In a year like no other, immigrant women of all walks of life reflect on the ever-changing meaning of home and belonging.
Introducing Real People. Real Lives and Leyla
Hello! Welcome to the podcast Real People. Real Lives. Women Immigrants of New York, a storytelling project from New Women New Yorkers.
Real People. Real Lives highlights a diverse picture of immigrant women living in the city. It elevates these narratives, moving beyond statistics and political rhetoric.
In the Summer and Fall of 2020, we interviewed immigrant women from all walks of life. They were selected through an open call or reached out directly, to ensure the participation of women from different backgrounds, and affected by the pandemic in various ways.
The participants talked about their immigrant experience within the backdrop of a year like no other – marked by the pandemic, Black Lives Matter and the presidential election. Each story you will hear is a unique mix of determination, hope, challenges, and victories – small and big.
Today, meet Leyla, a journalist from Egypt. After reporting on historic events like the Arab Spring and the trial of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Leyla landed in the US in 2017. Following a stint in Miami, where her husband completed a medical residency, the couple came to New York to look for more opportunities.
Used to tell other people’s stories, Leyla joins the Real People. Real Lives project as the subject of a story for once. One step at a time, she is eager to change narratives, telling stories that inspire and move away from stereotypes. Here is hers.
Coming to the US (01:56-05:34)
Growing up, I’ve felt sometimes I didn’t fully belong cause I went to English-speaking school, English was actually more of my first language. In Egypt, if you can afford to do so you can go to international school, so people go to English or American or German schools, whatever, and it’s not like you have to be ridiculously well-off to go to private school, it’s just if you can afford it you do it. Public schools are not great, most parents want their kids to be able to study abroad. I did my undergrad studies in Toronto, Canada. As soon as I graduated and worked as a journalist, my world was shattered. I met people from all walks of life, going to rural Egypt even, at some point, it was a bit of a re-cultural shock, people not understanding, you know, “where are you from?”. People would just point out: “no, you are not Egyptian”, I am like, “no, I am an Egyptian”, just having to prove my identity. At the end of the day, eventually I just became at the peace with the fact that I have these two worlds that influence me, my mom and dad that made me who I am, that made me open and tolerant and understanding people from different cultures. It took me a while to reach that point and I still struggle with that sometimes.
I found myself at odds with majority of the conservative values of the Egypt. Egypt is a huge country and there’s a little bit of everything, you can find your group of people, but overall it’s a conservative society, not as conservative as Saudi Arabia or anything like that, you can still wear what you wear to certain extent, and you can go to beach and still wear bikini and stuff. People are living a parallel life, those who can afford go to private beaches and wear whatever they want but if you go to public beaches it’s a completely different world. I didn’t know if I wanted to live like that, completely in a parallel life. So I left and and went and did my first masters in London, at SOAS. I studied Middle Eastern law and politics and I switched more to policy and analysis, so worked with the British Embassy for a year.
Home is still Egypt for me but I see my second home is where I don’t feel different, and I feel different in Egypt, by the way, because I was half-Italian, so New York, Toronto, London all these places, is where I truly feel at home, to be honest. Egypt is home because that’s where my family is, that’s where I grew up, but home is where nobody looks at you funny, nobody judges you for being different, you can wear whatever you want, you can do whatever you want, you have people from different languages, and at the end of the day that could be your home. Home is where everyone is also trying to find a home, in a way.
I came just the year Trump was elected. When I first moved I was not able to work for 7 months because my husband is a citizen but is just because of Trump became longer period of time, before it used to take 1 or 2 months before we were coming in. As soon as he was done with his residency program in Miami I said: “let’s please move to NY or DC”. Also, he applied for a fellowship and that’s how we both made to New York, it worked best for both of us.
Expectations versus reality (05:37-09:34)
My time here has made me realize how the American dream is not a real thing. This might be very controversial to say… I grew up in a context where we were very critical with the US because of its foreign policies, especially in the Middle East. I was kind of more aware that US is not the number one country that people think it is here and I think people who I know who lived abroad realized this. On one hand, you can have the chance to really innovate here, you have the best top places to do research, to do science, if you want to do business the capacity for do so is great, so if you have the tools, there is huge potential of opportunity. But my image of this country being the same for everyone is not the case, and living here I realize this even more because I saw first hand. When I was in the UK. you just walk into a clinic, you don’t have to pay anything. [Here] there are different levels of payments and things and how basically if you fall you fall very hard in the US. There is nothing to catch you, and if you make it you can make it big, so I think that’s a unfair path because so many people have potential, they just need that capacity to be supported initially, you see that mostly with minorities and immigrants. I am seeing it’s changing, people are becoming more aware, progressive movements and all of these. The US is still behind maternity leave and paternity, all these things, I am hoping our generation changes that, that’s actually a dream more than anything, young people changing what should have been changed decades ago.
