Undesirable Aliens By Mamoun Hamza Fandy

Abstract

In the winter, the trees along the Nile are filled with all the migratory birds of Europe. As a child I used to wonder if they could talk to each other, if our birds were able to understand what they were saying, or if they sang so loudly because they were frightened at finding themselves in such a strange place. They always looked too fragile to have come so far. Because I am already homesick, perhaps, the image of them comes to me in the National Airport in Osaka, where people of a dozen nationalities are milling about looking for their luggage and trying to find the right queue, all of them speaking their own languages and none of them speaking Arabic. I am an alien. Signs in Japanese and English direct me to the queue for aliens. The line moves forward and I move forward with it, pulling my bag after me. It's an automatic action, and I can't even feel my own exhaustion. The faces around me blur and freeze, like the faces in a modern painting, human features without human feelings. The airport police are looking at me carefully, but I can't read if it is with fear or suspicion or just curiosity anymore than I can read their writing on the sign above me. Small, alert black eyes examine my black Arab eyes and look away when I try to smile. The European man in front of me moves and I find myself in front of the passport officer. I hand him my passport with a tired smile and turn to pull my suitcase. The officer has trouble opening the passport and looks in the back for my picture. I explain to him in English that my passport reads from right to left. It's in French and Arabic and the officer only knows Japanese and English, so he looks for a long time at the picture and at me. It doesn't look much like me now, for my hair was much shorter then and my face fresh and eager. You are an Arab? His accent is so strange that for a moment I don't realize that he is speaking English. He repeats the question. Yes,' I say, An Egyptian'. I used to love to think of myself as an Arab. I read about Salah al-Din and the Arabian Nights and listened to Nasser's speeches and thought about our courage and culture and greatness. But the passport officer is obviously not sharing these romantic reflections. The people behind me, an American couple, look uncomfortable too. What is your profession? I'm an English instructor at Cairo University, I tell him, and he looks again at the passport to see if it has changed in the last minute and