A month ago, I returned to Egypt after a five-year hiatus. Merely a few hours in, I felt that I had come home. I don’t know anything about living in Egypt. Not really. In my whole life, I’ve spent perhaps six months there. I speak the language with slow deliberateness and can scarcely read and write it. As an Egyptian-Australian, I am geographically isolated from my country of origin. Yet I miss Egypt deeply. It’s a dangerous thing waxing lyrical about this, singing Egypt’s praises without regard for its faults, which are numerous and substantial. Yet Egypt’s warm, powerful embrace, and its ability to bring strangers in and make them stay forever or break their hearts upon leaving, is real and unique. For five years I have heard, “It’s not safe, It’s not the time to go, hold on, wait, not yet, not now.” The revolution, and stories of police torture, imprisonment, violence and the constant state of political uncertainty, delayed my eagerness and set me back. But then I saw it with my own eyes; it shone all around me, a great big, dirty, honking metropolis. I breathed in…
