Word: el-gaili
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Stuck between two cultures, el-Gaili presents the trappings of both home and adopted home with ease. Perennially clad in oxford shirts and khakis, he manages to simultaneously exude American preppiness and interpret his current home at a polite distance. Meanwhile, his Currier House single is full of Islamic and Sudanese artifacts from home and family. He pauses briefly to point at cane with an emblem of an eagle, the Sudanese national symbol...
...That was given by the Sudanese government to my grandfather, who was ambassador to the U.S. in the 1960s. My grandfather then gave it to me when I was preparing to come to America," el-Gaili says...
Asked if he considers himself a present-day Sudanese ambassador, el-Gaili laughs...
...father, a former supreme court justice in Khartoum, where el-Gaili was born, became disillusioned by increasing governmental encroachment onto the judiciary and left the country with his wife and four children for self-imposed exile in 1978. El-Gaili was two years old at the time. With the encouragement of his father, el-Gaili mostly learned about events in his homeland--its civil wars, famines, floods and increasing implementation of fundamentalist Islamic law--from newspapers he started to read when he was eight, at his home in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on the other side...
...family returned to Sudan every summer to visit relatives. For el-Gaili, growing up the only Sudanese expatriate at his Saudi school, memories of the town el-Gaili, named after an ancestor and 25 miles north of Khartoum, became a major influence over his identification with his country. Still, from ninth grade onwards, el-Gaili harbored dreams of going to America and broadening his horizons...