What Exactly Is a Homeland?

At Least Acknowledge That I Exist.

Some songs arrive because we go looking for them. Others find us before we know we need them. One in particular found me one evening as I was wandering through my playlist, looking for nothing in particular. By the time it ended, I realized I had been looking for it all along.

This song, by the Egyptian singer Hazem Shaheen and the Lebanese singer Tania Saleh, is titled Einy Fi Einik (“My Eyes in Yours”). But its meaning is deeper than eye contact. In Arabic, the phrase is used when two people know each other so intimately that neither can successfully lie to the other. It is as if to say, “I know you well enough to see through whatever you are trying to hide,” with this level of confidence and recognition.

There is a moment in the song where the music does something I can only describe as waiting. Not the passive waiting of someone who has accepted silence—the waiting of someone who is still convinced the answer is coming. The first time I heard it, I didn’t cry. I choked. I wanted to scream; the question the music kept asking demanded to be spoken aloud, while the silence kept refusing to answer.

When the lyric finally arrived, “Don’t let me be humiliated by this love. At least acknowledge that I exist,” the tears came before any thought did.

That is how I knew the song had touched something true, not something beautiful, but something I had been carrying without knowing its name.

The Atlantis No One Went Looking For

My village, Al-Arin Al-Qibli in Minya, Egypt, was not a place of tragedy. Not in the way the word is usually meant.

It was a place of ordinary mornings. Dusty roads. Children chased soccer balls barefoot through narrow streets. Farmers returned at sunset with the silence of people who had worked beyond exhaustion. Weddings that spilled into the night because joy, when it came, refused to be contained. Neighbors who knew every family by name, every grief by its history.

I was a small girl who happened to be born there, and for a long time I believed Al-Arin Al-Qibli was the entire world. Perhaps that is what childhood does—it makes the place you happened to be born in feel like the place you chose.

What I did not yet understand was that I had been lucky inside an unlucky place. My father could bring me infant formula from abroad and candy that no other child in the entire village had tasted, while around us families struggled to find food for the day. I remember my father handing out Ramadan iftar meals in our village. They were meals of meat, legumes, and rice, but for one woman they meant something far greater. She told him that every year she waited for Ramadan, because it was the only season in which she knew she would eat meat through the given iftar. Once a year.

I have thought about that woman many times since my father told me that story. I never knew her name. I do not know if she is still alive. But I know what her words do to every comfortable assumption about Egypt, about its generosity, its warmth, its famous hospitality. Hospitality is easy when you have enough. What this woman was describing was a life organized around scarcity so completely that a single meal felt like a season’s worth of dignity. Hunger was not merely her condition. It was evidence that no political community had ever considered her well-being its responsibility.

This story is not a random anecdote. In fact, it illustrates well-documented reality. According to Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), in the rural areas of Upper Egypt, the region where Al-Arin Al-Qibli sits, the poverty rate is nearly 57 percent. A 2023 estimate by a CAPMAS expert, cited by the independent outlet Al Manassa, placed Egypt’s national poverty rate at 35.7 percent, a figure the government has declined to officially publish since 2020. The World Bank’s own assessment found that 33.5 percent of Egyptians were poor by national measures in 2021, with 58.5 percent living below the upper-middle-income poverty line of $8.30 per day.

For women in particular, the data makes the lived reality of villages like mine legible in the language of policy. Women’s labor force participation in Egypt stands at only 15 percent, one of the lowest rates globally (ILO, 2024). In the Minya governorate specifically, illiteracy among women reached 37 percent in a 2012 CAPMAS study, with 5 to 11 million women across Upper Egypt and rural areas having never attended school at all, a number described by researchers as double the rate for boys in the same regions.

A real homeland, I think, is a political and moral arrangement, not a geographical accident. It is the place that sees you. That acknowledges your existence.

This is the state of conditions in Al-Arin Al-Qibli. I did not know then that this gap between my small privileges and their ordinary deprivation was not normal.

The women of Al-Arin Al-Qibli move through lives that had been decided before they were born. Most of them do not engage with the world beyond the threshold of the house, raising children, serving the family, making bread, sewing for small money, tending fields when needed. Girls are married young, which means education ends before it properly begins in other countries. A few escape this, but most do not. Upper Egypt records the highest rates of child marriage in the country at 18 percent, with girls from rural areas three times more likely to marry early than those in urban settings.

