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A warm and deeply evocative exploration of Cairo through fragments of memory, urban spaces, and everyday life
“Looking back, I realize that Cairo’s meaning for me was never in its grand monuments but in the fragile, ordinary places where life unfolded.”—Yasser Elsheshtawy, from My Cairo: A Cartography of Belonging
My Cairo is a deeply personal yet critically informed exploration of Cairo as a city lived, remembered, and imagined. In vivid, evocative detail, Yasser Elsheshtawy draws on his formative years in the city during the 1970s and 1980s to reconstruct an intimate urban geography shaped by walking, drifting, lingering, and return. Blending memoir with urban history, architectural reflection with cultural observation, he approaches Cairo as a constellation of fragments—neighborhoods, streets, cafés, cinemas, schools, and everyday rituals—through which his own sense of belonging to the city gradually took shape. He guides us into spaces that were central to daily life yet rarely documented, many of which have since disappeared or been radically transformed. Photographs, maps, and visual fragments reinforce the idea of the city as a mosaic laced with memory. Elsheshtawy shows us that home is not a fixed place but something carried within, sustained by remembrance, intimacy, and fleeting moments of belonging.
Part 1: The Cairo We Carry Within Us
Mapping Memory, Mapping Belonging
A Cartography of Belonging: My Cairo, My Cidade Maravilhosa
“Cairo Was His City”
What is Home?
Cities We Carry Within Us: Cairo and the Landscape of Memory
Third Places and the Life of the City
Stamps from Downtown, Memories of My Cairo
Part 2: Twelve Short Stories of a Vanished Cairo
The Island and the Nation: Zamalek, the German School, and the Negotiation of Egyptian Identity
A Street, a Restaurant, a City: Mohamed Ali Street, Hagg Said, and Cairo’s Everyday Histories
In the Shadow of Mirrors: Fishawy Café and the Enduring Culture of Cairo’s Coffeehouses
Ta‘miya in the City: Felfela, Street Food, and the Memory of Downtown Cairo
Café Riche and the Making of Modern Cairo: Politics, Literature, and the Urban Life of Downtown
The Heart of Sha‘bi Cairo: Sayyida Zeinab, its Shrine, Streets, and Food Culture
The Sheraton and the Cart: Eating Fuul Between Luxury, Tradition, and Reinvention
Clubs, Coffee, Art and Community: The Architecture of Belonging in Maadi
Books, Magazines, and Stamps: A Boyhood among Cairo’s Bookstores
When the Lights Went Down: Memories of Cairo’s Cinemas
Fragments from the Nile Hilton: Politics, Family, and the Cosmopolitan Dreams of Cairo
Between Two Mosques: Urban Life, Memory, and the Hidden Stage of Cairo
Part 3: Cairo Held in Memory, Cairo Held in Heart
The City I Left Behind, The City That Still Holds Me: A Memoir of Belonging and Return
Coda: “Home Is Me and You”
The Last Song with My Friend at the Taverne
Acknowledgments and the Weight of Memory