Kemet
I was 6 years old in 2008 when we took an airplane from Cairo to San Diego. Why did we leave? Why did we drop everything we’d ever known for the potential of knowing something better? Was it better?
To be migrant is to be confused, to be lost, to be misunderstood, to be told you don’t belong. To be migrant is to be without place. To have place is to feel one belongs in physical space. Being migrant is an alienating experience, however immigrants are resilient and through spatial forms of identity and place-making they can regain their agency and forge a new identity. Created places, that is to say architecture, is a way for immigrants to hybridize identity, to understand identity, and to find home.
The Living Room : Beginnings
Hidden away in suburbia lies an oasis of grafted and remixed elements from a land far away. In the beginning there was a general sense of naivete, a full-fledged assimilation. I had yet to be confronted with the contradiction which was brewing as a result of my migrantness. I was young and malleable. Life was simple. We lived in a 1 bedroom apartment. The four of us squeezed on two beds between one bathroom, a kitchen and a living room. The living room…
The living room is a place where you socialize with those closest to you. Where memories are made, bonds are deepend, arguments are had, and makeups are reconciled. For Egyptians the living room is also where you accept and entertain guests. It’s often the first impression someone has of your home; of who you are. It’s a significant space, which defines the way others perceive you but also the way you construct and present yourself. The living room can be understood as an architecture of the self: A space representative of the people which inhabit it.
Our living room was a place where worlds collided. To America we brought with us our culture, traditions, and physical belongings. These objects, determined by what could fit in a suitcase, constituted a home in America. Egyptian trinkets mingled with the ephemera of everyday American life. An old CRT TV from Goodwill laden with ornate Egyptian textiles known as mafaaresh. Rich decorated rugs of crimson and gold covered the American Oak wood floorboards. Instead of eating seated on the floor at a tablie we sat at a second hand IKEA dining table from the 90’s eating molokhia and koshary. These spatial moments were physical manifestations of the merging of two cultures and the creation of a new identity. Still largely undefined, still infant but distinctly new and different. At this scale of architecture, assemblage constituted the construction of this new identity. Furniture and household objects, of Egyptian and American origin, spatialized an empty box and created a sense of familiarity among that which was unfamiliar. The living room proved to be a place where the immigrant was no longer migrant. A home away from home. An amalgam of what they once knew: where they came from and what they now know: the culture which they’ve chosen to adopt. The living room because it is owned and private can be quickly retrofitted to create a sense of place without external influence. The living room is the first moment of migrant agency. The first moment we have an immediate and personal control over space and architecture.
We constructed a place for us and us alone and for a time it seemed normal, we were both from Egypt and now American. Some days we had pancakes, others we had ful.
The Supermarket and the Souq
It wasn’t long before distinct spatial differences, between Egypt and America, became apparent in the public realm and with them the feelings of alienation returned. Differences between the open air markets of Cairo and sprawling supermarkets of suburbia. Between their outdoor cafes (ahwa’s) which overtake the public as places for social interaction and the head-down grab and go attitude of Starbucks. Between the idiosyncratic, ad hoc guerilla urbanization of Cairo and the sameness which washes over swaths of American land.
Outside, in the public realm, I was seemingly without place — again.
The lying started around 4th grade. A friend asked if I had an XBox or Playstation, I didn’t have either but I said I did and made an excuse on why I couldn’t add him as a friend. Something about a forgotten username: a lie fabricated to hide from reality.
Why did I lie?
The Supermarket is a hallmark typology of postwar American capitalism. This brazen, booming behemoth with its endless rows of foodstuff packed in a warehouse larger than most houses epitomized everything new about my life here and everything which I did not have. It is big and loud and is uncompromisingly pregnant with excess. The supermarket flaunts American affluence, an affluence which I did not and could not possess. The supermarket is a physical object of steel and glass; of American exports and imports; of American technological advancement, and of American culture. Everything is pristine and perfect in the Supermarket; it has to be or else it won’t sell. Every detail, from the spatial orientation of each aisle to the placement of advertisements and display cases, is designed to sell and meet quotas. The highly desirables of American cultural life; the iPod nanos and Playstation 3s were foreign to me. I had hand-me-downs and the previous generation and the generation before that. What I was familiar with was unplanned, uncertain and irregular. The souq is an architecture of uncertainties and irregularities. The souq is a type of unplanned open air market which lines the streets of Egypt. It doesn’t have a physical building, it’s a temporary spatial moment. The souq is an alive architecture. Souq’s carry spices, clothes, vegetables, toys, fruits, gold, coffee, souvenirs and meats in repeating patterns down Egyptian streets. They are vibrant and bustling urban architectures of intimate localized human interactions. You can watch a man bargaining with a vendor over the price of tomatoes, a hawker pitching the special deal he has for watermelons and countless women and their children shopping for the week’s groceries. It’s not perfect nor pristine from the fruits themselves to the way in which the architecture is organized. There in the street, vendors selling fruit are placed next to vendors selling meat next to vendors selling clothes. Everything is subject to change and in constant flux. One day the watermelon vendor is there the next day he’s a street down the next he’s not there at all.
