Shattered Revolution

 

#Jan25. Illustration by Ann Kiernan

With every passing anniversary, on the 25^th of January, we try and remember a day that shook the world, a day where young people lead a defiance of years of apathy and depoliticization as well as a brutal police apparatus to try and dream of a better future.

The act of remembering is often a snapshot. After all, many other things that have happened in the world since then. So each year, there’s a snapshot of politics, economy, the fine young revolutionaries being thrown in and out of jail after a great many of them were killed. The state of police, judiciary and military. 

It is often difficult to remember or even imagine that the plethora of images of Tahrir square filled with people numerous days during the active revolutionary years are actually comprised of individuals, each with their own story. The big picture is often seen in an aerial photo, a hastily written article to meet the publishing deadline or a human rights report that details victims and abuses by the state. Yet outside these bulletins, the lives of these people that contributed to the mosaic-like photos continue and for the most part remain under reported. But there is no real reason to report these untold stories. Those living these stories know them and don’t need them reported and the bigger picture remains clear with every human rights report and every arms sale and business transaction between the west and Egypt’s government.

Yet there is value in remembering that the large mosaic image of the revolution and its defeat is made up of countless tiles of humans who put their lives and futures on the line, many of whom still exist despite the disappearance of the Egyptian revolution. They still form a mosaic image, but one that is not captured in an aerial image or a news report. The image is far less visible than the collection that once gathered in Tahrir, in fact, it’s hardly an image, it’s faint dots dispersed all over the globe, barely audible, yet the sound they make sometimes tells a story; of the rise of hope, the euphoria of revolution and the survival following its defeat.

Often times using the term mosaic is a cliché, but in this case, perhaps it’s adequate to think of the people who have been a part of the revolution as shattered glass. Each of them unique, colored and sharpened by their experiences and yet shattered. The picture they paint is that of defeat and groups of them share some of the same attributes, some of the same colors, some of the same flavors of escape.

From a distance, you may look at those who have stopped their politics, trying to get by with ordinary jobs, jobs that come directly in contact with the military, who have turned business in Egypt into a monopsony, a term used to describe an economy where there is only one client, where the armed forces is the only client.  There are others who sought refuge in studying abroad, or finding work there. Others have taken various different routes to survive.

I would not paint a picture based on these clusters, but rather on where they are mentally with processing this experience. How can we understand where they’re at? It’s unfortunate that there is no outlet for this sort of study or information, but you can see it in the stories of people you’ve known for a long time, on their presence or absence on social media, on the quality of content they post, in their travels and in what topics they choose to engage with. To those of us living the aftermath of the revolution’s defeat, it’s clear simply by looking at ourselves in the mirror or at those we’ve known along the years. To an outside observer the changes would be simply observed at the moment of their observation if they’re not doing so over time.

Still there are pockets where you can find some of that story, if you look closely enough. One such reflection of this ongoing story was a podcast that has been narrowly circulated in 2019 called Mesh Masmou, which means not heard.

In this podcast, we follow some of the voices from before the revolution, into their experiences and then finally into how they processed some of it and where they’re off to next. All of this is discussed on an abstract mental level, without the details you would find in a feature article, with some sort poster child.

That mosaic audio is one of a shattered revolution, like a Rubik’s cube gone into complete disarray, a far cry from the image painted by an overflooded Tahrir square.

This is the sort of snapshot worth taking today, the shattered pieces of a shattered revolution. Maybe a conversation with those in exile has been one angle, but more of the story is to be told looking at the ordinary voices of extraordinary people who were present at some point during the revolutionary years. What do they think of their past experiences? What do they think of their present? Of their future? But what do they think of the revolution itself.

Collectively we struggle, we fall and grow. At every point in my personal journey through dealing with the revolution, I’ve seen others who are going through something similar. We can still relate even though there is no longer a common place to meet, or even a shared goal to achieve. The places we keep remain in our minds and in our memory but more importantly in our journey. 

Paradoxically the revolution had given us all a glimpse of what we could be and then took it all away. It allowed ordinary people to rise to the ranks of creative heroes, knowledgeable experts with a fame mostly on merit. They rose against the will of those in power. When the revolution was quashed, they were targeted to vanish from the public sphere. Countless talented people had no choice but to withdraw to obscurity or an even more dumbed down version of their former self. The only way to survive is to return to building once again from scratch. Many of those who stayed on in Egypt have realized that success under these circumstances is not within reach. Silence alone does not suffice. Compliance along with moderately positive statements about Egypt is not enough. There is only room for the talentless, the opportunists, the hypocrites.

