Ikram with an Omaha elder and her daughter at their home on the reservation.

This experience, though very exhausting and not too pleasant, provided a nice introduction to the United States’ multicultural life and identity which I came to understand and interact with. Sharing my blight of the cold airport and the uncomfortable seats were two very friendly and cheerful couples, one Sicilian-American and the other of British and Hungarian origins. Linked in our human suffering, my blight companions and I, finding that rest was difficult and sleep impossible, decided to stay awake as we waited for the morning flight that would take us to Chicago.

Staying up proved to be much more fun as we all fell back on another very basic human heritage of survival in the face of adversity, storytelling and joking. Throughout the night, we talked about our experiences and lives (the British-Hungarian-American couple were just returning from a vacation in Egypt and the lady told us, in colorful details, all her happy experiences, particularly of a child in Luxor who kept following her around to tell her how beautiful he found her!), and joked about our blight being an act of providence meant to bring us together and teach us "how it must feel like to be homeless," as one of the Sicilain-American couple said.

Arriving in Chicago on Sunday, October 31, I was greeted by a warm, sunny day, which compensated for the long, cold and uncomfortable night at JFK. I was cheered even more when I arrived at the apartment building where I would live for the duration of my grant, finding in the hallway of my floor a very friendly neighbor who greeted me with a big smile, helped me settle in and allowed me to use her phone to call my family and tell them of my safe arrival.

Monday, November 1, was the real beginning of my work. At the Newberry Library where I was affiliated, I was again met with smiles and assistance. Everybody I met was ready to help both academically and personally. The first two months of my grant were very busy, but quite lonely. I worked hard on my research, using the Newberry Library and the library of the University of Illinois in Chicago (the Newberry also provided interlibrary loan services which allowed me to get the books that were not available in their collection).

Dinner with my neighbors and friends.

My fellow researchers and the Newberry staff introduced me to people who were specialized or interested in my research topic on Native American culture and literature. One of the people I was introduced to is a prominent professor of Native American studies, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, who proved to be invaluable to me. She directed and advised me and took the trouble to read the drafts of the papers I was writing. As a result of working with her, I managed to complete a paper that I had already started working on before coming to Newberry, and to finish another. I sent both to two different universities in Egypt and both were accepted for publication.

I also attended seminars and workshops related to my field, and visited Native American Art exhibitions and powwows. In short, professionally speaking I was busy and contented because I was doing my work. But socially, I was feeling very lonely. I arrived as winter was getting ready to settle in; and though the people I met were very friendly and kind, Chicago weather is neither friendly nor kind. People stayed indoors, hibernated and social activities were very few.

By Christmas I was already beginning to feel oppressed by the cold and the gloom and the very short duration of daylight, and, of course, my feeling of loneliness. Then the 'accident' happened, and it transformed my stay in the United States and was a real breakthrough in my social and cultural contact with the people.

On the evening of Christmas Day (one of the coldest that Chicago knew for a long time, it was said), the heating pipe in the living/study room of my apartment exploded! Sitting on my bed, reading and feeling miserable and sorry for myself, I suddenly heard an explosion and I jump up and ran to the living room to find hot water and steam gushing fountain-fashion out of the wall. Shocked and terrified, I only have time to grab my purse, where I keep my passport and important documents, and run out of the apartment to bang on all seven doors of the other apartments on my floor. Only two helpless people respond, since everyone else was gone to celebrate Christmas. I then ran down to the doorman's office to report and for the whole night and the next two days my apartment, which was totally flooded, was subject to maintenance work and cleaning.

Though the 'accident' was disastrous because I lost much of the research notes I worked hard on for two months, in addition to a few of my books, which were taken in the flood, it also proved to be a blessing in disguise. Many of my neighbors, especially in the floor below mine, who suffered minor flooding as a result of the major flood in my apartment, became aware of my existence, that of a lonely Egyptian who was struck by disaster! And I was embraced by people who, I'm happy to say, are now my friends.

Our friendship is beautiful because it was predicated on human sympathy. However, as time went by, this friendship became even more valuable to me. My friends are Americans of multicultures; Caucasian, Taiwanese, Italian, Arab. As a group of friends who met frequently and had dinners and celebrated birthdays and other occasions together, we discussed our cultures and communicated on a very human basis.

