It was, to start, just a really pretty canvas bag that was useful to have --stuffed in the bottom of some other bag--for groceries, an overflow of books, market finds and the like.
As it travelled with me through Europe and the Middle East, however, the little bag called Cairo took on a bit of a life of its own, and seemed to tell a story bigger than its self.
More than just a reusable canvas sack, the little Cairo bag wanders the world eliciting reactions and creating stories that tell a lot about how places and people relate to Cairo. More than Cairo though, the bag seems to come to symbolize something that seems lost; lost connections, lost friendships, or a lost golden period where Cairo seemed the centre of the world, umm ad-dunya...home to Umm Kulthum, Arab Nationalism, and maybe most importantly, the locus of optimism exported to a whole region.
