We’ve seen the seller of colored beads, the seller of poisons, the seller of dreams, the seller of delusions, the one who sells his party and the one who sells himself; the coward who flees the field and the brave man from whom the field flees; the tender and the cruel, the honest man and the liar, the sage and the idiot. We’ve seen those who can distinguish fifty kinds of wine and those who wipe their noses on their sleeves, so what is left for us to see?

We’ve seen smart bombs and stupid bombs, cluster bombs and phosphorus bombs, fragmentation grenades, tanks, armored cars, bulldozers, secret agents, and silencers, so what is left for us see?

We’ve seen the detention camps of twenty Arab states, so what is left for us to see?

I haven’t written a poem for three years because I don’t want to put a helmet on my poem’s head. I don’t want to work as a war correspondent. I don’t want to work as a fireman. I don’t want to work as an ambulance. I don’t want my verse to get used to living in graves. In the poem “Midnight” is the following passage:

Here is Death,

wearing padlocks as pendants,

his well-trained hounds at his heels;

his eternal belt

stuffed full of addresses.

He gently lays you in his ebony trunk

with his dark clothes,

handkerchiefs, combs,

and huge toothbrush,

preparing you for a journey

to a place he knows and you do not.

Yet, with the ending of the rain,

you discover

Death has overlooked you!

In a fit of irresponsibility

he has left you to this life;

you realize it is others who have died.

They have gone

for reasons as obscure

as the sources of the winds,

or they have departed

shrouded in banners

where winds go to sleep.

And though you can’t recall the details

your extravagant joy

now mellowed,

comes back again to you.

Slowly and slyly,

it has kept its charms for you alone,

as if it were a bolt of lightning that,

after seven years’ fermenting in the skies,

descends to strike,

electrifying you

from head to toe

from left to right,

snatching away your scepter.

Though you sought to evade it,

It returns to strike you,

because,

but for the hundred aches and pains

nagging at your window,

like the beggars at the traffic lights,

you were born for joy.

Yes! We were created for joy. We were created to reduce pain and increase pleasure. Isn’t man’s struggle with nature and with tyrants and invaders a sign of that goal? Isn’t our enchantment with love, kindness, justice, harmony, and freedom another?

We had got used to facing whatever we had to, as though the world would never add further hardship to hardship.

But on one of those typical Cairo springs that are not without foreboding, or dust kicked up by the burning khamasin winds, something that had never occurred to any of us was to happen.

10. The Dawn Visitor

When I was deported from Egypt in 1977, I told myself that this would be the last slap in the face I’d take from that regime. I set about trying to reorganize our family life using whatever means were available to me in exile.

I learned to appear ‘strong’ though my fragility was plain to any intelligent eye.

To appear to have no need of others though my need for a prop increased as the years passed.

To appear ‘under control’ like a stove burning quietly.

I asked myself if I’d fallen victim to a schizophrenia that hid the truth about myself from me even before hiding it from the world around me.

Was I now the Mourid I knew or had another Mourid formed inside me, at whose features I did not care to look?

One thing I was sure of: I would have to endure.

I am not a piece of music and I am not a play contemplating men’s destinies on a darkened stage. I am a father, a husband, a man with a cause, a poet, a son, and an uncle. I’m an adult and I’m supposed to provide answers and not just questions. I got used to my expulsion from Egypt and made it old news. I walked the roads of the world turning that page and trying with all my might to forget it. Life, though, taught me that you have to be free in order to choose, or be confused, or decide, or demolish, or build, or forgive, or apologize, or accept, or refuse; likewise — and here’s the rub — you have to be free in order to forget.

The world didn’t let me be free so that I could forget.

When I imagined that I’d forgotten or that I’d learned to coexist with my forgetfulness, the Egyptian police took it upon themselves to remind me that this was a delusion.

Tamim left Cairo for Boston on 20 August 2001. Just twenty-one days later, on 11 September 2001, the Twin Towers were blown up. He was obliged to live in an atmosphere of persecution directed against Arabs and Muslims in the United States instead of experiencing its social, scientific, cultural, and literary environment. What helped him, however, was the political openness of Boston and of New England in general. It is a fact that must be acknowledged that he was not subjected to harassment during the entire period of his residence there and that it was, for him, a normal period, with a certain measure of tension that should not be exaggerated, during which he was able to pursue his studies, teach his students, and read for the comprehensive exam that would precede the research and writing phases of his dissertation.

He took the comprehensive exam, passed, and returned to Cairo to do his research. He would take his laptop in the mornings and go to the library of the American University in Cairo, located a few steps from our house in Shari‘ al-Falaki, and there he would spend most of his time, racing to obtain the greatest academic benefit in the shortest possible time.

This was early in 2003 and America’s around-the-clock preparations for the invasion of Iraq were speeding up.

It seemed certain that Bush would launch his attack on Iraq within two or three days.