You Never Know: an essay I wrote for Writers for Democratic Action

 “You never know,” my mother used to say. And my father and I would shake our heads at her unwarranted optimism.

“There’s no hope for this country,” my father would tell me. “There’s no future for you here. Get out as soon as you can, go study abroad.” Nasser’s Egypt had slipped ever deeper into the Socialist bloc for nearly twenty years. Nasser’s grip on power was absolute, his one-man regime uncontested, his rubber-stamp parliament a transparent fig leaf; his very name struck terror in many and inspired blind adulation in the masses. After the shocking defeat of Egyptian forces in 1967, there was a stirring, a glimmer of hope, that public discontent, student demonstrations, and military humiliation might shake his seat. But that proved ephemeral.

The despair I sensed in my family was especially acute. As a politically powerful family under the ancien regime, we were targeted for arrest, sequestration, and confiscation of all assets. We still lived in a large, beautiful home filled with elegant antiques, but my father drove a fifteen-year-old car. A pall of gloom, of helpless despair and constant anxiety, pervaded the air as long as I could remember. It looked like the order of things was set in stone.

Yet my mother would repeat: “You never know. Only God knows.” Her faith was genuine, and she was of a naturally sanguine disposition, but now I realize that there was more to it. She was trying to keep my father from sinking into an irremediable depression. Still in his forties, he had already had several heart attacks, and indeed he was to die at fifty, years after I had indeed gone to study abroad.

And yet, my mother was right. The unimaginable happened. After Nasser died, his vice president Sadat, perceived for twenty years as Nasser’s yes-man, overnight veered sharply towards the West, kicking out Egypt’s Russian overlords, throwing in his lot with Western democracies, and flinging open the doors of the Egyptian economy to world markets. Egypt had its glastnost and perestroika avant la lettre. The pall of fear was lifted.

So this is the comfort I would share with you today: Don’t despair. Don’t be so overwhelmed by the hurricane forces sweeping through our America, upending norms and laws we thought as immovable as Mount Rushmore, laying waste to the democracy and freedom we held sacred.

It was that ideal of America, a country of laws, of rights and freedoms, that absence of fear, that my father had wished for me, and that I had sought when immigrating to this country forty years ago. And when I despair, I remind myself that what seems irrevocable, what seems entrenched forever, can change back. The pendulum never stops swinging. My American grandchildren still have a chance at a better world. As my mother said: “You never know.”

Samia Serageldin is a novelist and magazine and book editor. She is the author of The Cairo House, The Naqib’s Daughter, and Love is Like Water. She grew up in Egypt under Nasser, studied at London University, and emigrated with her family to the U.S. in the 1980’s. She is a resident of Chapel Hill, NC, for well over thirty years.

Evil Incarnate in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde vs The Picture of Dorian Gray

The problem of separating good from evil in human nature is addressed in literature through the guise of making evil incarnate: the Devil, in “Dr Faustus”; Mr Hyde, in R.L. Stevenson’s “The Curious Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”; or the portrait, in Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. Rereading the latter two revised my opinion. Stevenson’s short novel is an absolute page turner, and the sense of place is remarkable: his London is a character in the book, its changes of mood, time of day, and weather, as sensitively rendered as anything by Virginia Woolf. On the other hand, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, in the 1890 pre-censored edition, is almost unreadable. Stupefying, pointless pontification by “Lord Henry,” contrariness failing to pass for wit, let alone philosophy. London, as a city, is atmospherically absent, whereas the detailed descriptions of luxurious interiors serve no more purpose than Décor magazines.

In the end, though, the coexistence of good and evil in every human remains irreconcilable, at least outside of the realm of religion.

Blame it on the Algorithm!

