/ 25 November 2011

Exposing a nation’s soul in flux

Exposing A Nation's Soul In Flux

The pollution in Cairo is legendary, but these days the air is also heavy with frustration. The euphoria prompted by the successful overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in February has subsided and there are now warning signs that the freedoms won in those early days of the revolution are in danger of being lost.

On October 9 27 people were killed and 329 injured following a protest by Coptic Christians; more than 30 people were held after the incident, dubbed the Maspero massacre. Widely circulated video footage shows army vehicles mowing protesters down; it is alarming that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) is conducting the investigation into the incident.

As a result of the army’s efforts to restore order after the revolution, some 1 200 people have appeared before military courts and violent clashes continued this week. The army is supposedly the guardian of the revolution, overseeing the transition to democracy — the first round of parliamentary elections are to be held next week. But speak to almost anyone in Cairo and they will tell you this is an unfinished revolution.

I went to Cairo to interview writers for Talking Books, a programme on the BBC News Channel. At one hotel we were told we could film whatever we wanted, as long as none of the material was political. The unease was attributed to Maspero; the incident was undermining the new found confidence of Caireans.

Our contact said the ‘heat” journalists feel from Scaf is indirect: ‘They would love you to exercise self-censorship, so they don’t get their hands dirty.” He is now involved in setting up a public television channel, paid for by subscription. ‘A revolution did take place in Egypt,” he said, ‘but the revolutionary forces were never allowed to rule and, apart from getting rid of Mubarak, we have achieved almost nothing. The regime is very much still with us.”

Nine months on and the same activists who stood in Tahrir Square and called for the end of Mubarak’s regime are now calling for more demonstrations to defend the Egyptian revolution — to challenge the army over issues such as military trials for civilians and the return of censorship. For all the frustrations and disappointments, however, there is no doubt that the January revolution created a profound shift culturally as well as politically.

A younger voice
Ibrahim el-Moallem is owner of the al-Shorouk bookshops and publishing house, as well as two newspapers. He told me: ‘This is just the beginning. It has been difficult since Mubarak left. But people are giving themselves permission to be outspoken. There are songs, there are jokes; we are walking taller. The revolution showed us that we had lost our fear and gained pride and faith in the younger generation.”

And now it’s the younger generation that is saying the revolution is under attack. Alaa Abdel Fatah is an activist and blogger; he was summoned after he criticised the army’s actions on October 9.

When he refused to answer questions put by a military prosecutor, he was detained under charges of stealing military weapons and inciting violence.

His case is becoming a cause célèbre. His mother, an academic, has gone on hunger strike until her son is released and his aunt, the Booker-nominated novelist Ahdaf Soueif, said: ‘Egypt is paying a heavy price for a revolution that was grassroots — communal and leaderless.” She said that although ‘the positive, happy feeling of January and February has dissipated, replaced by tension and anxiety, you can’t go back into the box. The atmosphere feels like it did in January. Everyone is aware of what is possible. Everyone knows what things are being done by the military. This is the endgame.”

There is no shortage of writers who are keen to articulate what has happened and is happening to Egypt. Khaled Alkhamissi, now nearly 50, said he has waited half his life to write his first book; being the scion of a leading literary family has weighed heavily on him. His father and grandfather and his uncles were all renowned men of letters and poets. Taxi, his collection of 58 monologues with Cairo taxi drivers, is being described as having ‘predicted the uprising” and has become one of the most popular books in Arabic of recent years. It was recently published in English.

A psychological revolution
His second book, Noah’s Ark, was the bestselling book in the Middle East last year and is due to be published in English soon. Trained as a political scientist, Alkhamissi was out in Tahrir Square from day one.

‘The soul of the nation has changed,” he told me. ‘In Egypt we had a real revolution, a psychological revolution. What is new is that we know we have the power to make a difference. The army might be trying to keep the same faces, to kill the idea of change, but the people know it is in their power to keep change going. Egyptians have to understand that what has happened amounts to a social revolution, that the political revolution will come. What we are asking of people now is much bigger than Mubarak going.”

According to Alkhamissi, the protests against what he sees as the army hijacking the revolution will continue.

On this there is much agreement. I interviewed the veteran social and political activist and novelist Nawal El Saadawi beside the River Nile. In the distance was the blackened, burnt-out shell that used to be Mubarak’s National Democratic Party headquarters, destroyed in the revolution but still standing, like a carcass that cannot be discarded.

El-Saadawi is a woman who has challenged the socially conservative culture of Egypt for decades and has paid a heavy price, losing state jobs and being imprisoned. ‘We have cut off the head, but the body still remains,” she said.

She has fought for women’s rights and has been a pioneer in speaking out against female genital mutilation since she qualified as a doctor in the 1950s. Now 80, she still has extraordinary energy. She said she has been dreaming about this revolution since she was 10 years old and is angry about how the army is trying to take it away from women, who were central to the protests in Tahrir Square. But she is optimistic — she has faith in the younger generation.

Ghada Abdel Aal is half a century younger than El-Saadawi and a thoroughly modern woman. She made her name as a blogger, writing wryly about the pressures on women to get married. The blog’s title alone (‘I want to get married”) was provocative and perceived as political. The blog was turned into a book and a TV series and Abdel Aal is now writing a study of the role Egyptian women play in society. ‘Forty years of corruption can’t be dealt with in one year,” she said. ‘I think we should take our time. There isn’t chaos, but there is confusion. Now, if we go against the army, which stood by us in the square, who will be on our side?”

Abdel Aal may be middle class — she trained as a pharmacist — but she isn’t part of the capital’s elite. She lives in Mahalla, an industrial and agricultural city in the middle of the Nile delta: ‘In small towns we are not allowed to dream. It never occurred to me that I could be a writer. Writers are supposed to be guys from Cairo and over 60 years old.”

Writing against dictatorship
She could be forgiven for thinking that because for many years Egypt’s most famous literary export was a Nobel laureate, the late Naguib Mahfouz. Now Alaa al-Aswany appears to be his natural successor, not least because Mahfouz’s influence is clearly evident in his writing. Aswany is the author of the bestselling The Yacoubian Building and Chicago, and also of a searing collection of essays that first appeared as newspaper columns; for several years before the revolution he was writing against dictatorship and for democracy.

He makes the distinction between the military council that is in power and the army. ‘What has happened since February when Mubarak resigned is a conflict of two wills — the will of the revolution and the will of the military council, which is against the revolution. The council wants to preserve as much as it can of the old regime and those behind the revolution want revolutionary actions.”

Aswany, who trained as a dentist, is keen to emphasise the importance of being close to the street and ordinary people. Sometimes talking to people is more important than fixing teeth. ‘The writer, especially the fiction writer, should always be with the people. I think that being a novelist means you defend human values by writing novels. The novel is a moment of truth and good literature is a tool of human understanding.”

During Aswany’s time in Tahrir Square he survived sniper fire several times, but what was revelatory to him was what happened whenever there was gunfire: ‘When people were shot and died, other protesters never stepped back or ran away; they were more determined to [carry on]. During the revolution, the ‘I’ became ‘we’. People became less interested in their personal security and began to feel themselves as one being.” Needless to say, he is writing about it.

But, more important for him, the immediate future of Egypt lies not in the coming elections but in the power of the people to effect another revolution: ‘The only power of the revolution is for the revolution to exist. Our only power is to be on the street. I am optimistic because that’s how we did it before. So I think that at some point, we — the 20?million people who made the revolution — should go back on to the street; I expect us to do that shortly.” —