An officer I did not know greeted me outside the museum, drove an electric pulse through my belly. They broke up the sit-in. They knew our names. I was one of 18 women. They took us inside. Old Kingdom scribes watched wide-eyed as men poured water on us. Shocked us. Flung boots at us. I was sure it was the end. Then they put us on a bus. Before spring I had come from the south on a train. Walked right up to the frontlines of music and fear. Hours into the desert, I still had no idea where we were headed. Our hands were tied. When we arrived at Huckstep they dragged us across the sand like dead goats. Ripped our clothes. All night we were beaten and grilled. What do you want from this country? At the time we still had answers to a question like this. Had broken our breath singing justice to the wind. We handed everything over. If we had them, we slipped the wedding bands off our fingers. A fresh portrait of the deposed president hung behind us like a blind. Even the scotch tape was new. What is he still doing on the wall? The officer said, we want him watching over us and used the word love. One more word I’ll bury you in the sand. I was sure he was serious. Swollen, I slept and saw a leopard-clad priest slaughtering a bull. Giant incense in the sky like palms. Lone foreleg twitching in the sand. Then a pail of cool water woke me. Now we test if in fact you are virgins. We said what test? One woman held her head in both hands. Another told stories about the mourners of the past; two women were paid to beat their bare breasts and smear their skin in dirt to lament the deceased. As stand-ins for Isis and Nephtys, these women had to be hairless—their bodies shaved like stone. And they could not be mothers. If you still have a hymen, make a line. I was one of seven girls. They took us one after the other into a room with a big window. Door left ajar. A jailer—a woman—asked us to undress. And the prison gate was wide open. She untied even our hair. Removed the pins from our scarves. Shook out our clothes like stiff winter blankets. Imagine your body, seen from the outside. I asked her to close the window. A whole wedding is watching me. She said, no. Daylight flickered like the limp spine of a kite. My hands are tied. The doctor who examined me was dressed in olive green. If he really was a doctor, why spend five whole minutes searching with his hand in me? We found the hymen, said the report. He gave me a blue pen. A space had been left blank between the finding and the dotted line. On my dead body, I said. You will be shocked and beaten. I signed. I wanted to die. What did you want me to do? You can’t look a lion in the eye and say let me be, I am a black-winged kite too far from home. In court they said we broke the sidewalk. Charged us with carrying white weapons, gas cylinders, Molotov cocktails. They looked us in the eye. I denied all of it. …
Sara Elkamel
The dream came weeks after I visited The Beautiful Captive, a solo exhibition by an Alexandrian artist. In an installation exploring enactments of domesticity, two goldfish were meant to be floating mindlessly around a glass bowl but upon looking closely, I noticed one of them had stopped moving. When I inquired, I was told the fish had died unexpectedly that morning, and that the assistant curator was on her way to the gallery with a replacement. Can I make you some tea while the new fish gets here? …
I am pleased I will soon die and with me the pressing need to make a terrible, terribly poignant film, and the pressure to put a writing desk by a window exceptionally permeable to sunlight. On my left on the green shore with no wind, a black-clad woman is killing time. I would give the film a contemporary title, most likely absence makes the heart grow moss. It would complicate the question of mourning a living subject. The premise a string of mornings where my paper-fingers massage the secret trees in your head. My unseeable hand in death’s unseeable hand, I am pouring my eyes into a sea of ink. All the summers that would have come now come at once, the light at a distance that will never change. Like our memory of the future, the film’s ending would change every time. One time, my hand of paper will croak in the wind. Another, I will finally curl to sleep on your tongue. Finally, a borrowed ending: within eyesight of the shore, a maniacal orange cloud will swallow a ship. A few seconds before, a pianist born and raised in the hull will take a final look at the sea, his fingers stroking what he remembers of the finite black and white keys. I do not know the first thing about making a film, but I know what wanting does to time. In the future outside our window, moss mantled the lava fields. …