We are living tense days in Egypt. As Egypt slowly moves from the state of revolution to that of a transitional period, things are in movement. Some of this movement is positive, and some of it is dangerous. In the village where I am staying these days, people are therefore busy asking themselves: What is to be done?
Since yesterday, a north wind from the sea, known here as nawwa, has brought cold weather, wind and rain to the village, and today most people stay home under the blankets if they can. But yesterday afternoon the weather was still sunny and not too cold, quite perfect for the announced cleanup campaign at the village cemetery. Two weeks ago there had been a wide-scale cleanup campaign where the activist group manage to win over lots of people, including the mayor and the head of the village council. But after a campaign of insults they faced from supporters of the old system, the activists were a little cautious, and not quite so enthusiastic. In result, little advertisement was made for this new round of the cleanup campaign. In the afternoon, perhaps twenty to thirty adults showed up, followed by a large group of children. Except for one woman from the neighbourhood, the adults participating were male crowd, and most of them belonged to the activist group. A truck of the communal cleaning service from the neighbouring town had been organised, and in the course of the day, it filled with garbage, sticks, and weed collected in the graveyard.
The graveyard turned to be a lot more difficult to clean than the streets, being full of weed and loose bricks. The cleanup proceeded slowly, and by sunset about one third of the graveyard was cleaned up. The activists were a little disappointed about the relative low turnout (although it was still more than the cleanup campaign in the neighbouring village was able gather), but decided to use this campaign to make advertisement for a next round on Friday, calling people to join to finish cleaning up the graveyard after the noon prayer. S. had borrowed a video camera and filmed the cleanup, and today we sat most of noon and afternoon together editing it to be screened on the local cable channel network to invite people to a public meeting with the village council on Thursday and to the next round of the cleanup on Friday.
The people who organise the cleanup understand it the first place as a way to create consciousness and to mobilise people to care about local affairs. In this village things don’t look too bad, there being a big enough activist base, enough popular sympathy, and a cooperative mayor. In the neighbouring village where I paid a short visit yesterday, things have been more difficult. I met two young men who had organised a cleanup campaign there, but only very few people had shown up, and described most of the youth in their village as being in a state of apathy. The real success of the campaign in the village I am staying in will be seen tomorrow at the public meeting with the village council and a number of people from the local administration. Everybody is invited to come with their issues and complaints, and just an hour ago a group of female secondary school pupils knocked on the door to ask whether girls can participate. The answer was yes, everybody is welcome to discuss their complaints. (This is not obvious in the village where it is very unusual for women to play a direct role in public affairs.) But we shall see whether the people from the administration will really show up tomorrow.
Tomorrow will thus be a day to discuss what is to be done regarding the administration, the bread distribution and the public utilities of the village. But in the meantime, people also look for solutions to other pressing concerns, some of them personal, others national.
One big issue is the referendum about constitutional amendments announced to take place on 19 March. In the past two days it has been a repeated issue of discussions. My revolutionary friends largely oppose the amendments and would rather like to see a completely new constitution. Others are busy getting informed. S’s mother-in-law who is illiterate but has become highly interested in politics in the course of the revolution, inquires us at length about what the amendments exactly mean, and what exactly a “yes” and a “no” vote implies.
Yesterday afternoon, I met H, a lawyer living in the village and working in the nearby town. Since a couple of years, he is member of a locally based human rights organisation that had managed to build a relationship of dialogue and trust with the regime. He argues that the success of the revolution has been vastly exaggerated. For one thing, he argues that nobody had prevented him from expressing his opinion before the revolution, since he knew how to communicate it the right way to avoid conflicts with the system. And he is not happy about what he describes as the sudden and chaotic course of the events. Unlike many others whom I know who blame the security apparatus for the chaos, he puts the blame on the majority of Egyptians themselves, and criticises their ongoing hostility towards the police apparatus. In his view, the police has committed mistakes, but it is being blamed for more than is its responsibility, because “as the immediate face of the government, the police has been made responsible for its own errors and the errors of others.”
I ask him what he as a lawyer thinks about the constitution. He is opposed to it, and will vote against it in the upcoming referendum - a point of view, by the way, shared by many of the people I know. He thinks that the entire way in which the military tries to push a quick transition is questionable. He speaks especially from the lawyer’s and judge’s point of view, demanding reliable constitutional conditions rather than an amendment coupled with the condition that next year a new constitution will be drafted. Why not draft it right away, he asks. He finds it very questionable to make few amendments to a constitution that in any case has been de fact abolished. Instead, he argues for a proper constitutional board that wouldn’t need more than two months to present a proposal for a new constitution. He also criticises the speed with which election should be held, which in his view makes it more difficult to hold free and fair elections. Finally, he also has some suspicion about the current anti-corruption campaign because in his view it focusses only on a part of the old system. What about field marshal Tantawi? Isn’t he a man of the old system, too? Nobody talks about his money and wealth. I ask H what he sees as his task in the coming period. He answers: “to do my part to get the judiciary working again.” The court in the local town is working again since Monday, but so far the judges have only delayed cases, and don’t want to run any processes until they have police protection again, and that will take at least another ten days.
H. is an interesting critic of both the revolution and of the military rule, arguing mostly from the point of view of the rule of law. This is also linked with his personal experience. On the Friday of Anger 28 January he was in the local town calming down the demonstrators who wanted to burn the court after the police had withdrawn. Compare this to the experience of S. who on the same day saw people being killed by the police in Sidi Bishr. In his view, the current sense of unrest and insecurity is allowed to continue “in order to make the people forgive the police and to ask them to come back. But after what they did to us in Sidi Bishr I cannot forgive them.”
Everybody agrees that restoring law and order is a key priority at the moment. But what exactly should be done is a different question altogether, depending on people’s assessment of what causes the sense of unsafety. Those who see the unrest caused by irresponsible behaviour by people who allow their pre-existing conflicts escalate in the current atmosphere of anxiety, look forward to an organised return of the police force to calm down the situation. Those who see the unrest caused by forces of the counterrevolution, that is, the National Democratic Party and members of the State Security, spreading rumours and inciting unrest, think that the return of the police will not solve the problem as long as the counterrevolution remains active. Many also point out to me that worse than any actual unrest is the terror effected by rumours, and that the biggest problem is the fear that is inside the people. The revolution of 25 January did break an important barrier of fear for many, but the existential fear of the safety of one’s family is of a different kind, and has a strongly destabilizing effect when out of this fear people don’t go to work and don’t send their children to school.
The sense of unrest is serious at the moment. Since two days, there is a sit-in of Christians, supported by some Muslims, in protest to the burning of a church in a village south of Cairo due to a conflict that began with a love affair between a Christian man and a Muslim woman. Just as it looked like this problem was being solved after the army promised to build a new church, confessional clashes broke out in Muqattam in a neighbourhood inhabited, among others, by Christian garbage collectors. Thirteen or fourteen people were killed in clashes that lasted two days. The good news is that the peaceful sit-in in front of the television building have been successful in pressing and making public demands by the Christians in a way that can be constructive. The next round of demonstrations planned for next Friday were supposed to take place in support of the transitional government of Essam Sharaf, but their theme will no be national unity. In the village, news spread about gangster attacks and chaos in Alexandria, and also many people in the outskirts of Alexandria fear going to the city now. People in Alexandria with whom I spoke with the phone said that the situation was entirely normal and quiet except for few conflicts between families that seem to have incited the wave of rumours and fear. And indeed, the terror of rumours and fear is much worse than any of the actual trouble that happens. The biggest unrest is not in the streets but inside people and in their intimate relationships. There have been so many strong emotions in the past weeks that people have very short nerves now.
But the biggest concern here in the village right now is how to get through the year of difficult economical situation which people commonly expect. This afternoon I met D, a recently married man who has been doing various kinds of work. He has always been a man of pragmatic solutions. He expects that it will take a year for the situation to stabilise, and three years for the economy to improve, after four years he expects things to be better in the country. By then, he plans to start a business. Many young people now want to start businesses, especially after the news was released that for people over 30 there will be no government jobs anymore, but a scholarship to start a project and a temporary unemployment benefit. That’s much more to his mind than a government job anyway, and with his driver’s license he hopes to start a taxi or minibus business. But he doesn’t expect to be able to do it now, and in order to pass through the difficult times, he is going to work in Saudi Arabia. He already got a visa, and only waits for the last phone call, but things are slow at the moment. The labour agent only returned to Egypt a couple of days ago, and he didn’t get to work right away but first went to look at Tahrir Square. Many others are thinking about migrating at the moment, too. The expectation is widely shared: Things will get better in Egypt, but it will take a while, and to get over that while, one will have to work abroad.
D. stayed in the village throughout the revolution, although he did want to join at one point, he tells. He was emotionally so involved watching the news all day long that in the end he became sick and the doctor told him to turn off the television. After the attack on Tahrir Square on 2 February he wanted to join a group of people, mostly from the Muslim brothers, who wanted to join the demonstration in Cairo the following Friday (4 February). But when one villager who had been on Tahrir Square on the day of the attack returned home with his shoulder seriously injured by a bullet, D became too afraid to go. The group of people that did leave the village for Cairo to join the demonstrators were sent back by the army at the ring road. On that day, lots of people tried to come to Cairo to support the demonstrators but were sent back.
D’s story of almost participating in the revolution is shared by many who feared for themselves, felt responsible for their family, or were forbidden to go or told to come back by their parents. Many others did not even intend to go, but everybody remained glued to the television screen. Today, there is wide agreement (but no consensus) among the people that they have together accomplished something really special. For those who stayed mostly at home watching television, this sense of accomplishment is, of course, debatable to a certain extent. But S’s mother-in-law, for example, nevertheless insisted that she, too had lived through it as if she had been part of it, by the force of empathy. Since the beginning of the revolution she was glued to the television, watching the news until late at night and unable to stop. During the revolution a neighbour took advantage of the absence of the police and judiciary and took over her shop that was temporarily standing empty. For her, this became a way to relate to the much greater sacrifices others had to face:“I lost my shop, but others lost their children.” S. didn’t oppose her directly, but to me he added that he has a big problem hearing people claim the revolution as theirs when they spent it “at home wrapped in blankets” while others were risking their lives on the street. A shared friend of ours from Cairo has been out on the streets ever since 25 January, and has been participating in the sit-in in Tahrir until today, and on Facebook she is sharing angry comments about those who criticise the continuing sit-in. S. has a lot of sympathy for her anger and essentially shares her point of view.
In the course of this day and evening, more and more worrying news reach us from Tahrir square. Ever since the closure of the State Security Offices, there has been increasing fear of elements of the old regime systematically working to destabilize the situation, and Tahrir Square has been the central site of those attempts recently. Yesterday a demonstration by women’s rights activists voicing demands for full equality of women faced a very nasty reaction of attacks and derision, apparently quite organised and not just a spontaneous chauvinist reaction. Today morning there was an attack by thugs armed with sticks, knives and who threw stones and tried to drive away the sit-in, unsuccessfully. Considering that the final demand of the sit-in has been the complete abolition (and not just the suspension and reorganisation as announced) of the State Security, it is not difficult to guess what motivated the attack. But the problem is that meanwhile the sit-in had become small, and many people who participated in the demonstrations considered it better to give it a break and to see how the new government manages. This sentiment mixed with supporters of the old system claiming that the sit-in was the cause of all the unrest in the country has put those continuing the sit-in in a tricky position towards a public opinion split not just in supporters and opponents of the revolution, but also in different opinions about what is to be done to overcome the threat that continues to emanate from elements of the old system. And a big question mark has remained on the position of the Army - after all in itself a part of the old system - on all of this.
