Black Honey for Breakfast

To understand Egypt, one must understand how poets romance, with both tenderness and teeth. Blackstrap Molasses: the viscous, sweet staple in every Egyptian kitchen reflects the flavor of our homeland’s knotted contradictions — and the stubborn, aching love it inspires even despite.

At the halt of bottleneck traffic, cab drivers wipe the tears spooning on the slope of their eyelids when realizing they are riding a Gazawy (someone from Gaza, Palestine). They ask for absolution they say they don’t deserve. They resist payment, pushing it back with a trembling hand: “God knows, all I ask is your forgiveness. Forgive me — if my hands held more, they’d be yours,” one cab driver said, eyes red shot. I couldn’t forget the image of his haggard face if I ever tried.

In underresourced, government-owned doctor’s clinics, the only kind of medical visits Palestinian evacuees can afford when scraped-together grassroots aid is footing the bill, as it always is, doctors are yelling because there’s no one else to punish. Layani, 28, a displaced Palestinian from Rafah now living in Egypt, picked up the wrong medicine, only that the one the doc prescribed wasn’t in stock. Baffled, she asks me why a clinic would prescribe a drug long withdrawn from circulation, as the pharmacist had informed her.

The already overburdened clandestine networks shouldering her medical bills were never guaranteed and would take weeks to return for another trip to the doctors. Her back pain was louder than logic. Forgive her, she’s just doing her best. The injured mother with bruises all over her chest blinks, adjusts her scarf and apologizes. She doesn’t know what she’s done wrong. But she is certain that in this warped world, it is she who must have. I try my hand at admonishing the man in a white lab coat. That even the largest of his worries are dwarfed by hers, I toss. My words meet mostly air. The vociferating continues, even as we’re long out the doctor’s room now.

“Out! I have nothing more to tell you, woman!” He cuts her off with a viciously loose-handed motion, as though the war survivor and her words weighed no more than a spent cigarette.

“May God forgive you, sir,” I say not unkindly as I rise from my seat, “woe to those who bow before Allah, yet withhold even the smallest mercy.” And the doctor suddenly so small and chastened, comprehends he has catastrophically miscalculated the women this land has always produced.

I apologize the entire drive home, my words filling the car the way complicit guilt does. Restless and excessive, I prattle on. I tell her we won’t ever return. And who led her to this clinic anyway? The question curdles as soon as I hear it, ashamed of my own privilege. How chumpish, this mental housekeeping of recommendations and options, where the only real criterion for displaced Palestinians in Cairo is existential minimalism, no matter the medical emergency.

In this absurdly crooked world, it falls to the masses of a near-bankrupt, mismanaged country to absorb the crimson catastrophes flaring along each of our frontiers. Here, where even the helpers need helping, here, where each year brings with it a mysterious population boom that only grows far more outlandish with time… who is the fool but the world, for guilelessly expecting the wounded to structurally nurse the wounded? With what atomized reserves, I ask? And what of the millions of penniless Egyptians, reduced to a currency worth nothing more than a hill of beans, sleeping in needlessly filthy ashwayat (slums) — do they get handouts too? Or only the world’s shrug?

I spend the rest of the car ride wondering how working class Egyptians must reconcile the draconian mandate pressed upon them – on a country of more than one hundred million people, draped as we may be in ancient civilizational prestige and the burden of remembered greatness – to function as a buffer for regional implosion when we have already long withdrawn care from our own. How can such a predatory political order, designed to toady Gulf investors and Western allies far before they ever relieve the lives of those indigenous to the land, who are asked, time and again, to gulp economic austerity in the name of Egyptian patriotism and civic virtue, plausibly endure?

Among the country’s most prominent talk-show hosts, Amr Adib, offered a bizarre prescription: cajoling Egyptian citizens to moderate their consumption habits, and urging people to forego organic eggs and other pricier items. They should, he said, even go so far as to “withhold” their money from supermarkets in hopes of “forcing price cuts.” It is nothing but a classic tale of let them eat cake: while millions of Egyptians must retrench their diets - cutting staples such as meat, eggs, even bread - the broadcast studios and ignorant elite problematize organic pastrami. Because artisanal fenugreek is the brutal hinge of it all.

