“Before the revolution, Cairo was like a decomposed corpse. It came back to life shortly after the revolution but now it is dying again,” says Khalil Abdulraouf. “Long before the revolution, Cairo stopped impressing me; nothing was special about it, days passed almost indistinguishable. Then something happened. The revolution broke and the sense of amazement that I had long lost awakened in me, life had a meaning once again. The revolution is a personal matter” Khalil told Correspondents.
“Before the revolution, Cairo was like a decomposed corpse. It came back to life shortly after the revolution but now it is dying again,” says Khalil Abdulraouf. “Long before the revolution, Cairo stopped impressing me; nothing was special about it, days passed almost indistinguishable. Then something happened. The revolution broke and the sense of amazement that I had long lost awakened in me, life had a meaning once again. The revolution is a personal matter” Khalil told Correspondents.
Kings of stress
In an international report released this year – for the years 2013 to 2015 – about happiness, Egypt ranked 120 out of 157 countries polled. The report came after a statistical study of international, political, social and economic reports, in addition to a survey that questioned people about how satisfied they are with their lives. The survey also questioned people about their feelings, about the negative and positive experiences they have been through and how they were affected by them, and about whether or not they can make out a meaning or purpose in their lives. In another report based on a German study, published by the BBC website last October, the people of Cairo rank number one in the world for depression and stress. The study published these results after studying employment, noise, traffic and so on.
Reel nightmare
The revolution for Abdulraouf was the movie he wanted to make and the woman he wanted to love. He saw and took photos of tens of breathtaking scenes of young men facing death. Abdulraouf has a large volume of photos, many moments of the revolution he stored to make his film, a project that he has not yet began. Then came what he calls “the backlash”, and the treason that ended the whole thing. The seeds of treason were planted in the first sit-ins in the revolution, that was when the people chanted, “The people and the army are one hand,” and when the religious factions –anti-revolutionary by nature- were tolerated. Abdulraouf believes that the revolution ended the moment its enemies started killing each other in August 2013. “That was the moment when the revolution was buried alive,” he says. Abdulraouf had to cut his relationship with many close acquaintances then because some became too involved in the bloodshed.
To Abdulraouf the revolution was not the wide pictures taken of the crowds. It was in the small frames, in the glitter in the people’s eyes as they stood in front of insufferable odds. After, Cairo could cheer Abdulraouf no longer. Last October, without a plan and with only a little money, Khalil Abdulraouf moved to Sinai. In his first month, he stayed in a camp in return for painting the walls. He held many similar odd jobs for upkeep thereafter: he worked in construction, the food industry, manual labour and teaching. Recently, he started subtitling movies as a freelancer.
“I learned what silence means”
“In Sinai I learned what silence means; on the beach the waves make noises, but the mountain makes no sound at all. Sinai might be boring for tourists, but life here is very rich, there is plenty of time here for one to reflect on one’s own life. Plenty of time to do anything, from climbing a mountain to building or painting.” Abdulraouf found difficult at first in Sinai, it is after all a “wilderness” for most people, but he feels he was compensated with the slow and placid rhythm of life. Even the discrimination he felt at first as stranger did not last long. Abdulraouf works in Sinai in extreme temperatures, but back in Cairo, he used to waste 6 hours every day in the transportation system. What Sinai lacks is services; the only qualified hospital is in Sharm El-Sheikh, far away from the areas of Dahab and Nowibe.
“The people here are not happy,” said Abdulraouf upon his return to Cairo, a city he can no longer stand because of the crowds, the traffic and the noise. The moment he set foot in the capital after a year away, he smelled the stagnant air. When he met his friends, he was convinced that he had made the right choice. Abdulraouf will only go back to Cairo when another revolution breaks. Until then his plan is to run a place in Sinai that can be his home.
On the road
Mohammad Jaber had a strong relationship with the streets of Cairo; he used to sleep on them when he did not have the money to go home. He slept in Tahrir Square before the thousands of young Egyptians slept there during the political protest in 2011. As an independent street artist, Jaber had a relationship with the ugliness of the city. “I am inspired by it,” he told Correspondents. With the revolution breaking, the art scene in the city changed and he was not comfortable with everyone calling themselves street artists. With the onset of post revolution depression in May 2011, he suddenly moved to Beirut.
“I ran away, I decided I would not stay and slowly commit suicide. I did not think twice about it, I took my small freelance job that I had and the little money that I had saved – not enough for three weeks in the expensive city of Beirut- and set off without a plan,” says Jaber, who has no intentions of returning to Cairo anytime soon.
His first visit to Cairo after that was in October 2011, one day fter the Maspiro Massacre. He found himself caught up in the events there, like the Mohammad Mahmoud Street protests in mid-November 2011. The events then put him face to face with the injustices that his generation were suffering and the long lasting psychological effects of these injustices. He returned to Beirut and in the last two years he has only returned briefly each time.
“Blood on the streets increased”
Each homecoming is overshadowd by public events. In mid-2013, Jaber’s sister developed a rare case of brain cancer, so he stayed beside her in Cairo, returning to his relationship with the city’s streets. It kept getting worse. “I used to roam the streets looking for medicine and doctors, then a coup took place and the blood on the streets increased,” he recalls.
In Beirut, Jaber can breathe clean air; he laughs off the city’s waste issues. “I saw people here wearing masks, so, out of curiosity, I went to look for the waste they were talking about. When I found it, it was nearly half the size of any garbage pile in any neighborhood in Cairo,” says Jaber, adding that he is too traumatised to return to Cairo, where only his mother remains.
According to Jaber, Cairo is not diverse, “people want to be the same, the same language, the same architecture, the same dressing code, and even those outside of it want to be a copy of Cairo people. The streets in Cairo cannot be walked anymore, people there do not respect personal freedom, and they are meddlesome, distasteful, violent and hard to deal with. There is no space in Cairo for personal freedom and no sense of security; anyone could disturb your day for no apparent reason.” Despite the streets of Beirut buildings riddled with bullet holes, Jaber feel safe. He attributes Cairo’s ills to a lack of “attention to thought and intellectual development.”
Internet to mosquito net
When Nawara Murad, a movie director, went to Sinai two years ago, it was not the first time she had thought about leaving. When her mother suggested that she should buy an apartment in Cairo, she retorted that in SInai was a better investment. In the summer of 2014, Nawara went to Sinai for six months and worked as school teacher. She lived in a camp. Every morning she woke up at dawn and practiced yoga. It was a fast and unsettling reaquaintance with nature: the unforgiving bees and mosquitos, rocky beaches and dangerous fishes, as well as a slower and more traditional way of life. It has changed her permanently, she says.
The idea of leaving came to Nawara before the summer of 2014, because of the revolution. She started having panic attacks; she was constantly afraid that the security services would break into her home and take her to prison, which to her was more frightening than death. The panic attacks started a little before she finished her movie about the revolution. Nawara began working on the movie about one year earlier with a group of people who took part in the uprisings. By the end of 2014, most of the film’s characters were either in prison or had fled the country. It was devastating for Murad.
Murad still wants to return to live in Sinai, to work on her delayed art projects. She sees herself growing old there, away from the emotionally dead life in the city dominated by the constant struggle for survival. While she now appreciated the creature comforts of life in the capital when she returns there, she feels that Cairo has engendered in her a sense of fear and isolation.