Tonight the army forcibly removed the sit-in from Tahrir Square. The Army has been trying to do away with the sit-in ever since 11 February, and this is in fact the third time the sit-in has been cleared. The most recent news is that the army has declared a curfew on Tahrir Square and the surrounding streets from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. They seem serious about putting an end to the sit-in, and the thugs of this morning seemed to be if not in their service then at least a useful pretext. This time the attempt to clear the square seems more likely to be successful because the sit-in had become small and controversial. Justified as it has been, continuing the sit-in on Tahrir after last Friday with only a small amount of people and without a strong backing may have been unwise because it has turned the sit-in into a convenient target for the counterrevolution. The clearing of the square today is a victory to those who seemed to be thoroughly defeated last Friday when interim prime minister Essam Sharaf spoke to the celebrating demonstrators.
My friends in the village take it heavily: “The revolution has been thwarted.” But from the village, there is little one can do about Tahrir Square, and the effort here is now focussed on reforming the local administration. But in Cairo, people will be making up their mind tonight and tomorrow about what is to be done, and the next two days will tell, especially next Friday when the next demonstration in Tahrir Square is announced to take place.
Greetings from revolutionary Egypt!
Samuli
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
The village revolutionaries
The village where many of my friends live has a history of political activism, and has a lot of supporters of the left and of the Muslim brotherhood. It was no surprise, then, that it was one of the first in its region where the revolutionary dynamics took off after Mubarak was sacked. It all began with a clean-up campaign in the village that culminated in a sit-in at the city hall of the nearby town. The movement, which is gaining growing popular support, was at first initiated mainly by a group of young men of left-wing orientation. Two of them were demonstrating in Tahrir Square on the very first day, on 25 January, and others were demonstrating at different times in Cairo and Alexandria. On 10 January, the evening when Mubarak was expected by everybody to step down but didn’t, they decided to go to Cairo and stay there until Mubarak goes, but realised that they didn’t have enough money to go to Cairo. So they decided to collect their money and to send four people to Alexandria. One of them couldn’t go because his mother hid his ID card, fearing for his life. But three others went, arriving just on time at the massive demonstration in Alexandria on the evening Mubarak resigned.
After the first wave of revolution was successful on the national level, they decided to take the revolution to their village, and since then I have received a continuous stream of news about their actions. Yesterday as I arrived in my friends’ house I found the outside walls covered with anti-Mubarak slogans, and the guest room turned into a meeting point for the village revolutionaries. On a table are notes for announcements and demands, and a computer connected to the internet. A group of men of different ages gathers here, discussing and planning. S’s wife (who was also out on the streets in Alexandria with her children in one of the demonstrations against Mubarak) serves them tea, and the children play in the living room, occasionally shouting slogans against the system
I arrived here last night and sat in the guest room until the early morning hours, exchanging news and experiences with the men, some of them old friends of mine, some of them new faces. They are very proud of their action in the village (although many of the cleaned up alleys are already getting dirty again, since many people in the village have not changed their ways). They are especially proud because they were the first to start such a campaign in the area, and their example has been now followed by the surrounding villages and also the nearby town. There it was lead by the same mayor whom the villagers confronted with a sit-in on 23 February. After the fierce resistance he faced, he has clearly decided to ride the wave of the revolution. In the village, the next step of the cleanup campaign is due tomorrow on Tuesday, with a cleanup of the graveyard. I will participate in that. After that the future of the campaign is open because it has been to a significant extent carried by pupils and students who will be going back to school or university this week.
After the cleanup campaign and the sit-in, and a period of insults and accusations by supporters of the old system last week, the next major revolutionary event in the village has been a series of demonstrations in schools. It started on 2 March in the boys prep school in protest against a new director. The old headmaster moved to another school, and a senior teacher who had been directing the school before and who was quite liked by the teachers and pupils had filed a lawsuit to get his position back. Meanwhile the headmaster of a school outside the village had purchased a fake doctor’s attest that for health reasons he should work near his home, and got the director’s post, against the rules because such a transfer is not allowed there is a lawsuit filed about the position. Supported by the teachers, the pupils held a demonstration on in the schoolyard. The next day, the teacher came with relatives of his to take his position by force, but was sent back, and now the issue has been transferred to the village council and will be transferred to the ministry of education. In the meantime, the director’s post remains vacant. In the secondary school, too, there was a demonstration to get back money the pupils had to pay to the school, but not quite as successful.
One of the leading figures in the group of village revolutionaries is Hajj F, a senior school teacher around fifty. F. tells that some people have called them the 23 February Youth because of their sit-in in the town on 23 February. I ask him: Well, Hajj, how do you feel about being part of the youth? He finds it a great joke and a compliment. There is, indeed, quite some irony to the title of “youth revolution,” because the movement really combines people of different ages. And having people of different ages is crucial. While young men’s willingness to take risks was crucial in the early days, and their energy continues to carry the movement, for other tasks old men are needed. Hajj F’s task is to spread the message to the mosques so that they can use their loudspeakers to inform people about tomorrow’s next clean-up campaign. It takes a senior teacher’s authority to do that in face of potential opposition and stupid questions.
Today, a group of people from the activist group met with the village mayor. Unlike the mayor of the nearby city who had arrogantly turned them down, the village mayor (like all mayors appointed, not elected) took them seriously, and I’m told that they had a very productive meeting. Here is a list of the issues they addressed, paraphrased from the handwritten notes they shared with me:
1.:The quality and distribution of state-subsidised bread. In this issue, which has long been suffering from corrupt networks of National Democratic Party members, a major success has already been booked and a new distribution system has been introduced. The issue of quality still needs to be solved.
2: Cleanliness of the alleys: The activist group offers their participation but also requests a concrete plan from the village administration.
3: Electricity, demanding an end to the diversion of electricity of the village network power, a more predictable system of billing, and information about the causes of power cuts.
4: Drinking water, demanding more frequent cleaning of the water filters and better supervision.
5. The graveyard, requesting that a wall should be built around the graveyard to separate it from the houses adjacent to it.
6. The youth centre, asking the people who run it to be replaced, or else abolishing it altogether because the way it is currently run is useless to the youth.
7. Designating an area to be used as a bus station.
The excitement and determination of the young men working to take the revolution to their villages stands in an impressive contrast to the boredom and nihilism they expressed to me in earlier times. More than three years ago I was here to do fieldwork on boredom, and almost everybody I talked to complained about there being nothing, just waiting. At least for a moment and for some of the young men, things have quite changed, there is a sense that things are meaningful, and there is more to be done than just waiting. But there is still a lot of empty time, as meetings take time to hold when people arrive late from errands. For the empty time, the computer lent by A. (he worked for two years in one of the richt Arab Gulf states, and the money he earned was just enough to buy him a laptop and a phone) is equipped with a good selection of computer games. “Because this is the youth revolution”, comments one of the young men.
The situation in the village is in many ways different from that of the cities. Also here people express pride and happiness about the peaceful revolution in their country. There anxiety about safety and crime that I encountered in Cairo is absent here. The retreat of the police on 28 January didn’t affect the countryside where there is very little police presence anyway, and people have always taken care of their own security here. Therefore the villagers have had no reason to worry about crime and looting. There have been cases though of people taking over empty shops hoping that it will take a while before they can be sued by the lawful tenants or owners. But the situation in Libya is hitting the people hard economically, as the income of the people in the village is heavily dependent on labour migrants abroad. Many migrants are returning from Libya these days, and others are stuck in Libya in a very difficult situation. The brother-in-law of a friend of mine just came back from Libya the same night I arrived from Cairo, evacuated via Tunisia on a military transport plane. He and colleagues of him escaped from Tripolis with the help of their employer, but on the border troops loyal to Gaddafi took all their money and bags, and they found themselves empty-handed in Tunisia, but happy to be alive.
With the economical situation staying difficult, and likely to remain so, young men are more pressed than ever to think about migration, but the problem is, where to go? Now that the chain of revolutions has begun, who knows which country will be next? But while economical uncertainty prevails and puts pressure on people, a strong the sense of possibility also prevails, and the revolutionary “youth” (as said, this “youth” actually includes people in their fifties) is most importantly marked by the sense that they are finally doing something meaningful. The demands they make to improve their local politics are pragmatic and simple: They concern the distribution and quality of bread, garbage collection, drinking water, public transportation, and so on. But the sensibility of life is quite different from what I know from the past. Three and a half years ago I was here to do research about boredom and frustration, and the image I gathered was that of a nihilistic sense of “it’s all wrecked, there is no point in any of it.” Religion provided some sense of meaningful action, but also with limitations. for some, creative production and the flight of fantasy offered another path, but usually also marked by the frustration of knowing how much more limited one’s actual possibilities were. A sense of deep, existential boredom prevailed. At the moment, there is no boredom. For the young men gathering in the guest room and organising cleanup campaigns, this is a moment when things make a little bit more sense, and many young men whom I have seen wasting their talent in a state of waiting, are now able to make themselves useful, at least for a moment. Life has quite a different feeling when sitting in the café is not about killing time but about thinking how to organise the next cleanup campaign and discussing the differences of a presidial and parliamentary government while knowing that this is not a theoretical question but a practical one.
More tomorrow...
Greetings from the revolutionary countryside!
Samuli
After the first wave of revolution was successful on the national level, they decided to take the revolution to their village, and since then I have received a continuous stream of news about their actions. Yesterday as I arrived in my friends’ house I found the outside walls covered with anti-Mubarak slogans, and the guest room turned into a meeting point for the village revolutionaries. On a table are notes for announcements and demands, and a computer connected to the internet. A group of men of different ages gathers here, discussing and planning. S’s wife (who was also out on the streets in Alexandria with her children in one of the demonstrations against Mubarak) serves them tea, and the children play in the living room, occasionally shouting slogans against the system
I arrived here last night and sat in the guest room until the early morning hours, exchanging news and experiences with the men, some of them old friends of mine, some of them new faces. They are very proud of their action in the village (although many of the cleaned up alleys are already getting dirty again, since many people in the village have not changed their ways). They are especially proud because they were the first to start such a campaign in the area, and their example has been now followed by the surrounding villages and also the nearby town. There it was lead by the same mayor whom the villagers confronted with a sit-in on 23 February. After the fierce resistance he faced, he has clearly decided to ride the wave of the revolution. In the village, the next step of the cleanup campaign is due tomorrow on Tuesday, with a cleanup of the graveyard. I will participate in that. After that the future of the campaign is open because it has been to a significant extent carried by pupils and students who will be going back to school or university this week.