Layani had delivered her cloth to a downtown Cairo tailor, requesting Gaza be embroidered across it – a tiny flag of insistence, entirely hers in a life otherwise stolen. It was to be stitched on a onesie she imagined on the baby growing inside her. The shopkeeper shook his head. “I can’t,” he said with sorry eyes. “It could cost me everything.” She tried again, careful to pinch the request: nothing political, only the word Gaza, she urged. The man’s chin buckled under shame. Emptied of defense, he spoke from the straitened posture every Egyptian understands: “My children need to eat. Believe me woman, if it were up to me alone, I would.”

Layani wept the whole way home. I tried to tell her that when butter becomes the ransom, even principle is made to kneel. It did not reflect their stance, I assured. It availed nothing.

Not long after, she phoned following a visit to a public hospital. The doctor, perhaps emboldened by the small tyrannies of the white coat, maliciously snarked that her people had “roused the war to take Sinai from Egyptians.” She had just fallen down a flight of stairs, while deep into her third trimester. How did a bruised body, and the unborn child it carried, enter the examining room already on trial? Layani never quite learned what to make of her life here - whether she was a patient or a provocation, an exiled kin or a newly stateless body without papers – indefinitely so.

Then there are the neighbors – like Jamal, Layani’s husband, who, once his origins were known, stopped meeting his eyes in the corridors of his shoddy building. In fact, it’s a concerted effort now.

“And us?” he asked me, when throngs of Sudanese refugees congregated, as they do every other Friday just after noon prayer, to receive their UNHCR-sponsored food packages at the public school nearby. The deliveries occurred right off the nose of his building in one of the busiest streets of Ain Shams. On the same road he crosses each day to look for the work he knows he’ll never be afforded.

Most days I had no answer for Jammal. Only deep shame. Other times, I said the only thing that ought to have been screamed by us in our millions. That hurt people inevitably hurt people. And I for one could never understand how a hundred million wrongs could ever equal a right.

“I’m sorry,” is all I come up with.

To be Palestinian in Egypt is to be held in place by a geopolitical parable, “permanently temporary,” says Oroub El-Abed, associate professor in forced migration at Birzeit University. If such a venal contradiction could ever exist, Egyptian officials have graciously assigned it to Gazawy’s who arrive in Egypt newly orphaned of any political belonging. Unlike the logs of hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Ethiopians refugees, and over 1.5 million Sudanese nationals who are entitled and empowered to work, labor, and access subsidized healthcare and school, Palestinians have historically been locked out. All trumpet under the loving pretense of Arab fraternity.

Oroub has spent more than two decades interviewing Palestinian refugees across Egypt for her seminal 2009 book, Unprotected: Palestinians in Egypt since 1948, among other extensive research projects.

With Egypt shuttering UNRWA operations and blocking UNHCR the authority to register them as refugees, Palestinians who reach Egypt exist beyond the perimeter of any formal protection regime - faring in an opaque limbo buffered only through a slender lifeboat of local ad-hoc charity.

And this quagmire functions precisely as it was meant to. The influx of the nearly 200,000 Palestinians now displaced across the border, and the Egyptians’ equally sporadic, clandestine response — “underground” networks operating at the edge of the law, risking arrest and state-sponsored abductions to assist them—is no fluke. Always, it has served the state’s political logic: responsibility deferred, pro-Palestinian rhetoric preserved.

Oroub describes the state’s contradictory “balancing” act as anything but accidental. “By projecting solidarity internationally, Egypt reinforces its regional role, but domestically it avoids political costs that might come from full integration of Palestinians.”

She argues the twisted logic becomes even more palpable when placed against Egypt’s national insolvency-in-waiting, after only just skirting outright economic collapse last year, spared only by a $50-billion-plus bail-out, brokered by the IMF and the UAE, which effectively mortgaged the redevelopment rights to a coveted stretch of Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, long eyed by Gulf capital. The last-minute financial resuscitation, like many of its kind, capitalizes on Egypt’s Achilles’ heel: our ever-ballooning debt.

