Revolution Bookshelf: Blacklist

Again, revolutions are not stories. At the same time, societies process and frame events like revolutions by way of narrative. Stories are how we remember past events and how we understand our present moment. They inform how we act, how we strategize, how we get by. Which is to say, to grapple with the Egyptian Revolution means that at some point, we are grappling with stories about revolution. In Egypt, this has been happening since 25 January 2011. Egyptian writers and artists did not wait to begin producing works that take on present history in various ways, and there are now more than a few “revolution novels” on the market, some of which are quite compelling. Among the most notable is a 2012 novel, Sayyid al-Ahl’s Blacklist, by Ahmed Sabry Abul-Futuh, best known for his prize-winning Saraswa quintet.

At the outset, the premise of Blacklist is powerful and blunt. The plot follows an unlucky young man, Rifaa, who finds himself locked up and tortured in the basement jail of a Cairo police station. During his ordeal, he draws up a blacklist of all the people who have wronged him and imagines the revenge he will take. When the Mubarak security regime begins to retreat, he gets his chance. Rifaa is released along with his cellmates on the condition that they help the Central Security Forces put down the rebellion in the street. This, in other words, is the story of the January 25 Uprising as told by baltagiyya (thugs). (Read more)

Revolution Bookshelf: Revolution is My Name

For thinking about how the collective memory of revolution is being created right now, even as the revolution regains its steam, there is no better place to start than with Mona Prince’s remarkable memoir of the 25 January Uprising. Self-published (and largely self-distributed) by the author in 2012, Revolution is My Name (Ismi Thawra) tells the story of revolution as it unfolds over eighteen days. It is a literary memoir in the best sense of the word. By this, I mean that it expresses and reflects on, rather than documents a set of lived experiences. Moreover, it is not merely a story about the unfolding of a revolution as told by a participant who was there. Arguably, the more important story is about the character of the narrator developing as an evolving, complicated revolutionary.

“Evolving” and “complicated” are keywords insofar as they signal a basic tenet of modern humanism, namely that incompleteness and ambiguity are core to the experience of being human. This version of humanism is a source of strength in Prince’s account of revolutionary times. Her character and the characters around her struggle not just against an oppressive state, but also with the fact that they have no sacred texts to guide them. Lacking the confidence of righteousness or assured victory, Prince understands that humility and humor are even better. Hers is an improvised revolution, with nothing but a loose set of pragmatic, humanist precepts to follow: treat fellow Egyptians with respect; appeal to reason, not force; be generous when possible; understand that laughter bends swords. This brand of pragmatic humanism has been one of the core strengths of the Egyptian revolution all along. When ascendant, the revolution moves forward, inclusive, utopic, realist. When eclipsed, chaos ensues.

Though a strength in the Midan, this kind of humanism is also a vulnerability as Prince has come to experience in her own life. In recent weeks, a series of spurious charges have been made against her by Islamists at the campus where she teaches, Suez Canal University. Though the case is serious—and involves threats to Prince’s life—the charges themselves are ludicrous, the product of a wider effort on the part of empowered Islamists to clamp down on the kind of humanist discourse we see in her memoir. [4]. But odds are that Prince will endure and triumph. Already before the publication of Revolution is My Name, Prince was an dynamic author, translator and literary critic. With this memoir, Prince’s presence on the Egyptian scene is now firmly established. (Read More)

The Levant

On the way back from Kafr Qasim, we turned off the highway in Ran’ana where, we were told we’d find the best Moroccan food in the country. We went into the first gas station we saw when we came into the town, and the Iraqi attendant there told us where our restaurant was. It’d been weeks since we’d had anything but local food, and as delicious as that could be, we were getting sick of the humous and tomatoes and thyme and parsley and eggplant and rice and flat bread. What we craved was bitter lemons, dried fruits, hot red pepper paste and couscous—anything that diverged from the seasonal norms of the Eastern Mediterranean. We crossed our fingers and went into the place people had recommended so much. We noticed that in the window they’d posted two reviews they’d received back in the 90s. The accompanying faded photos made it seem like another century.

We laughed when we walked inside because it had the same kitsch appeal that its counterparts everywhere did. Someone asked whether there was a single Moorish design team, dispatched from Paris or LA, every time someone somewhere in the world wanted to open a restaurant called “Casablanca” or “Fez.” This one was called, “Le Levant.” We thought the name was clever, though Khalil remarked the place should have been called "Le Ponant." (Read More)

The Keys to Birweh

We went to visit Shatila camp where our friend Lula was teaching English. We knew the camp was important. We knew that it was a center of the struggle for many reasons. We knew that this was the place where hundreds of women, children and men were massacred over a few days in September 1982. We knew who the murderers were. We knew who trained them. We knew who supplied the weapons. We knew who promised to provide security for the camp when the PLO evacuated. We knew that the camp was leveled in 1985 to punish the people for allowing the men to come back. We knew all this because we’d read these facts in books, we’d seen the pictures, and we’d listened to eye-witnesses. And now we were going to see the place for ourselves.

