Once, she was not your city. Once, she was a tent, and in 641 AD, a dove laid an egg in her belly.

Before the Muslim army leader who had conquered Egypt rode to another war, he found the egg on his tent’s bed. The egg was a sign from Allah, he decided. When the army returned, victorious, the leader declared the tent Al-Fustat: The Tent. Around it, he built his capital.

The legend says that over three centuries later, when the Fatimid dynasty restored the same land as Egypt’s capital, their leader gathered scholars to bestow upon it a worthy name. On the chosen night, the scholars brushed shoulders as they stood to pray Isha’a before convening.

Arabs knew planet Mars as Al-Najm Al-Qahir — the Vanquishing Star. When the prayer ended, an astronomer squinted at the sky, spotted the red planet, and yelled: “Al-Qahir is ascending — may she be Al-Qahira!”

And so she was: Al-Qahira — The Vanquisher.

Growing up, your teachers always told you: “Al-Qahira taqharu’l I’ida.”

Cairo vanquishes her enemies.

As a Cairene, you’ve thought often about this name. What are you when you’ve grown inside the womb of the vanquisher? Which of her stories does she teach you, and which ones about you does she tell?

She’s unbearable, non-Cairenes would say. I could never live there. To them, Al-Qahira is an untamed beast. She’s the grim hue hovering above, a smoke dome on the horizon when you approach her from afar, as if her twenty-one million souls all leaned on balconies and dusted their carpets at once. She’s a stifled gasp in a microbus crammed to ten times its capacity. She’s a child dangling from the bus’s door — often the driver’s nephew, hooking two fingers, index and middle, around the handle — urging more pedestrians to hop in the “empty” vehicle.

She’s car horns blaring; children, vacant-eyed, sniffing cheap kolla glue under her bridges; stray cats and dogs pegged with stones and bolting in terror whenever a human approaches; newly painted walls with a graffiti stretching across: مبروك البويا الجديدة “Congrats on the fresh paint.”

She’s catcalls, unzipped pants, and unsolicited touches.

Those whom she birthed would object. They’d say but, and recall Al-Qahira as she beams through the shutters.

To them, she’s the precarious wooden chairs at the ahwa, swaying to the euphonious voice of Umm Kalthoum; the ahwagi rushing to wipe vacant tables with a cloth filthier than their surfaces; the sheesha crackling with a saccharine fragrance; the clanks of domino and tawla pieces against the board, flung by weary men as they sip Arabian coffees cooked to that precise crispy-thick-film-on-top degree.

To them, Al-Qahira is the deep inhale at the Khan El-Khalili bazaar: the fragrance of oriental rugs, handmade crafts, ancient parchments, and suspended history. She’s the soothing ceramic of the grounds of Al-Hussein Mosque, kissing the soles of shoeless feet; the flitting pigeons mingling with the huddle around Al-Hussein’s mausoleum, all seeking remedy for their ailments. She’s the woody incense of Al-Mu’izz Street, hanging in the air like a prayer; the feluccas cutting the turbid surface of the Nile; the masses rushing to the laid-out street feasts of Iftar at Ramadan’s sunset, how cascading Athans flow from the thousand Cairene minarets buoying souls up to Allah.

To them, she’s the aroma of fresh-baked baladi and fino bread tickling nostrils on the walk to school; the ful and falafel carts, packed in the early morning with men dipping cat-ears of bread into the creamy blend of ful, oil, tahini, and cumin, with lemon squeezed on top. She’s the hermetic strolls across Qasr Al-Nil Bridge between dawn and six in the morning, spellbinding before the world awakes, its two lions towering at the threshold. She’s the same bridge, hours later, carrying Cairo’s lovers and their stolen kisses, wrapped in wafts of cotton candy, grilled sweet potato, slightly burnt corn on the cob, and the slurping of h’alabessa.

Then, on a blue January morning, Al-Qahira gave birth to a revolution — and you glimpsed her anew.

Now, she’s the 28th of January 2011, when the same Qasr Al-Nil lions witnessed the marvel: serpents of smoke writhing in the sky after blasts of tear-gas launched by police; iron fists of water jets streaming into the bodies of revolutionaries, hauling them in the air like dolls; defenseless young men baring their chests and staring down police vans that accelerate to crush them; soldiers with shields and batons and helmets met by screaming masses running — for the first time in ages — not away from, but towards them. She’s the maroon-tinted epic etched on the bridge’s asphalt when the soldiers retreated, then fled before the unarmed cataract of Egyptians flooding Tahrir Square. She’s the day you learned Molotov cocktails were not a drink, and that destruction could be an act of love.

Now, she’s your naive triumph when Mubarak stepped down after those eighteen glorious days in Tahrir, when you believed she’d become yours. She’s the blood that never ceased spilling; the snipers bursting eyeballs and skulls in Mohamed Mahmoud Street; the locked stadium gates and slaughter of Ultras football fans in Port Said; the mask falling off the army’s face and the blood rivers that followed. She’s the virginity tests and army tanks crushing bodies in Maspero, the mass slaughter at Raba’a Square at the hands of police and army forces.

She’s the shattered dam after the 2013 military coup and the bloodbath unleashed, the fanged prison bars that sucked into their pits whomever did not toe the line.

She’s when we became statistics.

January 25 revolution: eight hundred and forty-one martyrs.
Maspero massacre: twenty-eight martyrs.
Mohamed Mahmoud street massacre: fifty-two martyrs.
Maglis Al Wuzara’a massacre: seventeen martyrs.
Port Said Stadium massacre: seventy-four martyrs.
Air Defense Stadium massacre: twenty-two martyrs.
Republican Guard headquarters massacre: sixty-one martyrs.
Al-Manassa massacre: one hundred and twenty martyrs.
Al-Nahda sit-in massacre: eighty-seven martyrs.
Rabaa sit-in massacre: over one thousand martyrs —

Once, God had sent a dove to lay an egg in her belly. Now, on Al-Qahira’s soil, the closest thing to a temple has become an airport. As you board your answered prayer at last and eye her from above, you think again, as you’ve thought for years inside her guts, about language.

Today, in Al-Qahira’s telling, she uses barbed words when she utters your name: saboteur, traitor, enemy of the state, threat to national security, blood-tainted hands.

Al-Qahira kneaded you with her dust until you couldn’t tell where your body ended and her gravel began. When they taught you how she held the hands of her kin and spilled the blood of her foes, you assumed. You should have asked: Whose hands? Whose blood?

Al-Qahira has shaken you until she chattered your teeth. Given you love so searing it was almost a whisper. And that’s what she is, you realize: an almost. You search for her in language, sift through diction, rearrange syntax; but she remains, as ever, elusive. She beckons with the promise of sweetness but leaves a cloying shudder. Her beloved tang always bitters your tongue. Her deceptive, soft crunch in your mouth shatters your teeth. Her spice, instead of tingling, sets you ablaze.

Yet, you never stop searching the words: for her, for you. And because she is an almost, she keeps you perched. Maybe today her pulse will dance to the beat of your heart. Maybe today, you’ll return hand-in-hand to a time before hope tarnished your souls.

Maybe, she’ll recognize you for what you are: her child.

Maybe, you’ll recognize her for what she refuses to be: a shoulder.