The shaved local currency has suffocated all political curiosity and imagination, leaving the masses entirely preoccupied with the humiliating business of bread and rent: “Egyptians themselves struggle with deep poverty, so the state cultivates distance to prevent competition or resentment. It’s less about care for Palestinians and more about regime stability.”

Across two decades of interviews with displaced Palestinians in Egypt, Oroub arrives at a conclusion that scarcely changes with Egypt’s administrative carousel of officeholders. Palestinians marooned into Egypt may have escaped the bombs, but only to find every avenue of social protection and welfare access cordoned shut. Amiss paperwork, they are present in fact, yet absent on every register imaginable.

Egyptian sympathy for Palestinians is real, Oroub says, but it tends to stall at the level of gesture. What emerges in place of kinship is an aloof parity of destitution: two populations navigating a shared climate of economic precarity and authoritarian rule. While their suffering advances in tandem, as Oroub puts it, “they diverge in recognition.” Egyptians retain citizenship and its protections; Palestinians remain stateless, without recourse to law. The result is an inversion of the official script that flips logic on its head: the politics meant to “preserve” Palestinian identity instead compel many of the displaced to bury it. Enough so, she says, many ultimately learn to “hide their Palestinian roots due to feeling ashamed of what it costs them.”

Surreptitious aid networks, working in legal half-light, merely buy time in a pinched, highly inflated economy consolidated under military stewardship. With no legal right to work, no papers, and no means of earning even a skeletal income, life collapses into total supplication. Any effort to romanticize this pernicious arrangement would require a willful amnesia about what even a modicum of basic human dignity actually demands.

Although former president Abdel Gamal Nasser’s open-armed policies facilitated Palestinian integration in Egypt to a degree unmatched by any Egyptian administration before or since, according to Oroub, naturalizing Palestinians in Egypt was never an option in light of the Arab League’s Resolution 462 of 1952, which anchored host states’ terms of reception around the premise of eventual Palestinian return and warned against naturalisation as a political solvent. A high-minded rationale, at first –yet one that has been milked well past any moral sincerity.

If Palestinians settled too deeply on Egyptian soil, the state’s logic went, the dream of their return to their homeland would evaporate. A noble-sounding pretense, of course, for a devastatingly myopic policy that has kept displaced Palestinians in a legal and existential deadlock for the entirety of their grief-ridden time here.

The orthodox classism, endemic among the Arab world’s pompous stance towards the Palestinian population is not inherently biological. Egyptians, in their millions, have remained so very immune; many have kept their souls awake their entire lives. I see them crowdfunding, covertly campaigning, and distributing to the displaced. I see them flirting with arbitrary detention. I see them undergrounding while ululating. I see them damned if they do, and damned to hell if they don’t. And what else is true Islamic duty and love, I think in awe, but a promise to do just that? Even as the law bends charity towards punishment. Even in defiance. Even in the iron-gilded bastions that cage and re-cage the only home some had ever known. To be clear, I’ve seen a hundred different faces. But it is rarely the exempted, societally advantaged, or the heirloomed who take on this most endangered work.

It might not be an active war zone here. But I think it must be something far from peace too. A place where everything blurs for the Palestinian asylee just as it does for the Egyptian trained on ritual, not wastas (insider connections) and crypto; the enemy, the neighbor, the ally, even and most especially, the self. I’m watching everyone carry more than any one human should, overmatched by years that took far more than they ever gave, stretched thin in too many directions, until what cannot be borne is inadvertently hauled off to the nearest body. Like lightning caged in muscle, hunting for assuagement; some small proof of will or an outlet for release – I have watched exhaustion make a handsome home in every Egyptians’ spine, striking anything it can for a people never taught how to compartmentalize pressure from its source. It lands on the bereaved who inherit both grief and Egyptians’ misplaced wrath. I do not know if they are aware that each of us are casualties of the same nefariously political economy. Occupation wears many masks.

