Mohsen Rifaat: Watercolour Artist and Author in Vancouver
Discover My Book
Discover My Book
More than a memoir, this is the story of a life lived between Egypt and Canada.
Filled with personal memories and illustrated with many of my own watercolours, it explores identity, family, art, and the search for belonging.
Come along on the journey.
Prologue
“We know exactly what you are up to.”
It took some time for the full impact of these words, uttered by Mr. Kelly, the Canadian immigration officer in Cairo, to sink in. I had just confidently presented him an admission letter to a graduate programme at the University of Toronto.
“All I need is a student visa,” I reminded him, thinking it should not take more than a day or two to be issued.
“We know exactly what you’re up to,” he repeated, leaning over his desk and retrieving a red file from a nearby drawer. “You submitted an immigration application last year,” he said, his eyes wide with suspicion.
In my naivety, I reassured him that either option, immigration or a student visa, would be acceptable to me. He explained that a student visa could not be granted while an immigration application was pending. Worse, the embassy had frozen all immigration processing entirely. At that moment it dawned on me: The long gruelling journey I had taken to get here might be ending in sudden failure.
It felt like slamming into a brick wall mid-stride. After months of wrestling red tape, sidestepping bureaucratic traps, and overcoming one obstacle after another, I was halted mere steps from the finish line. Stunned, and unaccustomed to challenging authority, I swallowed my frustration and kept my composure. He held my fate in his hands. I left the embassy with a hollow chest, feeling utterly deflated.
The year was 1967, a disastrous year for Egypt’s military. Under President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s astonishing mismanagement, Egypt was decisively defeated. Israel attacked and easily outmanoeuvred him, both on the battlefield and in the court of world opinion. With overwhelming military superiority and unwavering US support, Israel succeeded in portraying Egypt as an existential threat while knowing full well its army was unprepared. Because Canada voted for positions aligned with Israel’s interests at the United Nations, diplomatic ties with Egypt were strained, and the embassy’s operations in Cairo were scaled back. Nothing to do with me personally!
And so began the long, uncertain road to Canada, a journey that started with resistance and rejection, but which opened the world to me and set my life on a path I never could have predicted. Immigration was not only about changing countries. It was about reshaping my sense of self, slowly, until I no longer belonged completely to one place. Today, I am Canadian in spirit and in outlook, while Egypt remains my foundation. I would grow into a hybrid identity and, in time, feel peacefully at home in my own wholeness.
I do not know what fate might have had in store for me had I never emigrated. But in Canada I found what I had hoped for, and more than I could have imagined.
P A R T I .
Roots in Egypt
Chapter 1 Mother of the World
As the Second World War crept perilously close to Alexandria, I came into a world where Britain, Egypt’s occupying power, was deeply entrenched in a conflict that would shape history. In October 1942, El Alamein became the site of a decisive battle where General Montgomery’s Eighth Army repelled Field Marshal Rommel’s German Afrika Korps. It marked a turning point in the war, and my first birthday.
Yet beyond that curious overlap between world history and the timing of my birth lay a far more serious reality. From the very beginning, my life would unfold in the long shadow of conflicts, both near and distant.
Despite Egypt’s substantial material and financial support to the British war effort, the independence it had been promised remained out of reach, overshadowed by Britain’s unyielding determination to maintain its grip on power. Then came the Nakba, the catastrophe that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel and left more than seven hundred thousand Palestinians displaced from their homes. Their homes were taken, their towns renamed, their olive groves abandoned. The following year, war broke out between the newly declared State of Israel and its Arab neighbours.
Like the great war before it, this one drifted past my consciousness. I was too young to grasp the disasters unfolding but not to feel moments of fear. I vividly recall the shrill air raid sirens slicing through the citywide blackouts. The clatter of anti-aircraft guns filled the air, and every now and then, a thunderous bang would rattle our windows and terrify us.
