My Uvula

This story first appeared in the December 2024 edition of Shoebox Magazine.

A few years back, I needed to go through what my doctor described as a minor surgical intervention to address my sleep apnea. “The solution is to remove your adenoids and trim my uvula”, my doctor informed me. Seven years later, I remain indifferent about the loss of my adenoids and deeply nostalgic about my then oversized uvula. What have my adenoids done to merit my indifference? What has my uvula contributed to deserve my longing? These continue to be points of personal amusement. I assume most men would sympathise with my predicament, and many women would find my nostalgia befuddling, though I do wonder if a similar sentiment might be shared around breasts; after all, there is something about protruding body parts! An older version of me would never give words to this ridiculous reality, but the current version sees the humour in it all.      

The light-hearted reflection, however, meant in jest, is not entirely divorced from reality. The more salient point during this ordeal was my post-surgery pain: it was excruciating. One week through recovery, I had consumed double the recommended dosage of painkillers. I couldn’t eat, and worse, I couldn’t drink, let alone smoke. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. The surgeon assured me that it was a routine surgery, and yet I never experienced any pain like it. I needed more painkillers, so I went to his clinic for a prescription and an explanation. “The pain you are feeling is very normal; we did cut a part of your body. Had I amputated your leg, this would have been the same level of pain you’re currently experiencing.” I left the doctor’s office with a fresh supply of painkillers and a newfound appreciation of the relativity of pain.

I banked my thoughts with the rest of my endless archives. I knew they would come in handy whenever I mustered the courage to write the story I’d been meaning to write about Egypt. The notion of writing a book about home dated back to 2010. I started putting down my thoughts about my country from the perspective of someone who lived outside of Egypt far more than he had lived in it. At the time, I lived in the suburbs of London, pondering who I was and where I belonged, a sort of premature identity crisis that I conveniently attributed solely to being away from home. I started and then stopped and then started and then got stuck. I had never been the type to procrastinate until I decided to write! Fortunately, the Arab Spring happened. It gave me a great excuse to postpone the inevitable under the pretext that Egypt would change under the weight of this event; after all, the intention all along was to write about Egypt. 

I thought of going back to Egypt but opted to wait. Instead of leaving London for Cairo, I moved to Paris as I watched attentively for the Arab Spring to tell me something about myself and the country I call home. It was yet another excuse, one of my better ones, to put off a search that never took place, the search for my brother, the very root of my crisis. Within the first few pages of my book, which I eventually managed to write and publish, the reader will find out that my brother disappeared in 1990. A rapid disclosure of my pain and that of my family. A cerebral decision that I took because my intention was never to write a suspense novel but to bring forward the series of circumstances that resulted in the intentional disappearance of a middle-class young man from Cairo. A deep dive into my family’s history that dates back circa the 1920’s and travelled through time, place and generations.

I was a pressurised system with no relief valve. All it needed was the spark. A seasoned writer may be able to let their thoughts out on command. I wasn’t, and still I’m not. I needed the spark that gets the engine running. It came from my son, Nezar, whom I named after my brother. At the time he thought of Egypt as part of the mythology he likes us to read to him before he goes to sleep. A fantastic story with magic and spells, ghosts and demons, gods and goddesses. He saw himself as a little Italian hero, the protagonist in his own Roman amphitheatre. My failure as a father to explain to my son his roots provoked me; I needed to course correct. My son became the spark, the fuel and, more importantly, the person I talked to when I decided once again to write. We need all three elements to write a story if one exists. I knew what I intended to tell him, the truth, it may seem simple, but the simplest in life are the hardest to attain. 

Truth in Egypt is elusive, a tradition that dates back to the pharohs. In my generation, a bit more recently, Egyptians had their sofas made to order, and they were meant to last a lifetime. It always started with the fabric, the colour, the pattern and the embroidery. Those who can afford it use Gobelins (with a silent s). The very second French word I heard after merci. It came from Paris, and furnished the court of French monarchs. It was a simpler time back then, we associated freely with royalty, it’s a class thing. At the very moment the sofa is made, a tight-fit cover of hard-woven white cotton is also produced to protect the Gobelins. A lifetime passes, and the embroidered tapestry with its turns and motifs gets forgotten, for the effort required to reveal its beauty seems overwhelming to many Egyptians. Imagine if the cover is meant to hide rather than protect. Much like the tapestry is our truth, we have tightly wrapped under a snug fit of hard-woven, rarely dusted protective cover. I needed to find the truth in order to tell it.

