vocally unhappy about it. That's what feminists are up against.
It's true that Egypt isn't Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan under the Taliban, but there are still men and women here who believe, as a thirteenth-century Muslim scholar put it, that "the whole of the [woman's] body is to be regarded as pudental and no part of her may lawfully be seen." Even when this line of thought is diluted a hundredfold, the effect is that a woman's mere solitude can be interpreted as an advertisement for sex. It's exasperating, because it cuts off access to all the fun stuff we get to do that truly is sexy.
I've
fantasized about saying something to Hanny, something that
could be interpreted as either dirty or innocent. |
Case in point: one day a friend was riding the subway, and as the train pulled into a station, a man brushed against her. She looked up to find him standing outside the open doors. "I'm waiting," he intoned — actually believing, on some level, that she might get up and join him. A few weeks after I arrived in Cairo, a soldier was listlessly guarding a nearly empty subway station when he walked toward me and stared. All I was doing was sitting and reading. After hovering for a bit, he hissed and said something I couldn't understand. "What?" I naively asked in Arabic. He kept his distance and stared, and finally spoke a few more words, one of which was "sex," but he waited until a train on the opposite track pulled up, effectively drowning out most of what he was saying, which is the perfectly telling anecdote for sex in Egypt: If I say it and she can't quite hear me, maybe I haven't said it at all, or maybe I'll get laid.
In a certain respect,
I'm sympathetic to that soldier. I've fantasized about saying something
to Hanny, something that could be interpreted as either dirty or innocent.
I'd take my cue from the way his eyes did or didn't hold mine after
I said it. If I say it and he can't quite understand me, maybe I haven't
said it at all, or maybe I'll get laid.
I haven't said anything, though. Instead, Hanny and
I have begun an innocent form of intercourse: we're tutoring each other. I'm
teaching him to read English, and he's teaching me more Arabic. When we were
deciding where to meet for our lessons, we couldn't come up with a good option.
He kept being coy, saying "I don't know, I don't know," shaking his head. Finally
I
said that I wished we could just go to my apartment, but it would
look
bad.
He
said not
to worry. As he explained, "Everyone around here knows me." They do;
his store is popular. But what was his point? That everyone knows that he's
a respectable guy? When he walks into my place to learn the English alphabet,
is every bawab up and down the street saying to the next bawab, "You
know Hanny,
what a nice guy"? Or are they nodding to each other saying, "Lucky guy — alone
with the slut"?
I may not be sleeping with Hanny. But at
least all the people watching me in
my neighborhood — and that's probably everyone — think I am. What's
dismaying, though, is that considering their limited exposure to it, the sex
I'm having in their minds probably isn't that good.
n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Theresa Everline has worked as an arts editor, a
managing editor, and a freelance writer in St. Louis,
New Orleans, Orlando, New York City, and Cairo.
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©2003 Theresa Everline and
Nerve.com
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