 If I needed proof of how “algorithms” work, this is it: lately I discovered that Italian PM Georgia Meloni’s speeches and interviews are perfectly easy for me to follow with my limited Italian. I’m no fan of Italy’s hard right PM, but something about her speaking style—deliberate, clear, without regional accent—makes it good for practising Italian. Well, I soon found video clips of Marine LePen popping up in my feed! Apparently the “algorithm” inferred that I liked right wing female European leaders. It couldn’t be more wrong! Blame it on the medieval Arab mathematician Al Khwarizmi after whom Algorithm is named. Both these ladies are happy to blame Arabs for everything, anyway. 

“You Never Know.”

 “You never know,” my mother used to say. And my father and I would shake our heads at her unwarranted optimism.

“There’s no hope for this country,” my father would tell me. “There’s no future for you here. Get out as soon as you can, go study abroad.” Nasser’s Egypt had slipped ever deeper into the Socialist bloc for nearly twenty years. Nasser’s grip on power was absolute, his one-man regime uncontested, his rubber-stamp parliament a transparent fig leaf; his very name struck terror in many and inspired blind adulation in the masses. After the shocking defeat of Egyptian forces in 1967, there was a stirring, a glimmer of hope, that public discontent, student demonstrations, and military humiliation might shake his seat. But that proved ephemeral.

The despair I sensed in my family was especially acute. As a politically powerful family under the ancien regime, we were targeted for arrest, sequestration, and confiscation of all assets. We still lived in a large, beautiful home filled with elegant antiques, but my father drove a fifteen-year-old car. A pall of gloom, of helpless despair and constant anxiety, pervaded the air as long as I could remember. It looked like the order of things was set in stone.

Yet my mother would repeat: “You never know. Only God knows.” Her faith was genuine, and she was of a naturally sanguine disposition, but now I realize that there was more to it. She was trying to keep my father from sinking into an irremediable depression. Still in his forties, he had already had several heart attacks, and indeed he was to die at fifty, years after I had indeed gone to study abroad.

And yet, my mother was right. The unimaginable happened. After Nasser died, his vice president Sadat, perceived for twenty years as Nasser’s yes-man, overnight veered sharply towards the West, kicking out Egypt’s Russian overlords, throwing in his lot with Western democracies, and flinging open the doors of the Egyptian economy to world markets. Egypt had its glastnost and perestroika avant la lettre. The pall of fear was lifted.

So this is the comfort I would share with you today: Don’t despair. Don’t be so overwhelmed by the hurricane forces sweeping through our America, upending norms and laws we thought as immovable as Mount Rushmore, laying waste to the democracy and freedom we held sacred.

It was that ideal of America, a country of laws, of rights and freedoms, that absence of fear, that my father had wished for me, and that I had sought when immigrating to this country forty years ago. And when I despair, I remind myself that what seems irrevocable, what seems entrenched forever, can change back. The pendulum never stops swinging. My American grandchildren still have a chance at a better world. As my mother said: “You never know.”

 

The Elementary School Shooting in Minnesota

 Heartbroken, and terrified, about this elementary school shooting in Minnesota. The two children who died were exactly the age, 10 and 8, of my two elementary grades grandchildren. Like them, they must have been excited to start the first school week, planning the night before what to wear that first day, what lunch to pack, what accessories to attach to their backpack. I try not to imagine what their parents and grandparents are feeling right now, because I can imagine it all too well. I pray no one repeats in their presence the mantra “guns don’t kill people.”  Cars don’t kill people, and we regulate the hell out of them.

The thing is: guns are the weapon of cowards, the weapon of impulse. And especially and most dangerously, the weapon of our time. The weapon of the delusional loner who spends hours in front of violent video games and loses his sense of reality. Violence in our reality-bending age is disassociated from reality. The twenty-year-old who went to the school with murderous intent had a hand gun, a rifle, and a pistol. Could he have attacked seventeen children and killed two if he had only a weapon, like a knife, that required close body to body contact? 

