After six years of living in Cairo, my writing began to shift, from a reliance on realistic narrative to that based on the fabulous and the fantastical. Many of these new stories were inspired by anecdotes in my neighborhood. Because I speak Arabic, many of my sources for the new stories were the gatekeepers of the building where I live, who told me stories about neighbors and daily life in Cairo. The gatekeepers’ interpretations of daily events in the building have often inspired my fiction. For example, in “The Empty Flat Upstairs,” my Japanese neighbor claimed that her neighbors upstairs were drilling a hole in her ceiling so that they could spy on her. The gatekeepers’ anecdotes about her paranoia gave me the idea to write a story about a Japanese woman who is driven crazy by the desire for “the literal truth” about an empty flat upstairs, which is officially empty, but often used as a crash pad by neighbors and relatives. Her desire for “the literal truth,” shows her cultural alienation and displacement since Egyptian culture does not place a high value on “the literal truth” or on facts, but on maintaining appearances. Read more...