(December 2016)

I like to think that I’m invisible sometimes. It usually happens as I walk down a street, or look up from my work or lunch at the library, or wait for the bus at the bus stop. I become like a video camera shooting a movie; you can’t see the camera but it is what the camera records that becomes the focus. Sometimes the camera captures the weather, acknowledging the peeping sun from behind the clouds on a cold morning, the rustle of the leaves as the wind picks up .

Most of the time, the camera zooms in on a passerby. It captures their attire, their stature, how they walk. Sometimes it zooms in on a silent facial expression. I am left wondering about the story behind the exterior. Is the girl pacing down the street running for an appointment? She is smiling as her blonde ponytail sways like a pendulum with her pace; that seems optimistic. There is an older man in a business suit adorned with a scarf sitting alone at a table, slowly sipping coffee and flicking the screen of his phone. What brought him here? His pace is slower than the millennials in the backdrop. Is it the confidence of an aged white man in a suit that makes his pace slower, or something about the mysterious weariness that shows in the way his eyes are half closed and his face wrinkled ?

The camera captures the scene while I am intrigued by the black man, eyes to the floor, who almost imperceptibly loosens his shoulders in the periphery of the camera’s focus as I shift my seat on the subway next to him, away from the white man on my other side. I do notice the simple smile of the woman of color sitting across from me, almost approvingly. I do notice when the next time on a bus, a white woman looks straight into the camera, a clear worry on her face, and glances sideways at her partner while stiffening her posture. As the bus rolls down the street, she loosens her stiffness and I get off, and her whiteness is no longer on scene.

—

Color didn’t intrigue me before coming to the US for graduate studies.

My dad looks a southern European white; skin that burns red in the sun, brown eyes, dark hair (or at least it was dark, now he just looks like Santa). My grandpa’s photo shows that he had what Egyptians call “colored” eyes (non-brown, so green or blue) as are my aunt’s and uncle’s. My dad swears my grandpa’s father was black, immigrating from the southern banks of the Nile to the north of Egypt – “but he married a Turkish woman”. My paternal grandmother’s family had immigrated from eastern Europe to Egypt when her father was young. I guess that tipped the genetic odds for my dad and his siblings to a larger prevalence of white skin among themselves, which is a rare homogeneity among siblings in Egypt.

My mom’s 9 uncles and aunts are like a litter of kittens. Three of them have blonde hair, olive skin, and green eyes. Three of them are middle toned with dark hair. And three look black. They have the same set of parents. Moreover, my great-uncle Farouk, who is one of the olive skinned, blonde green-eyed lot, marries a woman of Sudanese origin. All three of his sons look black. The eldest who has chocolate colored skin and hazel eyes marries a blonde whiter woman with green eyes. His two kids are green-eyed blondes (with tight curls). It’s beautiful to look at the way melanin manifests itself differently across members of the same family, all with the same last name.

Egypt had its first black president in the 1970s, but you would have to bring it to any Egyptian’s attention that Sadat was black. Egypt is one of the oldest states in the world, centrally connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa. The sun feels lower and larger in the horizon, palm trees and vegetation lining the slow, long river Nile eventually meeting the placid turquoise of the Mediterranean. The rest of its expanse is grainy desert. Ruled by Pharoes from Africa, Romans from Europe, and Arabs from Asia, I wonder if many Egyptians would test genealogically positive for having roots from all continents of the world. Perhaps all human color just blends into the yellow hues of the horizon in Egypt. 

—

I still marvel at where we have arrived in Egypt; a time in which people are not necessarily judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character (and whatever moral and political stance this character may suggest). July 3^rd 2013 at 10pm, I got the news of our friend Suhail being fatally shot at a demonstration on the streets objecting the military coup that happened that day. Suhail was only mourned by the people who knew him, because mainstream media writes him off as a “terrorist” threat. I remember him as a father, husband, and friend and he is smiling in the image of him in my mind.

Fear is a potent fuel, and it is lethal. I came to America a few months ago, and I recognize fear on frowning silent faces, in news reports of people being shot because of something that makes them less person and more label. What world are we making for our children if the first thing others see in them is a category and not the curious smile on their faces?

I have to remind myself I am not invisible. Maybe like me, there are others with camera vision, trying to figure me out as I come onto the scene.

I get on the bus and I can be a scary looking person to some folks whose body language says they don’t really want to be next to me, a rather obvious Middle Eastern Muslim woman. I do try and choose colorful hijabs to look inviting, but that doesn’t always work. Rather than frown to the floor, I smile at the other frowning person, and I have rarely not gotten a smile back, maybe even a short exchange where I tell them more about me, the person, the hero of my story. When my 6-year-old son stares like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone at the homeless man on the street and Mr.H the homeless man frowns and looks fearful and angry, I smile, I tell my son that thing on his arm is called a tattoo and not to be afraid of the wolf on his forearm. My son eventually smiles and so does Mr.H, and along with Robert from the mayor’s office, we make stories of how Mr.H is related to a long line of pirates in the Caribbean. When I imply to my 9-year-old daughter that I worry for our future as Muslims, she matter-of-factly tells me that it is wrong to judge others; “God says in the Quran that we can all choose what we want to be. Only He can judge people.” I smile the sort of smile a parent has when a pearl of wisdom comes from her progeny at the time when this parent feels most vulnerable. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about my daughter’s future too much.

But I do.

I’m an educator, and I’m committed to an education that develops children’s capacities for empathy with different people by sharing their stories. Will you help me get more stories their way so they develop the connections to others?

Maybe there is hope in the world, if forging our stories makes each of us more than some category of passerby.