CU Abroad – Maurice Chammah

Every week I spend approximately eight hours on a bus, travelling from Zamalek, near the center of the city, to the campus of the university, located in the suburb of New Cairo. Clustered with Americans, Egyptians, and others on a ride that can take up to an hour and a half, I literally experiene the the expansion of the city outwards, from dense to spacious, from loud to quiet, and from smog-ridden to clear.

In the past decade, the Egyptian government has teamed with Western developers and Saudi-funding to leave the inner-city alone, with all of its poverty and structural decay, and promote a movement quite similar to American “white flight.” The new suburbs, alternately called “satellite cities” and “compounds,” go by names as striking and openly referential as Dreamland, Utopia, and Beverly Hills. Houses are built with an overblown, dramatic sense of design, with coliseums, fountains, and intricately carved woodwork erupting out of the otherwise dead landscape of the desert. The houses are crammed together, as if space were an issue, and frame European public squares, sidewalks, swimming pools, golf courses and massive fountains. Bright swaths of green grass unfold out of the endless sand, catching one’s view but never looking comfortable in their surroundings.

 If my tone of of cynicism is not clear by now, then suffice it to say that many Americans on the bus actively deride these erupting cityscapes, pointing out the opulent monstrosities as a clash of Hollywood and “Arabia”. If Aladdin gave a false impression of the Middle East, then that impression has returned with force, for the architectural designs feel like a disney set: overdone, out of place, and most of all temporary.

The feeling of temporariness pervades the campus of AUC as well, when USAID stickers peel from the new machines with cheap adhesive, and tables collapse in every class because screws are missing. The A4-sized paper doesn’t fit in the new 8.5 by 11 inch cabinets, and the whiteboards are already stained black after one semester of usage. These moments are tiny, and we giddily shout “Welcome to Egypt!” every time something doesn’t work right, feeling culturally superior in a setting that attempts to mirror our experiences back home but never quite succeeds. 

The cultural-superiority complex, or simply elitism, is hardly surprising, and it would be futile here to just criticize it. Why is this the situation, though? Why does Cairo look like this at its margins: shiny, bright, new, and yet haphazard and disjointed? What makes downtown and the old Islamic areas feel more “authentic”?

Many Egyptian students in my classes are from the satellite cities (they are the ones who refer to them as compounds). Some who are sociology-majors are well aware of the reasons their neighborhoods came to be and continue to be built, and feel guilty for participating in a system where, as they see it, the rich flee the decaying inner city for the open desert. 

And so I inhabit this bizarre situation, making the migration every day out of the city that feels so authentic to suburbs that feel so fake, and it makes me question what any of us Americans were looking for when we came to Cairo. What is the real Cairo that we seek?