The revolution now is a story of wasted potential. It’s the story of all the things that could have been but have not, all the people that could have been and have not.

It is a time where people are bearing the brunt of poor economic policies throughout the years, and even some of the staunchest supporters of the Egyptian state have realized the economic catastrophe. But the people have already been divided and there is nothing new for old revolutionaries who have seen this coming from the start. The fear is that the greatest of dreams have turned into cynicism and in a sense, that would be the true defeat.

Everything is boiling beneath the surface, but that surface is fortified and no one knows how solid or brittle it is in the face of the unknown, unseen, unheard quantities suffering beneath it. 

Dear Lydia

This is one of the worst periods of Egypt's history. The next generation will ask us, how could you allow this. I wrote this letter addressing Lydia, one of my fascist friend's daughters some time back, envisioning what I would tell the next generation. My simple answer is that we tried.

Dear Lydia,

It is with great sorrow that I write this letter to you knowing full well that you may not trust or comprehend it, or even believe me. You may have grown up believing a narrative that runs contrary to the truth, in which case, this letter shall not have an effect on you, and you will feel bitter and angry at this letter and at me for writing it. But there's a strong chance, that unlike your parents, you will have come to understand the true history of what happened in the time before, a time of events, both I and your parents have witnessed up close and each of us took their route.

This letter will only make sense if you've ever come across the truth of the history that took place starting from 2011 and the repulsive turn into oppression in 2013 where injustice prevailed and massacres took place. It is only with the realizing of the ugliness of this history and trying to reconcile it with what people did that would give meaning to this letter.

Your mother was one of the staunchest supporters of the Sisi regime, because your uncle was a policeman, she was a vehemently opposed to anyone who pointed to police corruption. She supported the police as they killed thousands of people, and even though many have presented her with evidence that they were unjustified, she shrugged them off. She continued her support for police brutality in the face of logic and evidence of a declining sense of justice and a declining economy. She was happy to label anyone who opposed the crimes of these irresponsible tyrants as traitors, while the real treason was committed by those she supported.

Your father and I were closer, he was also more moderate, yet he showed great weakness, never engaged in trying to call out the criminals even though he may have seen their crimes. He was looking out for your future as any father would, but the cost was the future of many other generations and the history you have inherited. So many have been killed with the blessing of apologists and your parents were those apologists.

In answer to your questions as to whether our generation was aware of these atrocities that you learn about in school, the answer is yes, there was plenty of information. It is just that many did not want to believe or want to be confronted with the sad reality that their country was run by criminals, that their children's future was going to be determined by criminals. They would rather believe that those trying to rectify the situation were spies, rather than people who loved their country and valued its future enough to oppose the oppressors.

Torture was widespread, and to get a sense of how people reacted, they didn't care, as long as their own people were not affected, yet as we've come to learn it was only a matter of time before someone close to someone got hurt in some way or another. The country descended into lawlessness on account of police brutality, yet your parents and people like them were steadfast in blaming the victims of this brutality rather than the perpetrators.

There was a strong narrative that the country was fighting terrorism, but as we've come to see, the policies put in place by the oppressive regime did nothing but create more extremists who were fighting because of a growing extremist ideology or to attain some sort of justice against a regime that offered no civil way of attaining it.

I want you to believe me when I tell you I have tried hard to speak to your parents and convince them to take a different moral route, but they shunned me and chose to continue in their ways. I asked them to stand by their integrity for your sake, so that you will not view them as weak or immoral for allowing such atrocities, but to no avail. They were determined.

I do not know if there was anything more I could have done, I want you to believe that I have tried my best that you and many like you not inherit the country and the history that you did, not to inherit the parents that you did. We had many opportunities, if only people had learned to look beyond their selfish needs, we would have all been better off.

History cannot be changed now, you have seen what has happened, and the only thing I urge you to do dear Lydia is not to follow the same path taken by your parents, of apathy and justification for tyrants. Remember that all this is transient, all that remains is how much of your integrity you have maintained.

Lovingly,

W.

Fuck Their Palaces

This is about the spaces they take from us to give themselves.

Here I am with spaces all around me. In a city in Europe whose rich history covers its streets with darkness and brightness. I’m here in this space, with everyone enjoying the music and their freedom. But back home, there are few such spaces. They are building palaces at our expense. The cost of their space is ours. They have set out to take our spaces to make them their own. The cost of their freedom to steal is the freedom from our own, the very youth that would ever build our future.

Thousands in jail, the spaces they should be inhabiting stolen from them, and for what? For luxury palaces, gardens and special interests. For spaces that may end up abandoned but guarded. Empty spaces, as empty as their dreams for a future.
The present I’m experiencing in those foreign spaces abroad is what we deserve back home. It’s what those thrown in prison deserve.