Confessions of a Dante Dilettante

 Confessions of a Dante dilettante: I’ve dipped into Inferno over the years, fascinated to discover how Bosch’s triptych might have been influenced by Dante’s trilogy. But the awkward translations to English were discouraging, until I was recently introduced to a flowing, fluent verse translation that manages to preserve Dante’s terza rima. By Angelaurelio Soldi, a poet and native Italian speaker.

“Enemies of the People”

                    

“The Enemy Within.”

 “Enemies of the people.” When I hear these words I have an atavistic reaction. I grew up hearing those words applied to my family and others like them. At school, I had to study a textbook that mentioned my family, by name, as “feudalist, capitalist oppressors of the people.” I grew up in Nasser’s Egypt, where my family was targeted on account of its political prominence and large landholdings. President Nasser, faced with setbacks internally and internationally, followed the playbook of autocratic regimes throughout history around the world: he deflected public discontent by accusing “internal enemies” of being responsible for the failures of his own regime.

 The other imperative of such regimes is to silence dissent. That is done by installing a pervasive atmosphere of fear and distrust. In Nasser’s Egypt, even between parent and child in our own bedrooms, we whispered. People were arrested and disappeared into prison for years or months for a random remark. For fear to effectively paralyze dissent, for autocensorship to work, repression must be both ruthless and arbitrary. No one feels safe. No law can protect you. The power of the ruler is absolute.

It was Nasser’s Egypt that I fled at the age of twenty. Later, when I immigrated to the United States, over forty years ago, it was because my husband and I wanted to raise our children in a free country where they would never know that fear. For us, America was the land of freedom, of justice, of laws and due process.

Today in America, I cannot believe that I am hearing the same words, watching the same playbook. “The Enemy Within.” “The Deep State.” The xenophobia. The crackdown on dissent. The emasculation of the legislative and judiciary branches. The flaunting of the courts. The intimidation of the media and the persecution of universities, those two bastions of independent thought. Using the formidable powers of the government to concentrate all power and influence at the top, in the hands of of a handful of men.

How does ambient fear succeed in silencing dissent? Even someone who does not feel vulnerable in their own right might fear potential repercussions on a family member or friend, for example the son or daughter whose career might be negatively affected. No one feels safe. The secret to universalizing fear as a deterrent is arbitrarines in the application of repercussions: surely the young student at an elite school, a permanent resident who came to the U.S. from South Korea as a child of seven, surely she had every right not to expect to be arbitrarily hunted down by ICE for deportation simply because she participated—not even led—in an anti-war demonstration. The intention is to teach the lesson that no one is safe.

And today, just as it was with Nasser back then, as with any charismatic leader, there is an irreducible core of true believers who will see no evil, bear any price, countenance any outrage, because their leader can do no wrong in their eyes.

But this is the one optimistic note I will strike: as with Nasser, as with Stalin, as with all-powerful cult figures throughout history, the secret is that the emperor has no clothes. When Nasser died, it was all of a sudden as if a pall had been lifted, a strait jacket had been released. It took his successor Sadat only a couple of years to turn the ship of state around in the opposite direction and undo everything Nasser had done over nearly twenty years.

Trump has only been in power for two months. This is still America. There is still time, before fear is completely installed. There are still laws, there are still pockets of free speech. This is still America. Let’s act like it.

 

 

 

 

High Stake Election Strategy

 

How can a film about a fraught super-high stakes election help get you through the fraught supe-high stakes American election? My theory about uncertain, crucial outcomes is better to wait till the verdict is final and definite. If it’s good news, you’ll be relieved and overjoyed. If it’s bad news, at least you would have had a few extra hours, or days, to indulge in optimism. A case in point: a couple of years ago when I awaited a medical report that had the potential to be, at a minimum, life-changing, I didn’t look at it over the weekend. If it turned out to be good, great, and if on Monday it confirmed the worst, well, at least I had the weekend before the sky fell in.