Anyone I speak to was muslim or Arab who grew up here experienced 9/11 said their life changed forever after that and people didn’t stand up for them and now Trump make people realize. Trump is just a symptom of things that were existing, and he just made them worse, he exposed a lot of issues that existed in terms of hatred, anti-immigrant sentiment, that he fueled it but existed before, and living through that actually especially in a progressive city like New York, made me see the other side, of the people who were just so outraged by this, trying to fight back. I wonder if Trump hasn’t arrived would these people have mobilized to this extent, fight back and talk about these things… So in a way there is a silver lining, people just got shocked into realizing things that I think a lot of minorities knew already, but to the general public maybe not everyone knew, it’s a very divided time and it’s a very scary time. The pandemic just exposed things we knew…healthcare system has broken, people don’t have trust in government, basically come across a little decline that just should talk about science, Maybe the problem here is community, the pandemic made people feel like it’s a political thing, and in the midst of that, especially the country that, according to numbers, has the most of any other country, as far as we know we don’t know for sure. It’s is a very crazy time, the election and being a reporter. I just see the difference between people and power, people are trying to change the narrative, change what’s going on the ground.
Life in the pandemic (09:39-10:25)
It’s been challenging, of course, because the market here is not very open to people who have been educated abroad. Even though I did get educated in Canada and the UK, still, surprisingly, that was a shock honestly to me. My husband is also an ER doctor so he was in the midst of working accounting in hospital, one of the poorest areas in Brooklyn, they were hit very hard got overwhelmed, that was very tough. I’m doing much better than the beginning of the lockdown, the lockdown was very depressing time, as ok as you can be in these crazy times [laughs]
On being a woman (10:32-15:28)
Egypt has a very strong history of women’s leaders and feminine leaders people don’t know this. Historically going back to ancient Egypt we had queens and pharaohs that were women and it’s kind of tricky history because, we gone up and down, there were times when women were succeeding very much and there time were, middle ages stuffs like that…Women were very active in the beginning of the 20th century, very open society, and then when in the 1970s the government opened up the doors for Egyptians to go live in the Arab Golf, which traditionally is very conservative, they went work there for job opportunities and then they came back in the 70s and 80s and Egypt started to become more conservative, more and more women starting to getting pressure to wear things like hijab, wasn’t like anything law, like Iran or Saudi Arabic where you have to wear, but in certain neighborhoods, not only all neighborhoods, but you find more women wearing. It’s fine if it is your choice, right now it has been a discourse of women raising up making it either choice how they wear that’s becoming a woman’s movement as well in Egypt, and now we also had a recently thing in Egypt now because sexual harassment is very bad in Egypt, like street cat-calling, in New York actually it used to be very bad too but Cairo is even worse. Being part of that is very exhausting, because I remember when I was a child it was almost if not every 2 to 3 men when you are walking it would be at least every 5 men that would cat-call you, imagine, that takes huge toll on your mental health, I remember the early 2000s a lot of people start to fighting back, there is huge movement in sexual harassment that started happening.
There are challenges but women are fighting back. We’re not this fragile, passive people that the media often makes us seem. We have this weird dichotomy between what is seen in pop culture in Egyptian TV where women wear mini-skirt and talk about very sexual things and then you go to on the ground in more conservative neighborhoods where it is completely opposite. You just have this parallel worlds in Egypt, you go to more liberal neighborhoods you could still find people wear dresses. It’s just depending where you go, the amount of decision you need to make on what you need to wear, if you know you are going to downtown Cairo, which is more conservative, than you will dress differently than if you go to a club or bar, when you know you can pick up a car and just drive straight there. That was honestly exhausting, but it is changing, at least people are trying to change it. Here in comparison I could wear a clown costume, no one would care. Maybe that’s not the case anywhere in the States, I am sure if you go to parts of rural US, you can’t just wear anything. People will judge you, they may… if you are gay maybe if you wear something that they are not used to, maybe if someone is… Hijabi women she can wear anything in parts of the country. We have this weird dichotomy (…) the challenge is much longer and much higher in Egypt. There’s a lot of religiosity in both countries. Both very conservative, unless you go to New York or San Francisco overall you can find your pockets to escape in the US, but in Egypt the pockets of escape are much smaller. Here, to some extent you can get your rights more. In Egypt it’s much harder, the police would harass you, they are actually the worst perpetrators. How would you go and report sexual harassment if they would harass you themselves?
