My Cairo is a personal cartography of a city lived in fragments, memories, and returns. Drawing on fifteen formative years spent in Cairo, this project brings together writing, photographs, sketches, archival material, and short films to map the city not as a unified whole, but as a constellation of places—homes, streets, cafés, cinemas, mosques, bookstores, and everyday encounters—that shaped a sense of belonging. Moving between memoir and urban history, each section unfolds around a specific site or neighborhood, allowing visitors to navigate Cairo through layered narratives, images, and sounds. Rather than offering a comprehensive portrait, My Cairo presents the city as it was experienced: partial, intimate, and deeply personal—an invitation to wander, linger, and return.

At the top of the the Sultan Hassan Madrassa. 1994
Part 1 introduces Cairo as both a personal landscape and a shared city of memory. It begins with a personal cartography and a lyrical opening that frame the city through fragments, contradictions, and intimate recollections. Themes of home and belonging emerge, showing how cafés, cinemas, and other “third places” sustain everyday life while revealing its inequalities. The section closes with a vignette on Egyptian stamps from Downtown, small artifacts that echo the collection’s broader concerns with memory, place, and the optimism of a city in transition.

Part II. 12 Short Stories of a Vanished Cairo

Part 2 traces the Cairo I knew through its cafés, restaurants, cinemas, clubs, and neighborhoods where daily life and memory converged. From Zamalek’s German School to the shaʿabi heart of Sayyida Zeinab, and from fried liver on Mohamed Ali Street to ful at the Sheraton, these places reveal the city’s layers of privilege, devotion, and improvisation. I recall afternoons in bookstores, evenings in cinemas, and conversations in cafés where literature, politics, and friendship came alive. Together, these fragments form a mosaic of Cairo’s modern life — cosmopolitan and shaʿabi, monumental and intimate, always alive in the rituals that made it home.

Part III. Cairo Held in Memory. Cairo Held in Heart

Part 3 brings the collection to a close by reflecting on how Cairo became my true home. Not through monuments, but through the fragile grace of its everyday places, I found belonging in cafés, cinemas, alleys, and encounters that endure in memory. A final coda echoes the refrain “home is me and you,” reminding us that home is ultimately carried within.