The View from Garden City
by Carolyn Baugh

List Price: $24.95
Pages: 336
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780765316578
Publisher: Forge Books

Carolyn Baugh, a native of Indiana, studied Arabic and Arab literature at Duke University, graduating summa cum laude. She spent her junior year abroad studying at the American University in Cairo. She rowed crew for AUC on the Nile, where she met her husband, a member of the Egyptian National Crew team. They live with their two daughters in Philadelphia.

Ms. Baugh is now in her fourth year of the Ph.D. program in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, where her focus is gender issues in Islamic law.

top of the page

Q: What were you interested in exploring in The View from Garden City? Did you set out to dispel some of the stereotypes/prejudices against Muslim women (or men)?

A: That wasn’t really my focus. I was really mostly interested in exploring shared landscapes between different groups of women, and I wanted in particular to try to sort out the distance and nearness I felt vis a vis my Egyptian women friends. I wanted to work through how sometimes we could tilt our heads together and laugh almost as though we were one voice, and at other times a woman could explain to me in all seriousness that female genital cutting is okay or necessary. I really set out to dispel my own confusion, because writing has always been sort of a revelatory process for me. There were a few things that, as I began to write, I started feeling like I should address. I had a lengthy discussion of the headscarf (written before I ever thought to wear one) that bordered on the didactic, and my editor called me on it. I realized above all that there are forums in which didacticism is useful, and this was not going to be one. This is, I hope, a book that gives impressions and images, and should give a very human experience and not one more appropriate to a lecture hall.

So, even though I knew that there was confusion attached to the region about which I was writing (literate adults have asked me if everyone in Egypt --- which probably has more Mercedes than Germany --- rides camels or if there are also cars), I didn’t feel compelled to deal with it except as a sidebar. Again, the point was exploring the stories of women. And my hope is that on some level it’s enough to become acquainted with someone else’s story as a beginning; when we share stories, and feel out the way we’ve weathered life’s sucker-punches, then we can start working through the mechanics of why we differ on certain points and upon which points we can come together.

On another front, though, my intention was always to include Arabic poetry, because literature does so much toward linking people, causing that flash of recognition of the Self in the Other. There are very few retro-fittings in this book, but when I read an article in Amnesty International about the poetry of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, I felt like this is something solidly in line with what I’m trying to get across. It’s so much more difficult to dehumanize people who express themselves in literature, and the Arabic poetic tradition is centuries older than Shakespeare and Chaucer, with highly developed systems of rhyme and meter and complex imagery.
Do I set out to dispel some of the negative assumptions about Islam and Muslims when I lecture on the subject? That is 100% my goal, and some of my happiest moments are when someone comes up to me afterwards and tells me he or she has been pleasantly surprised.

Q:  How do you write so well about Egypt and Egyptian women?

A: Well, I’m not sure all Egyptian women would characterize my writing that way. I’m interested to see what the Egyptian reaction will be! There are plenty of women in Egypt who are far more educated than I, wealthy, powerful women who probably won’t identify at all with the sort of stories in the book. I am most at home writing about the milieu to which I am most accustomed there, a very middle class sort of lifestyle with middle class stories.

It wasn’t long after I got to Cairo that I was in a conversation with a young man not too much older than myself…. By virtue of being 20 years old, I had all the answers to the planet’s ills, and I had just gotten done charting for him my master plan for world peace, and then I asked him about his dreams for the future. He told me that more than anything he longed to have a car and a home so he could get married and have a family. It took me a long time to get over my first reaction which was, oh, how mundane. I had never heard anyone respond that way. I was used to getting a summary of how so-and-so would one day be ending poverty or leading the free world or becoming the next Spike Lee, etc. A car and a home. So simple and yet so overwhelmingly heavy, complicated, distant! And then it hit me that I had a lot to learn about the world, and I’d better start by shutting up a little and listening to people. Suddenly I knew that almost every paradigm I’d ever known was going to be challenged. I had to learn to try not to judge by the standards in which I’d been steeping my whole life. Every time I am in Egypt I always find myself asking what my life would look like if this were my only terrain --- as rich as it is, in many ways. I watch my sister-in-law function: Her commute to work alone, fighting the traffic and the heat and the pollution day after day would kill me; but she works all day, and cooks food from scratch, and takes care of her kids and her husband, and hangs her laundry out on a nylon line. And she has enough grace left over to be good and gentle and loving, and I always think, where do you get this strength, and how can I get a little?<br>
So, in answer to the question, all I can say is that I have tried to listen.

Q: How has your life been shaped by your marriage to an Egyptian?

A: Oh, wow. No one has ever asked me that question before. I guess I first have to admit that we married absurdly young; I was 20. So it’s really more a matter of growing up with this Egyptian guy. I lucked out, of course --- it could have been disastrous, as any decision made at 20 is likely to be. But getting to grow up with him means that a lot of very innately Egyptian things have become reflexes for me… like hospitality, or getting the check at a restaurant. The thought of having my companion pay for lunch causes me physical pain.

