Article: The decades-long search for my...

The decades-long search for my ancestors has brought many surprises. My sub-Saharan African roots were remarkable and expected, but less predictable were the genealogical chases that led me to Chinese and Egyptian forebears.

Very recently, I visited Egypt with my husband, both a vacation trip as well as a pilgrimage of sorts, an opportunity to see a part of the world that has fascinated me for quite a long while. The timing was driven by two things: the fact that increasing global instability made the decision a "sooner is better than later" one; and the second that my novel, RED RIVER, includes a family storyline that identifies an ancestor as coming from the Nile Delta. I had a strong pull to visit Egypt before going off on book tour. The itinerary for our trip was all of the requisite tourist places: Cairo, the Giza pyramids, a cruise down the Nile from Luxor to Aswan, and, last, Alexandria to the north, abutting the Mediterranean Sea.

Yes, I was apprehensive about the wisdom of visiting that part of the world during this time of escalating tensions. No, I am not naïve enough to believe that my trip to Egypt exposed me to true Egyptian life or Egyptian people. I was surrounded by professional guides and Egyptians primarily interested in my tourist dollar. But I didn't feel uncomfortable or unsafe at any time during our visit. Everyone in my line of sight made a great show of professing great fondness for Americans, including the countless heavily armed Tourist & Antiquities police everywhere, and the hundreds of military men and plainclothes government security men lining the main streets of Cairo on the day Mubarak made a speech in parliament. Tourism is too important to the Egyptian economy for the government to not attempt to control the mood. I was relieved by the friendly, unsolicited assurances of almost everyone we came in contact with, but I would also have easily settled for indifference. Friendly, indifferent, both work for me, as long as there isn't hostility.

Although a vast majority of the Egyptian women I saw were Muslim and wore headscarves, the physical characteristics of many of the people in each city we visited bore striking resemblances to people we knew back in the States. Egypt was a sea of dark hair and brown faces. The running joke between my husband and I whenever we spotted a familiar-looking profile of an Egyptian on the street became, "Isn't that Philip? Isn't that Paula?"

Cultural identity is a curious thing. I identify primarily as a woman, an African American, and an American, mostly in that order. My internal monologues use these as foundational points of reference, as prisms through which I evaluate and categorize the world around me.

Most everyone immediately identified us as Americans, not only because of the obvious clues of English speech, uncovered heads, and Western clothes, but because of the ever-present camera. But in wandering through the bazaars with tourists of every nationality, as long as I kept quiet, hawkers trying to make a connection (and make a sale) sometimes misidentified me as being from some other country as well—India, South Africa. Or they called me "cousin," before launching into their sales pitch in English. On the Nile cruise, the vendor in the gift shop lured me into his shop with an unprovoked and expansive discourse on my obvious Egyptian heritage. According to him, I looked Egyptian—100 percent. He held out his arm to compare skin tone—exactly the same as his. He said my hair was just the right color as an Egyptian woman's. I have to admit to being terribly pleased with his assessment, and happy that enough of the genes of a long-ago ancestor could still show through. He recognized our kinship, albeit a distant one. This was a validation of one of my reasons for coming to Egypt: to form a linkage with past generations. Imagine the disappointment a day later when I walked past and heard this same man tell my husband that he looked Egyptian—100 percent. Notwithstanding, I vowed to keep the sliver of my far-reaching Egyptian heritage close to my heart.

Copyright © 2007 by Lalita Tademy