Shelf Life Page 10

  Sabah had the key to our apartment. She arrived around midday, because she enjoyed staying up late to watch television and because the red buses and minibuses that she had to take from the neighborhood of Haram, where she lived, were too crowded in the morning. She left the apartment whenever her work was finished. Our paths seldom crossed, but neither of us minded. Wiping the floor was her last chore. The first time I saw her drag the cloth with her hands in sweeping arcs, her body perfectly bent in two, I bought her a mop to make things easier. She thanked me, and proceeded to leave it in the broom cupboard untouched.

  What I knew of Sabah’s life I learned from Samir, who occasionally joined her for a smoke in between errands. I found out that her husband, unemployed, used to spend his days at the ahwa smoking sheesha. Eventually, he disappeared, lessening her burden but leaving her saddled with the certainty of being sole provider for her son and elderly mother. I knew that 30 percent of Egyptian households were headed by women (divorced, widowed, and single); they were the primary breadwinners. How distinct were their stories? Even worse, how similar? Weren’t they all entrepreneurs in their own right? They had to creatively solve the problems of their daily lives, taking professional risks with uncertain consequences. Female providers were stretched beyond their capacity, but they coped, just like Sabah did—until, one day, an incident toppled the painfully delicate balance.

  “We have a problem,” hissed Samir from under his sloppily trimmed mustache, clearly relishing the drama of the news he had to relay.

  “What now?” I asked, opening my diary, ready to add one more task to my list.

  “Sabah’s son is in jail. She needs cash, but she can’t ask you for a loan.”

  “Why is he in jail?”

  “I don’t know,” said Samir, feigning ignorance. I raised my eyebrows in dismay, and he revised his statement. “Well, of course I do, but Sabah would kill me if I told you, and I swore on the lives of my children that I wouldn’t.”

  “Why won’t she ask me for a loan?”

  “She’s already drowning in debt.”

  “She should stop spending on cigarettes, for a start.”

  “That’s what people like you always say. You don’t realize that cigarettes are our only pleasure in life … well, and the other thing.”

  “What is she planning to do?”

  “She is going to take a second job,” said Samir incredulously.

  “She can barely manage this one. There aren’t enough hours in the day.”

  “I always say you are a woman who provides shade for others from the beating sun. Give her some of your shade.”

  Later that day, I had an idea, so I left the office early. I asked Samir to stop the car outside of a home goods store, where I picked up two nonstick cupcake trays. I returned home to find Sabah slumped at the kitchen table, the heaviness she always carried somehow even more pronounced. The only proof she was still conscious was the smoke trailing from her cigarette. When she registered my presence, she rose, beginning to tidy up aimlessly. I asked her to sit back down, and she obliged.

  “There’s a new coffee shop a few doors down from Zamalek. I know the owners, so I offered to supply them with carrot cake. I’ll teach you how to bake it and price it out. You can do it here alongside your cleaning, and you can coordinate with Samir to deliver the cupcakes during his errands. To begin, I’ll supply you with all the ingredients. Whatever money you make is yours. If things go well, you can start sourcing your own materials.”

  I knew I’d made an offer that she could finally accept. She hugged me across the kitchen table, and I felt the coldness of her bones. I realized that she was crying. I tore out a sheet from my notebook and passed it to her along with my pen so she could transcribe the recipe. She shook her head.

  “You write it. Make it big and clear,” she said.

  Within two months, Sabah was purchasing her own ingredients; she managed to scale her daily production up to 192 carrot cupcakes. The apartment smelled of cinnamon and vanilla icing.

  I thought of other women whom life had condemned into nonexistence, beautifully bundled into Judith Shakespeare, the playwright’s fictitious sister whom Virginia Woolf described in A Room of One’s Own. She stayed at home while her brother went to school, her ambition hampered by gender. The necessity of her eventual marriage made any career impossible. Could Sabah have been Madam C. J. Walker instead of one of the millions of Shakespeare’s sisters with their thwarted destinies? Why are female entrepreneurs understood as only a contemporary phenomenon? Stilted historical narratives and cultural mores deny our foremothers’ labor—domestic, professional, and otherwise—in favor of progress, suppressing untold narratives and preventing us from knowing what we are capable of.