These numbers are not abstractions. They are the girls who never learned to read, measured. They are the precise, documentable gap between the citizenship that is promised by politicians and the life delivered to the citizenry. CAPMAS itself has stopped publishing poverty data since 2020—a silence that is, in its own way, a form of the same refusal this essay is about.

Only much later in life did I realize that while I had always known Al-Arin Al-Qibli, Egypt and the rest of the world had never really known it. Yet this Atlantis of Upper Egypt sinks in poverty.

The Exile Within

Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian writer and a Nobel Prize winner in literature, wrote in his novel Heart of the Night something pertinent:

Imagine evaluating ourselves without yielding to selfishness and evaluating our homelands without being influenced by what we call patriotism.

I have been thinking about this sentence for a long time. Patriotism, like selfishness, is a filter. It does not lie to you outright. It simply adjusts what you are able or wish to see. And what Egypt wished not to see, for a very long time, was places like my village of Al-Arin Al-Qibli.

Through the filter of love—and I do love it—in the involuntary way you love the places that shaped you, it is the weddings, the dusty roads, the neighbors who knew my name. Through the filter Mahfouz is asking for, the one stripped of sentiment, it is the girls who never went to school. The women who never left the house except to serve it. The families who could not find food for the day. The acceptance that wore the face of religion.

A homeland is not only what you feel for a place. A homeland is what a place feels for you.

Hazem Shaheen sings: “Between us are scattered homelands.” You can be inside a place and still be separated from it by everything it refused to give you. The homeland scatters across the distance between what a place promised and what it delivered. Between the Egypt of the wonderful weddings and the Egypt of the girl who was married at fourteen and never learned to read.

I keep asking. The silence keeps refusing to answer.

A hungry child does not eat history.

I want to ask a question that feels almost forbidden to ask out loud in Egypt: What exactly is a homeland? Not rhetorically. Literally. What is it?

Is it the land in which your parents happened to have sex and brought you into existence? Is it the language you learned before you knew you were learning it? Is it the smell of bread from a specific street, the particular quality of afternoon light in a village in Minya?

Or is it something you choose or something that chooses you, by fulfilling a promise?

A country has borders, but the things that make us feel part of a people rarely stay inside them. Even the song that brought me to this question joins an Egyptian and a Lebanese singer in a language neither country owns exclusively. Food and stories travel, too. A nation takes shape when strangers come to think of themselves as a people, through what they share or have learned to believe they share. But familiarity has its limits. People may speak the same language and eat the same bread while accepting that some among them will live with far less freedom than others. A shared culture does not settle what we owe one another.

In a June 1794 report to the National Convention, the French revolutionary Henri Grégoire estimated that at least six million French people did not know the national language. He wanted everyone to be able to understand the laws and take part in public affairs. A common language could indeed help expand communication and political participation. The problem arose when linguistic unity became a goal of erasing local languages rather than allowing them to coexist with a shared national language.

In March 1927, at Mahad in western India, B.R. Ambedkar led Dalits, people treated as “untouchable” under the caste system, to drink from a public water tank. The municipality had already declared it open to them. Local caste opposition had kept that right from becoming something they could use. A legal battle followed, and in 1937 the Bombay High Court rejected the attempt to exclude them. It had taken a decade to defend something as ordinary as access to water. Ambedkar had explained the purpose at another gathering in Mahad in December 1927: they were asserting “that we too are human beings like others.”

In Egypt’s 1923 constitution, Article 3 promised equality before the law without discrimination based on origin, language, or religion. Article 19 went further into the everyday lives of families: primary education was to be compulsory for Egyptian boys and girls, and free in public schools. Girls were named in that promise. They had a place in the country’s idea of its future. The girls in my village were born decades after those words were written. When one of them grew up without learning to read, she had been failed by a standard Egypt had set for itself not that much earlier.

To call someone a fellow citizen ought to mean that their life makes a claim on you even if you will never know their name. The state, with its laws and institutions, is supposed to give that claim practical force. It can also take the tenderness a person feels for her birthplace and demand it as loyalty to whoever happens to govern. When those loyalties become inseparable, asking why a neighbor goes hungry begins to sound like an insult to the country itself. The woman waiting for her Ramadan meal belonged to Egypt as fully as anyone. What she needed was for that belonging to mean something to people beyond her family and her village.

