Of Venom and Hope: Reflections on Tahrir Square, Exile and Return
By Jacinthe Ahmed Assaad
While the world may have learned the meaning of the Arabic word “Tahrir,” the significance of that liberation and its implications are still dawning on Egyptians.
For more than thirty years, I lived my life wondering what it meant to be Egyptian. I didn’t want to be an Egyptian and I felt no pride or dignity in being one. For more than thirty years, I was robbed of my identity, because I couldn’t align the idealized view I had of my country with the sad reality of everyday life. I was robbed of my identity, because my own country seemed stifling and I had lost hope that I would ever flourish in Egypt. I felt misunderstood, unappreciated, and inadequate. I was a foreigner in my own country; and there is no worse alienation than to feel exiled in your own homeland. My parents’ generation, the one which witnessed Nasser and Sadat, the 1952 coup, and the various wars, paraded their testimonies like peacock feathers. My generation on the other hand, felt like worthless parasites, who watched the sun set behind the pyramids, while texting and uploading pictures on Facebook. Everyone thought too much technology, television and music videos had addled our brains, fashioning an apathetic youth.
However, all that changed after January 25, 2011.
I realized then I was wrong, precisely because I knew I was no longer alone. Every citizen in Egypt had felt like a foreigner, or more aptly, like a second-class citizen, who, instead of hating the government, hated the country.
The government of Mubarak had infiltrated our minds, breaking apart what it meant to be a citizen of Egypt from what it meant to be a human being. The cries in Tahrir Square were the attempt to reconcile our sense of nationhood with our ideals of personhood. What we saw and heard there was the true rise of national consciousness once advocated by Aimé Césaire - the final stage of Fanon’s “decolonization of the mind.”
While imperial powers no longer ruled Egypt, the choking grip of Mubarak’s regime had achieved (what no colonialist could) a total depoliticization of Egyptian society. It wasn’t the British, the French, or the Americans who were administering us so totally, it was our own hegemon, the one that strategically stepped in the colonizers’ shoes, while perpetuating all their tactics.
After 1981, the survival of the Mubarak regime gradually came to depend on the dehumanization and “thingification”[1] of its subjects in tandem with the dismantling of any form of national identity. The regime repressed genuine individualism and patriotism as both were potential sources of dissent. During and after the revolution, the extent of the horrors committed by the state police became clearer. We had our own “wikileaks” detailing the regime’s covert (and sometimes not so covert) activities. It seems the Ministry of Interior may have been behind the bombing of the Saints Coptic Church in Alexandria on January 1st, 2011. Supposedly, the Minister of Interior, with Mubarak's sign-off, hired “terrorists” to execute the bombing. The plan was to pit Christians against Muslims, thus making it harder for the communities to come together in resistance to the government. This was how the regime maintained control over the masses. That particular intervention, though, had deep unintended consequences. Muslims denounced the terrorist act, standing in solidarity with Christians during their Christmas (which is on January 7th). Then, later in the month in Tahrir Square, they held their ground together.
It seems the state security police was a state within a state. Instead of safeguarding the rights of citizens, it became an agency that preserved and tightened the regime’s iron grasp. Dubbed SS in the technosphere, it became obvious that its activities were far from legitimate. Right after Prime Minister Shafiq resigned, personnel in SS headquarters were burning or shredding what must have been incriminating documents. The protestors and the army, however, managed to salvage some items. On March 14, the state security was dismantled, and in its stead the National Security department was established. We have yet to see whether this is merely a rebranding campaign by new PM Sharaf’s government, or a first step on the road to a new Egypt. The technosphere expressed its skepticism and cynicism in the following joke: National Democratic (Party)[2] + State Security = National Security. The revolutionaries still fear the rotten apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.
This strategic revamping came after an escalation of sectarian violence, between Copts and Muslims, over a burned church and a love affair between a Muslim man and a Coptic woman. There was a gnawing sense that this clash was the penultimate attempt of a dying order to divide and deflect public opinion since the conflicts occurred during debates over constitutional amendments that Egyptians would vote on March 19. This, and other recent attempts to spark violence, seem to have been the result of machinations by what the revolutionaries call “the counter-revolution.”
It’s all true: power is an aphrodisiac. It’s addictive too. The remaining entities from the former government are trying their worst to hold on to power. Camels, horses and Molotov cocktails might not be in play, but the reactionaries’ aim remains the same. They’re out to divide public opinion, to weaken the solidarity that united the opposition behind one single demand: the end of the regime. Numerous attempts were and still are made to undermine the revolution, and extract vengeance for the fallen regime and the ousted president. Counter-revolutionary media offers a parade of movie stars, singers and former soccer players who praise Mubarak for his thirty years of “service” to his country, for fighting in the wars against Israel, etc. These public figures repeatedly whine that he’s being treated disrespectfully. Many of them seem to have forgotten the police brutality that killed hundreds (if not thousands of Egyptians), the numerous rigged elections (parliamentary and presidential), the systematic eradication of any opposition, the blatant nepotism and the culture of corruption infesting all levels of the society (from routine daily transactions to major decisions about national priorities). The one constant in this thirty-year regime was the abuse of power. Mubarak and his regime are indefensible; no serious person would ask what he did to deserve disrespect. Current gestures of support for this deposed dictator border on the pathological and are reminiscent of the Stockholm Syndrome. Egypt has always wallowed in the shadows of a pharaoh. Let Mubarak be our last one. Egyptian media seem ineluctably divided between adulation of the former president and praise for the revolutionary youth, who in turn find themselves attacked for being the source of instability and insecurity in the country, even as they’ve gained the respect of most elders.
