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"They Put in Their Stomach a Summer Watermelon"
Watermelon, Fabrikzeitung Nr. 369, eds. Noha Mokhtar and Gregor Huber, Zurich, Switzerland, 2021
In this short piece, I use watermelons to trace a life stretched between Cairo, Kuwait, and Montreal. I start on my parents’ new Nasr City balcony, where returnees from the Gulf debate rind-color and sweetness while wondering whether to resettle. From there I follow the fruit’s Egyptian slang—miramila for the perfect, araa’ for the disappointing—into a dermatologist’s warning that my thinning hair is turning my scalp into desert, a dating-app promise of “seedless” love, and my grandmother’s lifelong crusade for vitamins after losing her daughter. Each slice exposes another edited-out seed: the unkept promises of emigration, post-2011 politics, Rogaine, even nutrition itself.
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