We live in a transmogrified past and the only way to reach the present is to travel. I never thought time travel was possible, but it is. You just have to leave the borders of this time warp, where its inhabitants are stuck in slavery. It’s not easy to leave. The wardens are not just our jailers but those very same foreign countries who arm the oppressors with weapons and technology to keep us locked in. The condescending view of us in their embassies as they forget about the riches they’ve stolen. That sense of entitlement for a better life even though its price is paid by our enslavement.

My friends are in jail so that some General’s wife can have her customized palaces. These palaces are not just built with the money they steal from us, but with our lives. Their fortress is not just the walls they put up, but the network of greedy interests that produce humans that stand in the way of justice to maintain the corruption that keeps them thriving.

We never asked for this, we would have been happy to dance. But what choice were we given? To dance away while trampling the rights and lives of others underfoot. To dance while trampling their dignity and ours. It’s not much of a choice. Both are a form of death. One of them closer to the literal sense of the word, our lives being destroyed if we speak, the other a literary death, the death of our conscience and humanity.

Fuck their palaces. We will dance when we can to counter their greed. We will speak when we can to counter our death.

Survival Is Also a Form of Resistance

It has been difficult for me writing this piece. I was asked to write something for the anniversary of the #Jan25 revolution. I struggled. What was the point of writing. What was the point of sending this out as our world seemed beyond that which words can remedy. My first draft was a political narrative. Factual, impersonal, perhaps even accurate. The night before I couldn't just send that in. Our story was not about accuracy or simply facts. Our story goes on through our struggle to escape hope and find it. I rewrote it when it dawned on me that the most important part of our struggle is personal, not public. I struggled with words, with emotions, these are eight years and our experiences are full of emotions and we're at different stages of grief, of recovery.

All the words seem lacking, but I tried to find them with the little energy I had to describe us. I'm aware they don't do us justice. Yet, with all the flaws of expressing where we're at, I'm grateful to have used some of my energy to document some of my struggles that I believe are shared by many. And on a day like yesterday, it felt that I was not alone struggling in the dark. We are all collectively struggling, everyone in their own way, a battle to remember, a battle to forget, a battle to survive.

Our memory has been resilient in the face of seemingly infinite resources trying to crush it. It's worth something to keep remembering. It's worth something to keep trying to survive. It's worth something to hold on to that one thing that was genuine in our lives, that we were blessed and cursed to witness and be a part of. I don't know what that something is, but I often feel it when we connect. We shared something real that is somehow beyond words.

I was never a romantic dreamer, and the reason I write these sentiments is because I've questioned them a thousand times over to make sure they were real and not just some naive romanticization.

The revolution continues in our struggle and our trauma, but perhaps what I never mentioned is that it continues in the integrity we hold on to.

https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2019-01/egypt-revolution-repression-military-youth

I Cried Today

I had thought the country would take numerous years to change into that which we hoped for. All it takes is a visit to Tahrir Square (which I now call Tahrir Republic) to see that it took only four days to change people. It is a revolution of the people, by the people. Like my fellow Egyptians, I too am shocked. Yet for the first time I look upon my country with pride. Many have died for us to have that piece of land in Tahrir that gives us hope for the future.

Tahrir Republic is all that is good about Egyptians.

I cried today. Like many others who watched Wael Ghonim's interview, I cried today. It was a moment that I felt so well. They were tears for a country that could have been. It was not the first time I shed those tears. I often cried for my country when moved by the goodness of its people; we don’t deserve this prison, we don’t deserve this injustice. I did not cry for Wael Ghonim but for the same reasons he did.

When I saw those young beautiful faces of those who died for the revolution I was moved to tears. The reason I cried is because of their smiling faces. They weren’t soldiers, set on spreading their ideologies. They weren’t serious about fighting for some political cause. They were smiling because they loved life. Some seemed to have had a comfortable life. They looked like many I knew who ordinarily would have brushed off the prospect of making our country a better place and sat at a café. They all looked like they would have been happier driving off to a coastal city than walk into danger, into the hands of the tyrants that were sworn to protect us. They all could have stayed home that dreadful but glorious day.

But on 25 January, they decided they must speak up. They would leave the luxury of their comfortable lives and fight for their dignity and ours. They would go to the streets and voice out their woes despite their fear. They would overcome violence with peace. Those ordinary young men and women of this country chose to care; they chose to fight for something great. They chose to fight for our children, for our future.