New York City, I feel like it changed me in a sense that I just can be myself, I don’t have to worry about what I’m going to wear. It made me more like I shouldn’t care what other people think because everyone around me doesn’t care about what I think. I just see people doing crazy things in New York, and I love that, you will find someone playing music in the middle of the street, no city I have been to has the same extreme acceptance of anything. In London people sometimes might be outraged when they see strange things, in Toronto also people are very polite. Here people do not care at all. it’s a great way to live by. Who cares? It’s a “live your life” kind of thing [laughs]
Changing the narrative (15:30-20:20)
I’d cover mostly political issues, foreign policy. At some point I’d cover women rights as well. I worked a bit with the Guardian for a while, I worked a little bit with the Financial Times for a while, and some local newspapers. One is called Egypt Independent and it is in English language, and then our newspaper. One time we got censored and shut down and we tried to keep it alive, they were saying it was for financial reasons so we said we will do a concert and we did a huge fundraising event. We fundraised way more they said they needed but they still decide to shut us down so we did a huge campaign where we say okay we are going to publish our final issue, we published it and we published all the articles that were controversial, they thought we were too controversial that’s why we got censored, and so eventually we got shut down so the entire team decided that we going to do our own newspaper, our news outlet, independent completely, we called it Mada Masr. It’s bilingual both in English and Arabic, it’s a progressive news outlet, probably the only independent news outlet right now in Egypt.
The reason why I really love Journalism, you really get to know people very closely especially if you are doing things in the community level, people are passionate about a cause. I just see this side of resilience, you know, these people not just surviving but thriving in a way even despite the challenges. All kinds of communities trying to find solutions, trying to make their communities survive in this very difficult time and I think that’s very beautiful if I haven’t been experience it myself I wouldn’t have known. I’d love to, eventually, do my own business that changes narratives around the Middle East, North Africa and Arabic worlds, tell human stories and at the same time connect them to foreign policy issues and politics and find connections between both, not just people who have interesting stories, or not just the politics but lets connect both together, that’s one path I’d love to go. But at the same time, I’m also thinking communication is also something I am very passionate about, I love the idea of changing the narratives. So for me, that’s my final goal. I want to change narratives. It could be through journalism, it could be through podcast, through storytelling or communication, all the above have that goal, I am at the end of the day passionate about doing that, narrative change. I want people to know the stories of different communities who live here, people coming from all over the world hoping to have a better life but not always getting it, sometimes getting it sometimes succeeding and doing amazing things and doing research and discovering in science and STEM and sometimes even not being giving that push, or been also from a Black community where you been here for centuries through generations. I hope to tell these stories that people are resilient and surviving and trying to find innovative ways to do so.
Reach out to people who have been through what you have been through, other people or people of color if you are a person of color, people who lived abroad, all these things first, not that you shouldn’t reach out to other people too but it helps to have that community, people been here for a while will understand what you have gone through and learn some lessons and give you morals to learn from, and my biggest moral is don’t feel despair, even though it’s hard [laughs] realize that sometimes there’s nothing wrong with your experience, your capacity it’s just sometimes the system doesn’t want to be employed, they doesn’t prioritize people with their experience, even though you may have so much experience, you may be very educated, is not you it’s a system that doesn’t value you but you can persevere and make it up eventually and if don’t, then don’t be in the system, do your own thing, if you can. It is easy said than done, bring the value you have and don’t try to mute it, don’t try to mute your background or language and try to change to fit in.
Closing/Credits
Thank you so much for tuning in to our podcast today. This week’s episode was produced and scripted by Bruna Shapira and Arielle Kandel. Editing is by Anna Zemskova. My name is Daniella Golombeski and I’m thrilled to be your host.
For more information about Real People. Real Lives. and the transcript of this episode, head to nywomenmmigrants.org. Next week, you’ll meet Rosa, a baby-sitter and early childhood worker from the Dominican Republic.
The 3rd edition of Real People. Real Lives. Women Immigrants of New York is made possible in part with funding from the William Talbott Hillman Foundation.
. See you next week!