Immigrants often don’t feel like they have a place in the public realm because of these exacerbated differences. Certain cultural references lead immediately to disconnect and eventually to alienation. I didn’t know half the things my friends talked about or referenced. I didn’t play Call of Duty, I didn’t listen to Eminem, I didn’t know what rock was and hadn’t seen Napoleon Dynamite. I was ashamed of my souq and envied the supermarket. I lied because all I knew was the souq and out of fear of being further alienated I feigned understanding of the supermarket. “Yea I have that video game.” “Of course I know that artist.” “I have lasagne all the time.” I never denied my Egyptian heritage but I denied the conditions which resulted from my immigration. This led to a crisis of identity, in the same way that it would be impossible to architecturally reconcile the supermarket and souq, it is difficult to reconcile past and present identities related to immigration. In the living room identity seemed to make sense, some things were Egyptian, other things were American in an imperfect collage. It was outside that I found conflict and confusion. Between the supermarket and the souq I couldn’t seem to find myself.
An Ocean Between Cairo and San Diego
I went back to Egypt the summer after I had turned 15. It was then I realized that in America I was an Egyptian and in Egypt I was an American. The identity crisis which had been growing since we first migrated reached its denouement.
But it was also there that I got to see Cairo. Cairo is an assemblage of architectural styles and colonizing scars. A physical reminder of the colonizing powers which have washed through Egypt since the ancient Macedonians. The Persians, Romans, Christians, Arabs, Ottoman Turks, French, and British after them all left a piece of themselves as a going away present and reminder of their part in Egyptian history. To be colonized is to be a migrant in one’s own home. The act of colonization forces one’s own place onto others. This act of erasing the victims’ architectural language in favor of the colonizers’ creates alienation for those who called that place home and in doing so the colonized inadvertently, without any action of their own, become migrant.
However, despite colonization’s forced migration a form of reclamation and agency can still be observed through the appropriation of the architectures of colonizing powers. Tahrir Square and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo were built as part of a long running effort to modernize and westernize Egypt in the 19th and 20th centuries. The square was designed to emulate Paris on the Nile. It was centrally planned, included a roundabout and gardens in the Neoclassical style. The museum which came much later was designed by a French architect, Marcel Dourgnon, and built by an Italian company owned by Giuseppe Garozzo and Francesco Zaffrani. The museum, designed also in the Neoclassical style, was symmetrical, ordered, included Ionic columns, and Greco-roman ornament in addition to ancient Egyptian moldings. The downtown district in Cairo is perfect neoclassical colonial architecture. It is of entirely European origin, farther back than the British, with the ornament and afterthought of Egyptian identity and nothing contemporary at that, only ancient. It is in this way that Egypt became Europe and Egyptians became immigrants. But in 2011 Tahrir Square became the sight of a revolution for the Egyptian people. During this moment of great social upheaval, this traditionally European typology was redefined. The square became a space for protest and place-making. It became a place to redefine what it meant to be Egyptian, what role the government had and what it meant to be in power in Egypt. A historically Westernizing spatial typology was appropriated by the Egyptian people for their purpose and their identity.
Similarly in a moment of great personal discourse and contention I realized it was neither her nor there. I wasn’t one or the other but both. In doing so redefining what it meant to be an immigrant: I was EgyptianAmerican and AmericanEgyptian. I spoke Arabic and English interchangeably and often simultaneously, I combined aish baladi and cheeseburgers, and I spatialized my living room with Egyptian and American architecture.
Finding Place
The living room is a story of immigrants who have come to a new world and the spatial devices which they use to create hybrid identity. The souq and supermarket is a metaphor for the two worlds migrants feel caught in between and the way their spatial and architectural qualities represent those experiences. The square is a tale of people made migrant in their own home and the spatial processes by which they reclaim it.
We are all in some way or another trying to find place: spatial representations of ourselves. For those of us who are migrants these representations are not immediately present and have to be created and found. In Egypt there is a saying Masr Om el Donya, it means “Egypt is the mother of the world,” it’s a saying Egyptians say to each other and themselves as a reminder of the cultural heritage we come from. It’s a saying which reinforces our place in the world and the worlds place in Egypt. Despite the centuries of migrancy Egypt nonetheless maintains its agency. And immigrants nonetheless through architecture are able to maintain and create identity.
Work Cited
Influence of the traditional food culture of ancient egypt on the transition of cuisine and food culture of contemporary egypt. (2023). Journal of Ethnic Foods, 10, 1–13. doi:https://doi.org/10.1186/s42779-023-00177-4
Garis, B. (2023). A church of the people: Coptic church building and direction in central new jersey (Order №30528891). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global; ProQuest One Academic. (2835414287). Retrieved from http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/church-people-coptic-building-direction-central/docview/2835414287/se-2
Haselberger, L. (2008). Rediscovering the architecture of alexandria: THE ARCHITECTURE OF ALEXANDRIA AND EGYPT, c.300 B.C. TO A.D. 700 ( yale university press, new haven 2007 ). pp. xx + 460. ISBN 0–300–11555–5. $85. Journal of Roman Archaeology, 21, 703–712. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/S1047759400005158
Rupp, R. (2021, May 3). Surviving the sneaky psychology of Supermarkets. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/surviving-the-sneaky-psychology-of-supermarkets
