The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014

by Daniel Handler

  I said, “Look, after hours of people of my nationality beating me, sexually assaulting me, ignoring me, refusing me medical attention—after all these things, I want someone here that I can trust. And if that someone is from the American Embassy, I don’t care. I want someone in this room with me that I can trust.”

  And then literally in the eleventh hour he comes back in and says, “Okay, you can take off the blindfold now.” That’s when he tells me, “Look, Mona, we don’t know why you are here.” So who the hell does!?

  Then they did this song and dance: “We’re very sorry what happened to you, we’re going to investigate—can you write down what happened?”

  Write it down? For the millionth time, my arms are broken!

  So, he records my statement with his iPhone, takes pictures, apologizes again, insists that they have no idea why I was sent there—after they had already told me that my “file” is full of incriminating evidence!

  The most climactic moment, I think, was when this guy tried to play the elitism card. “The guys who did this to you,” he said, “you know who they are—they are the dregs of society. We drag them up, we scrub them clean, and we open a door in their minds.” He clearly thought I would get mad and say, “Yeah, those barbarians!” But instead I said to him, “Who made them live like this? And then you’re surprised we had a revolution? And then you ask me why we’re fighting at Mohamed Mahmoud?” I was basically defending the men who had sexually assaulted me against this bastard who thought he could play the class card.

  Anyway, so then he gives me fifty pounds and tells me to take a cab and go home. Just hands me an envelope with money and his name and number, “in case I need anything.”

  EL RASHIDI: Surreal.

  ELTAHAWY: Completely. So I walk out, find a cab—which is playing patriotic music—get to the hotel, pay the cab the whole fifty pounds, since I wanted none of their filthy money. And then a Tweep, Sarah Naguib, takes me to the hospital, and at the hospital—and this is very telling—I’m at the emergency room and I’m telling them I was sexually assaulted and this female nurse says to me, “How can you let them do that to you? Why didn’t you fight them off?”

  So this entire night is the microcosm of everything I’ve been talking about. From the nurse who didn’t think I fought them off hard enough, to these good cop/bad cop guys, to them telling me that my sexual assault was by the animals of Egyptian society—which they have created, you know. That whole night, it changed my life.

  EL RASHIDI: In what way?

  ELTAHAWY: In the way that it brought me to where I am now, being a writer with casts on both hands, only being able to use a touchpad with one finger. It took the fight that I used to use my words for to my body. My body became the source of my activism. Whether it’s me appearing on TV and talking about what happened, or my hair, or my tattoos.

  EL RASHIDI: So the hot pink hair is post-assault?

  ELTAHAWY: Oh yes. When my arms were broken I vowed that when I physically healed—because emotionally I haven’t—I would celebrate my survival by dyeing my hair red. For me red is a very defiant color. And in the same way that I now go back to Egypt every month to tell the authorities they can’t keep me away, the hair also says, “I am here.”

  Don’t you love it? People tweet me at airports to say they saw me—you can’t miss the red!

  EL RASHIDI: And the tattoos?

  ELTAHAWY: The tattoos just came to my head. Look [holds out forearm], this is Sekhmet. I was on a speaking tour in Italy, at this museum in Turin where there are many of our national treasures that we supposedly sold to some rich Italian man two centuries ago. And we’re in this room, and the director of the museum says, “And this is the ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet—we have nineteen of her statues in this room, and she is the goddess of retribution and sex.” And I thought, “Oh! I want that! Retribution and sex!” I was like, “Sekhmet is my woman.” So I decided on Sekhmet here, to celebrate my ancient Egyptian heritage. And on the other arm, I’m going to get Arabic calligraphy of Mohamed Mahmoud and Horreya, to celebrate the street, and the Arabic script.

  EL RASHIDI: So the tattoo is also post-accident?

  ELTAHAWY: In August! I went red, and then went straight to the tattoo artist. This is Sekhmet a la Molly Crabapple, an artist friend who designed it. Sekhmet has the head of a lioness and the serpent on top and all that, and she looks like a hieroglyph, obviously. And her dress is usually red, and the color red is generally associated with her because she’s associated with blood and war. According to legend, when humans turned against her father, the sun god Ra, she went on a rampage. And to stop her, the priestesses created this concoction that was a mix of wine and possibly opium and other things, and they poured it on the ground ahead of wherever she was about to go. And when she arrived they said, “Look, Sekhmet, you’ve killed everyone already, the blood is here on the ground.” So this concoction calms her down, calms her bloodlust, and then they have an orgy to celebrate.

  EL RASHIDI: So you have bloodlust?

  ELTAHAWY: [Laughs] Well, the reason for the tattoo is because of the boys who wrote their mothers’ numbers on their arms at Mohamed Mahmoud. Sekhmet is my mother in that kind of symbolical way.

