Crawling on the Dust is a long term project by Ali Zaraay with his friend Haj Hani who is part of the Nomadic Bedouins in Egypt’s Delta. This project looks into what it means to be always on the move, crawling, resisting and imagining.
Befriending, living with and researching alongside Haj Hani for nine years allowed the photographer, Ali Zaraay, to understand how deeply intersectional the struggles in Egypt are. In the city, Ali’s memory is challenged by the demolishing of many neighbourhoods that he worked in, and the displacement of people he photographed. Both Hani and Ali “crawl on dust” as the Bedouin saying describes; “We both are on the move following something as unstable and uncertain as dust.” But now, Haj Hani is only nomadicly moving with his animals around the few remaining patches of greenery near the house his elderly mother recently acquired. While he still travels and sets up tents, he tells Ali with frustration, “Now, I am just going around myself!” This reflects a linguistic paradox, in Arabic they describe themselves as ‘crawling on dust’ الزحف على التراب ‘for their lives’ due to instability and uncertainty. Ironically, the same verb ‘crawling’, is used to describe urban spawl - الزحف العمراني. Metaphorically, Hani and his people’s “crawling” resists the “crawling” of urban expansion.
Urban sprawl over the green lands of the delta in Egypt suffocates the spaces Hani and his people have known for centuries by heart. Being close to the nomads of the Delta, has allowed Ali to witness their daily lives, filled with movement, challenges, changes, dreams and modes of resistance. The Nomadic Bedouins take pride in knowing how to navigate the land. These spatial memories are embedded in their social fabric that allows for alternative narratives and meanings of “space,” “road,” and “home.”
The project seeks to explore through the lens of a single family across generations, the social and spatial memory of Egypt’s nomads. It delves into their alternative narratives of “home,” their relationships with the land and animals, and the ways they resist marginalisation, underrepresentation and systematic oppressions by imagining themselves otherwise. These radical imaginings vary between generations; both “crawling” on the dust and pursuing a centuries-long nomadic lifestyle as a form of resistance, settling in Delta villages or migrating to the European shores across the Mediterranean, as Hani’s son Selim did, is another form resisting economic and social state violence & oppression.
Hani, a nomadic Bedouin, at his father’s graveyard in the Nile Delta, Egypt in 2019. When someone is always on the move, like the nomadic Bedouins in the Delta region, what happens when they die? Where do they settle? Haj Hani took the photographer to where his father is buried, which is now under threat of demolition due to highway expansion.
The main reason for the continuous movement of the nomadic Bedouins is to feed their animals and herds. This project looks into the complex relationship Hani’s family have with animals between intimacy and care and killing and commodifying. The animals also exist in the nomad’s social fabric and imaginations as mystical characters that resist their oppression and marginalization. Photographed in the Nile Delta, Egypt in 2024.
A bridge beside Hani’s mother’s house, which she recently bought to settle, in Delta, Egypt in 2024. Although bridges are meant to facilitate movement, this bridge, like many others jeopardizes the lives of Hani’s family and animals. It is broken, fragile and poorly maintained, leading to the loss of lives—both human and animal—while crossing it.
Warda, in her wedding in Delta, Egypt in 2017.
Ali Zaraay is an Egyptian documentary photographer and his masterclass project follows his friend, Haj Hani, and his nomadic Bedouin family and attempts to look through the family’s different generations, into the social memory of Egypt’s Nile Delta nomads, their alternative narratives of the “road” and “home”, their relationships to lands, animals and modes in which they radically resist marginalization by imagining otherwise about themselves.
Credit: Ali Zaraay