We got to the English class early, and Lula introduced us to the students, who were all women.

We said “Hello. Nice to meet you. How are you?”

And they said, “Hello. Welcome to Shatila. I am fine. How are you?”

We asked them, “What is your name? Where are you from?”

They laughed at our apparent ignorance and told us, “Palestine, where else?” (Read More)

Walls

We went to visit our friend who was participating in the summer program for foreigners at Aida camp in Bethlehem. We were surprised that it took only ten minutes from the center of Jerusalem to get to the checkpoint at Rachel’s Tomb. There we started to take pictures. We walked through the spotless new terminal and thought of our tax dollars. On the Bethlehem side, we took pictures of a huge sign that the Israeli Board of Tourism had put up on the wall.

It said “Go in Peace” in Hebrew, English and Arabic. The taxi drivers wanted to give us tours of the Church of Nativity and Shepherds’ Field, and would not take no for an answer. Finally they relented and told us how to get to Aida camp on foot. They told us to follow the wall around as best we could, and they were right. It was not far at all, though the blazing summer heat wilted us as we walked.

We reached the camp and soon found our friend who was at the community center. The director invited us in. In his cool, airy office, we drank coffee and talked about the center for a while. When we’d finally shrugged off the heat of our walk, Raji offered to give us a tour and show us how the wall has affected their community. The camp had been opened around 1950, the third in the Bethlehem area that took in refugees, both those who had fled in 1948 and those who had subsequently been expelled. When his family fled their village in the western part of the Hebron district, they had followed the rest of the family to Bethlehem. When they heard about the UN Camps opening up around Bethlehem, they went first to Daheisha, but all the tents there were taken. Then they went to al-‘Azza camp, but again were turned away. For months, they rented a cave in Beit Suhour, walking miles each morning to fetch water. The men worked in the fields nearby; the women sold vegetables in the market. (Read More)

Cannes ya ma Cannes Ramallah

We’d been invited to the Franco-German cultural center to see a film by a leftist Israeli filmmaker. The advance notice had said that “this was perhaps the most important film on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict ever made.” It was endorsed by a couple well-known intellectuals from abroad, and all its screenings at the Jerusalem Film Festival were sold out well in advance. I’d never seen his first film, which apparently was a autobiographical work that was “sort of interesting.” My friends said the director was a good guy, even if his films weren’t so great. “In any case, this was his first attempt at making a feature film. It’s based on a book of fiction he published.” Afterwards, there was going to be a discussion with a Balkan philosopher, said one of the ecstatic blurbers of the film. The two men had come to Israel for the festival and insisted on making a side trip to Ramallah as part of their trip.

The room was packed with people. Young directors, producers, and actors showed up. The city’s cultural elite were present, including the poet. We arrived so late we had to sit on the floor. It took a number of times for them to get the screening to work right. The first time, we watched the credits and opening scene in a VHS format, but there were only Russian subtitles. The center’s director put in the DVD format, which had Arabic subtitles, but no sound. It must have taken at least half an hour for them to fix the glitches.

Meanwhile, the director hurriedly explained why they were there, and how, paradoxically, their coming to Jerusalem actually honored the spirit of the boycott that Palestinian filmmakers had called for. It certainly was paradoxical. The director said that they had corresponded with the boycott committee in Ramallah. Together, they had come to an arrangement that would allow them to make “unofficial” presentations, thus participating in the film festival and honoring the boycott at one and the same time. As they announced at the beginning of the event, their insistence on twinning their appearance in Jerusalem with one in Ramallah was part of this arrangement. Coming to Ramallah, they said, was an act of solidarity with the many Palestinian filmmakers who were de facto excluded each year by the festival. The director looked into the crowd and nodded at the poet. He then declared that the story of the film was “inspired by the work Mahmoud Darwish. This is the Palestinian premiere of my film. I don’t expect all of you to like it. Its truth may make some of you feel uncomfortable. But it will make you think. I have no doubt about that.” (Read More)

Our Solidarity

A group of us activists went to Qalqilya, a town so far west that it sits not in the dry hills, but on the humid coastal plane. Though the uprising had been effectively suppressed, we felt that our trip, in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, was important. After all, the violence and dispossession of the occupation had not ceased even though the resistance had been decimated. 

Our solidarity group was warmly received by local activists who were quite used to seeing similar delegations from Europe and the US. They took us to the massive concrete wall, complete with guard towers every few hundred yards. We couldn’t believe it, though we’d read about it, and had seen dozens of pictures of it before we decided to come here.

