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Egyptian activist Sarah Hegazi died on June 13, 2020 in Toronto, Canada. In life, Sarah was compelled to revolt. More accurately, society revolted against her, and she had no choice but to respond. Sarah was arrested on October 2, 2017 after raising the rainbow flag at a Mashrou’ Leila concert in Cairo, Egypt. She was accused of inciting debauchery and joining an illegal group offending public stability and social coexistence. During three months in prison, Sarah was tortured with electric shocks. Other prisoners were informed she was homosexual, putting her at risk of sexual assault.

Sarah knew that she could not return to Egypt and felt alienated. Her mother's death made it worse. She told me, “I was arrested in Egypt and now I am arrested in Canada as I can do nothing for my family in the midst of this disaster.”  In exile, she could not even say goodbye to her mother, who left the world without seeing her daughter one last time.

Sarah regarded Canadian psychiatry as an insensitive machine ignorant of the Middle Eastern problems and which treated refugees with pity, which she considered an insult.

We cannot be perpetually resilient, we cannot just be resisting all the time

after all of the car bombs and all of the wars, when friends in Lebanon ask me how I am, I tell them I am fine. When I ask them how they are, they tell me they are fine. We all know that fine is never fine, that there is no such thing as fine because we have no idea what normal even looks like. We just believe in the idea of a normal because we have ‘seen’ it in others, elsewhere, and in books or movies.

I can’t remember birthdays or anniversaries but I can recount a dozen or so yearly commemorations of horrors past. The act of remembering itself has become so difficult that I often find myself memory-less, unable to daydream anymore, unable to lose myself in the moment lest the moment overtakes me and destroys me.