Status: Emo: An Egyptian Novel

By Eslam Mosbah

You are bored, bored, bored, stuck in a half-job, berated by your parents and unsure whether you should marry your cousin. You want to change. A chance encounter on Facebook leads you to Emmie and her underground world of strange fashion, drinking, dancing, sex, and drugs. You become an Emo and discover philosophical atheism and practical Satanism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781617973413

Book preview

Emmie Emmie Emmie Emmie.

You love Emmie. You hate Emmie. You hit Emmie. You shout in Emmie’s face. You’re in tears begging Emmie.

Emmie Emmie Emmie Emmie.

You sleep with Emmie. You spit on Emmie. You quarrel with Emmie. You’re worth nothing to Emmie. You go back to Emmie. You’re jealous over Emmie.

Emmie Emmie Emmie Emmie.

Emmie is the unsolvable equation in your life. You’re not brave enough to leave her, and you can’t get really close to her.

If you went close, you’d get burned.

Ohhh, Emmie Emmie Emmie.

How did you get to know Emmie?

You look at her fake profile picture and wonder about this creature called Emmie. You send her a friend request. You wonder about the secrets of a character who posts photographs smeared with colors like that. You browse her photos and her personal info trying to solve the enigma.

In the beginning was Facebook.

For months you’ve been exploring the highways and byways of Facebook in search of a friend. Not a friend in the usual sense. No—you’ve been searching the fake profile pictures and false personal info for a person to change your life.

Screw boredom

You eat bored. You watch TV bored. You play soccer bored. You go out with the few friends you have left. You argue with your dad. You ride the metro. You walk the streets. You look at the sky. Every day of your life the same boring things happen. Boredom is killing you. So you go to sleep, only to wake up feeling bored.

To begin with, you tried to get to know foreign girls living in Egypt. The American and German Universities are fertile ground for your fantasies of exciting girls—rich, beautiful, eager for sex, and maybe they even get high. You know that most foreigners who come to Egypt are not well-off in their own countries. They’ve come to study and live for less. Still, even poor foreigners are very rich in this country. And maybe—along with the hash, marijuana, and speed, the beer, wine, and vodka, and the stripping, threesomes, and foursomes—you’re also looking for European or U.S. citizenship to protect you from today’s hard times.

You surf around for weeks. You force yourself to learn a bunch of foreign lingo. You resort to various bilingual dictionaries and the might of Google search. You join foreign groups and participate on various topics in an effort to make friends. But whenever you send a friend request, no matter the language—English or French, or even Italian, Spanish, or Russian—there’s never a response.

This thought keeps repeating: You’re Jack the Ripper and you long to kill all the girls on the face of the Earth.

Finally, you get a response from Linda.

She’s an American studying economics at AUC. She’s stark naked in her profile picture. You try to find something out about her, or another picture, but you can’t. You try again to get her to reply. You’ve put your money on her, and it’s clear you’ll win the bet if you go about it the right way.

You try to come across as a young Arab guy with a western frame of mind. You’ve watched a lot of foreign films and TV shows, and you know how it goes. The sitcom Friends has provided a complete picture of the girls who spend all day looking for knowledge and work, and all night looking for company, sex, and a boring romance on TV or a porn film. By day, she’s a librarian or biologist dressed in prim clothes and prescription glasses; by night, a wild horse in need of an expert rider. You’ll meet her for some small talk, then take her out to dinner to get to know her better. After dinner you give her a lift back to her apartment. She invites you in for coffee or a beer, just to be nice. And of course you accept, all innocent.

You might not score the first time, but it’ll all end for sure in her pink bed, or perhaps on the sacred couch seen in every sitcom.

Half-looking at the computer screen, you ask her in stilted English, Do you accept my invitation over dinner?

You understand Linda’s reply, having put it through Google Translate: It’s too soon for dinner. We don’t know each other very well yet. I can’t ignore the Blue Book just because it’s you.

Of course you’re dying to know what the Blue Book is. She tells you it’s just a book with a blue cover. But you keep trying to get further information out of her, and your picture of this Blue Book becomes clearer with each response. They hand out instructions on every aircraft heading to Egypt, very simple instructions that show huge respect for this people: Don’t drink from the Nile, it’s poison; Don’t eat Egyptian fruit and vegetables, they’re polluted; Don’t try and make friends with Egyptians, crime is widespread in Egyptian society and resentment at the west and western civilization is present in every Egyptian’s heart; Don’t attempt to buy anything expensive in Egypt because they double the price for foreigners.

Egyptians, in short, are bums, cheats, hypocrites, and sons of bitches.

There are additional instructions for students coming to Egypt to study at a branch of a European university—particularly girls. Things like: Don’t spread your legs for any Egyptian guy, all of them are rabid about sex, and having sex with them is more like being raped. Plus, most of them are mentally ill and have STDs. Make sure you have safe sex and always make your partner wear a condom, no matter how much you trust them and however close you are. Try not to be unnecessarily communicative with Egyptian guys, they’ll take any kind word or ordinary conversation, even a smile, as an implicit agreement to a sexual relationship. Most of them are looking for the chance to marry a European or American in order to get citizenship and escape the clutches of dictatorship, bureaucracy, and poverty in Egypt.

