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Everybody needs to understand that I learned Arabic from the United States Army as a second language. I never spoke it at home.

But my Arabic is pretty good. It's good enough to have conversations with people, to understand what they say, to understand what they're feeling.

Whenever I come across an Arabic word mired in English text, I am momentarily shocked out of the narrative.

My dad knows every single accent from being an old Yiddish grandpa to being Indian or Jamaican. It was very cool to grow up with that.

I'm half Egyptian, and I'm Muslim. But I grew up in Canada, far from my Arab roots. Like so many who straddle East and West, I've been drawn, over the years, to try to better understand my origins.

My mother's English, and she always was fascinated by the desert.

My cultural roots are something illusive.

I've always been fascinated by family ancestry.

The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.

Although I was raised in Canada and the U.K., my roots are in Egypt through my father, in a family line that stretches back generations and runs along the Nile, from the concrete of Cairo to the coast of Alexandria.