After the cleanup campaign and the sit-in, and a period of insults and accusations by supporters of the old system last week, the next major revolutionary event in the village has been a series of demonstrations in schools. It started on 2 March in the boys prep school in protest against a new director. The old headmaster moved to another school, and a senior teacher who had been directing the school before and who was quite liked by the teachers and pupils had filed a lawsuit to get his position back. Meanwhile the headmaster of a school outside the village had purchased a fake doctor’s attest that for health reasons he should work near his home, and got the director’s post, against the rules because such a transfer is not allowed there is a lawsuit filed about the position. Supported by the teachers, the pupils held a demonstration on in the schoolyard. The next day, the teacher came with relatives of his to take his position by force, but was sent back, and now the issue has been transferred to the village council and will be transferred to the ministry of education. In the meantime, the director’s post remains vacant. In the secondary school, too, there was a demonstration to get back money the pupils had to pay to the school, but not quite as successful.
One of the leading figures in the group of village revolutionaries is Hajj F, a senior school teacher around fifty. F. tells that some people have called them the 23 February Youth because of their sit-in in the town on 23 February. I ask him: Well, Hajj, how do you feel about being part of the youth? He finds it a great joke and a compliment. There is, indeed, quite some irony to the title of “youth revolution,” because the movement really combines people of different ages. And having people of different ages is crucial. While young men’s willingness to take risks was crucial in the early days, and their energy continues to carry the movement, for other tasks old men are needed. Hajj F’s task is to spread the message to the mosques so that they can use their loudspeakers to inform people about tomorrow’s next clean-up campaign. It takes a senior teacher’s authority to do that in face of potential opposition and stupid questions.
Today, a group of people from the activist group met with the village mayor. Unlike the mayor of the nearby city who had arrogantly turned them down, the village mayor (like all mayors appointed, not elected) took them seriously, and I’m told that they had a very productive meeting. Here is a list of the issues they addressed, paraphrased from the handwritten notes they shared with me:
1.:The quality and distribution of state-subsidised bread. In this issue, which has long been suffering from corrupt networks of National Democratic Party members, a major success has already been booked and a new distribution system has been introduced. The issue of quality still needs to be solved.
2: Cleanliness of the alleys: The activist group offers their participation but also requests a concrete plan from the village administration.
3: Electricity, demanding an end to the diversion of electricity of the village network power, a more predictable system of billing, and information about the causes of power cuts.
4: Drinking water, demanding more frequent cleaning of the water filters and better supervision.
5. The graveyard, requesting that a wall should be built around the graveyard to separate it from the houses adjacent to it.
6. The youth centre, asking the people who run it to be replaced, or else abolishing it altogether because the way it is currently run is useless to the youth.
7. Designating an area to be used as a bus station.
The excitement and determination of the young men working to take the revolution to their villages stands in an impressive contrast to the boredom and nihilism they expressed to me in earlier times. More than three years ago I was here to do fieldwork on boredom, and almost everybody I talked to complained about there being nothing, just waiting. At least for a moment and for some of the young men, things have quite changed, there is a sense that things are meaningful, and there is more to be done than just waiting. But there is still a lot of empty time, as meetings take time to hold when people arrive late from errands. For the empty time, the computer lent by A. (he worked for two years in one of the richt Arab Gulf states, and the money he earned was just enough to buy him a laptop and a phone) is equipped with a good selection of computer games. “Because this is the youth revolution”, comments one of the young men.
The situation in the village is in many ways different from that of the cities. Also here people express pride and happiness about the peaceful revolution in their country. There anxiety about safety and crime that I encountered in Cairo is absent here. The retreat of the police on 28 January didn’t affect the countryside where there is very little police presence anyway, and people have always taken care of their own security here. Therefore the villagers have had no reason to worry about crime and looting. There have been cases though of people taking over empty shops hoping that it will take a while before they can be sued by the lawful tenants or owners. But the situation in Libya is hitting the people hard economically, as the income of the people in the village is heavily dependent on labour migrants abroad. Many migrants are returning from Libya these days, and others are stuck in Libya in a very difficult situation. The brother-in-law of a friend of mine just came back from Libya the same night I arrived from Cairo, evacuated via Tunisia on a military transport plane. He and colleagues of him escaped from Tripolis with the help of their employer, but on the border troops loyal to Gaddafi took all their money and bags, and they found themselves empty-handed in Tunisia, but happy to be alive.
With the economical situation staying difficult, and likely to remain so, young men are more pressed than ever to think about migration, but the problem is, where to go? Now that the chain of revolutions has begun, who knows which country will be next? But while economical uncertainty prevails and puts pressure on people, a strong the sense of possibility also prevails, and the revolutionary “youth” (as said, this “youth” actually includes people in their fifties) is most importantly marked by the sense that they are finally doing something meaningful. The demands they make to improve their local politics are pragmatic and simple: They concern the distribution and quality of bread, garbage collection, drinking water, public transportation, and so on. But the sensibility of life is quite different from what I know from the past. Three and a half years ago I was here to do research about boredom and frustration, and the image I gathered was that of a nihilistic sense of “it’s all wrecked, there is no point in any of it.” Religion provided some sense of meaningful action, but also with limitations. for some, creative production and the flight of fantasy offered another path, but usually also marked by the frustration of knowing how much more limited one’s actual possibilities were. A sense of deep, existential boredom prevailed. At the moment, there is no boredom. For the young men gathering in the guest room and organising cleanup campaigns, this is a moment when things make a little bit more sense, and many young men whom I have seen wasting their talent in a state of waiting, are now able to make themselves useful, at least for a moment. Life has quite a different feeling when sitting in the café is not about killing time but about thinking how to organise the next cleanup campaign and discussing the differences of a presidial and parliamentary government while knowing that this is not a theoretical question but a practical one.
More tomorrow...
Greetings from the revolutionary countryside!
Samuli
Monday, 7 March 2011
State Security Leaks, and a theory of anxiety
The discussions yesterday and today have mostly circled around the documents seized by protesters in the headquarters of State Security, Egypt’s feared secret police. This is what happened: On Friday after news about wide-scale destruction of documents spread, protesters occupied the offices of State Security in Alexandria. On Saturday, twelve more offices around the country were occupied, most importantly so the headquarters in Nasr City (Cairo) and the archives in 6th of October City. The offices were found empty, with a large part of the documents shredded and burned, but many could still be secured. And this is were things got complicated. Some of the files were handed directly to the state attorney or to the military. But protesters also took with them a lot of documents which are now in private hands and have been published online since Saturday night. A journalist friend of mine described it as a “sea of documents that flooded the internet..”
The military leadership has prohibited Egyptian newspapers from publishing the contents of the documents, and the government is trying to collect the documents back from private hands, but people have already scanned them, photocopied them, and put them on the internet. The damage has happened.
We now know a lot more details about the dirty businesses of leading government figures and businessmen. A number of informants from the public life have been identified. We now know that the ultra-fundamentalist Salafi movement which gained increasing influence in Egypt during the past decade has been closely cooperating with State Security that has tried to use them to limit the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. (This certainly explains why the Salafis sided with the government before Mubarak’s fall.) We know that the state security sent a message to Amr Musa, a potential presidential candidate, asking him to go and calm down the protesters. We also know that the mufti of the republic Ali Gum‘a, one of Egypt’s highest religious authorities, has been involved in no less than ten secret marriages. We also know that State Security has remained fully functioning until last Friday, because the documents seized in Nasr City included photos taken on Tahrir Square the previous day. Unfortunately, we still have little to no documentary evidence of the illegal practices of State Security, especially their torture practices. It seems that those documents that contained incriminating evidence against State Security were the first to be burned and shredded, and what has remained are mainly personal files of people who have been followed by the State Security.
And this is why the flood of State Security documents on the internet is seen very sceptically by many. While some of my friends rejoiced about all the information proving what they had always known - that the country has been run by a corrupt clique involved in amazingly dirty businesses, many others are rather worried. Human rights activist Saad Kamel says that the personal files contain mainly information that can be used by State Security against people - not just their political views, but to whom they owe money, their religious views, and their sexual practices. And it has all been scanned or photocopied and put online. This is not the kind of relevant information we need about the State Security, this is the private life of people who were observed by it. M. is even more sceptical. His joy about the occupation of the State Security headquarters of yesterday is gone, he sees it now as the biggest accomplishment of the counterrevolution so far. He argues that this is a terrible thing because State Security has been a key information agency for the entire state, and now also much relevant and sensitive information is lost - such as information about real terrorists - or in private hands, and because the documents will also cause a huge problem for social relationships as everybody will be busy identifying State Security informers in their surroundings.
Just a little note on the Salafis in passing. If people abroad are afraid of the Muslim Brothers, I think they have chosen the wrong people to worry about. The Muslim Brothers are playing a constructive role in the democratic process. The real problem are the Salafis. They took a pro-Mubarak stance during the protests before 11 February (and with the State Security documents becoming public it turns out that they did so because they were working for the government). Now that the situation has changed, they needed a moment to regroup and grasp what is going on. But now they are giving interviews telling that democracy is forbidden in Islam, distributing leaflets demanding that Egypt should become an Islamic emirate, and stuff like that. Their reputation has seriously suffered due to their role during the protests (and speaking out against democracy certainly doesn’t hit the right nerve with the public opinion at the moment). But they will still have their supporters and sympathisers who will not believe these news, and while they will not be able to gather majority support, they look like they are up to playing a very destructive role in the coming months.
To continue the theme of anxiety of yesterday, I yesterday spoke with three people, each with a different account and a different version of the prevailing sense of ‘ala’, Egyptian Arabic for anxiety and unrest (qalaq in classical Arabic).
A friend of mine in southern Cairo was very sceptical of the current course of the revolution. In her view, it will be a revolution when a democratic transition is accomplished. But she did not see the people of Egypt represented by the ongoing sit-in in Tahrir square. And what she saw in the events at the moment was mainly noise, chaos and an irresponsible drive to break without building. Very worried about the high level of criminality (high for Egyptian standards, where armed robberies used to be practically nonexistent) that has remained after the night of lootings in the end of January, her first and primary concern is that there must be a strong and firm police force back in place. Looking forward to the future, she hopes Egypt to become a democratic country ruled by a strong president who will have the time and powers to press through important reform projects. She is very much in favour of anti-corruption trials and democratic change, but on the condition of continuity and stability. And a revolution, of course, provides change but neither continuity nor stability. In her experience, the anxiety has become only worse. I ask how this can be, comparing the total standstill of public life in early January, and the busy and peaceful streets now. She says that the situation in early February was an acute one, but now it has become a permanent state, so that even if it has less intensity, it troubles her more.
While my friend in southern Cairo is anxious about the force of irresponsible behaviour caused by rapid change, my friend S. who spent most of the revolution in Alexandria and in his village, is upset and anxious for quite the opposite reason. He was demonstrating in Sidi Bishr in Alexandria on the Friday of Anger 28 January - the bloodiest day of the revolution - and he saw terrible things done to the demonstrators by the security forces, so terrible that he still cannot speak about them. Just thinking about it brings tears into his eyes. From that day on, he went to demonstrate every day, once with his wife and children, the other days alone, until he ran out of money and had to return to his village. There he was one of the initiators of the cleanup campaign that was the first in a series of cleanups in the villages of the area. But there he also encountered the resistance of people supporting the old system, and it was too much for him: “After what I saw in Sidi Bishr, I encountered people in the village who defended corruption and the system.” He couldn’t take it, had a nervous breakdown, and is only now getting back into good shape.