  And why is it that when I look to my entrepreneurial ancestors, I am met only by Walker? Again, there’s the problem with a single narrative, even when that narrative is a trailblazing one. Where are the Egyptian women in charge? Sabah’s life was constrained not only by the broken systems surrounding her but also by the absence of precedents in our collective imagination. And even when they existed, some chose to be portrayed as men. Take Hatshepsut, the fifth pharaoh of ancient Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty, who was regarded as one of the most successful rulers, focusing more on trade than conquest—statues of her with a male body and a false beard abound. The belief that women in charge in big business, small businesses, women who manage, don’t exist, when, in fact, they’ve been present throughout history, is crippling. Hind was named after one such woman, the daughter of Utbah ibn Rabiah, a very powerful woman in early-seventh-century Arabia, who owned more than one hundred camels. Still, she is remembered primarily as the archenemy of the Prophet Muhammad, and as a powerful man’s daughter.

  Another powerful woman from our canon, Khadija, is primarily defined and remembered in relation to men and their institutions. First known as Khadija bint Khuwaylid, then as the wife of the Prophet Muhammad, she was born in the latter half of the sixth century into a family of merchants of the Qureish tribe that ruled Mecca. She enjoyed tremendous respect and a reputation for fairness. Khadija inherited a fortune from her parents and continued trading and increasing her wealth well after their deaths and the deaths of her first two husbands. Stories suggested that her camel caravan surpassed the length of all others that traded with Syria and Yemen, the commerce centers of the time. She hired Muhammad to oversee one of her caravans to Syria, and he impressed her with his honesty and diligence on the job. She was forty and he was twenty-five. She sent a mutual friend to ask for his hand in marriage. It was her immense wealth that furnished him with a room of his own during his early prophethood. That’s where he meditated, received the word of God, and questioned the validity of his revelations. It was her faith in him that made her the first convert to Islam and enabled him to venture out as the messenger of God. She managed him then, too, calming the stress and pressure of his newfound role. Theirs was a monogamous union that lasted twenty-five years and produced four daughters. It was only after her death in AD 619 that polygamy, a common practice at the time, seems to have crossed his mind. He subsequently married ten women, not including concubines.

  Despite her widespread influence, Khadija is mostly remembered as a dutiful wife. I didn’t know her full story until I was an adult. Her historical mistreatment resonated with my contemporary encounters, like with the franchiser who couldn’t shake women’s hands. If the Prophet Muhammad was accepting of his wife’s powerful status, how could this franchiser, so eager to replicate the practices of the Prophet Muhammad’s time, find us so unworthy? So many men spend their lives studying holy books with the hopes of becoming holier themselves. But they apply these religious texts to justify bad behavior, while secular men pose as moral authorities to pursue the same cruel goals. Our beliefs insulate us from other people, blinding us to our own hypocrisy.

  Of course, these rules apply to women, too. While the scarcity mindset encourages competition, it also stifles solidarity. L
ife had confirmed Virginia Woolf’s claim: “Women are hard on women. Women dislike women.” Even though this happened more than ten years ago, I can’t rinse it out of my memory. A well-put-together middle-aged lady came up to me on Heliopolis’s shop floor as I was stacking books and arranging displays.

  “I want to speak to the owner.”

  “I am one of them,” I said, as I set down the batch of books in my hand on a nearby table.

  “You must be the secretary,” she scoffed. “Now run along and find me a decision maker.” I stomped up the stairs to the café, ordered myself a coffee, and returned the calls of the day that I had missed. By the time I ventured back down into the book section, she was gone. I didn’t know whether her assumption was based on the menial task she’d seen me doing. I didn’t know whether her terseness was evidence of patriarchy’s indoctrination or her own desire not to see fellow women succeed. Whatever it was, it stung because it came from a woman.