  I didn’t choose this scar [points to her hand], I’m very proud of this scar, but they left this mark on me. I wanted to put markings on my body that I did choose, that celebrate my survival.

  Last summer I lost this suitcase that totally tore me up. I had a breakdown over losing it. It had a lot of Azza Fahmy jewelry that I’d been collecting for a very long time and that was very dear to me and that I’d wanted to give to my sisters and nieces when I died. And a lot of clothes . . . things that were really dear to me. It got lost in transit somewhere.

  I had a breakdown over this in Cairo and I realized that it was a displaced kind of trauma. I don’t know what I lost when they attacked me last year—but any kind of attack like that, you lose something. You just don’t know what it is. So I was like, “You know what, no one can ever take my tattoo away from me—this can never get lost.” It was a way of figuring out what I can and can’t lose, changing myself in a very obvious physical way, and emotionally, too—though I don’t know where I’m going to end up. I’m trying to have this out in a very public way, through Twitter. I tell people all of this, and I want to write an essay about it. A lot of my detractors will say it’s for narcissism and self-promotion. They’re entitled to their opinions. But I’m doing it for a reason—I think that we don’t talk about trauma enough, we don’t talk about vulnerability enough. When I am in Egypt, everyone I know is traumatized. They’re not able to put it into words. So I’m trying to go through my trauma—very publicly—as a way for those who can’t have that very public discussion to watch it happen. Perhaps to recognize the relationship between strength and vulnerability. I’m hoping that it will help someone.

  EL RASHIDI: Hearing you, I wonder if the anger toward your piece—which as you know I was angry about, too!—was actually discomfort at issues that many women in the region face but are unable to speak about? That you are able to be so vocal about things that women are made to feel ashamed of.

  ELTAHAWY: We’ve been told to be silent about it. Twelve other women were sexually assaulted. You know the organization Nazra? They contacted me and they said, “Will you join this lawsuit with us?” and I said, “Of course.” And they said to me, twelve other women have gone through what you’ve gone through, but none of them want to pursue it. They can’t, for whatever reason.

  EL RASHIDI: But you can?

  ELTAHAWY: I’m older, I’m forty-five. I’m not a virgin. I was married, I talk about sex openly. I’m a public figure. They can try to shame me, but it’s almost like I’m beyond shame. So for all of these reasons I’m obliged to talk about this stuff in a way that a twenty-six-year-old Egyptian virgin can’t. And I’m not speaking for her! I’m speaking about my experience, but in so doing I hope I can help others say, “This is what happened to me.”


  Blue bra girl—and I hate that term and I never use it—she’s been silenced by her family. They won’t let her speak. It’s outrageous, Yasmine! They might as well just put tape over our mouths! And then they get angry that I wrote an essay in Foreign Policy?

  EL RASHIDI: What about—

  ELTAHAWY: Wait, let me tell you where the men’s rage comes in, because a lot of men wrote to me after what happened, and their reaction was this:

  Dear Sister Mona,

  I’m so sorry about what happened to you. I want to bow down before you and kiss your feet because I was not able to protect you. But I vow to you, that I will not rest until I avenge your honor.

  So I think, This is very interesting. I write back and I say:

  Dear Brother So-and-So,

  I am so grateful for your support.

  Thank you. I am very moved.

  But.

  My honor is intact. Nothing has happened to my honor.

  And let’s vow together to restore Egypt’s honor. Men and women together, because that’s how our revolution will succeed.

  Sister Mona

  The regime does these things to us because they know it emasculates our men. Our bodies are the battlefield, the nexus of power and sexuality. So the regime does this and our men—even men very close to me, including men I’m emotionally involved with—feel emasculated, and they want to go back and take revenge. Or, because I was on the front lines and they weren’t, they feel emasculated in that way. I’m like, I’m not responsible for your masculinity issues. I’ve got enough to deal with!

  But that nexus of power and sexuality is the revolution that I want to fight. Which is why I’m going back to Egypt. We weren’t ready for that in the eighteen days. Now that more and more people see what I wrote about in my essay because they go to the protests and they get groped by the very men who were keeping the physical revolution alive against the police, we can start talking about this revolution. Why are these young men who are so courageous groping me as they are running away from bullets?

  And this is where I enter now and say: because the revolution is happening over our bodies. And unless that nexus of power and sexuality is reckoned with, there is no future. That’s what I want to do in Egypt—I want to work against sexual violence. There are so many people on the ground working on this, but they’re just not working horizontally. If we put all the different initiatives under one umbrella, we can have a national campaign. I’m going to be working with the group Baheyya and their community of artists, writers, musicians, going into the rural areas we normally never see, reaching out to people. Working holistically, with doctors, creating female police units in precincts, getting rape kits and crisis lines and free therapy in place. Working with the Ultras to get awareness down to the streets. Working with football stars like Abu Treika to make a billboard that says, REAL MEN DON’T GROPE.

