All the Burning Stars
A graph theorist’s daughter, yet I can’t solve how to orient myself in time or space. Where to plot inside this parched landscape, rubble buildings, unyielding heat. The mournful sound of muezzins bellowing daily calls to prayer. Noisy, chaotic traffic that somehow seems to flow, alongside the Nile River that seems not to flow at all. Sleeping, while feluccas drift.
Even the slivered moon hangs differently in the Egyptian sky—an eyebrow raised to me.
Dad and I have been on our hotel balcony each night, bewildered by the sights below in Tahrir Square. My eyes have been burning from the gray, polluted haze of industrial and fuel emissions. At this point in time, Cairo’s air quality is as toxic as inhaling a daily pack of cigarettes.
I arrived at this foreign land without any sense of its current societal struggles. Forgivably immersed in a difficult parenting, half a world away—in 2005, before distant countries were connected by a live tether. I’m not aware that tomorrow when we leave, a new park will be inaugurated, offering Cairenes a bit of green space. A humble step forward in environmental progress for this smoggy metropolis.
However, this hopeful event will be diminished by an overarching conflict: the Iraq War, entering its third year. Our once-in-a-lifetime visit to Cairo has coincided with an anti-war demonstration against the United States’ military presence in Iraq.
Today, tensions increased in Tahrir Square while Dad and I quietly browsed old volumes inside the university’s rare book library. We emerged from the building to be startled by riot police with metal shields, lined in front of armored trucks. There was an angry mood on the streets, the growing potential for erupting violence.
As we tiptoed through the commotion, a man spat at my shoes while a few other men jeered. A vulnerability arose from this invasion of my safe space. The quick dissolution of morning’s serenity. Weariness from the city’s constant assault on my senses. I am so naive and tender.
No one is aware of terrorist attacks being planned, that two weeks from today—near the bazaar where Dad, Ashraf and I ate rice pudding under starlight—a suicide bomber will kill three foreign tourists. A month from now, another terrorist will jump from a bridge, exploding a bomb on the wide concourse near the Egyptian Museum, where Dad and I have visited twice this week to marvel at antiquities. More people will be injured during that coming explosion. Today, I walked the same pavement their blood will stain.
I can’t foresee six years from now, when thousands of Egyptians will crowd Tahrir Square, protesting for political change—their merged voices, a fierce uprising to end a corrupt government—I will feel an overwhelming surge of solidarity for their demands. Food security, freedom from police brutality, other civil liberties: all things I take for granted in my own peaceful life in Canada.
The Cairenes will have smartphones by then, able to share their revolution worldwide. I will have one, too, retiring my old pocket camera with double-A batteries —the one I used to capture hieroglyphics at Saqqara. Carvings of an ancient language, background for an innocent self-portrait I now view with a much different lens.
With the softening filter of time, I’ll recall the taste of cinnamon and milk on my tongue. Night skies, blinking in parting haze above historic graveyard mosques. That shopkeeper sweeping sand from his threshold back into the desert—the futility of pushing back an expanding universe.
When I board my departing flight, I’ll have a burned face from the Sahara sun. Known the silent darkness inside a tomb and my desperate instinct to scramble outside into the light. I’ll have witnessed a jubilant wedding procession with drumming, singing, and rejoicing—and my father’s own overflowing joy, fulfilling a boyhood dream to see the Giza pyramids.
I will return home a changed person, having lived an entire, alternate lifetime compressed into five days. Alchemized from a past version of me, an inexperienced traveller awakening to other worlds. The remnants of ancient civilizations, dirt underneath my fingernails.
A traveller still alive, by some measure of unknown grace.
In years to come, I will open my small jar of desert sand, pinch and rub the grains between my fingers—fragments of millennia, sprinkling over the pebble I pulled from the Nile’s bank. Granules I transported home from Cairo, now embedded in me. I will touch time and feel in my soul, a tiny bit Egyptian. The moon will raise its eyebrow. The stars will keep burning.
Karin Hedetniemi is a writer and photographer from Vancouver Island, Canada. Her place-inspired essays and poetry often weave the experiences of grief and joy with life’s mysteries. Karin’s creative work has been celebrated with award prizes from the Royal City Literary Arts Society, Haiku Canada, and the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival. Her work appears in many international literary journals, including Grain, EVENT, Lunch Ticket, Pithead Chapel, and Reed Magazine.