My relationship to this group of friends proved to be wonderful in may ways. They took me around and showed me places. They were always there when I got back from the library, a talk I was invited to give, or a trip and were eager to hear about my experiences, to discuss things, and to give me feed back. They introduced me to other people, and they were always interested in my culture and were ready to answer any questions about their own as Americans of different origins. Knowing them, I started to feel more at home and to have more confidence in approaching and talking to other people; and because of their support I found it easier to accept invitations to give talks on my culture. The interesting coincidence is that after the flood and after I came to be friends with them, my cultural and professional contacts started to expand (maybe because I started to feel more at home).

Ikram with a class at Northwestern University.

A colleague at Newberry asked if she may introduce me to a professor at Northwestern University in Chicago who was going to Egypt in March and who wanted to have some academic contacts there before leaving. Of course I agreed and met him. I got him in touch with the Fulbright office in Cairo and also introduced him to some of my personal friends and colleagues who met him in Cairo. On his part, he introduced me to the Center for International and Comparative Studies (CICS) at Northwestern University who invited me to give a talk on Egyptian women. I also received an invitation from him to visit his class, on international literature and the Muslim Diaspora, and talk to his students who were reading a book by an Egyptian-American woman professor and writer. Another invitation was from the International Visitor Center of Chicago who asked me to take part in their annual celebration of International Women's Day and give a talk on Egypt's celebration of the day. Yet another invitation came from the Metropolitan State College of Denver for me to take part in a panel discussion of 'Feminism, Fundamentalism and Fanaticism'.

The professor who invited me is a Navajo Native American and was a Fulbright Scholar whom I had met in Egypt, when she was participating in a Fulbright program, and invited to my home village in Upper Egypt in the Summer of 2004. My visit to Denver was a wonderful experience. I stayed there for a week, and in addition to taking part in the panel, I gave different talks to different groups of students. One group was taking a course on Native American religion; the other was taking a course on international literature and Criticism and was reading one of Naguib Mahfouz's novels.

These two talks were very interesting because they allowed me to talk both about my culture and about my research. The responses of the students were enlightening for me and they were truly interested in finding common grounds for understanding my culture and knowing about my country. The teacher who was teaching the Native American religion course was herself a Native American, and, interestingly enough, a Catholic nun. It was a real pleasure to meet her. She invited me after my talk to her class to give another talk to a group of Catholic sisters who were interested in knowing and understanding Islam. My talk and interaction with them was a great experience and an enlightening one on both sides as we all could draw on basic similarities in the basic religious beliefs of Islam, Christianity and Native American religion(s).

My other trips outside Chicago were two trips to Omaha, Nebraska where I went to visit the Native American Omaha tribe on their reservation in Macy. In the Newberry, I met the administrative assistant of the director of the Omaha Tribal Historical Research Project (OTHRP) who was doing research for the organization. Through her, I established contacts with the director of OTHRP and I went to visit the tribe.

On the reservation I met and talked with many of the elders of the tribe and many of the younger generations; visited the public school and saw the cultural projects incorporated in the curriculum, including a course teaching the Omaha language; and visited many of the historical sites. My conversations with the people were probably the most enlightening to me, for they gave life to the historical facts one reads in books. They were also very interactive, for as much as I was interested in the people's history, memory and culture, they were also interested in mine.

My second visit to the Omaha reservation added to my cultural understanding of the Omaha people; and OTHRP provided me with material that would help me in my teaching of American literature at my home university. OTHRP has also expressed a real interest in establishing a program for student exchange with Egypt. In acknowledgement of the help and welcome I received on the reservation and from OTHRP, I volunteered to translate the organization's Web site into Arabic (a French scholar who had been there before me did the French translation) for the organization is committed to the collaboration between native and non-native cultures.

My story is getting too long, and though there are many more incidents and people I'd like to mention, I will end. But what I feel I must say is this, in addition to the academic advantage of consulting libraries, interviewing people, and meeting with specialist in my field, this visit to the United States (for I have been here before for shorter periods) taught me something very important. I found the American people I met, with few exceptions, whatever their ethnic, racial, cultural or religious affiliations, on the individual and human level very receptive. They were friendly and they were always interested and ready to understand and communicate with me. When I took the first step (and some of them did not even wait for me to do that), they always met me half way. I always believed that literature, particularly fiction, can teach about other people and other cultures. But now I believe that literature is only the second best way to know other people. The first and best way is to meet, live, listen and interact with them, provided that on both sides there is a genuinely sincere effort to communicate.

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