  It’s going to take years, but I’m totally fired up about it. So this will be the activist part of what I do in Egypt, where—again—my body becomes a tool. I never called myself an activist before now, but after Mohamed Mahmoud, I’ve become an activist, as a kind of therapy.

  EL RASHIDI: When we first corresponded you replied to my email by apologizing for the tardy reply because you had been busy responding to hate mail.

  ELTAHAWY: Every single day! I read it all, I respond to lots. But sometimes when I begin to read it and it’s like, “You cunt, you bitch,” I realize there’s no point.

  EL RASHIDI: It doesn’t upset you?

  ELTAHAWY: When it comes from the right wing, I expect it. When it comes from what should be allies on the left, that hurts more.

  EL RASHIDI: I notice that some of the people on Twitter who I know used to hate you, despise you even, are now flirting with you on Twitter.

  ELTAHAWY: I know! It took a few months, but I think people have come around, especially as more and more women face the kind of assault I did. And I’m glad people are coming around—we need to move beyond that knee-jerk position.

  EL RASHIDI: I don’t see the Muslim Brotherhood being too thrilled about your return.

  ELTAHAWY: It’s true, but I plan to make a very public appeal to Morsi, to say, “Look, you claim to be the president of all Egyptians, you could have really helped things when you were in Tahrir opening your jacket saying, ‘Look look, no bulletproof vest.’” He could have said something about the price Egyptian women have paid.

  EL RASHIDI: How did you feel about Morsi’s win and that speech in Tahrir?

  ELTAHAWY: I was much more depressed than I expected. I think we have five or ten years of really hard work on the ground to get to the point where we can get rid of what the military dictatorship of the past sixty years created and begin to build the country we hope for. If we don’t look ahead, the revolution will die. And we have to be optimistic. Our optimism is our biggest weapon. If there’s no optimism, forget it—pack the whole thing in. I think Morsi is an ineffectual, utterly unprepared nobody. He was just a fill-in, like a spare tire. The problem with him is he’s a soft cuddly grandpa, uncle-looking guy, which made a lot of people say, “He’s kind, give him a chance.” That’s crap.

  EL RASHIDI: What’s your take on the Brotherhood?

  ELTAHAWY: They’re too ingrained in collective thinking. It’s not rocket science—the Muslim Brotherhood is a microcosm of the regime. The Supreme Guide is Mubarak. A top-down structure, just as the country had when Egyptians said no. So they need an internal revolution.

  But they’re organized! They’re out there doing things, and all we can think of is Tahrir. The extent of our political imagination is, “Let’s go to Tahrir!” I love Tahrir and wish I were there right now, but for God’s sake, people.

  EL RASHIDI: What about Brotherhood defectors, like Abdel Mo-neim Aboul Fotouh?

  ELTAHAWY: [Shudders] Who are you? You told every political faction that you were what they wanted. To the left you were a leftist. To the Islamists, an Islamist. You represent nothing man, nothing. Not a fan. Don’t buy the soft, cuddly, Islamist guy.

  EL RASHIDI: So are you categorically anti-Islamist?

  ELTAHAWY: No. I have a platform, and it’s more than being anti Islamist. My platform is to create a ceiling of freedom that is high enough in Egypt that it encompasses everyone’s freedoms. What last year has done for me is that it has moved me beyond reacting to their agenda. With my essay, with my arrest, with the kind of stuff I want to do now, I’m creating an agenda that other people have to react to. Now, whenever anyone writes something about women’s rights in the Middle East, they always mention my Foreign Policy piece. It has put a flag on the ground that you have to respond to. And that, for me, is taking away from them. In the past it was their flag people had to respond to. Now it’s mine.

  MATTHEW DICKMAN

  Three Poems

  FROM Wish You Were Here, a chapbook

  Greencastle

  I like the dark inside

  the hotel room

  because it reminds me

  of the dark inside

  of an apple

  before you cut it in half.

  How the core

  is like a ribcage some bird

  left behind

  after it was eaten

  and the wind and the rain

  had its way with it

  and basically that’s what

  this room is

  and what I am too, wondering

  how to get outside

  when I’m the kind of person

  who looks at his shoes or hands

  only sees a kind of dark shape

  or something like the unnamed

  color of molecules.

  I’m in Greencastle trying

  to express myself

  by not being, not moving.

  I’m closing my eyes like two

  refrigerator doors and thinking

  of garbage cans and ponds,

  I’m thinking about your feet

  and sawdust and rock
ets.

  I’m thinking about all the things

  I haven’t done

  like burying an animal