Fairy Tale of Morningside
(I originally wrote this in early January 2018; a few days and it will be two years old. I never got around to publishing it.)
Last December, as I listened to The Pogues’ “Fairy Tale of New York,” I realized that there is a chance I may not set foot again in Columbia, Manhattan, or New York. It was late December, but it wasn’t the jingle bells, the decorations, or the New Year’s festivities that made me nostalgic. It wasn’t even the emails from friends coming back home for the winter break. It took the melancholic footage of foggy and icy New York in an Irish song about lost dreams and broken hopes to do the trick.
On November 18th, 2017, I was stopped by Homeland Security as I was on my way to New York to defend my dissertation at Columbia. After a lengthy and absurd interrogation, I was informed that my visa was being canceled and that I was being sent back to Egypt. Against my protestation, I was told that I should be grateful they were not deporting me, not because of anything I did, but because it was in their power. They also said they were doing me a favor by canceling my visa, rather than banning me from entry altogether.
I wasn't in denial. I knew that, while technically I can reapply for a new visa, and while there is still a chance I will be in New York soon, it is likely that I will not, perhaps not until the Trump administration is over, perhaps never. And yet it took me a month and a few days to be hit by the reality and affect of exile.
When I embarked on my journey at Columbia some 7-8 years ago, I promised myself I would not get attached. I promised myself that New York was only a surrogate home, that my intellectual and social journey at Columbia had a different destination. And yet who can deny the allure of this city: for me, as a subject of this empire, as a researcher in the making who for long dreamt of Columbia, and as a fan of theatre in all its forms, I couldn’t help but be drawn even to the billboards on Broadway, which New Yorkers find overrated and kitschy. And even as these lights were always a reminder of the first time I strolled in Times Square during the first week of my PhD, and an affirmation that I am in fact orbiting many of my dreams, I always reminded myself that “those lights above you think nothing of you.” “These lights also stand for capitalism and empire,” I reminded myself. I promised myself not to romanticize a city and a campus built on the appropriation of Native lands and slave labor, not to overglorify the bubble that pretends (often with little success) to shelter us from the racism, militarization, discrimination, and hatred that takes place outside.
During my study at Columbia the 2011 uprising broke out in Cairo. The events in Tahrir Square and all over Egypt added to the precarity of my sojourn in New York. “My place is there,” I told myself, and despite myself I was always here and there.
In summer 2013, while I was in Egypt preparing the reading lists for my comprehensive exams, a military coup d’etat took place, bringing to a halt whatever revolutionary dreams we once had. I replicated my Columbia bubble in Cairo and pored over my readings. Coups d’etats can be good for comprehensive exams, it turned out. Two months later I was packing my books and my lists (a lengthy list on revolution and counterrevolution included) and heading back to New York; via the deserted streets of Cairo (a rare occurrence in the actual city that never sleeps) and through the checkpoints constructed by the military regime which had imposed a nighttime curfew on the country it had usurped. At that moment I was glad to have my surrogate home; my bubble. I joked with a friend about how being in New York robbed us of our sanity in 2011, but saved our sanity in 2013. On a very personal level, I preferred the jingoism that I can isolate myself from to the jingoism that forms the bounds of my social existence; I took the jingoism that takes me as its target over the jingoism that takes me as its audience, until that jingoism declared me no longer welcome.
Throughout these years Cairo and New York came to form the two poles of my existence, my utopias and dystopias; they are where I cannot be, and where I cannot be elsewhere; “where'er we go we celebrate, the land that makes us refugees.”
These events, my experience over 7 years at Columbia, my recent (provisional or permanent) ban from the country, despite my earlier sobering precautions, have turned the city, the campus, and my overall experience into A Fairy Tale of New York (whereas the uprising in 2011 has created a real if ephemeral “Fairy Tale Cairo” which lasted for 18 days and inspired our hopes, dreams, and illusions). But let me give the last words, incredulous as they may be, to the Pogues: “I can see a better time, when all our dreams come true.”
