Can it be forty? I sometimes wonder. And after forty years in Egypt, who am I?
-Photographing Egypt, John Feeney
I met Hajj Bashir at the Cairo camel market in 1979, the year John Wayne died which he wanted to ask me about, forty one years ago. Since then I’ve come and gone. I didn’t ever ask myself Feeney’s question about himself. I always knew, I never forgot. Even on the trail I kept my name and my own clothes. I slept in my sleeping bag, not under a saddle blanket, and tuned my radio to the BBC in English. When I returned for the second time, KhairAllah said, Here comes the khawaja. Maybe he’d forgotten my name in those four years between trips with him. But now I know that he knows, Here comes Luwees.