I visited Michael Heizer’s City for the first time in my dreams, twenty-seven years ago. I was twelve years old, living with my family in Kuwait, when I started to experience a recurring dream where I found myself wandering, naked, through an unfamiliar city, engulfed in shame, desperately seeking a wall to hide behind—but none existed. The city’s landscape was a blend of concrete ruins, sandy dunes, and winds that deepened my embarrassment with every gust. It was an abandoned city without visible inhabitants, yet I felt their eyes peeping at me. With no walls to shield its secrets, the city should have been an open, liberating space. Instead, I wandered, immersed in my shame, hopelessly seeking refuge.
I never shared this dream with anyone; it was etched into my memory as the ultimate image of embarrassment and shyness. Naked in a city without walls.
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contributor
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Ahmed Naji is a writer, journalist, documentary filmmaker, and criminal. His novel Using Life made him the only writer in Egyptian history to have been sent to prison for offending public morality. His published novels in Arabic are Tigers, Uninvited, and The Happy End. He is also the author of the memoir Rotten Evidence, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. For more about his work, visit ahmednaji.net.