Most other people I have encountered these days share neither the general scepticism towards the revolution nor the intense indignation about what remains of the old system. They express a sense of pride and optimism that comes along with a sense of tension, worry, and anxiety. With this thought in mind I went to see Saad Kamel, a psychologist and human right activist, who offered me his theory of anxiety in Egypt after the revolution.
Dr. Saad, too, sees anxiety, or ‘ala’, as a key emotional state of the ongoing revolutionary situation. However, he distinguishes between the immediate affectionate state of the revolution, and the more long-lasting emotions that characterise daily life, and which are often expressed and enforced by songs. The revolution, Saad argues, was in becoming for a long while, and the past decade witnessed contrary developments that contributed to it. On the one hand, young people have become more and more immediately aware of the wider world around them, comparing their situation directly with what they know from the media, and asking why they cannot have what other peoples around the world have. On the other hand, the Mubarak regime became increasingly arrogant in its repression of anything that would limits its wealth and power, so that the contradiction between expectations and the actual scope of action became greater than ever.
This sentiment was expressed by a strong underground discourse, in Saad’s views best expressed in a song from three years ago titled “il-dinya kharbana” (meaning approximately: it’s all gone in pieces, there is no point in anything), and during the revolution it took a more combatant stance as expressed in the rap song “ana didd al-hukuma” (I#m against the government). Saad points out that the text and the style of rap is over the top for Egyptian taste, and this break with musical aesthetics is also a break with the emotions carried by music. This music, Saad argues, speaks out a shift in the emotional state, a move from one sense of longing to another: The old sense of longing was expressed by the emotional note of shagan (which translates approximately with melancholy), a sense of lack that is at the same time cherished. The new sense is that of ‘ala’ (which translates approximately with anxiety, but includes more noise and unrest). It is all over the place, it is the word everybody uses to describe the current state of things. Saad argues that this anxiety is not directly related to the demonstrations or the economical situation. In his neighbourhood there are lots of arguments and fights for petty reasons. People are nervous, and it is an anxiety that is due to the change in the entire way authority works.
This anxiety, Saad says, is the expression of a lack (in Lacan’s psychoanalytical sense) of authority. Lack, with Lacan, is an essential condition of the imaginary picture we make of ourselves, building it from the reaction of our surroundings, of our mirror image. It is never complete, because the subject doesn’t see himself completely, but constructs oneself through the imaginary, which always leaves a sense of lack. Traditional patriarchal authority (which in Saad’s view was often primarily exercised by women by delegating this authority to men) offered a solution of its own, providing a sense of authority that is has now been either rejected or lost. The protesters were not lead by a strong opposition leader. Instead, they wanted to do away with leaders. Now every leader’s authority is put in question, from the government down to the village school (I get back to that in tomorrow’s post). This creates a state of existential anxiety that in Dr. Saad’s view is not a passing state of revolution, but the fundamental state of modernity. And democracy, characterised by a lack and limitation of authority through elections and the separation of power, is the political system of this state of modern anxiety.
I ask Dr. Saad where this development will take us. He laughs and says: “We are here to see and find out!”
Yesterday night I left Cairo and arrived in a village in the northern Nile Delta where the revolution began a little later, and is now in full progress. Last weeks have seen a cleanup campaign, an attempt by supporters of the old system to discredit it, a sit-in at the city hall of the nearby town, two days of demonstrations in the prep school, and there is more to come. As I write these notes, a group of men is sitting in the room next door and planning the next cleanup campaign. I will keep you updated.
Greetings from the revolutionary countryside,
Samuli
The military leadership has prohibited Egyptian newspapers from publishing the contents of the documents, and the government is trying to collect the documents back from private hands, but people have already scanned them, photocopied them, and put them on the internet. The damage has happened.
We now know a lot more details about the dirty businesses of leading government figures and businessmen. A number of informants from the public life have been identified. We now know that the ultra-fundamentalist Salafi movement which gained increasing influence in Egypt during the past decade has been closely cooperating with State Security that has tried to use them to limit the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. (This certainly explains why the Salafis sided with the government before Mubarak’s fall.) We know that the state security sent a message to Amr Musa, a potential presidential candidate, asking him to go and calm down the protesters. We also know that the mufti of the republic Ali Gum‘a, one of Egypt’s highest religious authorities, has been involved in no less than ten secret marriages. We also know that State Security has remained fully functioning until last Friday, because the documents seized in Nasr City included photos taken on Tahrir Square the previous day. Unfortunately, we still have little to no documentary evidence of the illegal practices of State Security, especially their torture practices. It seems that those documents that contained incriminating evidence against State Security were the first to be burned and shredded, and what has remained are mainly personal files of people who have been followed by the State Security.
And this is why the flood of State Security documents on the internet is seen very sceptically by many. While some of my friends rejoiced about all the information proving what they had always known - that the country has been run by a corrupt clique involved in amazingly dirty businesses, many others are rather worried. Human rights activist Saad Kamel says that the personal files contain mainly information that can be used by State Security against people - not just their political views, but to whom they owe money, their religious views, and their sexual practices. And it has all been scanned or photocopied and put online. This is not the kind of relevant information we need about the State Security, this is the private life of people who were observed by it. M. is even more sceptical. His joy about the occupation of the State Security headquarters of yesterday is gone, he sees it now as the biggest accomplishment of the counterrevolution so far. He argues that this is a terrible thing because State Security has been a key information agency for the entire state, and now also much relevant and sensitive information is lost - such as information about real terrorists - or in private hands, and because the documents will also cause a huge problem for social relationships as everybody will be busy identifying State Security informers in their surroundings.
Just a little note on the Salafis in passing. If people abroad are afraid of the Muslim Brothers, I think they have chosen the wrong people to worry about. The Muslim Brothers are playing a constructive role in the democratic process. The real problem are the Salafis. They took a pro-Mubarak stance during the protests before 11 February (and with the State Security documents becoming public it turns out that they did so because they were working for the government). Now that the situation has changed, they needed a moment to regroup and grasp what is going on. But now they are giving interviews telling that democracy is forbidden in Islam, distributing leaflets demanding that Egypt should become an Islamic emirate, and stuff like that. Their reputation has seriously suffered due to their role during the protests (and speaking out against democracy certainly doesn’t hit the right nerve with the public opinion at the moment). But they will still have their supporters and sympathisers who will not believe these news, and while they will not be able to gather majority support, they look like they are up to playing a very destructive role in the coming months.
To continue the theme of anxiety of yesterday, I yesterday spoke with three people, each with a different account and a different version of the prevailing sense of ‘ala’, Egyptian Arabic for anxiety and unrest (qalaq in classical Arabic).
A friend of mine in southern Cairo was very sceptical of the current course of the revolution. In her view, it will be a revolution when a democratic transition is accomplished. But she did not see the people of Egypt represented by the ongoing sit-in in Tahrir square. And what she saw in the events at the moment was mainly noise, chaos and an irresponsible drive to break without building. Very worried about the high level of criminality (high for Egyptian standards, where armed robberies used to be practically nonexistent) that has remained after the night of lootings in the end of January, her first and primary concern is that there must be a strong and firm police force back in place. Looking forward to the future, she hopes Egypt to become a democratic country ruled by a strong president who will have the time and powers to press through important reform projects. She is very much in favour of anti-corruption trials and democratic change, but on the condition of continuity and stability. And a revolution, of course, provides change but neither continuity nor stability. In her experience, the anxiety has become only worse. I ask how this can be, comparing the total standstill of public life in early January, and the busy and peaceful streets now. She says that the situation in early February was an acute one, but now it has become a permanent state, so that even if it has less intensity, it troubles her more.
While my friend in southern Cairo is anxious about the force of irresponsible behaviour caused by rapid change, my friend S. who spent most of the revolution in Alexandria and in his village, is upset and anxious for quite the opposite reason. He was demonstrating in Sidi Bishr in Alexandria on the Friday of Anger 28 January - the bloodiest day of the revolution - and he saw terrible things done to the demonstrators by the security forces, so terrible that he still cannot speak about them. Just thinking about it brings tears into his eyes. From that day on, he went to demonstrate every day, once with his wife and children, the other days alone, until he ran out of money and had to return to his village. There he was one of the initiators of the cleanup campaign that was the first in a series of cleanups in the villages of the area. But there he also encountered the resistance of people supporting the old system, and it was too much for him: “After what I saw in Sidi Bishr, I encountered people in the village who defended corruption and the system.” He couldn’t take it, had a nervous breakdown, and is only now getting back into good shape.
Most other people I have encountered these days share neither the general scepticism towards the revolution nor the intense indignation about what remains of the old system. They express a sense of pride and optimism that comes along with a sense of tension, worry, and anxiety. With this thought in mind I went to see Saad Kamel, a psychologist and human right activist, who offered me his theory of anxiety in Egypt after the revolution.
Dr. Saad, too, sees anxiety, or ‘ala’, as a key emotional state of the ongoing revolutionary situation. However, he distinguishes between the immediate affectionate state of the revolution, and the more long-lasting emotions that characterise daily life, and which are often expressed and enforced by songs. The revolution, Saad argues, was in becoming for a long while, and the past decade witnessed contrary developments that contributed to it. On the one hand, young people have become more and more immediately aware of the wider world around them, comparing their situation directly with what they know from the media, and asking why they cannot have what other peoples around the world have. On the other hand, the Mubarak regime became increasingly arrogant in its repression of anything that would limits its wealth and power, so that the contradiction between expectations and the actual scope of action became greater than ever.
This sentiment was expressed by a strong underground discourse, in Saad’s views best expressed in a song from three years ago titled “il-dinya kharbana” (meaning approximately: it’s all gone in pieces, there is no point in anything), and during the revolution it took a more combatant stance as expressed in the rap song “ana didd al-hukuma” (I#m against the government). Saad points out that the text and the style of rap is over the top for Egyptian taste, and this break with musical aesthetics is also a break with the emotions carried by music. This music, Saad argues, speaks out a shift in the emotional state, a move from one sense of longing to another: The old sense of longing was expressed by the emotional note of shagan (which translates approximately with melancholy), a sense of lack that is at the same time cherished. The new sense is that of ‘ala’ (which translates approximately with anxiety, but includes more noise and unrest). It is all over the place, it is the word everybody uses to describe the current state of things. Saad argues that this anxiety is not directly related to the demonstrations or the economical situation. In his neighbourhood there are lots of arguments and fights for petty reasons. People are nervous, and it is an anxiety that is due to the change in the entire way authority works.