On the night of November 8th, 2016, I went to bed certain, as everyone I knew seemed to be, that the morning would confirm Hilary Clinton as our next President. A disturbing dream woke me up in the middle of the night. My mother had died a few weeks earlier but in the dream I was hurrying to her sickbed, where I found her sitting up in bed and reassuring me: “It was just a cold.” I puzzled over the dream for a moment and then thought, since I was awake, I might as well turn on my cell phone and take a look at the election results. To my shock, Trump was winning. Now I wish I’d slept through till morning.

So this November 5th election night, I opted to go watch a film about another election where the global stakes are arguably at least as high: the election of a Pope in Rome. “Conclave” is a riveting story of intrigue and ambition, of Cardinal rivalries and cardinal sins, overlaid with gorgeous pomp and pageantry. Well worth the distraction from the news roller-coaster of doom-watching or irrational exuberance. Especially since this election promises to be a marathon, not a sprint, with final results taking days to certify, and then bracing for challenges and potential unrest. Be grateful for the calm before the storm.

 

The Paris Olympics Hot Air Balloon, Napoleon in Egypt, and the hero of The Naqib’s Daughter

 The Paris Olympics hot air balloon, Napoleon in Egypt, and the hero of The Naqib’s Daughter

 

Watching the hot air balloon that dominated the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, I immediately thought of the original Montgolfieres and their sensational use in Napoleon Bonaparte’s ill-fated Egyptian campaign in 1798. Nicolas Conte, the hero of my historical novel The Naqib’s Daughter, was the Chief Engineer of the Balloonist Corps in Napoleon’s army in Egypt.

Napoleon tasked Nicolas Conte with flying a manned hot air balloon over French-occupied Cairo, as a display of superior French military engineering intended to awe the local population. Conte’s objected that he could not answer for the safety of such a demonstration with inadequate resources and limited time, and prevailed on Bonaparte to at least let him attempt an unmanned Montgolfiere. The Cairene crowds gathered to witness this miracle of French invention, a formidable flying airship capable of transporting soldiers great distances. The enormous hot air balloon rose in the cloudless sky until it burst into flame and came down ignominiously in flaming tatters. Far from being impressed, the crowd dispersed in disgust, convinced, according to the scathing Egyptian historian El Jabarti, that “this was no more than a very large kite of the sort knaves at street fairs fly to entertain children.”

 

Françoise Hardy and the Yé Yé Era

 Françoise Hardy and I 

Nothing has the power to bounce you back to your teenage years like the music of that decade, and nothing sobers you up like learning of the passing of one of your adolescent icons. If you grew up in the 1960’s listening to the French pop singers of the decade, as I did, you had your favorite, just as you had your favorite Beatle. Sylvie Vartan, Chantal Goya, France Gall, Sheila, and Françoise Hardy, were everywhere, especially on the cover of Salut les Copains.

Although they were not a girl group, they were invariably swept together in press and publicity, emblematic of a fresh, upbeat yé yé generation, light years away from the moody chanteuses like Juliette Greco and Mireille Mathieu.    

Each cultivated her own style. Sylvie Vartan, the cute bleached blonde in glamorous outfits, Johnny Halliday’s girlfriend. France Gall and Chantal Goya with their identical page boy bangs, one blonde, one dark, like negative images of each other. Sheila, with whom I empathized, because she seemed more awkward than the others, as if, secretly, she sometimes had to struggle with her hair or her weight.

Françoise Hardy, on the other hand, was the epitome of cool. She stood out from the others with her tall, lean, slightly androgynous figure and style, akin to her contemporary Jane Birkin. One suspected there were darker depths to Francoise Hardy. You could say she was the George Harrison of the group. She is also the one whose classic style and thoughtful lyrics have survived the test of time. How fitting today to listen to her “Mon Amie la Rose,” with its intimations of mortality, inviting the listener to contemplate the short, lovely life of the rose. The beauty of the garden today, withered and denuded the next. “On est bien peu de chose….” Or, as Shakespeare put it: “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.” So true. RIP Françoise Hardy.