We took pictures of ourselves and each other, and our guides, beside the wall which was covered by graffiti from earlier solidarity delegations before us. We even recognized one slogan that a friend of ours from back home must have painted. I took a picture of one of our friends beside it to send to him over the internet. (Read More)

The Persistence of Jokes

My friends laughed and called me a “revolution tourist” — which wasn’t incorrect, since part of my reason for coming was to see what was happening up close. But the other reason, of course, was to visit the state archives to check on the status of my application. Last fall, I wrote up a vague proposal for research I intended to undertake on the inefficiencies of cotton pricing in the nineteenth-century. I submitted the proposal in triplicate: one to the head of the Ministry of Higher Education; one to the section of the Ministry of Culture which oversees the administration of the State Archives; and one to the head of the particular archive for which I sought permission. I was optimistic when I first submitted my application—not just because I had a foreign research institution backing me, but because my advisor had contacted the archives director and requested his assistance in expediting my request.

But now, after these last few months, I had begun to worry that my proposal might fall through the cracks with everything else going on. Or that it might be rejected in a wave of zealous post-revolution cleaning. It was only after I arrived for my visit that I discovered that the same people I used to know at the ministry were still in charge. I scheduled a visit to the archive as soon as possible. I would pay a call to the head of the archive. I would greet him, sit with him, drink tea with him, and finally, just before leaving, hear something about the progress of my application. Years ago, the last time I was working in these archives, I used to bring this man various gifts—Edward Said’s latest book, a Montblanc pen, particular opera CDs that he had made a point of mentioning to me. I made sure to see him whenever I was about to travel abroad and then again on my return to Cairo. Just as I left the apartment, I felt in my jacket pocket for the small box of cuff-links I had purchased in Heathrow duty-free. (Read More)

The Bawwab's Daughter

I was staying with friends in Maadi, a noisy, dusty suburb south of Cairo. One of the most striking features of this neighborhood — actually its own city — is that many of the expats who live there persevere in the spurious claim that it is quieter and greener than the neighborhoods of the city center. In any case, there is no dispute about this: Maadi is far away from the city center and, unlike Cairo, no one would travel hundreds of miles just  to visit it. Despite my strong objections to the place, I was enjoying myself with my friends, sleeping late, staying up late on their terrace, smoking cigarettes and talking about how our lives were changing as we entered middle age. It helped that their beautiful child was often there to gleefully punctuate our conversation or to deflect it into gentler, brighter directions. It was not hard to forget that the country was in the midst of a revolution.

While I was staying there, I spent much of my time thinking about the past and comparing the present to before January 25. And then comparing everyone and everything — friendships, buildings, streets, music, food, air temperature — to how I remembered them to be 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, even 20 years before. I know it is wrong to judge current experiences by past ones. Invariably, the comparison is not generous and gets in the way of experiencing the present as it is. Yet, I found myself engaging in this behavior despite myself. I walked through city with a camera to record the changes. I talked with friends, and heard their stories about the revolution. I wrote these down and looked at the photographs and considered how malleable a city of concrete and flesh could be when time does its work. Though I considered some of these changes to be improvements, most seemed to be a loss: gone were the tram lines, one of the last urban links to the 1919 Revolution; gone was the Friday market in Imbaba with its incomparable displays and bargains; gone were some friends — this one emigrated to Spain (still owing me money), that one dead from lung cancer in his mid-40s. His death affected me more than I thought it would: I had no friend here who loved me more than him. (Read More)

Locations

We chose the hamlet of Beit Jeez in from the hundreds of Palestinian villages that were cleansed in 1948. Maryam was scouting locations for her film, and she was looking for a ’48 village where one scene in particular needed to be shot. It was the scene where the protagonist and his girlfriend go after robbing the bank, the place they hole up while they decide whether to continue going on with their crime spree, or to leave for good. It was important that it take place in the ruins of a ’48 village.

Her travels had taken her all around, from the areas around Umm al-Fahim in the triangle, to old villages in the plain between Acre and Haifa, to even the upper Galilee, to old hilltop villages overlooking the south of Lebanon. Once, in the village of Bir‘im where a Maronite church still stood partly intact, she’d found a group of women sitting, looking off into the distance. When she spoke to them, she realized from their accent that they were Lebanese. Talking with them, she found out they’d come with their families in 2000 when the Israeli occupation came to an end and could probably never go back. Now, they said, they lived in a nearby Palestinian Israeli village where no women would speak to them and where their husbands could find no work, not even with the IDF. The rest of their families lived in Jewish cities like Nahariya and Safad where they felt even more miserable and isolated. Many had already returned, though who knows what would be in store for those who did.

They often hitched a ride to the place on Fridays where they sat picnicking until sunset. They offered Maryam apples and sweet tea the day she was there. While she sat with them, they pointed out Mt. Meron, Mt. Hermon, the Golan, and even the faintest traces of the Shuf Mountains far to the North. Unfortunately, as compelling as these locations were, they didn’t feel right for the film. Maryam had so far had already seen more than 50 locations, she’d know the right one when it came along. (Read More)