This anxiety, Saad says, is the expression of a lack (in Lacan’s psychoanalytical sense) of authority. Lack, with Lacan, is an essential condition of the imaginary picture we make of ourselves, building it from the reaction of our surroundings, of our mirror image. It is never complete, because the subject doesn’t see himself completely, but constructs oneself through the imaginary, which always leaves a sense of lack. Traditional patriarchal authority (which in Saad’s view was often primarily exercised by women by delegating this authority to men) offered a solution of its own, providing a sense of authority that is has now been either rejected or lost. The protesters were not lead by a strong opposition leader. Instead, they wanted to do away with leaders. Now every leader’s authority is put in question, from the government down to the village school (I get back to that in tomorrow’s post). This creates a state of existential anxiety that in Dr. Saad’s view is not a passing state of revolution, but the fundamental state of modernity. And democracy, characterised by a lack and limitation of authority through elections and the separation of power, is the political system of this state of modern anxiety.
I ask Dr. Saad where this development will take us. He laughs and says: “We are here to see and find out!”
Yesterday night I left Cairo and arrived in a village in the northern Nile Delta where the revolution began a little later, and is now in full progress. Last weeks have seen a cleanup campaign, an attempt by supporters of the old system to discredit it, a sit-in at the city hall of the nearby town, two days of demonstrations in the prep school, and there is more to come. As I write these notes, a group of men is sitting in the room next door and planning the next cleanup campaign. I will keep you updated.
Greetings from the revolutionary countryside,
Samuli
Sunday, 6 March 2011
Football with the Revolutionaries
(This note is from 5 March, The blog gives 6 March as title because I posted it after midnight)
My first day back in Cairo was devoted to a walk in downtown, meeting friends in Giza and Dokki, and a post-Shafiq football match with a group of friends with whom I used to play football every Saturday in the past years. It is a day marked by a mixture of pride and hope, anxiety and worry, and a new crucial step in the revolution. I start with the football.
As I entered the sports grounds of Gezira youth centre I met R., a musician, and asked him how things are going. “Better”, he said but continued, “but a lot of people have been injured by the psychological war of the days before 11 February, when there was a lot of fear, and many pro-Mubarak songs were made, and that has left many of us with a strong sense of paranoia. That’s why we didn’t manage to play football until today. There were many times when we thought that we should play again, but there was too much anxiety. And there were tensions among the people on Tahrir: Should we do this, should we do that, should we stay, should we go. Only now that [the former prime minister] Ahmad Shafiq is gone, it seems like this is a good moment to relax and play football again.” I ask him if there are any other news in his life. R.: “There is nothing else than the revolution now.” R. put in words what I had sensed with others, too: being committed to a revolution includes a lot of anxiety. There is a continuous tension, a continuous fear of what the system will do, whether the demonstrators will hold together, whether there is enough popular support, on whose side exactly the army is, whether one can still be arrested... A sense of fear and anxiety has kept the revolution running, it has kept people alert and active. But it has also worn them down and created a sense of paranoia.
Gezira youth centre is a little oasis of sport utilities for the general public (entrance fee 5 LE, no membership required) in the middle of otherwise very exclusive social clubs for Egypt’s elites. The football fields are rather bumpy, but it is a pleasure to play there, in a green oasis the middle of the city, and with a marvelous view of the burned down headquarters of the National Democratic Party on the other side of the Nile. It was a good match in the afternoon sun, although the team I played in lost 5 to 4. The people in this football group are mostly left wing, many artists and musicians, but until the revolution most of them were not politically active. For the past month most of them have been busy with the revolution almost full time. This was their first match after the revolution began, and while there was a sense that things were now clearly going the right way and that one could afford to relax, the revolution was still on everybody’s minds. The small talk was all about where they had been on which important days of the revolution, especially during the first days when the police was still attacking the demonstrators. Even comments on the match always took joking reference to the revolution. A counter immediately prompted jokes about counterrevolution.
For my friends, the football was a welcome moment to relax from the tension of the revolution. And taking a break from the revolution is not easy - it comes with problems of its own. J’s girlfriend tells me that many of the people involved in the revolution are now suffering from depression, after the moment of intensive activism for the revolution is over, and they return to everyday life. Many of them have lost their job, others don’t have a job to return to in the first place, and many relationships and marriages have broken during the past weeks. I ask my friend M. what he thinks about this and he says: “Yes, it’s true. After you have been participating in the revolution, ordinary life seems so dull and meaningless. You go to work and do your job, but you don’t feel anything about it.” To participate in a revolution is a very fulfilling experience. It takes over one’s entire life, even one’s dreams. There may be a lot of fear, anxiety and disagreement, but there is a strong sense of purpose: Everything one does matters. When this moment is over, the mundane course of everyday life can be a depressing experience. (I wonder if those who continue the sit-in in Tahrir Square do it partly because it has become so difficult for them to return to the banality of daily life.)
After the match R., the only one with a car, gave us a ride, and political debate continued in the car, this time about the yet unclear voting procedure in the referendum about constitutional amendments in 19 March, and about the upcoming presidential elections. The main potential candidates at the moment are Amr Musa, secretary-general of the Arab League and former minister of foreign affairs, Muhammad ElBaradei, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Husam El Bashtawishi, a judge committed to the cause of independent judiciary during the bast years. None of these candidates represent clearly any particular political direction, and my football friends couldn’t really agree on any one of them yet. R. found that ElBaradei was the only one who had so far presented anything logical and rational, and who had spoked credibly about freedom of opinion and democracy from the beginning. Another one of the people disagreed and said that there were things ElBaradei had said which he didn’t agree on, but in any case, he wants to see the programmes of the candidates before he can make up his mind.
Making up one’s mind is one thing Egyptians are called for these days, and there is an enormous amount of discussion again, although not all discussions circle around the revolution anymore like they did in early February. In the metro and on the streets, more mundane topics dominate. But on Tahrir Square, it is all about the revolution.
On Tahrir square where a significant group of people continued today their sit-in to press for the remaining demands of abolition of State Security, release of all political prisoners, and an official end of the state of emergency. At the same time, Tahrir square was today also the site of an ongoing stream of proud and curious people who came to look at the site of the revolution and to buy revolution souvenirs - flags, posters, t-shirts, and “JAN 25" number plates. Many of them did not support the ongoing sit-in, however, and intense discussions and debates about whether the sit-in should continue or not were going on all around the square.
I stood quite a while on Tahrir square listening to the discussions, and at times debating with the people, too. Everybody had their own point of view, but three tendencies were most clearly present. One were people fully supportive of the ongoing demonstrations until the entire old system is abolished. Another were people who came up with arguments typical of the supporters of Mubarak in early February, claiming that the demonstrators were paid and didn’t even know why they were demonstrating. A third group were people who were supportive of the revolution, and partly had also participated in it, but felt that the continuation of the sit-in in Tahrir now that most of the demands have been realised, prevented the people from returning to work and getting the economy running again. I was especially intrigued about this point of view and asked the people who expressed it: How exactly do thousand people (the remaining sit-in is quite small) keep an entire nation from going back to work? Their answer was that the ongoing pressure on the political system that emanates from Tahrir Square keeps everybody busy in their minds, anxious and waiting for the next major turn of events. As long as the demonstration continues, even with small numbers, they argues, there is no peace of mind to get back to work. A man selling cars for work said that this was not because he wouldn’t go back to work, but because nobody will buy a car as long as there is a revolution going on. Another man said: “If the new government doesn’t fulfill its promises, I come to demonstrate here again. But now we first need to give them a chance.”
But these were not the only voices - in fact, the crowd along the edges of Tahrir square as quite evenly split in people who wanted the sit-in to continue and who wanted it to end, and all of them had something to say to each others. It was quite an impressive scene of a collective debate. The debates were heated, but never aggressive - in fact, with all the disagreement, worry and anxiety that there was, many of those debating were at the same time proudly pointing out to me the very fact that they could now debate and make up their mind freely and without fear.
The debate about the sit-in is not new - the same discussions, I heard, were already taking place on 12 February after Mubarak resigned. But the problem is evident. The sit-in in Tahrir exerts powerful pressure The tricky question that the activists of the revolution face now is how to safeguard the legitimacy of an ongoing revolutionary struggle in the eyes of people who first of all want to get the economy running again and to solve the problem of increased criminality. Different people have different answers, and while some found this a good day to play football, others found it necessary to continue to sit-in, and yet others found it necessary to go and debate with those continuing the sit-in.
The problem of crime and lawlessness causes perhaps the greatest tension at the moment. Partly it is serious crime like armed robberies, but partly it is also petty disorder, and I have been told a lot about chaotic traffic - but I must say that today I found the traffic not more chaotic than it has always been in Cairo. J.says that among the demonstrators there is the fear that this sense can turn into a popular counter-uprising against them. Getting the police back on the streets alone won’t do the job of restoring law and order because people don’t have any respect for them anymore - they have to earn this respect first, and it will be a difficult job. And the citizens’ checkpoint cannot be a long-term solution because the people will need to get to work and sleep again. This will be probably the most urgent task for Essam Sharaf’s transitional government.
With all this anxiety, at the same time there is an amazing sense of pride among the people, no matter what their specific judgement is. A group of young men in Champollion street had painted a sign at the entrance of a one-way street reminding motorists not to drive wrong way. They were guarding the spot and checking that people obliged. They were excessively proud when I took a picture of the sign. A taxi driver who took me to the football field said that Tahrir Square was “a problem”, and in the next sentence he asked me for my opinion whether Egypt will manage to rise to a better future like the countries in Asia, and about how to get back all the money stolen by Mubarak and his clique. Another Taxi driver giving a ride to me, M. and a friend of ours later same evening, was very proud of what the Egyptian people had accomplished, and very optimistic, yet he did not expect things to change quickly: “We can make our country just as good as any country in Europe, we can do that. But it will take time. Maybe things won’t get better for this generation, but the generation of our children and grandchildren will. The problem now is that there are 50% of people who understand the responsibility, but we have also a lot of people who don’t understand it yet.” During the same taxi ride, the discussion again turned to the question of the future president. Should it be an old man so that he cannot stick to his office because he won’t live that long, or should it be a young and dynamic person. It doesn’t make a difference, the taxi driver argued, because whoever the next president will be, he will have to listen to the people, “because they know the way to Tahrir Square now, and everybody can use Facebook now and get organised.” Men at a fast food restaurant where I bought liver sandwiches were outspokenly proud about the fall of Mubarak, although they didn’t think that former prime minister Ahmad Shafiq was so bad. I told them that demonstrators in Wisconsin in the US have taken Egypt and Tunisia as their examples, and they sure were happy to hear that.
I have saved the best news for the end. (Although I’m not sure whether those who just want to get the economy running again would entirely agree ) Since yesterday, there are demonstrations all over Egypt trying to occupy the offices of State Security, Egypt’s feared and hated secret police. Abolition of the State Security is one of the remaining key demands of the demonstrators, and on Friday the ministry of interior declared that the State Security would be suspended and restructured. This did not satisfy many protesters, however, especially after news spread about files being shredded and burned on large scale in State Security headquarters around the country. It all started yesterday in Alexandria, where there was especially much anger after reports had spread telling that former Minister of Interior Habib Al-Adli had ordered the terrorist attack against the Church of Martyrs in Alexandria on New Year’s eve. Yesterday there was also a demonstration at the State Sequrity in Giza, but it was sent back - not by the police, but by people’s checkpoints in there area who were more concerned with the safety of their area, wanting to prevent clashes where cars could burn and property be damaged.
