Lived place, embodied remembering, and narrative belonging in Samia Serageldin's <i>The Cairo House</i> and Pauline Kaldas's “A House in Old Cairo”

Abstract Samia Serageldin's The Cairo House (2000) and Pauline Kaldas's “The House in Old Cairo” (2006) allow a comparative analysis on place dynamics and the psycho‐spatial aspects of subjectivity and belonging. This article builds on the premise that place has an ontological implication for its occupants as it allocates a portion of space for them, and also identifies and animates them through its potential to alter their affective experience of the world. In Serageldin's novel and Kaldas's poem, the function of place extends beyond that of a mnemonic tool only, as the co‐dependence of place and lived bodies takes on a symbolic layer of meaning through the metaphorization of the family house—that was left in the homeland—as an anchor to the migrant individual's roots. The threat of losing the intergenerational and intersubjective nexus looms over both texts emphasizing the anxiety over the loss of shared cultural heritage and the relations between genealogy, place, remembering, and narrative. Examining the nostalgic yearning for the homeland and the elements of acquiring a sense of belonging to a place, the article delineates the capacity of narratives to function as mnemonicons and the potential of belonging through narratives to adopt the position of place‐belongingness.