Josie and her friend are in a taxi on their way to the bus station in Cairo, where they’ll head to their next destination – Siwa. While she has the driver’s ear, she asks him the same question she’s asked almost every other Egyptian on her trip.
“What would you say to anyone who thinks Egypt is full of scammers?”
The driver pauses, then glances in the rearview mirror as he processes the question. These are the stories outsiders tell about his home.
Josie is trying to change the narrative and reduce the harm caused by travel vloggers who are warning travellers not to visit Egypt. In her own travel content she tries to represent people and places carefully. But by posing these questions to local Egyptians, the message lands as an insult first, and a question second.
She’s using their energy to do this work – asking them to push back against the half-baked opinions of people they’ll never meet and whose content they’ll probably never see.
It makes me think about emotional labour in cross-cultural situations. In everyday relationships, when someone is critical, hostile, antagonistic or aggressive, others step in to smooth things over. That’s emotional labour. In the West, it’s mostly women who do it – often without the people they’re doing it for even realising.
I think the same is happening here. Egyptians end up doing the labour of absorbing and correcting stereotypes. Josie is trying to correct the narrative, but in the process, she doesn’t protect Egyptians from the emotional sting of hearing them.
It makes me wonder, on a cultural scale, who ends up doing the most of this work?