Tonight, the breaking news came on Al-Jazeera as I was having a glass of tea with M. and our friend: “Demonstrators occupy the central headquarters of State Security in Nasr City (a suburb of Cairo).” Similar news come from 6th of October City, where demonstrators surrounded the State Security all day. Documents have been secured, and people held imprisoned have been released. One of them, released in Nasr City today, had been held there for 14 years. In other cities, attempts to occupy State Security offices have been unsuccessful, in yet others, the army has taken them over. In Nasr City and 6th of October City, demonstrators were able to secure files and computers, and video footage from Alexandria shows torture instruments and soundproof doors in the torture chambers. The evidence that is being secured at the moment will cause scandals in Europe, too. Computers secured in Nasr City reportedly contain a German software called Gamma to hack emails and Skype accounts. One video shows a former prisoner showing how a torture instrument was used. It contains elements made in Germany (it is stated at 0:30): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgvIhO1CI8w More news about the secured files are being published online as I am writing this. Some can be found here:
http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2011/03/night-capital-of-hell-fell-down.html
Today, the most wicked and brutal part of the Mubarak regime is falling. And as it falls, a lot of people in Egypt and abroad may fall with it.
Good night from the Egyptian revolution!
Samuli
My first day back in Cairo was devoted to a walk in downtown, meeting friends in Giza and Dokki, and a post-Shafiq football match with a group of friends with whom I used to play football every Saturday in the past years. It is a day marked by a mixture of pride and hope, anxiety and worry, and a new crucial step in the revolution. I start with the football.
As I entered the sports grounds of Gezira youth centre I met R., a musician, and asked him how things are going. “Better”, he said but continued, “but a lot of people have been injured by the psychological war of the days before 11 February, when there was a lot of fear, and many pro-Mubarak songs were made, and that has left many of us with a strong sense of paranoia. That’s why we didn’t manage to play football until today. There were many times when we thought that we should play again, but there was too much anxiety. And there were tensions among the people on Tahrir: Should we do this, should we do that, should we stay, should we go. Only now that [the former prime minister] Ahmad Shafiq is gone, it seems like this is a good moment to relax and play football again.” I ask him if there are any other news in his life. R.: “There is nothing else than the revolution now.” R. put in words what I had sensed with others, too: being committed to a revolution includes a lot of anxiety. There is a continuous tension, a continuous fear of what the system will do, whether the demonstrators will hold together, whether there is enough popular support, on whose side exactly the army is, whether one can still be arrested... A sense of fear and anxiety has kept the revolution running, it has kept people alert and active. But it has also worn them down and created a sense of paranoia.
Gezira youth centre is a little oasis of sport utilities for the general public (entrance fee 5 LE, no membership required) in the middle of otherwise very exclusive social clubs for Egypt’s elites. The football fields are rather bumpy, but it is a pleasure to play there, in a green oasis the middle of the city, and with a marvelous view of the burned down headquarters of the National Democratic Party on the other side of the Nile. It was a good match in the afternoon sun, although the team I played in lost 5 to 4. The people in this football group are mostly left wing, many artists and musicians, but until the revolution most of them were not politically active. For the past month most of them have been busy with the revolution almost full time. This was their first match after the revolution began, and while there was a sense that things were now clearly going the right way and that one could afford to relax, the revolution was still on everybody’s minds. The small talk was all about where they had been on which important days of the revolution, especially during the first days when the police was still attacking the demonstrators. Even comments on the match always took joking reference to the revolution. A counter immediately prompted jokes about counterrevolution.
For my friends, the football was a welcome moment to relax from the tension of the revolution. And taking a break from the revolution is not easy - it comes with problems of its own. J’s girlfriend tells me that many of the people involved in the revolution are now suffering from depression, after the moment of intensive activism for the revolution is over, and they return to everyday life. Many of them have lost their job, others don’t have a job to return to in the first place, and many relationships and marriages have broken during the past weeks. I ask my friend M. what he thinks about this and he says: “Yes, it’s true. After you have been participating in the revolution, ordinary life seems so dull and meaningless. You go to work and do your job, but you don’t feel anything about it.” To participate in a revolution is a very fulfilling experience. It takes over one’s entire life, even one’s dreams. There may be a lot of fear, anxiety and disagreement, but there is a strong sense of purpose: Everything one does matters. When this moment is over, the mundane course of everyday life can be a depressing experience. (I wonder if those who continue the sit-in in Tahrir Square do it partly because it has become so difficult for them to return to the banality of daily life.)
After the match R., the only one with a car, gave us a ride, and political debate continued in the car, this time about the yet unclear voting procedure in the referendum about constitutional amendments in 19 March, and about the upcoming presidential elections. The main potential candidates at the moment are Amr Musa, secretary-general of the Arab League and former minister of foreign affairs, Muhammad ElBaradei, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Husam El Bashtawishi, a judge committed to the cause of independent judiciary during the bast years. None of these candidates represent clearly any particular political direction, and my football friends couldn’t really agree on any one of them yet. R. found that ElBaradei was the only one who had so far presented anything logical and rational, and who had spoked credibly about freedom of opinion and democracy from the beginning. Another one of the people disagreed and said that there were things ElBaradei had said which he didn’t agree on, but in any case, he wants to see the programmes of the candidates before he can make up his mind.
Making up one’s mind is one thing Egyptians are called for these days, and there is an enormous amount of discussion again, although not all discussions circle around the revolution anymore like they did in early February. In the metro and on the streets, more mundane topics dominate. But on Tahrir Square, it is all about the revolution.
On Tahrir square where a significant group of people continued today their sit-in to press for the remaining demands of abolition of State Security, release of all political prisoners, and an official end of the state of emergency. At the same time, Tahrir square was today also the site of an ongoing stream of proud and curious people who came to look at the site of the revolution and to buy revolution souvenirs - flags, posters, t-shirts, and “JAN 25" number plates. Many of them did not support the ongoing sit-in, however, and intense discussions and debates about whether the sit-in should continue or not were going on all around the square.
I stood quite a while on Tahrir square listening to the discussions, and at times debating with the people, too. Everybody had their own point of view, but three tendencies were most clearly present. One were people fully supportive of the ongoing demonstrations until the entire old system is abolished. Another were people who came up with arguments typical of the supporters of Mubarak in early February, claiming that the demonstrators were paid and didn’t even know why they were demonstrating. A third group were people who were supportive of the revolution, and partly had also participated in it, but felt that the continuation of the sit-in in Tahrir now that most of the demands have been realised, prevented the people from returning to work and getting the economy running again. I was especially intrigued about this point of view and asked the people who expressed it: How exactly do thousand people (the remaining sit-in is quite small) keep an entire nation from going back to work? Their answer was that the ongoing pressure on the political system that emanates from Tahrir Square keeps everybody busy in their minds, anxious and waiting for the next major turn of events. As long as the demonstration continues, even with small numbers, they argues, there is no peace of mind to get back to work. A man selling cars for work said that this was not because he wouldn’t go back to work, but because nobody will buy a car as long as there is a revolution going on. Another man said: “If the new government doesn’t fulfill its promises, I come to demonstrate here again. But now we first need to give them a chance.”
But these were not the only voices - in fact, the crowd along the edges of Tahrir square as quite evenly split in people who wanted the sit-in to continue and who wanted it to end, and all of them had something to say to each others. It was quite an impressive scene of a collective debate. The debates were heated, but never aggressive - in fact, with all the disagreement, worry and anxiety that there was, many of those debating were at the same time proudly pointing out to me the very fact that they could now debate and make up their mind freely and without fear.
The debate about the sit-in is not new - the same discussions, I heard, were already taking place on 12 February after Mubarak resigned. But the problem is evident. The sit-in in Tahrir exerts powerful pressure The tricky question that the activists of the revolution face now is how to safeguard the legitimacy of an ongoing revolutionary struggle in the eyes of people who first of all want to get the economy running again and to solve the problem of increased criminality. Different people have different answers, and while some found this a good day to play football, others found it necessary to continue to sit-in, and yet others found it necessary to go and debate with those continuing the sit-in.
The problem of crime and lawlessness causes perhaps the greatest tension at the moment. Partly it is serious crime like armed robberies, but partly it is also petty disorder, and I have been told a lot about chaotic traffic - but I must say that today I found the traffic not more chaotic than it has always been in Cairo. J.says that among the demonstrators there is the fear that this sense can turn into a popular counter-uprising against them. Getting the police back on the streets alone won’t do the job of restoring law and order because people don’t have any respect for them anymore - they have to earn this respect first, and it will be a difficult job. And the citizens’ checkpoint cannot be a long-term solution because the people will need to get to work and sleep again. This will be probably the most urgent task for Essam Sharaf’s transitional government.
With all this anxiety, at the same time there is an amazing sense of pride among the people, no matter what their specific judgement is. A group of young men in Champollion street had painted a sign at the entrance of a one-way street reminding motorists not to drive wrong way. They were guarding the spot and checking that people obliged. They were excessively proud when I took a picture of the sign. A taxi driver who took me to the football field said that Tahrir Square was “a problem”, and in the next sentence he asked me for my opinion whether Egypt will manage to rise to a better future like the countries in Asia, and about how to get back all the money stolen by Mubarak and his clique. Another Taxi driver giving a ride to me, M. and a friend of ours later same evening, was very proud of what the Egyptian people had accomplished, and very optimistic, yet he did not expect things to change quickly: “We can make our country just as good as any country in Europe, we can do that. But it will take time. Maybe things won’t get better for this generation, but the generation of our children and grandchildren will. The problem now is that there are 50% of people who understand the responsibility, but we have also a lot of people who don’t understand it yet.” During the same taxi ride, the discussion again turned to the question of the future president. Should it be an old man so that he cannot stick to his office because he won’t live that long, or should it be a young and dynamic person. It doesn’t make a difference, the taxi driver argued, because whoever the next president will be, he will have to listen to the people, “because they know the way to Tahrir Square now, and everybody can use Facebook now and get organised.” Men at a fast food restaurant where I bought liver sandwiches were outspokenly proud about the fall of Mubarak, although they didn’t think that former prime minister Ahmad Shafiq was so bad. I told them that demonstrators in Wisconsin in the US have taken Egypt and Tunisia as their examples, and they sure were happy to hear that.
I have saved the best news for the end. (Although I’m not sure whether those who just want to get the economy running again would entirely agree ) Since yesterday, there are demonstrations all over Egypt trying to occupy the offices of State Security, Egypt’s feared and hated secret police. Abolition of the State Security is one of the remaining key demands of the demonstrators, and on Friday the ministry of interior declared that the State Security would be suspended and restructured. This did not satisfy many protesters, however, especially after news spread about files being shredded and burned on large scale in State Security headquarters around the country. It all started yesterday in Alexandria, where there was especially much anger after reports had spread telling that former Minister of Interior Habib Al-Adli had ordered the terrorist attack against the Church of Martyrs in Alexandria on New Year’s eve. Yesterday there was also a demonstration at the State Sequrity in Giza, but it was sent back - not by the police, but by people’s checkpoints in there area who were more concerned with the safety of their area, wanting to prevent clashes where cars could burn and property be damaged.