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My father calmly explained that it was the Agouza gun firing into the air. Agouza was our neighbourhood, and so the anti-aircraft gun must have been uncomfortably close by. My younger brother reminded me recently of how we’d huddle together, petrified, and how our mother, ever composed, would soothe us by saying, “It’s just the nearby shooting club members again, practicing with clay pigeons.” I don’t remember if that calmed me, but I must have wanted to believe her.
Neither of those conflicts left lasting scars on me as a child. Palestine, for years afterwards, felt like a distant land—somewhere over there, beyond the horizon of our daily lives. And yet, the tragedies born of that era—the uprooting, the wars, the broken promises—still ripple across the Middle East today.
Once the guns fell silent following the 1949 armistice, the nightly biplane drills began. As Egypt had no faith in Israel’s intentions, it had to remain prepared, my father explained. We would race up to the rooftop of our eleven-storey apartment building, wide-eyed. The sky would suddenly spark to life as searchlights swept across it, long beams of light criss-crossing the heavens in search of a single biplane. The low hum of an engine would cut through the silence. Soon, a searchlight would catch the plane, then another, until the aircraft was caught in a net of light. The plane would twist and turn, trying to escape the beams, to our great entertainment.
One of those target-plane pilots was a distant relative. He told us that an hour or more of piercing searchlights and violent spinning through the sky often left him returning to base with blurred vision and a long-lasting pounding headache. It occurred to me then that this was no theatre, and these men weren’t performers, they were enduring something real.
British colonial roots had dug deep into Egyptian soil long before then. The occupation, cloaked in the justification of safeguarding the Suez Canal, a lifeline to imperial India, began in 1882 and lingered for decades. Despite mounting nationalist resistance and waves of protest, the British dominated Egypt well into the twentieth century, leaving behind wounds that are still healing.
My childhood unfolded in the Agouza neighbourhood of Cairo in a world of comfort. My father was a practising architect, and my mother cared for me and my two brothers during our early years, after which she gradually turned her attention to becoming a professional artist. The building we lived in was designed by a Belgian architect, elegant in its art nouveau style, standing only steps from the Nile and not far from the pyramids.
Our home was, in fact, two ground-floor apartments joined together by a doorway my father had opened between them, creating a single, generous living space. In Egypt, major alterations and renovations were often carried out by the renters, with no objection from the landlord, because apartments were permanent homes.
The apartment’s true gem was the quintessential Egyptian salon, a formal sitting room lavishly adorned with polished, gold-framed pieces and Louis XVI-style armchairs and sofas that gleamed beneath the
chandelier’s light.
Chapter 5 -Gathering Clouds
By the early 1950s, Cairo buzzed with its usual symphony. My life remained cocooned and comfortable—school, home, the sports club, and the familiar neighbourhood streets were the borders of my little universe. I was blissfully unaware that history was shifting just beyond my line of sight.
Not all my countrymen felt the same sense of security or contentment. Many felt like outsiders in their own cities, strangers and misfits in places that were meant to belong to all. Except for cinemas, most attractions in Cairo and Alexandria were off-limits, unaffordable or unwelcoming, unless one belonged to the Egyptian or foreign plutocracy that dominated social, economic, financial, and political life.
I moved among the upper crust, but didn’t truly belong to their world or fully share in their privileges and excesses. Even so, growing up, I only faintly sensed, and rarely gave much thought to, the real hardships faced by low-income communities, both in the cities and across rural areas.
I am ashamed now to think that I was a willing participant in mocking the rural Sae’edies, the people of the Nile Valley countryside, often the butt of countless Cairene jokes. One joke I particularly liked went like this:
After returning from a visit to Cairo, a Sae’edy was asked by his fellow villagers about the trip, waiting eagerly for his report on the grand magical city. “There are monumental buildings so tall you could shake hands with God from the rooftops,” he bragged, in a thick rural accent I enjoyed mimicking.
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Spaces between the Nile and the True North 59
“How do you get up there?” the amazed audience asked, seemingly unfazed by what might have sounded like blasphemy.
“To reach the top,” he replied, “you walk into a small room called gascenseur9, push a button, and the apartment you want comes right down to you!”
