Alaa Hassanien is an Egyptian poet, writer, journalist and film-maker. Born in 1996 in Saudi Arabia to Egyptian parents, she graduated from the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Cairo and has lived in France since 2022. She has published five books of poetry and short stories. In 2015, she was awarded the UNESCO Prize for Arabic Poetry in Paris.

Nostalgia for my city (Cairo) took some time to develop. During my first year as an expatriate, I didn't really feel nostalgia for Cairo; in a way, I'd erased my memory of everything to do with it. I'd stopped talking to my friends and family and completely stopped remembering. I didn't realise that I was in a state of shock, that I was simply trying to forget. I had left Cairo angry, devastated, and I didn't want to accept that I'd been forced to leave for my own peace of mind after Cairo, having given me everything, had then taken everything away. 
But over time, this anger gradually subsided and my memories of Cairo resurfaced.
At first I denied them, tried to erase them from my mind. I wanted to cast off my old skin, to become a different person.
I was so fascinated by the idea that every so often, I would choose a new name for myself. On my twenty-seventh birthday, I announced to all my Parisian friends that from now on, I would be known as Léa, and that first I, and then they, would have to forget Alaa, and all she'd been through.

In fact, I'd resorted to this tactic whenever I'd suffered a trauma: rather than confront the ruins of my being and repairing the damage, I found it easier to become someone else. But I didn't realise at the time that by doing so, I was abandoning myself, burying myself alive. Until, during therapy, I began to uncover what I had buried for so long. I brought out my deepest self; my childhood, my toxic relationship with my mother, my old name, and finally, my beautiful but toxic city: Cairo.

I began to reconcile with myself, and this helped me to make peace with my past. My relationship with my mother improved greatly, as did my relationship with my city. It was at this point that I began to feel a new emotion, one that anger had long prevented me from experiencing: nostalgia.

Nostalgia began to gnaw at me at night, in the evening, and I started to take sleeping pills to fall asleep earlier and escape it. Then it began to get me every time I listened to an Arabic song. I'd stopped listening to Arabic music for over a year, ever since I emigrated, as I wanted a completely new life, but I was only making it harder for myself.  
Once again, I found myself pining for Cairo almost every day, and trying to accept this nostalgia without finding it torturous, because it was Cairo that gave me my first taste of everything; of love, separation, independence, conquest, anger and death. Although I only lived in Cairo for five years, no city in the world is dearer to me. I came to Cairo after many years of growing up in the Gulf, where so much is prohibited or repressed, and suddenly Cairo opened its heart and arms to me and gave me what I had been seeking for so long - experience. It was in Cairo thatI fell in love for the first time, broke up for the first time, wandered the streets aimlessly for the first time, lived alone for the first time, stayed up late, kept secrets, lived and danced for the first time. Then, after this phase of self-discovery amidst the bright lights of the city, Cairo also revealed its darker side to me. Not yet twenty-four, I encountered its police stations and courtrooms for the first time, and then its cemeteries. I buried my best friend, killed in a car accident, and stood over her grave. 

Cairo: loved madly, destroyed violently. 

After all these experiences, the image of the city began to crumble in my mind and I with it. Everything I loved about Cairo was gone. Not because it had disappeared or died, but simply because I didn't like the same things any more. Everything had lost its sparkle. It was then that I realised that my city no longer existed either, that these streets no longer belonged to me, that everything around me was screaming at me- "Go!" I realised that as much as Cairo loves passionately, it also knows how to break violently. 
I left my flat as it was: paintings still hanging on the wall, my books in the library. I didn't have the courage to empty it, nor the time. I liked the idea that I still had a home in Cairo, a place to which I could still be attached. But within months, the landlord had sold the flat. My family cleared the furniture, my friends kept the books and paintings and now my home no longer exists.

So when I feel nostalgic for Cairo today, I'm aware that it's for a Cairo that once belonged to me, and that no longer exists. A Cairo made up of parties organised at my house, with the friends I used to invite. A library that I had built with my own hands - and when you build a library in a house, it's because you have no intention of leaving it. But I did leave Cairo, even if it never had the courage to leave me. Not even though I live in a lovely French city here, impeccably clean, with such fresh air and a sky so clear you're amazed by its colours. Every day, from my window, I watch the pigeons and crows. And yet I find myself feeling homesick. Homesick for Cairo, for the dusty streets that I've hated for so long, for the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts where I spent my best days, for the café at the end of the street and the friends you could call at any hour to go out. A city that shaped me, that made me who I am today, and yet which I left, trying not to feel guilt. Because it collapsed before my very eyes. Or maybe... maybe it was already in ruins, and it just took me a while to realise it.

Every day I ask myself: Where did Cairo go? Where are you, my love? And every day I long for that feeling of ‘home’ that Cairo offered me, and that I haven't yet found in France. Maybe I'm just homesick. Maybe I just want... a home.