An actual thing I own in my home.
For far longer than good judgment allowed, I wanted to be a professional belly dancer. I imagined myself standing barefoot in the dark as the announcer introduced me as an artist—no the artist: “El Fenana Mooooooooonica!” Just then, my right hip would part the curtains and bright lights would blind me as the mizmar whined and the beat of the tablah grew urgent. Perhaps I would have started with a cane routine in the greatest observance of all that is traditionally Egyptian, all that is baladi. Or perhaps I would have lead with a restrained and technically challenging dance, fitted with a candelabra on my head. Regardless of my show’s first number, however, one thing was for certain and certainly dooming: I would have to belly dance using both hips. To my parents’ great relief, my right hip has always jutted out as natively as the Great Pyramids of Giza, but my left hip drones with a heavy and indelible American accent. Yes, I am severely culturally lopsided.
In my youth, belly dancing was an occasional but universal celebration of a culture that made ordinary days in Bergen County, New Jersey irksome. It’s a very confusing thing to be ethnic by association. It’s having portraits of grim-faced Egyptians of long ago and much longer ago as décor, knowing full well that your neighbors have no such faces on the faces of their walls, key chains, or clocks. It’s feeling guilty for not eating the fish eyeballs that your grandmother saved for you because your non-Egy best friend was over for dinner. Belly dancing was the most tolerable thing about my parents’ heritage. It was the only aspect of my Egyptian side that didn’t repel non-Egys. “Can you belly dance?” they would ask. “Can you teach me?” they’d plead. It didn’t have the stink of feta cheese or the cheap creepiness of pharaonic knickknacks. It was entrancing and exotic, it was fun and beautiful, it needed no explanation or disclaimer.
I would study belly dancers at some weddings, and frequently in movies. (It is my well-informed experience that all Egyptian movies, without exception, have a wedding belly dancer scene.) The best belly dancers were authentic clerics of history. Every now and then, a thin blond westerner hyphenated herself with a colorful coin-covered sash, but her performance was not baladi. It was either too fast and eager or too slow and seductive. The clinking of her coins and finger cymbals did not carry to the back of the room. The Arabian dancer was thick in the waist and ankles, and uniformly fluid in each step and turn. The sharp corners of her wide eyes, blackened with modern day kohl, somehow detached her hips that much more from the rest of her. She found the pulse of any song and made it her own. She gracefully did nothing with her hands.
At these weddings and frequently at family gatherings, clusters of girls just like me shimmied and shook in American department store dresses to a familiar set of Egyptian songs. One artist in particular, called Hakim, had a monopoly on our foreign intelligence on Egyptian pop music. We laughed and clapped and rotated in a circle of ourselves. As we got older, dancing in the company of equally older young men was frowned upon, but only the best dancers were flatly prohibited. That left me to right-hip my little heart out with a chain of cloth napkins or a shawl tied around my waist for years and years.
Of course, there were other cultural activities I could have picked up to connect with my right side. My problem was that I didn’t enjoy those other things. As far as I was concerned, belly dancing was the umbilical cord to the motherland. Otherwise, I didn’t feel Egyptian. I avoided learning to read or write Arabic until college, and even then the language’s difficulty prohibited a deep appreciation. Almost all other Egy undertakings centered on the Coptic Church, but I was never sufficiently devout or resigned to accept all the rules and regulations. I liked Egy food, but I loved Chinese, Indian, and Cuban food much more. I cherished my Egy friends, but I felt most comfortable with friends who didn’t randomly pepper Arabic words into conversation.
It wasn’t until my early 20s that I realized abruptly that I had no business in making my single Egyptian sympathy a regular business. I was mistaken for a real life Arabian belly dancer, and once in my lifetime was enough.
In July 2007, I went to Cairo to be with my cousin, Rose, during the days leading up to her wedding. Through our childhood, awkward tween years, and young adulthood, I spent weeks at a time with Rose and our late night conversations and tearful goodbyes intensified with each reunion. I love her dearly and, though there are no maids (or matrons) of honor in Egypt, I volunteered to be her functional equivalent.
Pursuant to Egyptian wedding protocol, preparing for her big day involved various salon appointments to have every single hair plucked, dyed, or otherwise chemically treated, as well as nail and skin treatments to achieve a standard of beauty not at all like the American standard. For one thing, Rose was forbidden from being out in the sun for any amount of time and forcibly soaked in skin lightening soups, so she could be as pale as possible. In contrast, exactly a year earlier, I prepared for my own wedding by clinging to straps hanging from the ceiling of an upright tanning booth, slathered in some darkening potion.