More than two thousand years ago, the Romans coined a maxim offering a definition of homeland that has provoked arguments ever since:

Ubi bene, ibi patria. Where I am treated well, there is my homeland.

Not where I was born, nor where my ancestors are buried. Where I am treated well.

The question this raises for Egypt is one most Egyptians are not permitted to ask: has Egypt treated its people well? This is, indeed, a question relevant in many nation states around the world.

When it comes to Egypt, I am not speaking of ancient civilizations. I know about the pyramids. I know about seven thousand years of history. I have been told about them since before I could read, as though a civilization built by people who have been dead for millennia is a valid response to a child going hungry today, to a girl married off before she finishes school, to a political prisoner who entered jail for writing a sentence about religious dogma.

Pride in the past is a poor substitute for homeland. A real homeland, I think, is a political and moral arrangement, not a geographical accident. It is the place that sees you. That acknowledges your existence. That guarantees your dignity not as a favor but as an obligation.

What is the name of the feeling you are supposed to have for a place that raised you in the language of love while delivering the reality of neglect?

That obligation has a history of its own. In John Locke’s account of the social contract, government holds power in trust to protect the rights people already possess. The American Declaration of Independence later articulated a similar principle, asserting that governments exist to secure these rights and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Yet these ideals coexisted with slavery and the exclusion of women and Indigenous peoples from meaningful political rights. Their significance lies not in how fully they were realized at the time, but in the standard they offer for holding governments accountable. A state must justify its authority to its people. Demanding their love is no substitute.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, recognizes freedom of expression and political participation alongside rights, among them the right to education. The girl denied a classroom and the prisoner punished for speaking have rights that no appeal to patriotism can cancel. They have them because they are human.

Ubi bene, ibi patria. Where I am treated well, there is my homeland.

By that definition—the only definition that makes moral sense to me—many Egyptians have never had a homeland. They have had a location.

Homeland is not the land of your ancestors. Nor the flag above the school. And not the civilization your teachers told you to be proud of before you were old enough to understand any of it. The homeland is wherever life is good.

It is a simple formula, almost brutally simple. And I keep returning to it because it forces the question I was never supposed to ask directly: Am I treated well?

Not as a complaint. Just as a measurement.

I think of the girls in my village who were married before they finished school, whose education ended not because they lacked intelligence but because no one in power thought their minds were worth the investment. I think of the political prisoners who loved this country enough to tell it an uncomfortable truth and paid for that honesty with years of their lives. I think of the workers who built things they could never afford to own. I think of my father, handing out meals in the street, feeling he had done something good—and he had—while the system that made his charity necessary went entirely unreformed.

By the Roman measure—by the only measure that makes moral sense to me—I am not well. And if I am not well, if the woman who waited for meat once a year was not well, if the girl who never learned to read was not well, if the person who wrote a sentence and lost years of his or her life for it was not well, then what exactly are we asked to feel when we are told to love you, motherland?

What is the name of the feeling you are supposed to have for a place that raised you in the language of love while delivering the reality of neglect?

I was not born choosing Egypt. None of us choose our birth country. We arrived here the way everyone arrives everywhere, without consent, without a contract, and without being asked.

Hazem Shaheen answered that with the lyric I quoted earlier: “Don’t let me be humiliated by this love.” The humiliation is in being taught to call all of this, which I described here, love: the scarcity, the forced silence, and the unanswered questions, and to be grateful for it. To carry it in your chest as though it were a gift rather than a wound that was given a beautiful name.

I was not born choosing Egypt. None of us choose our birth country. We arrived here the way everyone arrives everywhere, without consent, without a contract, and without being asked.

But I stayed. I learned its language before I knew I was learning it. I carry its smell and its blistering sun on my sweaty face, and yes, the sound of its weddings in my body like a second skin. That is not nothing.

And yet, a homeland is not only what you feel for a place. A homeland is what a place feels for you. Egypt: I am still here. I am still asking. At least acknowledge that I exist.

And for the girls who were handed a life they did not choose and called it fate. And for the political prisoners, like my friend Ahmed Douma, who loved this country enough to tell it the truth. And for everyone who spent themselves trying to make Egypt into something it keeps refusing to become …

You existed. You still exist. And I acknowledge that you exist.