My grandmother always used to say, “you don’t marry a man, you marry his family.” That’s an operating principle in Egypt, certainly. Getting to call his family my family for these fifteen years is very immense. I’ve been witness to all sorts of family dramas, death and illness and marriage and marriages-in-crisis. His maternal uncle (now his business partner) has been a very big, very important part of our lives, and his family lives here now; his daughter is doing her pharmacy internship, and another goes to Temple. My mother-in-law comes for visits that last 3–6 months, which sort of horrifies friends when I tell them. But she and I have a very good relationship (a fact that she likes to throw in the face of my husband’s brother’s wife who is constantly causing her grief). She invokes blessings on my head, which is the sort of good karma you can’t buy. His dad was such a character --- he had an incredible sense of humor, loved to laugh. As his father was before him, My husband Tarek is incredibly family-oriented, quite unafraid to be extremely emotionally attached; the worship that my daughters have for him --- even the baby, ever since she was a hatchling! --- is almost unsettling.

Certainly, my fifteen years of being home-schooled in the Egyptian dialect hasn’t hurt. Tarek didn’t speak English when we met, so it was sink or swim for my Arabic. Egyptians often remark that I speak Arabic without an accent, and I’ll admit I dig that. Early on, well, my tutor was a college-aged rower, so I’d get in trouble for, you know, speaking like a guy in a locker room. But now that I have a little sense of propriety, I’ve gotten to put my language skills to use in many ways, most recently getting to translate off and on for a family of Iraqi refugees resettling in Philly. Being able to speak someone’s language is such a door-opener; I love talking and laughing with people, knocking down barriers, making connections...

Q: How did you first become interested in studying Arabic?

A: You know, I really love languages. I’d studied a lot of French, and thought I’d choose something a little more difficult and more, well, vital to International Relations, because my aspirations going into college lay in the realm of government. I decided against Russian and chose the Middle East as an area, and then chose Arabic instead of Hebrew --- actually for the sole reason that more people speak Arabic than Hebrew. I owe Miriam Cooke at Duke a large debt of gratitude because she taught a fabulous course on the literature of Arab women; it was in translation, and I just knew I needed to learn Arabic well enough to read their words in the original language. So that got me to go the extra mile, because I quickly realized I had a really long way to go. Eighteen years later I sill think I have a long way to go.

Q: Did people treat you differently in Cairo because you were American?

A: Well, I am pretty sure that I have always been treated exceptionally well because most Egyptians are just exceptionally good people. No matter the worldwide political situation, I have never encountered anything but kindness from Egyptians.

I was in Egypt several months after September the 11th, and I remember getting into a cab with my daughter, and the cabbie had this astonishingly long beard, the kind that would make the TSA break out in a cold sweat. So even I, as a Muslim, as someone who’s lived extensively in Egypt, did a double take, thought, hmm, maybe we shouldn’t take this cab; I hadn’t yet started to cover my hair, so I looked very American. But I felt lousy about it as soon as we nestled into the back seat and we started chatting. I asked him how it’s been for him with that huge beard. The thing that a lot of Americans don’t realize is that in many ways the Egyptian government engages in “racial profiling” much more blatantly than the U.S. government does with its watch lists and Patriot Act. Men can be picked up off the street, interrogated, held indefinitely… all just for looking the part of a “terrorist.” For the vast majority, of course, the beard is a sign of piety and humility --- on a par in many ways with the headscarf --- and also of emulation of the Prophet Muhammad. Long and short, this guy and I got into a discussion of how the world had changed, and I was describing my family’s experiences post 9/11 and he was telling me the hardships he’d found from having the beard… and we were both agreeing how sad it was that Bin Laden and their ilk persist in making life so difficult for the rest of us. He was telling me how his friends and family had told him he should get rid of the beard, it would make life so much easier, but he gave me this smile and this little shrug, and said, “What can I do? I love my beard.” And then he did that thing that cabbies in Egypt do when you’ve had a nice chat, and tried not to let me pay the fare at all.

Now one thing that most people in Egypt don’t hesitate to mention is what a blithering idiot they think George Bush is. For the most part, Bill Clinton was well-liked… although nothing compared to the love that folks above a certain age still feel for Jimmy Carter. But here’s the thing that is most consistent: People in Egypt are always quite clear about their ability to distinguish between the ills of a particular government and the character of a people. I always get the benefit of the doubt. Always.

Q: Do you think any of the women in the book find love?

A: Well, that depends on what you mean by love. There was a poem that I wanted very badly to include (but couldn’t find the rights for the Arabic text) by the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan called “I Found It” (which exists in “A Mountainous Journey,” her autobiography translated by Salwa Jayyusi). This poem explores a woman’s self-discovery: on a day of unparalleled beauty, there is a tree that has survived a battering by violent storms, but her branches remain green and tender, the wind could not snap them, and birds have returned to shelter there…. The poet expresses joy and empowerment on “the day my self led me to myself.” And it’s another one of those instances where translation fails on certain levels because the Arabic title is, Wajadtu-hā, meaning “I found it,” where “it” (hā) refers to the “self” which is feminine (all nouns carry gender in Arabic). But the same hā is used to mean the pronoun “her”, so an alternate title/meaning could be “I found her--”, which is equally applicable because the poet has at last found herself, the unbreakable woman within. So, it’s very beautiful, very meaningful, and this is what I had envisioned for the women in my stories --- that they could find the sort of self-love that arises from surviving pain and discovering suddenly that you have it in you to endure, and endure beautifully. I think all of them find this at some level. And this is what I hope will resonate with women readers of all backgrounds.