They were stunned.
And that is when he continued, completely seriously:
“I paused again for a moment to watch,” he said, “then I saw an old woman with a cane shuffle into the room. Five minutes later, the doors re-opened and out came a brisk, attractive lady, high heels clicking.” Again, the villagers’ jaws dropped.
He shrugged and said, “Same room, different button.”
Joking aside, the laughter began to sit uneasily. What we dismissed as harmless humour was, in truth, a small window into a much harsher reality, the underprivileged side of our society. It stood in sharp contrast to the world I moved in, and to the glittering pockets of wealth I often only heard about.
There were stories of casinos where the King himself was said to gamble alongside wealthy Egyptians and foreigners, pouring money onto roulette tables with effortless ease, as if nothing in the country were amiss. I caught a small glimpse of that world myself at the Gezira Club, where I would sit in the tea garden watching the horse races unfold—elegant at first, until the final stretch, when the crowd erupted into wild cheers as the horses thundered toward the finish. I saw only the
9 Mispronunciation of the French word for elevator: ascenseur
spectacle, I did not yet grasp the scale of the betting, the rivers of money changing hands.
In my final year at school, I was invited by the parents of a school friend to the Auberge des Pyramides, a famous nightclub along the Pyramid Road that somehow still clung to the glamour of an earlier era. We went there to celebrate his birthday.
We sat at a table enjoying a fine meal while watching a show from Paris. On stage, the performers launched into lively can-can dances, kicking and swirling in the familiar style. Only at the very end did I discover the unexpected twist: all the dancers were men. The whole spectacle appealed to a tiny social world in Egypt, far removed from local traditions and everyday realities.
Those realities included barefoot vendors in tattered gallabiyahs pushing carts in the heat, weaving through traffic and narrow lanes. Children not much older than me trying to sell cigarettes or polish shoes. One man haunted my memory. He was a street vendor with a wooden leg and a severe hump who pushed his cart by our home every morning, limping along in obvious pain, calling out, “Hiluwa ya batata!” (Sweet potatoes for sale!)
One afternoon, my mother handed him some fabric and some money. “Use this for a new gallabiyah,” she said gently, “and go home to rest. That’s enough work for today.”
He looked at her, confused, unsure if this was not some cruel trick. But when he understood it was a kind gesture, he was overcome. Tears ran down his cheeks as he thanked her and lifted his eyes to the sky, asking God to protect her. I had never seen such raw emotion. It pierced me in a way I couldn’t explain. He didn’t show up the next day or the day
after that. But on the third morning, he returned in a freshly sewn gallabiyah, his wooden leg still clunking on the pavement, but he looked more dignified. From then on, he made sure to stop right in front of our house, raise his hands towards the sky, and loudly ask God to protect my mother.
I gradually became aware of the extent of how lower classes were excluded from the wealth created from Egypt’s resources. How Egypt’s best cotton was drained to feed the mills of Manchester where most of the profits were made, while the products were sold back to us at exorbitant prices. How the wealth of absentee landlords was drawn from the agrarian economy without them ever touching the soil. How the relentless toil of the fellaheen peasants who worked the land was pitifully rewarded. Or how firm the grip that foreign hands held over banks, trade and commercial transactions was.
I often overheard my parents and their friends talking. They vented about the British, about the king, about how Farouk had become little more than a puppet. It was well known that the British always held the strings, and that the once promising young monarch had lost any real appetite for reform.
They also commented on his lingering stature—his red cars, his palaces, his flair—along with his gluttony, extravagant displays of wealth, bon vivant excesses, and his appetite for female company. Whether true or not, he had the reputation of a ruler who had become more focused on self-indulgence than governance. I still remember the sight of his red motorcade sweeping past, polished and staged as ever, with sleek cars, salutes, and fluttering flags. It left me in awe, though the adults waiting in the halted traffic had perhaps long grown weary of the spectacle.