Ninety percent of marriages between foreign women and Egyptian men who live in Egypt end in failure after the husband leaves for the country he’s now a citizen of thanks to the marriage. When there are children, the Egyptian husband gets custody and sends his wife packing, or goes back home again.

Thanks, Mr. Mailman! keeps running through your head.

That’s all you could get out of her about that book. What other shockers could it contain?

You give up with her for a while, but try again in the hope of improving your image: I didn’t invite you to have sex, just to have dinner.

You’re asking me out on a date. I’m not stupid. I know how Egyptian guys think. You want to spend a night with me, and maybe you want to marry me and get citizenship through me. That’s fine. I won’t ask you about your job . . . but do you have accounts in Egyptian or European banks?

It seems that it isn’t only Egyptians who are bums. She’s offering you citizenship in exchange for cash, perhaps she’s offering sex for cash. But you don’t have enough!

Okay. Bye. Look for someone else.

You surf and surf and use more brazen techniques. Your interests extend to European girls abroad and the rich and classy in Egypt and the Arab states.

RICH AND BEAUTIFUL. FUCK HER!

You send messages like: I’ve never seen such beauty. Will you marry me? I’d like to get to know you. I really would. What do you think about becoming friends?

Mostly you don’t get an answer, or a hysterical one, or a brush-off: You must be crazy! You’re not human. Troll. Not you again! Fuck off! Okay, lady, I will.

This thought keeps running through your head: You’re Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon. You’re nobody. You’re not the first man on the moon and you haven’t been to Mars. You’re always second pick, or maybe last. So you’re nobody.

During your hobbling search around Facebook you find her. You send the same message you’ve sent ten thousand times before: Can we get to know each other?

This time you get an answer from Emmie. You’ve got 175 characters to introduce yourself and say who you are. It’d be great if you could do it in less. If it’s one letter more, I won’t reply.

That’s how you came to know Emmie.

You’re not utopian, just ambitious. Ambitious for anything. You’ve spent years stranded in virginity, and you still have some hope that this ridiculous male virginity can be consigned to the junk heap. You’re twenty-three years old and you’ve never touched a woman’s body—Oh God!

You’re not handsome, rich, intelligent, or well dressed; perhaps you’re not even human. But you hope to become a man, even if only once. You’re quite convinced that you’ve lost your virility because of the number of times you jack off per day—four or five times. Now you’re not even sure you’ll be able to do it properly, one time, with a woman.

HOW CAN TWO MINUTES SATISFY A WOMAN’S HUNGER?

Obsessing over size, thrust, and duration is killing you. You do it cursing Haifa, Nancy, Elissa, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and all the women in the world.

This thought keeps running through your head: BEING HARD IS WHAT COUNTS!

You haven’t done it before, but you long to do it someday soon with Emmie. Today might be your lucky day.

You shave your pits and your pubes. You take a hot shower for a whole hour and fantasize about all the different positions you’ve seen in porn movies. You put on the right amount of deodorant and your favorite scent. You’re wearing new underwear that you haven’t used before, and put on the shirt you borrowed from the neighbor that you think looks fantastic on you, and your younger brother’s new pants that you think make you look great. You take fifty pounds, half your current wealth, out of your secret stash. You’re going to meet Emmie today!

You fix your hair to match your longish face, raise your head to heaven, and wonder, Will Emmie be impressed?

You don’t know much about Emmie. You told her everything about yourself, but found out nothing about her. You sent her a message saying, I don’t really know what to say. I’m just a guy. I feel I’m alone and want to meet someone new. I’m twenty-three and studied social work at college. I’m single and don’t even really have friends. Can we get to know each other or not?

She sends you a prepared answer. And what do you want from me?

You respond disappointed at this lukewarm question, I don’t know!

When you do, tell me.

I want to get to know you, for sure.

You send this message and wait two days. You give up on a response and study her profile picture on Facebook in search of any info or secrets she left behind by mistake.

While you look at these color-splashed photographs, you ask yourself about this madwoman you’re trying to get to know on the other side of the screen. You go through various pictures of her, which all have one thing in common. Paint-spattered photos of Emmie as imaginary characters. Silken hair colored red or green, eyes made up in a strange way to create a black halo around them, strange, eye-catching clothes, mostly pink or black. A bell starts ringing in your head that you’ve been desperate to hear for ages.

Sexy.

You feel the word with the tip of your tongue and get a sense of its taste. You wish the sensation would last a while. The word has strong hints of freedom, liberation, and pleasure.

Okay, so check for secrets.

You know that the self-image is completely different from the real likeness. Maybe she thinks she has a special kind of allure, so she filled her profile with these shots. She might actually look like Gandhi or Mother Teresa, or even Martin Luther King.

You imagine yourself