I wanted to write an ode to my mother, Maha, a story of intergenerational relationships. Over the years, my mother has been my inspiration, my challenge, my collaborator, and my friend. Now I am a mother to a daughter too, and whilst writing this, she lies in my lap, sucking at my breasts for dear life.
In the picture, you see the face of my Mother; her chin held high, her face round and soft and brown. You will see all the love I have for her. Her eyes are wise and deep, and since forever I have looked at them, they have been surrounded by a dark line of kohl. With time, this line has become thicker and longer. Her right eye is lazy—that is the medical definition, a lazy eye. My cousin is an optometrist, he told her. Optometry is an ancient medicine in Egypt, more than 4000 (four thousand!) years old. As old as the left eye of Horus.
Her name is Maha, meaning half moon or beautiful eye, or the wild deer. She is an Arab woman. Her father was from Upper Egypt (from my perspective, it is down, and that is how I know I am different). He was Nubian and ashamed. I used to be ashamed of who I am, too.
On her T-shirt it reads: In the name of Allah the beneficent, the merciful: confuse not truth with falsehood, nor knowingly conceal the truth!
On my T-shirt it reads: Forgive me, Allah, I have sinned.
Offering my back as a canvas for your message to go on the streets: Silence = Death, The future is Female, I am a Man, Free Palestine, Elitism Sucks. My shirt has a lot to say. I want to tell you everything today, and I will let it speak, tell the story of what it conceals: The big old hands that used to grab my nipples as a child are now protected by loud words screaming NOT YOURS—mine.
Fig.1
My name is Dina. I am sure that in Allah’s everlasting record, I do not exist. My name is not even scribbled in the well-kept Book of Fortune.
I, Dina, daughter of Maha, daughter of Mahasan, press my head through the opening of the shirt, examine the hollow inside, which soon will be filled with my breasts, hugging my pregnant belly, which is not yours but mine.
It was the 3rd day of Ramadan in the year 2024, or 1446, or however you want to count the time. Maha was sitting on the balcony smoking cigarettes. She doesn’t care about fasting. She does not care for what our neighbors say either. Overlooking the City of the Dead, a cemetery which is so old and so big that it is, at heart, a neighborhood. Many living people live here too. First, they were guards of tombs of other families, then their own living families moved in with them. Now they all live together, skeletons and crying babies.
Some of my family members lie here, too, but I don't really know them. I am not sure yet where my mother will be put to rest, nor am I. I never lived in Cairo. I was born in Germany to a German father who has a German father too. I have a Nazi background, and I have what they call “other ethnic backgrounds” too. “I am here because white people were in my country and they still are,” my mother says when I, once again, ask her: Who am I?
We are all equal, she says to me. The jinns, the birds, the air, the humans, and we have to accept that.
Then she paints my toenails and smokes. The smell of acetone and cigarettes makes me feel like I’m a child again, protected in her chest, thinking to myself:
I have flown to you like a child to her mother - Sappho
* Prophet Muhammad, Hadith.
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- Images
Cover:
Imaan, 2025, Photograph by Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, courtesy of the artist
Fig.1 Maha, 2025, Photograph by Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, courtesy of the artist
