Monday, October 15, 2012

Beyond Tahrir


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.