1
If only a dance troupe of homosexuals would occupy the People’s Assembly to proclaim their right to be heard, and ordered that grim place to be turned into a bar…
If only the “religion” category on your identity papers were removed and replaced by another unique and entirely voluntary category: My favourite team is Arsenal…
1
If only a dance troupe of homosexuals would occupy the People’s Assembly to proclaim their right to be heard, and ordered that grim place to be turned into a bar…
If only the “religion” category on your identity papers were removed and replaced by another unique and entirely voluntary category: My favourite team is Arsenal…
If only a woman were able to address the Lord dressed in a miniskirt and have people pass her by without tattling to one another—or to the Lord—that something suspicious was going on…
If only tragedies could be resolved by courage alone, to start anew, renewed; if only they could be purged of their cyclical, melodramatic wretchedness; if only the cry, Bread!, might fade away and be replaced with: Comfort! Freedom! Social Justice!
If only…
These passing clouds were the revolution, vague hopes, lacking fine detail, but pointing the way: freedom and an end to the state’s manipulation of its citizens. We knew what we did not want yet lacked the courage to say what we wanted. We tucked it away so that it might not add injury to society’s misery, and made do with joining our voices to theirs as they hymned their loaf-shaped grail.
I believe that we awoke to find that the sun was the sun, that life was life, death, death, and the heavens were just were they should be; that when the failed state embraced us, its arms were old and weak. And that we were failures too: no different. Failures who know they deserve better than the crust they’re chewing. We shall all be drowned in happiness, a mysterious smile upon our lips. The only source of hope now is that the flood is coming, unstoppable, to claim the old man and his guest, once young and revolutionary, now sadly changed. The only solution now is to move beyond these pinched dreams of bread. When Death has passed us by, as promised, we shall know this to be true.
2
They had conspired with a truly admirable earnestness, and we plotted our future errors with great skill. Did it escape your notice that the remnants of the old order had become politicized, that they knew what they wanted, even though their will was now uncoupled from “authority” and “revolution” and had returned, brandishing an opposition agenda?
They will cast the homosexuals out of the People’s Assembly and burn them alive. They will deny Baha’is and Arsenal supporters a box to tick on their ID cards, will deny them discount vouchers at the Hypermarket. They will force the woman to drop her hem to some appropriate length around the ankle, and prescribe the way she must address the Lord: it’s well known that the bridge between conservatives and fundamentalists passes over a woman’s leg. Fearlessly they will talk of what they know they want.
Only you still fear to speak your dreams. You bring them to a halt at bread. You talk about legislating censorship and fear to inform them of your desire to watch the whole scene uncut as you crunch popcorn and swig Pepsi in the censor’s skull.
3
During the first wave of the revolution I was working at a publishing house owned by a major institution. The institution was owned by a woman who had a combination of qualities: She believed in knowledge as prescribed by the state; she allied herself with strength, no matter whose; she sought God’s favour through prayer and the hijab; and she wrung hard labour out of her lackeys at a minimum cost. Authority, she defined as that which cannot be questioned. She had all the authority she desired: the authority to speak in the name of the state, religion and wealth.
The revolution gave me the courage to go to her office and let her know in deliberately unvarnished language what I thought of her deficient and reactionary authoritarian policies, all prefaced with my resignation. But contrary to my expectations she refused my resignation and chose to take my words—unvarnished to the point of insult—as a wave of anger generated by a genuine enthusiasm. Like the state itself, she felt powerless before a new generation, which had in its possession some mysterious talisman called Youth. Before January 25 she would never have acted this way, but now she decided to “bring me on board”. She promoted me and gave me more power, and did so with a warmth that brought to mind General El Fangari’s salute to the fallen martyrs that left us sure of our victory.
For an instant I believed I had won. Then the illusion of this false promotion and my non-existent powers came home to me. I left the institution, understanding only that she had acted like the authorities. It had all been a trick to absorb the rage. But that explanation wasn’t enough.
Now, perhaps, I understand why she wanted me to stay around despite my rudeness and my bravado, which had started to percolate through the others working in the institution, people she feared and in whose presence she trembled.
She imagined that she’d be able to take possession of that mysterious secret, Youth, and absorb it; that I’d become her eye on a new generation that would secure her ever more money. In the instant of our confrontation, she realized that her power had become circumscribed; because there were things she didn’t understand. She wanted me so that she might defy her decrepitude, might prey on my secret like a vampire and leave me dead, her youth renewed, renewed, but “with her rules, her language, her home advantage and her own gains” intact.