  Despite the overwhelming work required by our new branch, we’d already begun discussing opening another one. We were ambitious, we were hungry, and maybe I was cocky. Anything seemed possible. There was also an altruistic force behind the new plans: we wanted to make more of an impact on a greater swath of people. In the midst of all this growth, I’d given birth to Zein and Layla less than two years apart. This brought more labels: pioneer, successful, mother, working mother. I struggled to recognize myself in these identifiers. I hoped that I would be able to in retrospect. Notions of power and success struck me as narrow, restricted to “real” professions rather than unpaid feminine labor. Domestic work, the work of giving care, went unrecognized, so whenever I was applauded with an award or a profile pertaining to my work in Diwan, the validation felt hollow.

  * * *

  In 2014, I was contacted by a journalist at Forbes Middle East, who was part of a team compiling a list of the two hundred most powerful women in the Middle East. I was ranked at number sixty. I asked how they measured power; they told me it was a complicated matrix of factors. For men, they ranked wealth: still complicated, but a more blatantly numerical rubric. I wondered why.

  They invited all of us powerful honorees to an awards ceremony, at the One&Only resort on Palm Jumeirah, an artificial archipelago in Dubai. The hotel was swathed in so much splendor that it felt like a caricature of itself. I walked down marble corridors until I reached the tongue of red carpet, which was bordered by photographs of the honorees. More marble, gold, nacre, and alabaster surrounded the ballroom. Flowing orchids crowned elaborate table settings. This was a wedding with many brides, their maids of honor, and too few grooms.

  I assessed my fellow powerful women with excitement. Most of them were accompanied by their best friends, daughters, or mothers, and I felt a pang: I should have brought Hind or Nihal, perhaps even my mother, who always managed to instill my moments of triumph with her own bittersweetness. Like the time in 2011, when Time magazine interviewed Hind and me, and featured a photo of us two “unlikely entrepreneurs.” My mother’s pride at her daughters’ Time debut was hampered by the untidiness of my eyebrows.

  “Darling, couldn’t you get them done?”

  “Actually, Mum, had my appearance been a factor in my success, I promise you, I would’ve addressed it long ago.”

  Faiza’s criticism aside, I did feel unkempt and underdressed as I scanned the other women’s clothing, from the Princess Jasmine–like ball gowns, to more traditional Emirati dresses and abayas, to business suits. I wore a khaki silk wraparound dress and sensible ballet flats. I was introduced to a TV presenter who towered above me, swaying like a pendulum in her heels. She maneuvered me to one of the backdrops, positioned me at an angle with my left foot forward, and began interviewing me on camera. I chastised myself for not bothering with foundation or powder, which I only ever applied at weddings: my face would look shiny in the footage, in contrast to the interviewer’s matte complexion.

  A booming voice announced the arrival of Sheikh So-and-So and the start of the ceremony. Powerful women were ushered to seats at the front, their plus-ones to tables farther back. The lights dimmed; dramatic music and a laser show followed. Eventually, I heard my name called. I rose, climbed onto the stage, shook the sheikh’s hand, received my gold-inscribed glass plaque, smiled for the cameras, and descended. Once all the awards had been distributed, I placed the cold plaque between my palms and treaded, hunched down in the dark, to the back of the ballroom to make a discreet exit.

  In the months and years that followed, I returned to the feeling of awkwardness that clouded that night. All these women being celebrated for their power by other women, with hardly any men in sight, other than the sheikh giving out the awards. I guess we didn’t need to say what we already knew: that most celebrations of women aren’t something that men feel comfortable participating in. In my early twenties, I attended many stilted International Women’s Day celebrations. The few token men present always said something hyperbolic and ingratiating, which only accentuated their visible discomfort.

  Weeks after the ceremony, I received a poster-sized photo of myself captioned The Most Powerful Women in the Middle East above the Forbes logo. My tightly crossed arms suggested both strength and confinement. My daughters were so proud of me that they decided to hang it in the kitchen, next to the refrigerator and above the garbage bin.

