This is a personal take. I know the writer, even though I am always on the fringe of the world he describes. I read some of the drafts, yet reading them now felt reading them anew. What can I say, no matter how much I can try to use academia to reconcile with a city after 2013 I seem to always fall short. To date, I think very few works even attempt to articulate how earth shattering the silence of post 2013 was. How tremendous was it to walk a city in a desperate attempt to fool yourself that it is still your own, and how formidable a task was it, to feel momentarily at peace with it. El-Hajj's texts poetically capture being stuck in a taxi on Tuesday noon, and it seems almost impossible for any one else to simply convey how nauseating, heavy, and crushing a Taxi, on a Tusaday in Cairo is, was in 2014.
I think the stories are self-indulgent, in a good way, in a way that tells tales we know, but find unable to tell.