A Love Letter on glossy black eggplants, diasporic longing, and protecting the lands we come from
Words by Jana Amin
From the balcony of my grandparents’ apartment, I watch intently as Ahmed, the man who sells vegetables at the corner of the street, retreats. As the glossy black eggplants and bright gold mangoes that line his wooden cart blur into the distance, I feel Cairo retreat, too, the honks that otherwise characterize the city subsiding, her chaotic facade replaced by a softer, more vulnerable hum.
As the city’s residents flock inside to pray, I reach for the platter of fruit my grandmother has prepared and left on the table before me, a collection of peaches, grapes, and pomegranates she brought home this morning, a curation the result of numerous stops at carts like Ahmed’s.
I am around 9 at the time, and I will not pay this much attention to the fruits whose juice presently dribbles down my chin until a decade later, when, at 19, I visit one of the many agricultural farms located on the outskirts of my city, Cairo.
There, I look on in awe at the fields of produce that stretch out as far as the precarious irrigation systems carrying Nile water will let them. As my fingertips graze over the sleek skins of hot Egyptian peppers, I learn about the annual back and forth between the land and its farmers, a test of how much the river will give—or take—in any given particular year.
In the decade since my family and I have immigrated to the United States, cultivating Egypt’s land has gotten increasingly expensive. Climate change has raised temperatures in the WANA region at two times the global rate, leaving communities of farmers like the ones I meet without the livelihoods their families have relied upon for centuries.
Mainly seasonal workers, these farmers come from across Egypt, and they speak of mangoes that once blushed a deep yellow-gold as the summer heat overtook the bustling, overcrowded streets of Cairo, and firm red grapes whose glittering green leaves children would pick for their teta to stuff with rice and serve, stacked in a snail-like spiral, come dinnertime.
These farmers have taken care of the land for generations. But the effects of rising temperatures, receding riverbanks, and Egyptian overpopulation threaten just how much longer the desert's unassuming sand can be tilled and toiled, before it cannot–will not–take any more.
As a child of diaspora, I know what it’s like to appreciate a place only once it is no longer there for you to labor over and love. And I know what it’s like to feel a burning longing for the sweet taste of just one more swollen gooseberry or sour green lime from my homeland.
As a child of diaspora, I fear what a future of climate change might bring with it.
But I know, too, just how well our WANA ancestors took care of the land: how effortlessly our great-grandmothers pickled cucumbers and olives for the winter months, how gracefully they incorporated seasonal ingredients into their breakfasts of fiteer and salted white cheese, how intuitively they insisted on zero food waste in their homes, a pillar of today’s environmental activism.
When I miss the sight of piercing sunset orange tangerines or bruised purple figs on the streets of Cairo, I turn to gratitude they still exist, pray they will be there to welcome me every time I return to the city, their juices turning me into a dripping mess once more.
More work by Jana can be found on @janaamin03