The Egyptian state can hardly promise bread to its own, but it’s expected to deliver hearths to the Palestinian people. It offers barely a fraction of the shelter needed for the over twelve million homeless within their own borders yet refuses to grant displaced Palestinians the documents to seek a bearable refuge elsewhere. Let alone the official “refugee” classification needed to unlock the UNHCR-sponsored aid that would only scarcely mitigate the crushing tax of living costs here. Crushed under mountains of multibillion-dollar debt, only to be superficially salved by a dependence on Gulf-related or IMF-laced coffers, price hikes and cost-of-living calamities set the daily terms of breakfast for all of us.

We can’t clean the soot-laced air, so black dust lines everyone’s lungs like crummy wallpaper. So cutthroat is the partition of wealth between the have and the have-nots that Egypt is stratified to the absolute marrow: plutocracy in the air-conditioned overhead, paupers assembling life from cinderblock and dust below.

The elderly cry for affordable food and competent healthcare. The young search for wastas or exits. The poor cry out, “Just some bread to feed my child.” We cry too, for the immiserated, honeyed children who should be in school, instead they chase after cars in tarnished pewter slippers that offer only the thinnest apology of synthetic leather between their feet and the city’s grimy cement. Kids are panhandling between the jaundiced and overworked drivers jammed back-to-back at every semi-functioning traffic light. Their desperate fingers form cupping signs and you’d be heartless not to notice. Palms press around the steaming hot glass, fogged by the recitation of “May God make you a bride. Make it easy for you and me both.” She is six, and already fluent in profanities never meant for a child’s mouth. And even when no passenger hands reach towards the pocket or wallet, they latch on, as if by some improbable stroke of fortune they might be able to hitch a ride into a fairer world. I imagine in Heaven, they will receive that world.

They call our people backwards, but I’ve never seen so many hands repelling what is rightfully owed them, least of all when that frail sum could tip the balance between their child’s starved belly or their own. They call our people indolent, yet this year alone saw our mercy tables proffer more than 100,000 meals in Mattariya, a record-breaking procession of bread and lentils laid before the city’s destitute, without applause or record. They call our people cowardly, yet I witness days and nights coalesce into the most cumbersome labor as Egyptians, in conjunction with the “Thamarat” and “Nour Al-Bukhari” association, amongst dozens of unpaid humanitarian workers, pack hundreds upon hundreds of boxes for aid trucks that will invariably meet their demise and perish at the Rafah border. They call our people apolitical but I watch them make a home where most times there are none; I watch them bear entire Gazawy lineages in the makeshift cradle of jerry-built walls they have cobbled into warmth, as indefinitely as circumstance will bear.

They call our people poor. Yet the deficit here has never been one of generosity, no matter the morass.

There is a kind of Muslim wealth untaxed by asphyxiation. A uniquely Egyptian inheritance no amount of poverty has managed to elide. There is exhaust from years of pleading. It creases on her bronzed, palimpsest cheeks. The precocious youth are tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. Disabled men aging worlds away from any vacuum of care are donning their orange-and-green waste-collection garb. They sit slumped on the concrete ledge of highways, blistered under the scorching heat. Dusk till dawn they are there, crouched beside piles of refuse. Uncertain of tomorrow’s sustenance, many will nonetheless offer you today’s, even down to their final grain of rice. Most times I catch our elderly sweeping nothing but unseeing nests of silt.

I swallow their fugitive silhouettes, as one learns to do beneath the jackboot of Machiavellian statecraft when the grip offers nothing but an abject witness. And I wonder often which of their dreams survived the ricochets of inferno, and which have long been abandoned out of pragmatism. I am nothing but a throat of glass here, observing, absorbing, eternally internally crying. And I see what I have always seen: a nightmare that never ends. Only balloons in volume, debt, and impractical refuge.

Forgive us, Gaza, had there been more bread in this house, you would have been the first to break it with us.