The Unrooted: An Essay by 2018 PNBA Award Winner
Omar El Akkad
The house where my father grew up is immortalized on an old Egyptian banknote. It’s the 25 or 50 piastre bill, I think, though I haven’t seen one since I was a child and they’ve been redesigned since then. The old bill, if memory serves me correctly, features a drawing of a narrow alleyway in …