This was not the first wedding I attended in Egypt, but it was the first time I was included behind the scenes. I was not only with Rose when the locally famous and predictably arrogant colorist removed the white towel from her head, exposed the exact shade of brown she did not want, and made her cry, I made a scene attempting to re-dye it myself until he fixed it. I went with her to pick up her white dress from a seamstress hidden in an elevator-less building, and I selected the menu for her night of the henna (which translates roughly into a rehearsal dinner). We hailed cabs and gambled our lives crossing the streets. On this trip, I was not treated like a haughty foreign guest. I was beginning to feel at home.
Rose and I arrived at our last pre-wedding stop about twelve hours before she was scheduled to walk down the aisle. She was one of two brides at her wedding, as both her fiancé and his brother were grooms that day. Both brides had exclusive appointments with highly regarded senior stylists. I tagged along and agreed to be styled by a promising junior stylist. There was no time to waste and I sat outside of their private studio in the general salon.
At the time, my hair was two colors. Most of it was jet black, but the hair from my temples forward was a deep eggplant purple. I don’t remember why I thought this was a good look for me. The junior stylist pointed to this as evidence that I didn’t shy away from bold trends and asked me if I’d allow her more creative license than usual. “Trust me, habibi,” she said. This salon was in the heart of Cairo and some of its most anticipated talent stood over my head. In chairs beside me, women were having feathers added to their heads and crystals to their eyelids. When else would I get an opportunity like this? I smiled and told her to go for it.
Within seconds, she placed fire-engine red hair extensions on my shoulders. It was as if she had kept them in her back pocket day after day waiting for this very moment. (I realize in telling this story, the reader may reduce some of these details to hyperbole, but I assure you, the reality was such that I don’t need to add any at all.) When I questioned her vision, she explained that she would weave in a few strands of bright red at a time into a larger up-do, giving depth and unexpected—but subtle—pops of color. This was as good of an explanation as any for me, so I sat there blindly and sipped on my coffee, my glasses on my lap.
When my hair was nearly done, Rose’s senior stylist came to my chair. He was angry and shouting and spitting. Someone in the salon told him that this junior stylist’s work outshined him.
“Are you an idiot? Do you know nothing?” he asked the junior stylist. “The bride wanted a traditional look and this is going to steal her glory!” It was too late in the morning to change course on my head, so he resolved to add “drama” to Rose’s. Minutes later, my hair was complete. It added no less than 8 inches to my height and extended approximately 18 inches behind me. It was as subtle as a head ablaze can be.
I begged the make-up artist to quell the “drama,” but there was no hope. My panicked pleas for neutral tones and minimal eyeliner were drowned out by gushing salon patrons, taking pictures, applauding the junior stylist, and complimenting me in the highest Egyptian terms. They spoke to me presumptively in Arabic. They asked me where the wedding was and tried to debate me on the best routes. By the end of the appointment, my eyebrows were two finely arched curves, my eyelashes were heavy with yet another set of extensions, and all of the real estate in between was shiny, shiny gold. I put on my strapless black and gold dress and completed my transformation into Nefertiti’s bust with modern Egyptian flair.
The ceremony was, of course, beautiful, and the reception jubilant. But my night was far from over. I left slightly before they cut the wedding cake to catch my flight home. My first wedding anniversary fell on the very next day, and my husband insisted that we spend it together. Not that I am unromantic, but I am, and since I insisted on attending the wedding, my forced compromise was to go directly from the wedding venue to the airport and board the overnight flight.
I had no issue hailing a cab. I went smoothly through the front of the airport to passport control, where I was directed to the Egyptian passports queue. One person asked me politely for the name of my show.
In the restroom nearest my gate, I changed out of my dress and into jeans. I stared at myself in the mirror. My hair was so stiff with hairspray and my face caked so heavily with makeup, there was nothing I could to leave Nefertiti in that bathroom, in Cairo. She was getting on the plane and coming to America.
I sat in a corner by the gate and tried to read, but men started hovering and approaching me and I was uncomfortable. I paced the terminal with my bags. I lingered over perfume and souvenir counters pretending to be in thought. I went to the restroom six or seven more times. Everyone stared because I was the most Egyptian Egyptian in the terminal. I was baladi. I never wanted so desperately to be my confused in-between self.
I still love belly dancing, but it is a celebration of only half my identity. Sitting here, standing there, or dancing away, I have two hips, and perhaps Shakira says it best: “You know my hips don’t lie.”