Those faces on screen, so full of life, are dead for no reason but greed and evil. I look into their faces and I feel like I’ve always known them. They are my friends before I ever got to know them, and I will miss them although I never spent time with them. More than that, I love them all because they loved us all without having met us.

I used to be afraid, now I'm Egyptian

Must they Protest?

There is a recurring pattern regarding the protests. On the day of the protests Jan 25, State Television remarked that the protests started well but turned violent in the middle of the day. This was done to justify police violence. On Jan 28, reports of the protest of Jan 25 changed completely, and the whole day was turned miraculously into a flawless, peaceful march, but that the real perpetrators infiltrated the protests on Jan 28. Some of the protesters were accused of setting police stations on fire.

In the following weeks, the same thing happened, again and again. Previous protests were commendable but the most recent were or maneuvered by a foreign agenda. Do you see a pattern?

Today, Safwat El Sherif and Gamal Mubarak have been removed and Hussam Badrawy, a man of more moderate opinions was put in charge of the NDP. Those who have asked for an end to the revolution have celebrated its triumphs. Every day they ask for protests to end, and are surprised by the results of its continuation.

On Friday Feb 4 there was propaganda that almost 70 percent of the protesters were from the Muslim Brotherhood. Irrespective of sources that tell me otherwise, how does one reconcile the mixed messages? There were around one million people in Tahrir, this means 700 thousand of them were Muslim Brotherhood. If they had that many people in Tahrir, they would have been obvious for starters. If the Muslim Brotherhood had these numbers, why weren’t they there on Friday? They wouldn’t have waited all these years to start demonstrations. It’s highly improbable. Also if Muslim Brotherhood were leading this movement, why would they stick so much to the peaceful demonstration philosophy?

If 70 percent were the brotherhood, that leaves 30 percent. Since almost everyone has been accused of having a hidden agenda, we can estimate a total of 25 percent of Syrians, Iranians, Israelis, Tunisians and Americans, which leaves 5 percent that can only be Egyptians unhappy with our dictatorship. Does that even make sense?

The game is to convince people that protesters are to blame. But are they now? Let’s consider the facts. The reason work did not resume after protests is because the internet was out and because the Ministry of Interior let prisoners out. So why are protesters being blamed? It’s because the government said so, and nothing else. Why is there a curfew? Because the government has organized militia to terrorize Egyptian people. If you come to think of it, protesters are to blame because they stood against tyranny and terror, and for that the whole of Egypt is punished using tyranny and terror. When you ask protesters to go home, you are asking for the punishment by the government to stop. You are succumbing to the tyranny we all resent. People are risking their lives for our collective rights, and they’re being backstabbed by those who fear oppression and thus will end up being oppressed.

The argument that the economy is collapsing is meaningless. It is also a form of collective punishment. The regime is hurting our economy to scare us. Why do you support the regime in the terrorist activity of destroying our economy? Don’t you know that if corruption is removed, we’ll rebuild our country in very little time? Don’t you know that one corrupt official like Ahmed Ezz can balance out any deficit even if they punish us like this for another month?

Before talking of the economy, remember again how it is being robbed. Our losses due to theft and corruption are more than those due to the suspension of trade. We will make it up when we become a true democracy. There will be investments to rebuild and this time, they will flow to the economy rather than some Swiss bank or mansions in Paris, New York or Frankfurt. Mubarak has 40 -70 billion dollars of our country’s wealth. To put that into perspective, our total deficit is 32 billion dollars. Don’t worry about our economy, if some people can amass that much wealth, then the country will be fine when they leave.

To those saying ‘give the government a chance’, I agree, but what’s stopping them? If they are true to their promises, the country will change irrespective of the protesters. The protesters are there to ensure that the decisions taken align with the promises. If the protesters had left when you first asked them to, Safwat El Sherif would have still been in power, Ezz and Adly on the loose, and a million other promises not unfulfilled. You really don’t know what you’re talking about asking people to leave and reaping their victories. You’re entitled to have an opinion, but please don’t discourage those in Tahrir fighting for your rights. It’s enough as it is that you’re not doing any of the fighting.

If the regime is not changed, you will have a powerful, more oppressive police state. This is a regime that shuts down phones and the internet. This is a regime that sends in camels and horses to disperse crowds. This is a regime that runs people over with police trucks. This is a regime that promises freedoms and safe passage to all protesters in Tahrir and arrests them as its Prime Minister makes these statements. Do you think it is in any way serious about reforms?

These people have died and been injured and you’re upset because you weren’t able to go to the movies or make an extra hundred pounds? Freedom comes at a cost and you’re not paying any of it. If you want to be enslaved by a tyrant, it’s your choice, but don’t force others around you to become as cowardly as you are.