This piece was written for the magazine, The Middle East in London, about two weeks before the government erased the graffiti on Muhammad Mahmoud st.
Muhammad Mahmoud Street is one of the ten
roads that feed into Tahrir Square. It
is home to the beautiful old campus of the American University in Cairo and,
therefore, to the all the most expensive cafes in Downtown Cairo. It was also the theatre for the biggest
street battle in Egypt since Mubarak’s fall.
Over five freezing nights in November the police killed more than 70
people and Tahrir transformed itself into an enormous field hospital. Now, Egypt’s newly emerged graffiti artists have
converged to make the long unbroken walls of the street sing with beautiful,
heartbreaking, ever-changing murals.
Pharaonic figures spelling out timeless lessons for good governance make
way for a fallen sheikh’s guiding hands and Christian angel’s wings, while huge
Islamic calligraphy curls up and around the faces of the overwhelmingly young,
smiling martyrs and down again to angrily sprayed stencils calling for freedom
for the imprisoned and justice for the dead.
This is where I come when I need reminding
that our strength comes from the combination of countless small, individual
contributions to the collective cause.
Here is where I know that the revolution is more than street protests,
more than battles with the police, more than the presidency, more than American
foreign policy. Here I know that the
revolution is, in the end, about the pent-up beauty that’s been released into
this country.
It is both an obvious and a very
difficult lesson to learn. But,
to be successful, the revolution has to constantly remember it,
has to be both mass street protests and smaller, personal acts of protest. The unionizing nurse, the striking worker. The
two nourish each other, push each other forward.
We forced the removal of Mubarak by
taking and holding Tahrir for 18 days.
But Tahrir then was a mortally contested space. The entire police force was defeated in the
winning of it. Now it has become a space
‘allowed’ to the revolution. Much like a
protest march in London has its route and territory marked out by the police,
Tahrir has – to a lesser extent – become an accepted area for
congregation. It is when venturing
outside it that the inevitable confrontations with the police and the military
flare up; it is outside that the boundaries that need testing now lie. The Ministry of the Interior, the State Radio
and Television Building, the Ministry of Defence. These are the black sites of
recent and future bloodshed. These are
the houses of power, the new challenges that the young unarmed men and women of
the revolution are drawn towards now.
Can you take the State TV building
without a hundred thousand people pushing at the barbed wire that surrounds
it? Will the machine-gunners on the
first floor open fire on women and children chanting selmeyya (peaceful)? Maybe
we won’t have to find out. Maybe, with
our elected civilian president, words will no longer be met with bullets. We have entered the third stage of our
Revolution. And it is true that we have
won many victories. We still can’t
believe this history that we’re living through, that we’re making. But we’re also still living in a police state
whose land and major assets are controlled by the military and a neo-liberal
business elite who are subservient to American and Israeli interests. The police just shot and paralyzed a
seventeen-year old boy in a train station for singing an Ultras song. We have a long way to go. At times it feels impossible. And at those times I go down to Muhammad
Mahmoud Street.