The revolutionaries remain unyielding in their demands for a truly transformed Egypt. They view any form of concession to the transitional government as a betrayal of the revolution and its hundreds of martyrs. The Egyptian citizen, formerly stifled and entirely subordinated to the ruling class, now feels that his or her voice counts. What we are hearing is not only the protests of a people that have been forcefully silenced for decades, we are also witnessing a broadscale creative outpouring of humanism. The fermenting dissent that led to the demonstrations, that later morphed into a revolution affirming universal ideals, underscored the key role of social media. The youth fought the archaic regime with very modern tools. While the police and the thugs were relying on beasts of burden, bullets and tear gas canisters, the pro-democracy protestors were inundating the world wide web with their tweets, status updates, and their blogs (ironically the tear gas, Twitter and Facebook are all made in the USA!). The old regime, by consistently and continuously reinforcing the gap between the ruling class and the rest of population (and most especially the younger generation), alienated the whole body of the people. It also made it impossible for the powers-that-were to conceive of – much less open – two-way channels of communication. To the regime, the youths’ cries were no more than white noise.
Armed with laptops and smartphones, though, the adamant crowd managed to uphold the role of social media in the political sphere. But calling this revolution a Facebook or Twitter revolution would be reductive and insulting to those who put their bodies and lives on the line (not just online). Social media didn’t instigate the Egyptian revolution, but they did amplify its impact and enable the pro-democratic movement to disseminate its message in an unprecedented way. The significance of social networks was certainly grasped by the transitional government. Riding the digital wave, the Supreme Council for Armed Forces, who are running Egypt in the transitional period until the presidential elections, has set up an official Facebook page, on which it posts all its decrees (so far there are 27). Over 800,000 people “like” it. In addition, there is now an official page posting news and messages to followers of the prime minister’s cabinet. The social networks are not only repositories of political propaganda, they are still being used as tools to raise political awareness, so much so that some networkers have been unable to cope with the overload of information in circulation. For example, in the run-up to the vote on the constitutional amendments, many groups were formed to discuss the new clauses, and advertising campaigns were launched to convince people to vote yes or no. Meanwhile other groups have started making the case for specific rights and constituencies, and political seminar series are educating people on the civil society, legal issues and the constitution. The technosphere has opened up a virtual space for democratic discourse that had no place in the society under the former regime. This sphere vehemently voices the demands of accountability and transparency, of social justice and political equality: it is the universal ground for democracy, the borders of which are defined not by virtual gigabytes (for they abound), but by the harsh, ongoing reality of corrupted politics.
The revolution has added dimensions to Egypt’s previously shallow politics, instituting a realm centered on Tahrir Square, which for many embodies the ideals of democracy. It has relocated, at the heart of Cairo, the Egyptian citizen - a citizen once completely marginalized, repressed, and mentally exiled. “What are we to do, then . . . What / are we to do without exile, without a long night / staring at the water?”[3] Here speaks the subaltern. He or she is no longer a faithless and faceless “thing,” but a citizen who speaks back, and stands up straight with pride and dignity. There is a requisite ideological shift that must accompany this new geopolitics of identity. Having toppled the Mubarak regime, we now have to strengthen the collective sense of community and national purpose among all Egyptians in order for the revolution to reverberate. Hurdles ahead will test the solidarity of the democratic movement and all other movements that were opposed to the old regime. For the revolution to succeed in implementing its ideals, the public needs to become conscious, informed and politically aware: all of the people must engage in critical thinking. Nothing is guaranteed on this score when so much of the population has suffered from oppression and illiteracy. The dailiness that we are faced with in the aftermath of the revolution is falling short of our ideals. And while the level of political awareness has increased exponentially in the last couple of months, democrats in Egypt worry for the following reasons:
(1) A political arena where all groups and tendencies in the opposition are fairly represented comes with risks especially since the most highly organized political group is the Muslim Brotherhood;
(2) The media is taking on an incendiary role in disseminating news and stoking controversies. For example, they have lately been highlighting the release of two political prisoners who plotted the assassination of Anwar Al Sadat in 1981, which led to Mubarak assuming the presidency. They are Jihadists (who make the Muslim Brotherhood seem like secular humanists!) and have explicitly declared their intention to actively engage in the new political scene;
(3) Egyptians are becoming restless with the ongoing drama of daily life in the post-Mubarak period and long for a return to “normal life;”
(4) the Egyptian army is proving to be less and less tolerant, treating the youth like whimsical toddlers and offering sugar-coated solutions that glaze over a rotted core. The army’s role is ambiguous, to say the least, but its inbred authoritarianism renders it increasingly suspect.
While we may have taken down the Mubarak regime in a couple of weeks, the reality is it will take much longer than six months to erase over sixty years of dictatorship and build the foundation for a democratic Egypt. Egyptians have to learn what democracy means in order to implement it. Many don’t fully understand the implications of this monumental and transformative event. There seems to be a general confusion about the persistence of difference among Egyptians – a tendency to conflate homogeneity and democracy. The revolution is being rushed and, as Marwa Sharafeldin said during the Doha Debates in Cairo: “This fast-food democracy can only create indigestion.”
The revolution in Egypt has turned every man, woman and child into a political actor. Now that political awareness and responsibility are rising, citizens will be harder to dupe. But that doesn’t mean demagogues won’t try. And all politicians have a tendency to lie. So far, the files keep piling up on the desk of the general prosecutor, and pro-democracy protestors aren’t about to leave the public square empty until their demands are met. Whatever happens, we will always have Tahrir. And we will always say “What happened then / What happened there.”[4]
Notes
1 In Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire demonstrates how colonization = thingification.
2 The National Democratic Party (NDP) is Mubarak’s party, the ruling party since 1981.
3 Mahmoud Darwish, “Without exile, who am I?” http://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/pub.php/en/Diario/04.html
4 James Fenton. “Tiananmen”
From March, 2011
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