#TheForgottenTombPt1

Generally, not many women walk through the streets of Siwa.

I’m still trying to discern who’s who. Non-Egyptian foreigners are easier to identify in their backpacking gear, ‘The North Face’ labels and more, especially if they’re blonde with pale skin and the lilt of an accent or language helps.

There are women with or without hijab wearing Western clothing. They tend to look and behave like city people. They’re louder, more expansive, they often wear trousers, designer labels and they often mingle in mixed-sex groupings and sort of spill off pavements onto the road or from chairs around a table into aisles and neighbouring tables. These are Egyptians.

And then there are Siwans, and this is where it gets complicated for me, and I’m still working it out. Siwan women seem to stay at home or visit female relatives and friends. Husbands do the shopping and shopkeepers are not allowed to serve women in shops. Out of the house, married women wear black shoes and frankly are just covered in cloth. Their hands are usually bare, they’re covered in black cloth from head to foot including their face – as if someone has thrown a black cloth over them. On top of that is a long shawl, which sits on their heads, up to their foreheads- as a headband might- and then drapes down over their shoulders and chest straight down to their heels. This shawl is handmade by Siwi women, is various shades of navy and white check and is embroidered with symbols made with coloured threads. This is, to my understanding what a married Siwi woman wears when she goes out of the house. After that it gets hazy. There are women wearing all black – from head to foot and only their eyes are visible. This, I believe, is what fundamentalist Muslim women wear. Siwa is a mix of traditional and Islamic beliefs which may account for the variations… and … more haze… working on it …

Men wear galabayas and turbans, that they often tie and untie, and when they meet, they shake hands. So every morning at the Siwa Coffee Shop there’s a LOT of hand shaking. As a woman I don’t have to shake a man’s hand and sometimes I do get tired and smile instead.

I got here because I was thinking of Amazigh men and women as ‘a’ people and of what constitutes Amazigh. What does being Amazigh mean to them? I thought of some of the things they share – the things I could see – rituals and dress of course, some of those could be considered Muslim, rather than Amazigh customs. I thought of what I could hear and the strong signifier of identity that is their language. I thought of the men I have been spending time with who identify as Amazigh and who mostly have regular contact with tourists so they are at the interface between the traditional and contemporary.

It all started with me mulling over ideas around the importance of history and traditional knowledge to identity and self-esteem. No, it started before that. I discovered a tomb in the centre of town 3 minutes walk away from our fave coffee shop. I say ‘I’ but it was actually my Egyptian friend who discovered it. Well, of course he didn’t ‘discover it’ and, to be clear, no one’s doing a Christopher Columbus on us and that’s really important to say in the sensitive neo-Colonial Siwa/Egypt context. Again, keep in mind there’s a lot I can’t write here about what it is to be an Amazigh Egyptian living in Siwa under the present (not to mention, past governments) system of government. To be more accurate, maybe what he discovered is that very few people know that this tomb exists including an older man who knows a lot of local history and some younger (although what is younger… thirties, forties?) safari drivers. The tomb is literally on the other side of the square that the coffee shop sits on. So, much so that my friend started to doubt whether he’d seen the tomb at all.

I’m told that Amazigh men agree to marry women who they often, or mostly, don’t want to marry because their mothers say they must. I’ve also heard Amazigh men who have property unfairly confiscated by corrupt Egyptian authorities must pay up to retrieve their belongings. I heard, and it’s consequently been confirmed, that every week an Amazigh smuggler is shot dead by the authorities. In the face of this type of political oppression, from the level of family to government, is there any surprise that I’ve heard the response to my suggestions to push back to the authorities, “If you do that you’ll ‘disappear”?

It was in that light that I started toying with the idea that the Amazigh men’s lack of knowledge of the tomb could in some way be linked to their ability to self-determine. The Wikipedia (I know…) definition of self-determination refers to ‘free’ choice (which I’m not sure anyone has anyway as don’t forget Kenyan girls run away from parents who refuse to circumcise them to have their genitals cut to prevent being ostracised by their peers).

I know it’s the wrong thing to say but I never really understood why knowing your history is important. I knew (was told) if you don’t understand the mistakes of the past you will repeat them. My father felt “I was doing the right thing in trying to stop Hitler” and he (along with his left wing book club pals who devoured books that had been banned or censored in some way) and 250 Trinidadians decided to risk their lives (he did not see it like that – he said he was just “young, adventurous and idealistic”) and join the RAF. Seeing the disjoin between the decisions taken around Brexit and those taken around WW2 when so many risked their lives I started to understand a little more why history is important.

So, is there a link between the ignorance of the tomb and the inability to push back as I’ve described here. I, of course, am not saying Amazigh men do not push back. I am only stating here, three particular instances in which specific individuals did not push back. This is not a fantasy, it is the lives of real men. Capable Amazigh men, in Siwa.

Living in the UK I understand the lament of black people that there were and continue to be a dearth of black people, and of course black women, in positions of power to show that black men and women can actually be astronauts, scientists, university lecturers and in the case of my father decorated service men and jurists, etc. People my age talk about not realizing that they could do certain jobs because they never saw black people in those positions. The recent popularizing of my father’s achievements is an attempt to, amongst other things, demonstrate by example, that you too can succeed.

So, I can understand how iconic Amazighs might instil pride and identity of a people but, ‘The Forgotten Tomb’? Is the fact that it has been forgotten symptomatic of … anything? Could remembering it affect the self-determination of Amazigh people in Siwa? Is it that a shared experience, or the knowledge of it, creates cohesion? Pride? Motivation? Hope? I don’t know the answer but, I’m certainly on a journey to further my own self-determination. Perhaps, so to are my Amazigh comrades.