Tonight, the breaking news came on Al-Jazeera as I was having a glass of tea with M. and our friend: “Demonstrators occupy the central headquarters of State Security in Nasr City (a suburb of Cairo).” Similar news come from 6th of October City, where demonstrators surrounded the State Security all day. Documents have been secured, and people held imprisoned have been released. One of them, released in Nasr City today, had been held there for 14 years. In other cities, attempts to occupy State Security offices have been unsuccessful, in yet others, the army has taken them over. In Nasr City and 6th of October City, demonstrators were able to secure files and computers, and video footage from Alexandria shows torture instruments and soundproof doors in the torture chambers. The evidence that is being secured at the moment will cause scandals in Europe, too. Computers secured in Nasr City reportedly contain a German software called Gamma to hack emails and Skype accounts. One video shows a former prisoner showing how a torture instrument was used. It contains elements made in Germany (it is stated at 0:30): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgvIhO1CI8w More news about the secured files are being published online as I am writing this. Some can be found here:
http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2011/03/night-capital-of-hell-fell-down.html
Today, the most wicked and brutal part of the Mubarak regime is falling. And as it falls, a lot of people in Egypt and abroad may fall with it.
Good night from the Egyptian revolution!
Samuli
Thursday, 24 February 2011
Revolution continues in local politics
The revolution continues in local politics
As I’m getting prepared to get back to Egypt in two weeks, I find myself late for the revolution again. This time it’s a revolution of local politics in a small town in the Nile Delta. Yesterday afternoon got I a text message from B telling that he is in a sit-in demonstration (a technique of protest that has characterised the revolution in Egypt, Tahrir Square being the biggest and most spectacular application of it) at the city hall of Motobis in northern Egypt. I called him, and at first I only heard the loud shouts: “mish hanimshi, huwa yimshi!” (We won’t go until he goes) - the same slogan of the demonstrations to remove Mubarak, that now is the slogan of all the local movements to remove corrupt and authoritarian managements and local politicians. B. told that he and many of our shared friends were at the city hall demanding the mayor to step down.
What happened was this. Two days earlier inhabitants of the village had started a campaign to collect all the garbage that covered the alleys of the village in a big collective effort. Cleaning up the village follows the example of the spontaneous cleaning up during the demonstrations at Tahrir square, as well as the cleanup campaign initiated in Cairo and the big cities after Mubarak stepped down. Now the same technique of collective action was taken to the village level. Some political activists have been a little suspicious about these cleanup campaigns, seeing them as just cosmetic action that potentially distracts attention by making people feel good without changing anything. But I think that cleaning up actually carries a genuine and important revolutionary momentum. It is related to that sentiment so many people told me in Egypt on my last visit: “If Mubarak goes, I can finally feel that this is my country.” Cleaning up one’s street and village is a powerful way to make the place one’s own, it is a case in point of the power of action to shape expectations.
And at least in the case of this village, the cleanup certainly didn’t mean that people would stop thinking about political institutions. Yesterday, the people who had been active in the village cleanup campaign - most of them students, teachers, doctors and other rural middle class - went to the town of Motobis, administrative centre of the district, to discuss with the mayor their concerns and demands that had to do with maintenance of the streets, public utilities, and the black market trade and unfair distribution of state-subsidised bread. The mayor (who is not elected by the inhabitants but appointed by the government) strictly refused to talk to them, saying “You think you can do here what they did in Cairo, no way!” In reaction, the people organised a sit-in in front of the town hall, demanding improvements in local administration, and calling for the resignation of the mayor. The standoff continues as I’m writing this.
In Motobis, the revolution has reached the countryside. What began with the head of the state, now continues on the level of local politics, where it is most urgently needed indeed.
A newspaper report in Arabic about the events can be read here:
http://www.shorouknews.com/ContentData.aspx?ID=395578
As I’m getting prepared to get back to Egypt in two weeks, I find myself late for the revolution again. This time it’s a revolution of local politics in a small town in the Nile Delta. Yesterday afternoon got I a text message from B telling that he is in a sit-in demonstration (a technique of protest that has characterised the revolution in Egypt, Tahrir Square being the biggest and most spectacular application of it) at the city hall of Motobis in northern Egypt. I called him, and at first I only heard the loud shouts: “mish hanimshi, huwa yimshi!” (We won’t go until he goes) - the same slogan of the demonstrations to remove Mubarak, that now is the slogan of all the local movements to remove corrupt and authoritarian managements and local politicians. B. told that he and many of our shared friends were at the city hall demanding the mayor to step down.
What happened was this. Two days earlier inhabitants of the village had started a campaign to collect all the garbage that covered the alleys of the village in a big collective effort. Cleaning up the village follows the example of the spontaneous cleaning up during the demonstrations at Tahrir square, as well as the cleanup campaign initiated in Cairo and the big cities after Mubarak stepped down. Now the same technique of collective action was taken to the village level. Some political activists have been a little suspicious about these cleanup campaigns, seeing them as just cosmetic action that potentially distracts attention by making people feel good without changing anything. But I think that cleaning up actually carries a genuine and important revolutionary momentum. It is related to that sentiment so many people told me in Egypt on my last visit: “If Mubarak goes, I can finally feel that this is my country.” Cleaning up one’s street and village is a powerful way to make the place one’s own, it is a case in point of the power of action to shape expectations.
And at least in the case of this village, the cleanup certainly didn’t mean that people would stop thinking about political institutions. Yesterday, the people who had been active in the village cleanup campaign - most of them students, teachers, doctors and other rural middle class - went to the town of Motobis, administrative centre of the district, to discuss with the mayor their concerns and demands that had to do with maintenance of the streets, public utilities, and the black market trade and unfair distribution of state-subsidised bread. The mayor (who is not elected by the inhabitants but appointed by the government) strictly refused to talk to them, saying “You think you can do here what they did in Cairo, no way!” In reaction, the people organised a sit-in in front of the town hall, demanding improvements in local administration, and calling for the resignation of the mayor. The standoff continues as I’m writing this.
In Motobis, the revolution has reached the countryside. What began with the head of the state, now continues on the level of local politics, where it is most urgently needed indeed.
A newspaper report in Arabic about the events can be read here:
http://www.shorouknews.com/ContentData.aspx?ID=395578
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Weapons of a peaceful revolution
A photo essay about some of the "weapons" that made possible the first step of a peaceful revolution in Egypt:
http://www.samuli-schielke.de/galleries/weapons1.htm
http://www.samuli-schielke.de/galleries/weapons1.htm
Friday, 11 February 2011
Power, normality, revolution
Yesterday, I wrote this more theoretical text about the revolutionary spirit. It won't give answers to what will happen today, but maybe some anwers to what has already happened. There is some repetition from my post of 6 February - sorry about that.
It was originally published here yesterday:
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/02/10/power-normality-revolution/
Power, normality, revolution
As I write this, the Egyptian revolution of January 25 continues in the streets of Egypt, and anything that is written these days will bear the characteristic traits of that moment, and will be proven wrong in one way or another by the further course of events. This is one lesson academics can take from this and other revolutions: realities change in a way that forces us to change our way of thinking much faster than we are used to, and to recognize how historically specific our theories are. In this essay, I try to offer some preliminary conclusions about how the revolutionary momentum has already changed the way Egyptians view their possibilities of action. To put it in more romantic words, I try to make some preliminary sense of the revolutionary spirit, but also of some of its limits.
Condition: normal?
I flew to Egypt on January 31, 2011, instead of going for holiday in Finland, where I had hoped to work on an article that was to be named in reference to the experience of a friend working as health inspector in northern Egypt. The inspector’s team’s work consisted of going to a state-subsidised bakery once a day, passing in front of the queue, collecting a pile of bread, and signing in the inspection book: “Condition: normal.” My friend pointed out that this doesn’t say whether the condition is good or not, only that it is the way it is. In the article, I wanted to write about this demoralizing experience: finding lofty promises of development and progress surrounded by a mash of nepotism and corruption, and high aspirations of personal advancement countered by repeated frustration. In the past couple of years, I have become rather critical of the Foucauldian approach of looking at religion, morality, government, secularity, etc. from the point of view of governmentality and subjectivation, because I have sensed that these approaches do not explain how it is to live under the conditions they describe. In the article I was going to write, I wanted to develop a more phenomenological approach to great expectations and grand schemes, looking at everyday tactics of evasion that people undertake to find a minimal degree of human dignity in a world that denies them that. This was a tragic undertaking, I wanted to argue, because it was those very tactics of evasion that, at the same time, constituted the system of corruption, nepotism, and shady businesses they tried to evade.
I was wrong. Suddenly and surprisingly—not only to foreign observers but also to Egyptians themselves—a vast part of the population has gone out to the streets and claimed their human dignity by demanding that the entire “system” (nizam) be replaced. What I had not taken into account was that the demoralzing experience of being forced to become a part of the corrupt system of relationships in order to survive its pressure, had become the breeding ground of a growing sense of anger and an urgent desire to live in a different world—a sense that only needed the successful revolution of Tunisia as an example to find that, rather than coping with the condition of normality, it is, after all, possible to change that condition.
That said, I continue to think that the Foucauldian fashion of studying power is inadequate to understand the revolutionary spirit. Revolution is certainly a matter of affect, but it cannot be understood by means of subjectivation, cultivation, governmentality, or any other approach that highlights the discursive and the strategic. As I have experienced it in Egypt, and as it has been told to me by people who participated in it, revolution is an emotional state, a sensibility of being that is marked by a peculiar shift in the relationship of imagination and action, and by a transient state of exception that stands in an open relationship with the persistence of political and social transformation. In the limited space of this essay, I will try to make some sense of these two points before I attempt a preliminary conclusion about the relationship of power, normality, and revolution.
“This is more than I could have ever dreamed of.”
People I spoke with in Egypt kept highlighting to me the way they themselves had been surprised by the events. Some told me that they had gone to demonstrate on January 25 but did not expect anybody else to show up. Several times, people have expected that the revolution would lose its momentum and that people would become tired and give up, only to be happily surprised by huge new crowds of demonstrators filling the cities’ streets. With growing trust in the possibility of changing things, the demands of the demonstrators have rapidly increased in scope: from asking Mubarak (and his son) not to run in the next elections, they have moved on to demanding his resignation, and now they want to put him on trial. The success of doing something they themselves had been utterly sceptical about just the previous day has given them an immense sense of pride, dignity, and trust in their capacity to change the world. This is the original revolutionary moment: the birth of a sense that something to date unimaginable is in the process of being realized. This stands in a striking contrast to the experience of normality, in which great expectations and promises—be they political, religious, economical, or moral—are always far ahead of a frustrating and demoralizing reality. If, in the condition of normality, reality systematically falls short of imagination, in the condition of revolution, action exceeds the imagined and creates unexpected new grounds of expectation. The revolutionary condition changes the world, not because it would change the logic of governmentality, the relationships of power, or the technologies of subject-making (although that will be necessary in the further course of the revolution), but because it in itself is a change of the subjective life-world of the people involved: an emotional reassessment of the situation, a new way of being in the world.
This is the starting point. But the question, of course, is how permanent this change will be. Right now it looks like the Egyptian revolution is going to be a long one, but one day, it will be over, for better or worse. The question, then, is what the revolutionary condition does to the condition of normality.