This is what the state did, on January 30 to be exact. It wanted us there, but stripped us of gains and guarantees: a new legitimacy to give it the kiss of life now that it saw that the legitimacy of the 1952 Revolution and the October War had become risible. It’s the revolution that has the legitimacy, now? What revolution might that be? Our revolution!
4
Alaa Abdel Fattah walked out of prison giving the victory sign and bringing with him the touching tale of his son, who had been born—as had Alaa himself—while his father languished in jail. By refusing to submit to questioning by the military, Alaa had given a sign of hope, a way to counter the intensive use of military courts to prosecute revolutionaries after January 25.
The victory sign, the touching tale of a son continuing his family’s legacy of struggle, these were a challenge to the greatest power in the land: the soldiers.
Sitting there in front of your computer you assume the solidarity with Alaa is overwhelming. You check the stats for subscriptions, the Facebook shares, and you think that the world is yours, that Alaa has won and you with him, that those who don’t support him are saboteurs working against the revolutionary dream—exactly as the state describes its enemies—or otherwise “the ignorant majority” whose opinions can be discounted and who make you feel like some sacred cow, like you possess some nebulous quality that sets you above the others.
Alaa Abdel Fattah, the young activist, symbol of the revolution, is charged with the same offences regardless of whether its Maspero or Muqattam: carrying weapons and incitement to violence. And every time the case is thrown out of court. They don’t want him in jail. They want him accused.
They have achieved exactly what they wanted, to bring defeat out of victory. Just like the time General El Fangari brought you on board with a military salute as he announced Mubarak’s abdication, smuggling in your defeat with an implicit demand that you abdicate, that you shuffle off-stage content with your euphoria.
The point is not to detain him. The point is to sway opinion, to turn every word he says against him. The spiritual father of bloggers—as the owner of Alaa and Manal’s Blog is known—must not quit the stage, but if he stays he must show how the revolution has been distorted. Only then will the parade of our corpses cease.
Alaa, with his flowing hair and fearless views that proclaim freedom for all, with his face that does not fit the profile of the Honourable Citizen but rather some ghost late born, who peers out over the scene and wrecks it. The Honourable Citizens are those who volunteered to hot-house the smearing of Alaa, to accept the illogical accusations of atheism and sexual deviancy directed at him purely because he spoke up for the state he dreamed of, the state where all are equal, that accepts the atheist and the deviant (the most despised in modern society) on the grounds of equality and not—not even—as an act of generosity.
Alaa, who has faced such accusations under Mubarak, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the Brotherhood, won possession of himself, while the authorities won the Earth. Alaa Abdel Fattah returned to his place on the margins, a bogeyman to those who treat the Internet and its young pioneers as virgin territory, a land of wonders, with some even citing proof of whatever slander they’re selling: I read it on the Internet.
So you want youth? We’ve given you Mahmoud Badr, a kid with perfect hair and the face of an Honourable Citizen’s obedient son. The Tamarod Movement gives the soldiers everything: obedience, appreciation, vacant eyes, a child-like celebration of officialdom, a flimsiness in place of Alaa Abdel Fattah’s strength, their consent, as false representatives of the country’s young, to be ruled by the old man who dreams that embracing youth will grant him his lost vitality.
5
In Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, the young screenwriter enters the palatial mansion owned by Norma, the aging, once famous actress, who with melodramatic defiance still believes herself to be a big star—“it’s the pictures that got small”. The screenwriter, penniless, unable to pay rent, and in flight from his debtors, seeks shelter in her mansion, which hints at great wealth within and a solution to all his problems. She gives him a job, a joke: to transform the terrible screenplay she wrote in order to revive her career into a triumph. He accepts for the sake of warmth and shelter, and she gradually reels him in. His presence by her side is her last chance to feel attractive. The last legitimacy she possesses is his youth.
He attempts to escape to Betty, a screenwriter who talks to him about the future and offers him a more fulfilling existence. She is his last chance to save himself and reclaim his life, but he ends up slain by a bullet that Norma fires into his back, face down in the mansion’s swimming pool. Norma goes mad: she believes the cops and the camera flashes from the press photographers to be a scene in her latest film.
Do you want me to explain? I’ll tell you. Hope lies in Norma’s descent into absolute madness, not her seesawing between insanity and denial, in the young screenwriter floating in the pool with a lunatic’s bullet in his back, not his wavering between his desire to remain in the mansion and to mount a revolution beyond its walls.
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