It’s hard to make out exactly who’s in the small Egyptian café because the smoke is so thick it feels like Snoop Dogg’s green room at the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. I’ve got a hookah pipe the size of R2-D2 and I’m talking to a 71-year-old man, with few teeth, about the most recent incident at Tahrir Square. All in all, it’s been a really cool day.
“It’s black out, but everything will be clear,” prophetizes Raouf Famousi, who has lived in Markham for the past 40 years but has family back home in Egypt and spends every night at the tiny Layaly El Sharke Café on Lawrence Avenue in a neighbourhood christened “Little Cairo.” Famousi, who sits with three men beneath a small television tuned to Egyptian TV, reignites my licorice-flavoured disc of tobacco and tells me that Egypt’s future will only be revealed after the final election on June 24.
“I don’t know if the new president will have real power or be under the army. We have to wait and see,” he says, and I feel a little embarrassed that I’m not better versed in the Arab Spring. I remember that it started in Tunisia and spread to Egypt, Yemen and Libya, leading to the ousting of that madman Gaddafi, but I thought Mubarak was already toppled.
From left, Kaplan puffs on a hookah, shares a laugh with local caterer Eeid Saleh, and plays backgammon with some of his new friends
Now the country is being ruled by the military, and there’s a weird series of elections being held in phases, and anyway, Famousi and I keep smoking, and he forgives me for not having a better understanding of Egyptian politics — it’s a newly democratic system that seems to be changing every day. “The important thing is that you can have an opinion, and I can have an opinion, and we can be free to disagree,” Famousi tells me. “In Egypt, we couldn’t live with different opinions under Mubarak, and now, finally, everything’s changed.”
Everything’s changing in Cairo, but according to two young guys I meet smoking hookahs and playing backgammon, the situation is certainly dire. Mike Bules, a 30-year-old Egyptian pharmacist who also lives in Markham, says he was in Egypt during the initial uprising and that he fought alongside his parents for his life.
“We had to go out on the street to protect our family because the prisoners came out of the prisons with guns,” says Bules, who recounts a vivid tale of an all-night vigil, armed with a baseball bat and a shovel, to protect his home overlooking Tahrir Square.
Bules says the situation in Egypt is so concerning because a huge swath of the population is entirely uneducated. When Mubarak took control, the population of Egypt was 43 million people. Today, there’s more than 83 million people, and illiteracy is hovering around 40 per cent.
“A lot of people who never had freedom and are badly uneducated are suddenly let go, and you can guess what happens next,” says Bules, who likes to come to the café for a smoke and a taste of home — where his grandparents still live. He’s sitting with a guy in an FBI T-shirt who works as a driving instructor and says that, when the Arab Spring first started, he longed to be back in Cairo.
“You miss home and feel like there’s a chance to be a part of history, but instead we’re here,” says Peter Bakhit, 32. “I’m glad to live in Canada, and I’m thankful, but you do miss the opportunity to be part of a revolutionary change.”
“In the Sahara Desert, you can be in a car and have no food, no nothing, and you can fill up on [basturma].”
On the day that I’m smoking in Little Cairo, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has announced that new residents must remove their niqab in order to take the Canadian citizen oath. I was expecting to hear vehement opposition to the ruling. After all, I’m against it and feel like people should be allowed to wear whatever they want, but instead I meet person after person who agrees.
“You can wear what you want to wear, but you have to follow the rule of the country,” says Eeid Saleh, 59, owner of Lotus Catering & Fine Foods on Lawrence Ave., arguably the only shop in Toronto that serves authentic Egyptian cuisine. Saleh is a character and reminds me of Al from Happy Days. After we exchange a few pleasantries, he drives me, in his BMW, over to his shop down the block and he shows me his kitchen. It’s pretty impressive. I look up and see 40 purple beef sticks hanging from the ceiling next to a four-foot hacksaw.
“In the Sahara Desert, you can be in a car and have no food, no nothing, and you can fill up on this,” says Saleh, who slices me off a shard of basturma, double-cured purple beef, which is the tangy specialty of his shop. The restaurant is closed Monday nights when we visit, but after opening for only a few minutes, an Egyptian customer — on his way out on a date — stops in for some snacks.
“I was blessed. I got into my career after just two months in Canada,” says Mohamed Youssef, 45, who works in real estate and lives in Markham, of course.
On the walls of Lotus Catering are stickers that read “January 25,” and there are flags and T-shirts commemorating the start of the Arab Spring. “The people are more than the army. Look at Syria. The army wants to kill the people, but the people are still fighting,” says Saleh, who has owned his restaurant for 19 years and has been in the city since 1969.
I sit with Saleh for a while, and we look at his photographs from Cairo and I try to shake off the nausea I still have from smoking so much of that damned hookah pipe.
Egypt’s definitely a country in transition, just like the surrounding countries in Africa and the Middle East.
I don’t pretend to understand what’s going on there or to even know how Egyptians in Toronto feel about the niqab, Rob Ford or the Shafia trial in Kingston where an Arabic father stands accused of committing an “honour killing” of his three girls.
Still, the time I spent in Little Cairo was eye-opening — even if, when I got home, my eyes were bright red.