Black Saturday. January 26, 1952
Revolutionary fervour was mounting. As King Farouk was at his Abdeen palace leading six hundred dignitaries down a gastronomic gauntlet of caviar to quail to celebrate the birth of his son and heir to the throne, Cairo was burning. Thick smoke curled through the downtown sky that twenty-sixth day of January 1952, Black Saturday, as it came to be known. The city seemed to erupt with fury.
A wave of arson and looting swept through downtown Cairo, targeting symbols of colonial presence, foreign wealth, and European culture. The most iconic casualty was Shepheard’s Hotel, a glittering emblem of elegance. Built in 1841 by the American Samuel Shepheard and originally named Hotel des Anglais, it had long stood as a luxurious gathering place for dignitaries, celebrities, and world travellers. That day it went up in flames along with over seven hundred other establishments.
A frenzied mob surged through the streets, torching other iconic establishments like the Egyptian headquarters of Barclays Bank, the Studebaker agency, the offices of the British Overseas Airways Corporation, and the Cairo Stock Exchange. Also burned were businesses catering to the wealthy or those identified by the rioters with moral corruption, including four cinemas, my beloved Groppi coffee house, the Casino Opera, and over one hundred bars and dance halls. Twenty-six people lost their lives that day.10 Of those, ten were burned to death in the Turf Club,11 including one diplomat: J. MacLeod Boyer, the Canadian trade commissioner.
10 This was the assessment of the British embassy in Cairo. See Stevenson to Anthony Eden, FO 371/96872, JE 1018/78.
11 The Turf Club was a social club long associated with the British residents and colonial elite that was out of bounds to ordinary Egyptians.
That fateful afternoon, my father had planned to take us to see Scaramouche, a swashbuckling adventure starring Stewart Granger that was, ironically, set during the French Revolution, complete with mobs, chaos, and fire. The film was showing at Metro Cinema, one of the grandest in downtown Cairo, and I was brimming with anticipation. On the way, I saw silhouettes of people moving urgently along the road ahead, their figures backlit by a large red-orange glow. The traffic looked blocked, but I still held out hope that we’d somehow make it to the movie. My father had already read the signs. He didn’t say much, but he didn’t need to. He only made a swift U-turn to head home.
The moment it became clear we weren’t going, my younger brother broke into a full-blown tantrum, sobbing loudly in the back seat. For him, it wasn’t danger, it was the sheer injustice of missing an adventure promised and then snatched away.
Reading the papers the following day, my father told us that the Metro Cinema was listed among the buildings burned down, reduced to ashes before the screening of the film had ever begun. I do not clearly remember how I felt, but at eleven years old, my feelings were likely mixed and confused, not fully comprehending the extent of what had happened, yet relieved that we had not been in danger.
Around that time, Masr, Umm el-Dunya, Egypt, Mother of the World, began her rapid descent on a long, treacherous path into a new and uncertain era. On July 23, a group of young nationalist military officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, capitalizing on the widespread discontent, staged a successful bloodless revolution. They overthrew the monarchy, declared themselves the new “temporary” government, and soon after, proclaimed the Republic of Egypt, a move met with overwhelming popular support.
We were vacationing in Alexandria as usual that summer. I remember the silhouette of a navy destroyer on the horizon moored near the entrance to the El Montaza Royal Palace grounds. I watched it with curiosity for a while, marvelling at its presence. Unlike my father, I didn’t dwell on it for long. I was content in my usual summer routine of swimming, fishing, and basking in the holiday rhythm of childhood.
It turned out that navy destroyer was preparing to escort the royal yacht El Mahrousa, with the ousted king and his family aboard, into exile. El Mahrousa was hardly just a yacht; it was a floating palace. With its gleaming white hull, polished brass fittings, and intricate woodwork, it evoked a splendour soon to vanish into history. It was built in 1865 in London for Egypt’s viceroy, Khedive Ismail, and crafted to dazzle Ottoman sultans, European monarchs, and foreign dignitaries. It was aboard this very vessel that Khedive Ismail sailed to the grand opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.