Last December, as I listened to The Pogues’ “Fairy Tale of New York,” I realized that there is a chance I may not set foot again in Columbia, Manhattan, or New York. It was late December, but it wasn’t the jingle bells, the decorations, or the New Year’s festivities that made me nostalgic. It wasn’t even the emails from friends coming back home for the winter break. It took the melancholic footage of foggy and icy New York in an Irish song about lost dreams and broken hopes to do the trick.
On November 18th, 2017, I was stopped by Homeland Security as I was on my way to New York to defend my dissertation at Columbia. After a lengthy and absurd interrogation, I was informed that my visa was being canceled and that I was being sent back to Egypt. Against my protestation, I was told that I should be grateful they were not deporting me, not because of anything I did, but because it was in their power. They also said they were doing me a favor by canceling my visa, rather than banning me from entry altogether.
I wasn't in denial. I knew that, while technically I can reapply for a new visa, and while there is still a chance I will be in New York soon, it is likely that I will not, perhaps not until the Trump administration is over, perhaps never. And yet it took me a month and a few days to be hit by the reality and affect of exile.
When I embarked on my journey at Columbia some 7-8 years ago, I promised myself I would not get attached. I promised myself that New York was only a surrogate home, that my intellectual and social journey at Columbia had a different destination. And yet who can deny the allure of this city: for me, as a subject of this empire, as a researcher in the making who for long dreamt of Columbia, and as a fan of theatre in all its forms, I couldn’t help but be drawn even to the billboards on Broadway, which New Yorkers find overrated and kitschy. And even as these lights were always a reminder of the first time I strolled in Times Square during the first week of my PhD, and an affirmation that I am in fact orbiting many of my dreams, I always reminded myself that “those lights above you think nothing of you.” “These lights also stand for capitalism and empire,” I reminded myself. I promised myself not to romanticize a city and a campus built on the appropriation of Native lands and slave labor, not to overglorify the bubble that pretends (often with little success) to shelter us from the racism, militarization, discrimination, and hatred that takes place outside.
During my study at Columbia the 2011 uprising broke out in Cairo. The events in Tahrir Square and all over Egypt added to the precarity of my sojourn in New York. “My place is there,” I told myself, and despite myself I was always here and there.
In summer 2013, while I was in Egypt preparing the reading lists for my comprehensive exams, a military coup d’etat took place, bringing to a halt whatever revolutionary dreams we once had. I replicated my Columbia bubble in Cairo and pored over my readings. Coups d’etats can be good for comprehensive exams, it turned out. Two months later I was packing my books and my lists (a lengthy list on revolution and counterrevolution included) and heading back to New York; via the deserted streets of Cairo (a rare occurrence in the actual city that never sleeps) and through the checkpoints constructed by the military regime which had imposed a nighttime curfew on the country it had usurped. At that moment I was glad to have my surrogate home; my bubble. I joked with a friend about how being in New York robbed us of our sanity in 2011, but saved our sanity in 2013. On a very personal level, I preferred the jingoism that I can isolate myself from to the jingoism that forms the bounds of my social existence; I took the jingoism that takes me as its target over the jingoism that takes me as its audience, until that jingoism declared me no longer welcome.
Throughout these years Cairo and New York came to form the two poles of my existence, my utopias and dystopias; they are where I cannot be, and where I cannot be elsewhere; “where'er we go we celebrate, the land that makes us refugees.”
These events, my experience over 7 years at Columbia, my recent (provisional or permanent) ban from the country, despite my earlier sobering precautions, have turned the city, the campus, and my overall experience into A Fairy Tale of New York (whereas the uprising in 2011 has created a real if ephemeral “Fairy Tale Cairo” which lasted for 18 days and inspired our hopes, dreams, and illusions). But let me give the last words, incredulous as they may be, to the Pogues: “I can see a better time, when all our dreams come true.”
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