  5

  PREGNANCY AND PARENTING

  The shelves of Diwan were the first to know of my pregnancy, after Hind and my mother. From them, I surreptitiously plucked What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and then I went back into hiding. I approached change with caution, like my mother. I remember summarizing the book for her—how it said I would feel, the bodily changes I could anticipate, the dos and don’ts that accompanied this temporary upheaval—as she looked on, dismayed. At some level, I knew that I was trying to control the uncontrollable. I hoped that if I could itemize my pregnancy on a to-do list, I’d feel autonomous again.

  “I remember being pregnant with Hind, sitting in the doctor’s waiting room for hours, smoking to pass the time.”

  “You smoked?” I asked her with horror.

  “Of course I did. And I didn’t give up my Scotch. The doctor told me that quitting smoking or drinking would add to my stress. I had my trinity to help me through: Virginia Slims, Johnnie Walker, and Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care.”

  “At least you read,” I said, convincing myself that one good habit out of three made for an acceptable record. Our conversation illustrates a generational divide. At the start, Diwan didn’t have an elaborate Pregnancy and Parenting section, which I’d learned was a necessity from researching online and visiting bookstores abroad. But our culture complicated this necessity. In Egypt, where extended families live close together, pregnant women are cared for and guided by their mothers, families, and female neighbors. Parenting has historically been a communal affair. We learn from others, not from books.

  Indeed, Hind’s Arabic inventory corroborated this fact, featuring only a single shelf stocked primarily with encyclopaedias of children’s names.

  “I read Dr. Spock to guide me through your early years, not to tell me that my stomach would stick out!” my mother responded with exasperation. “My mother died when I was sixteen. She took her advice with her.” My mother’s own advice had shaped my buying habits yet again—I ordered Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care for Diwan that day. Published in 1946, it had become one of the bestselling volumes in history, not too far behind the Bible. Dr. Spock assured women that they knew more than they knew: he encouraged them to follow their instincts, to be affectionate, and to listen to their baby’s needs. His gentle, approachable tone paid off. By the time I read it, sixty years after its publication, the book had been translated into forty-two languages and had sold more than fifty million copies. I heard echoes of my mother’s advice in Dr. Spock’s no-nonsense guidance.

  “But did you exercise at all? Yoga, maybe?” I remember asking her. What had begun as a search
for advice had become this extended bonding exercise between mother and daughter. What I hadn’t expected was that I would end up espousing my mother’s worldview, since I had spent most of my life rebelling against her.

  “Exercise? I can hardly listen to you.” She paused, and tried to explain. “Pregnant French women don’t stop eating Brie, and Japanese women don’t quit sushi. The only thing you need to exercise is your common sense.” At the time, I thought her attitude was a relic of her era. Now, I wonder if she was right.

  I always left our exchanges with the same question: How “common” is common sense, really, across a divide of three or four decades? I gave birth to my first daughter, Zein, in 2004, my mother to me in 1974, and her mother to her in 1933. Aside from our shared genetic lineage, what did our experiences of giving birth have in common? My mother’s mother, Fotna Wahba, gave birth to six children over the course of fifteen years, beginning in 1926. She had all of them in her Zamalek apartment overlooking the Nile, with the help of Ayousha, her midwife. Two of the six, twins, didn’t make it: the boy died after three months; the girl, more resilient, lived an additional three months. My father’s mother, Susannah, a green-eyed redhead from a tiny village in Mansoura, the first outpost of Napoleon’s cultural invasion of Egypt in 1798, began her childbearing career around the age of sixteen, giving birth to my father in 1921. This work spanned fifteen years and yielded eight or nine children, all delivered at home by a midwife. The head count varied depending on who you spoke to. My father and his siblings were lucky to survive the malaria and cholera epidemics that swept through Egypt in their youth. Like so many women who weren’t from the upper or middle class, Susannah lived and died without a surname any of us could remember.