Luckily, we are a nation of storytellers, as long as this story is not ours. Endless calls with various members of my family diving into their memory archives. Stories of stealth wealth and past glory made for a Greek ode only flatter. It took a lot of poking and probing to get the story within the story, the truth within the narrative and the ugly that made the pretty shine. I quickly learnt to keep my remarks to myself, for any reaction short of awe was frowned upon. They thought I was being nostalgic, and I was, but I couldn’t tell them I wanted to write our story. Certainly, I couldn’t speak of the disappearance of my brother because we never did. As I write these words 34 years after what happened, I can sadly admit that we, as a family, never spoke together about my brother. I was about to break a taboo, but I did it in English, and that made it OK for English was my chosen protective cover of the Gobelins that is my family story.

I expected the solitude of writing to be the hardest part of the experience, but it wasn’t. It helped that I wrote the majority of the original manuscript during the second confinement of the COVID-19 pandemic, but I know that was not all. I once heard a famous writer, whose name I don’t recall, say that distraction is the biggest hurdle for a writer. Being locked at home reduced distractions but didn’t eliminate them altogether. Technological advancement has enabled us to keep a distraction device in our pockets at all times. I’m guilty, like most people, of leaning, more often than I’m willing to admit, into the dopamine hit a smartphone provides. I was adamant not to be distracted, I turned off my Wi-Fi, silenced my phone and I even turned off autocorrect in my word processing software. It worked, even if my first draft was riddled with spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes.

Looking back at it, I see a wounded soldier running through the battlefield, hoping to find refuge. Stopping was not an option. I recall my wife looking at me lovingly at the end of each day, touching me ever so gently as if not to inflict on me too much pain and saying, “It must be hard walking through life an open wound.” I was shell-shocked, I saw her lips moving but didn’t make sense of what she meant. I was like a soldier running with a severed arm, a shot wound to the head and a persistent hum in my ears. The first draft didn’t pain me all that much, or so I thought. It solved a puzzle that was getting harder to solve with each passing year. The first draft answered every pressing question I feared to ask. There was a sense of achievement and elation. I broke the barrier of fear. 

It was the decision to publish and everything this decision entailed that was most painful. The adrenaline of the race against myself, of completing the manuscript, of reaching my refuge, subsided. My wounds laid bare in front of me, scab and pus and bleeding cuts. Exposing myself to the whole world to see: jaded, naked and, like most of us, deeply flawed. Each round of editing felt like a battle, a trauma surgery, flushing of wounds with alcohol. It stung. I screamed in silence. “Don’t report, expand, explain. Paint a picture. Lean into the emotion. Draw an image”, my editor pressed me. I cursed him in my sleep. My background as an engineer and a corporate executive didn’t help. For a decade and a half, I saw the world in equations, numbers and bullet points. I prided myself on being measured and concise, which are useless qualities in literature. 

I needed to relearn the English language as I tended to my wounds. I had to let go of an image carefully curated for decades. An image that was shiny, flashy, edgy, nonconformist yet playing by all the rules. It’s simple: I took a hammer and smashedhttps://shoeboxmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/shoebox-3-final-1.pdf it all, piece by piece, till it felt like there wasn’t much left of me that I recognised. To make things worse, I had no means to control the outcome, a challenge for someone with a slightly obsessive and controlling personality. A friend of mine who was a published author told me, “You need to accept that once your book is out to the world, some will view it with the disdain of an uninterested shopper in a bazaar. However safe you play it, some will be offended, few will hate it, and many will opt not to read it.” Encouraging words, but it seemed like an acceptable compromise for freedom, to lose a great part of myself to regain myself. 

I went to Egypt once the book was finished and before I was ready to publish it. I needed to look at her one more time before I put out her story to the world because, in the end, it is a story about Egypt. I wanted to get lost one more time in her streets and I did, only this time it felt less delicious than before. There was no more Gobelins tapestry. Egyptians traded Louis XXIV sofas for Lazy-Boy ones. Neither aesthetic appealed to me, but I saw merit in the comfort of a Lazy- Boy. I suppose this counts for a change. I wanted to do the final touches while I was in Egypt, but I couldn’t. Not for lack of trying or my newfound talent for procrastination, I just couldn’t. I decided to let Cairo and Egypt one last time before I published my book. I decided to walk the streets I knew and lose myself in new ones while I mourned the trimmed part of my uvula.