Tripping down memory lane
November 2006
Cultural pie and
civilisational mash
Between the reel and
the surreal
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Cultural
pie and civilisational mash
What if my Egyptian parents hadn’t left Libya
when I was three, how ‘Libyan’ would I be now and have those early years
influenced the person I am today in any perceptible fashion – beyond the
inconvenience it caused when going to the United States?
What if I hadn’t moved away from Egypt as a
young child, would I be more quintessentially ‘Egyptian’ today or would I have
still pined for a multicultural identity, for the exotic? If I hadn’t left the
UK as a teenager, would I feel more ‘English’ now and less ‘Arab’? Had I not
moved to Belgium more than five years ago, would I feel as ‘European’ as I do
now and am I gradually metamorphosing into a ‘Belgian’?
In today’s fluid world, my situation is hardly
unique and millions of people dress up in different aspects of their hybrid
identities every morning – veritable cultural and social chimeras. For those
who believe that we are in the throes of some kind of irreconcilable ‘clash of
civilisations’, I tell’em not to confuse economic and political interests with
civilisation. History has proven, particularly in the case of the
‘West/Christendom’ and ‘Islam’, that there has been as much mash as clash over
the centuries.
At a dinner party hosted by our Anglicised
Japanese-Egyptian friend in her plush apartment round the corner from Liverpool
Street station, there was plenty of mashing and no bashing beyond friendly
banter. The guests each brought their own peculiar cultural mash to complement
the pasta, poultry and Madelines on the menu. There was the half German-half
Egyptian who was reluctantly Americanising, the
Italianised-Indianised-Americanised Egyptian, the Arabised Italian, the
Arabised-Anglicised Belgian, the Belgianised Arab Anglophile, the Anglicised
Egyptian, the Americanised Chinese and the Anglicised German.
That’s not to mention the pub meal we had with
the Arabised English friend and his Turkish wife who have been in their own
successful and fruitful union for the last decade, despite the Euroscepticism
around them. Read
on...
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