Transience and persistence
As an anthropologist who has long worked on festive culture, I have noticed a strikingly festive aspect to the revolutionary space of Tahrir Square. What is taking place there is not just a protest against an oppressive regime and the expression of a demand for freedom. In itself, it is freedom. It is a real, actual, lived moment of the freedom and dignity that the pro-democracy movement demands. As such, this is an ambiguous moment, because its stark sense of unity (there is a consensus as to having absolutely no party slogans on the square) and power is bound to be transient, for, even in the most successful scenario, it will be followed by a long period of political transition, tactics, negotiations, party politics—all kinds of business that will not be anything like that moment of standing together and finally daring to say “no!” But thanks to its utopian nature, it is also indestructible. Once it has been realized, it cannot be wiped out of people’s minds again. It is an experience that, with different colorings and from different perspectives, will mark an entire generation.
A revolution is not a quick business; it requires persistence. And there are different kinds of persistent effects that this moment can have. Those regarding the political system and its entrenchment with the economic system are critical, and they have not yet been realized. They will be the subject of an ongoing struggle. Others, more psychological and affective ones, are already becoming part of a new normality. A particularly interesting one, because it is currently so intensively debated among Egyptian intellectuals, has to do with the figure of the father-president. On February 4, the vice president Omar Suleyman declared that Egyptians had to show respect to the president, because “Mubarak is our father.” In other words, Suleyman took recourse to a social ideology of patriarchal rule, where the father is to be respected even in disagreement. It is a shrewd attempt to employ some deeply rooted sentiments among the people, but meanwhile the sentiments of many Egyptians have changed in a strikingly Oedipal manner. Characteristically, one of the democracy activists replied in a media interview: “My father is dead.” Many intellectuals now argue that this revolution is really a Freudian father-murder par excellence. By symbolically killing the authoritarian father of the nation, they argue, Egyptians are gaining their independence as full persons.
Preliminary conclusions
The degree of success of the Egyptian revolution is still undecided as I write these lines. The situation is critical, and Egyptians are probably facing a long struggle ahead. Whatever the shape of the new normality that will emerge from the revolution, one thing is already certain: The generation of Egyptians who participate in this revolution can never again be governed the way they once were. Their experience of acting and changing their condition, the success of going out to the streets at all on January 25, of throwing back the police on January 28, of establishing law and order in the absence of the police after the lootings of January 29, of organizing mass peaceful demonstrations and putting the entire political system under pressure, has changed the way they understand their scope of possible action. Any attempt to govern them, be it by a democratic government or by the authoritarian system consolidating itself again, has to take this into account.
This leads me to a preliminary theoretical conclusion. Michel Foucault famously argued that his way of thinking about power by no means excludes resistance, but that every form of power produces its own particular form of resistance. Both the normality of the past years and the revolution that began on January 25 compel me to turn this idea around. Before the revolution, the “system” actually consisted largely of the people’s attempts to endure it, which gave it its particularly wicked and demoralising form. As the revolution continues, the “system,” which Egyptians now want to overthrow, is being hastily adjusted by the regime in reaction to a spontaneous mass movement that keeps surprising the ruling elite. After the revolution, new ways to govern the country will emerge, for better or worse. In reversal of Foucault’s thesis, the Egyptian revolution shows that every form of resistance produces its own particular form of power.
It was originally published here yesterday:
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/02/10/power-normality-revolution/
Power, normality, revolution
As I write this, the Egyptian revolution of January 25 continues in the streets of Egypt, and anything that is written these days will bear the characteristic traits of that moment, and will be proven wrong in one way or another by the further course of events. This is one lesson academics can take from this and other revolutions: realities change in a way that forces us to change our way of thinking much faster than we are used to, and to recognize how historically specific our theories are. In this essay, I try to offer some preliminary conclusions about how the revolutionary momentum has already changed the way Egyptians view their possibilities of action. To put it in more romantic words, I try to make some preliminary sense of the revolutionary spirit, but also of some of its limits.
Condition: normal?
I flew to Egypt on January 31, 2011, instead of going for holiday in Finland, where I had hoped to work on an article that was to be named in reference to the experience of a friend working as health inspector in northern Egypt. The inspector’s team’s work consisted of going to a state-subsidised bakery once a day, passing in front of the queue, collecting a pile of bread, and signing in the inspection book: “Condition: normal.” My friend pointed out that this doesn’t say whether the condition is good or not, only that it is the way it is. In the article, I wanted to write about this demoralizing experience: finding lofty promises of development and progress surrounded by a mash of nepotism and corruption, and high aspirations of personal advancement countered by repeated frustration. In the past couple of years, I have become rather critical of the Foucauldian approach of looking at religion, morality, government, secularity, etc. from the point of view of governmentality and subjectivation, because I have sensed that these approaches do not explain how it is to live under the conditions they describe. In the article I was going to write, I wanted to develop a more phenomenological approach to great expectations and grand schemes, looking at everyday tactics of evasion that people undertake to find a minimal degree of human dignity in a world that denies them that. This was a tragic undertaking, I wanted to argue, because it was those very tactics of evasion that, at the same time, constituted the system of corruption, nepotism, and shady businesses they tried to evade.
I was wrong. Suddenly and surprisingly—not only to foreign observers but also to Egyptians themselves—a vast part of the population has gone out to the streets and claimed their human dignity by demanding that the entire “system” (nizam) be replaced. What I had not taken into account was that the demoralzing experience of being forced to become a part of the corrupt system of relationships in order to survive its pressure, had become the breeding ground of a growing sense of anger and an urgent desire to live in a different world—a sense that only needed the successful revolution of Tunisia as an example to find that, rather than coping with the condition of normality, it is, after all, possible to change that condition.
That said, I continue to think that the Foucauldian fashion of studying power is inadequate to understand the revolutionary spirit. Revolution is certainly a matter of affect, but it cannot be understood by means of subjectivation, cultivation, governmentality, or any other approach that highlights the discursive and the strategic. As I have experienced it in Egypt, and as it has been told to me by people who participated in it, revolution is an emotional state, a sensibility of being that is marked by a peculiar shift in the relationship of imagination and action, and by a transient state of exception that stands in an open relationship with the persistence of political and social transformation. In the limited space of this essay, I will try to make some sense of these two points before I attempt a preliminary conclusion about the relationship of power, normality, and revolution.
“This is more than I could have ever dreamed of.”
People I spoke with in Egypt kept highlighting to me the way they themselves had been surprised by the events. Some told me that they had gone to demonstrate on January 25 but did not expect anybody else to show up. Several times, people have expected that the revolution would lose its momentum and that people would become tired and give up, only to be happily surprised by huge new crowds of demonstrators filling the cities’ streets. With growing trust in the possibility of changing things, the demands of the demonstrators have rapidly increased in scope: from asking Mubarak (and his son) not to run in the next elections, they have moved on to demanding his resignation, and now they want to put him on trial. The success of doing something they themselves had been utterly sceptical about just the previous day has given them an immense sense of pride, dignity, and trust in their capacity to change the world. This is the original revolutionary moment: the birth of a sense that something to date unimaginable is in the process of being realized. This stands in a striking contrast to the experience of normality, in which great expectations and promises—be they political, religious, economical, or moral—are always far ahead of a frustrating and demoralizing reality. If, in the condition of normality, reality systematically falls short of imagination, in the condition of revolution, action exceeds the imagined and creates unexpected new grounds of expectation. The revolutionary condition changes the world, not because it would change the logic of governmentality, the relationships of power, or the technologies of subject-making (although that will be necessary in the further course of the revolution), but because it in itself is a change of the subjective life-world of the people involved: an emotional reassessment of the situation, a new way of being in the world.
This is the starting point. But the question, of course, is how permanent this change will be. Right now it looks like the Egyptian revolution is going to be a long one, but one day, it will be over, for better or worse. The question, then, is what the revolutionary condition does to the condition of normality.
Transience and persistence
As an anthropologist who has long worked on festive culture, I have noticed a strikingly festive aspect to the revolutionary space of Tahrir Square. What is taking place there is not just a protest against an oppressive regime and the expression of a demand for freedom. In itself, it is freedom. It is a real, actual, lived moment of the freedom and dignity that the pro-democracy movement demands. As such, this is an ambiguous moment, because its stark sense of unity (there is a consensus as to having absolutely no party slogans on the square) and power is bound to be transient, for, even in the most successful scenario, it will be followed by a long period of political transition, tactics, negotiations, party politics—all kinds of business that will not be anything like that moment of standing together and finally daring to say “no!” But thanks to its utopian nature, it is also indestructible. Once it has been realized, it cannot be wiped out of people’s minds again. It is an experience that, with different colorings and from different perspectives, will mark an entire generation.
A revolution is not a quick business; it requires persistence. And there are different kinds of persistent effects that this moment can have. Those regarding the political system and its entrenchment with the economic system are critical, and they have not yet been realized. They will be the subject of an ongoing struggle. Others, more psychological and affective ones, are already becoming part of a new normality. A particularly interesting one, because it is currently so intensively debated among Egyptian intellectuals, has to do with the figure of the father-president. On February 4, the vice president Omar Suleyman declared that Egyptians had to show respect to the president, because “Mubarak is our father.” In other words, Suleyman took recourse to a social ideology of patriarchal rule, where the father is to be respected even in disagreement. It is a shrewd attempt to employ some deeply rooted sentiments among the people, but meanwhile the sentiments of many Egyptians have changed in a strikingly Oedipal manner. Characteristically, one of the democracy activists replied in a media interview: “My father is dead.” Many intellectuals now argue that this revolution is really a Freudian father-murder par excellence. By symbolically killing the authoritarian father of the nation, they argue, Egyptians are gaining their independence as full persons.
Preliminary conclusions
The degree of success of the Egyptian revolution is still undecided as I write these lines. The situation is critical, and Egyptians are probably facing a long struggle ahead. Whatever the shape of the new normality that will emerge from the revolution, one thing is already certain: The generation of Egyptians who participate in this revolution can never again be governed the way they once were. Their experience of acting and changing their condition, the success of going out to the streets at all on January 25, of throwing back the police on January 28, of establishing law and order in the absence of the police after the lootings of January 29, of organizing mass peaceful demonstrations and putting the entire political system under pressure, has changed the way they understand their scope of possible action. Any attempt to govern them, be it by a democratic government or by the authoritarian system consolidating itself again, has to take this into account.
This leads me to a preliminary theoretical conclusion. Michel Foucault famously argued that his way of thinking about power by no means excludes resistance, but that every form of power produces its own particular form of resistance. Both the normality of the past years and the revolution that began on January 25 compel me to turn this idea around. Before the revolution, the “system” actually consisted largely of the people’s attempts to endure it, which gave it its particularly wicked and demoralising form. As the revolution continues, the “system,” which Egyptians now want to overthrow, is being hastily adjusted by the regime in reaction to a spontaneous mass movement that keeps surprising the ruling elite. After the revolution, new ways to govern the country will emerge, for better or worse. In reversal of Foucault’s thesis, the Egyptian revolution shows that every form of resistance produces its own particular form of power.
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