Sarah, my future wife, still remembers the commotion just steps from her family’s home. A great crowd had gathered along the Corniche, lining the waterfront as the king’s convoy made its way towards the moored yacht. They clapped, shouted, and cheered, sending him off with warm wishes, some with tears in their eyes.
The royal party arrived at the port of Naples, Italy, on July 29, 1952. Once the king had disembarked, the naval officers aboard El Mahrousa, most of whom had close ties to the royal court, faced a pivotal decision: Should they remain in Italy with the deposed monarch and join him in a new life or return the vessel to Egypt, uncertain of what fate might await them under the new regime?
The ship’s master, Captain Allouba, who happened to be the father of one of Sarah’s close school friends, played a decisive role. He convinced the officers that their duty was not to the king but to Egypt. His leadership prevailed, and the officers chose to sail back to Alexandria, a powerful act of loyalty to the homeland and a reaffirmation of their continued service to the military.
Shortly after, Nasser skilfully increased his popularity by taking credit for forging Egypt’s independence. He forcefully ended British rule, he claimed, without mention of the decades of resistance and sacrifice by generations of Egyptian patriots, among them, my grandmother!
Still, his fiery nationalistic speeches and relentless anti-colonial harassment accelerated the final British evacuation, and he firmly established himself as a national hero.
For generations, the population was raised under a lingering sense of cultural inferiority, constantly told that everything foreign was superior, more refined, more “proper,” now his messages struck a powerful chord12. He gave us permission to feel proud of who we were and where we came from.
What made him remarkable, especially for young people like me, was his down-to-earth diction. He addressed the nation in everyday Egyptian Arabic, simple, familiar words delivered with patriotic conviction. Taking full advantage of the newly introduced television to Egypt, he no doubt recognised its potential as a powerful tool for mass communication and national unity, if not outright propaganda.
I was enthralled by the way he defiantly mocked the British.
12 In fact, the word “baladi,” which is literally translated as “my country,” is still used to denote that an object or act is tacky or in poor taste.
“If Britain sees itself as a lion,” he said with a sly smile, “we will pull the lion’s tail.”
It was the kind of line I could never imagine King Farouk, or any previous politician, saying. The crowd erupted, and something about the moment lodged in my young mind. It wasn’t just what he said, it was how he said it. Unapologetic. Unscripted. Unafraid. Children, students, workers, the elderly, Egyptians seemed spellbound. He wasn’t just giving a speech; he was giving people something they hadn’t felt in a long time: the defiant thrill of standing tall. That wave of support gave him the confidence to go even further.
In one of his most fiery and inspiring speeches, he announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, to thunderous applause, on the fourth anniversary of the republic. With that single bold act, he ended decades of British and French control over the world’s most vital economic artery. I was just turning fifteen, and the family were all sitting in the dining room of our Alexandria apartment expecting a routine address, some patriotic words, a little theatre perhaps, nothing dramatic.
My father sat with his ear to the radio, and we gathered around him in silence. The speech began by recounting history and slowly rose to a powerful crescendo. As I remember it, it went something like this: The Suez Canal, he said, was a major source of revenue. Egyptian labour had built the canal, and tens of thousands had died in the process. Why should it remain in foreign hands? Why shouldn’t we take that revenue for the good of our country?
I can still picture the way Dad leaned in, completely still, his eyes misting over. How proud he was. It wasn’t just politics that stirred him, it was the feeling that, at last, Egypt had reclaimed something of its dignity. Obviously, he understood the enormous implications far more than I did. Looking back now, I wonder if a part of him felt quietly disappointed. His excitement was immense, but I sensed he knew he couldn’t fully share it with us. He didn’t debate, he didn’t explain, he didn’t try to draw us in. Perhaps he regretted hearing that historic speech in a quiet seaside resort with his boys who were too young and naïve to grasp the moment. He was not in Cairo at the centre of his social world, among his club and close circles and the buzz of colleagues who would have embraced, congratulated one another, and argued the
implications with fierce emotion.