Circles about circles: On writing about sexual violence

I was part of Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment/Assault (OpAntiSH), one of several groups that fought mob attacks against women in Tahrir from 2012 onward. This piece is about my efforts to write about the group and its work. 

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I thought it would be easier from the distance of New York. 

I sat in front of a fan in my room in south Brooklyn last summer, remembering the details. The paralyzing noise of the square: helicopters, vuvuzelas, patriotic songs, nonsense on loudspeakers. It was quieter in the alleyway by Hardee’s, where we waited, 20 of us or so. The smell of the stagnant street water nearby. The waiting and waiting, smoking cigarettes with a nervous stomach, the superpower alertness of adrenaline, the itchy fabric of the cheap trousers I had bought. 

“You have to wear a belt, Yasmin. Wear a belt and wear a one-piece swimsuit underneath everything. It’s not a joke, I don’t have to tell you this.”

I find that I mostly dislike talking to people in New York about Egypt. I feel tongue-tied by how much there is to explain, and I don’t want to go back to 2011. I don’t want to describe the long slow fall of our aspirations in this city, where everyone nakedly judges one another’s ambitions all the time. 

I go back to Cairo in January and February. I thought I had escaped New York’s brutal winter, but I had forgotten about Cairo’s own cold — how you can’t get away from it, even indoors under sweaters and blankets, how you wear it like unwanted skin. 

I use the opportunity to talk to other volunteers and organizers of the group. 

One of the questions I asked S, when I met her in Maadi, was about how she dealt with the violence, her fear of it, her memory of it. 

“I was terrified. I didn’t know what was waiting for me. But it wasn’t the shaking legs kind of terror. My legs kept walking forward, I couldn’t go back. Once O was inside the circle, once I saw the two women in there, I forgot everything else. You’re so consumed by what you’re doing, the need to make spontaneous decisions, one after the other. Afterward, you have no idea how you made them, what you were thinking.” 

Cairo’s air must be made up of particles of possible and impossible, in equal parts, simultaneously, all the time. 

I circle back from the interviews to the heart of my memory of OpAntiSH. It is January 25th, 2013. I am in an apartment downtown, the makeshift “operations room.” It’s a grand, old, high-ceilinged apartment that has multiple rooms, some opening directly into one another. It has a long balcony with different entrances, overlooking the square below, which is packed with people commemorating the revolution.

Around 15 or 20 people have been working here since the afternoon. There are backpacks and fliers and piles of cheap clothes for what we call “safety kits” —pants, abayas, shoes, underwear. Some first aid material. Painkillers. Sedatives.

A volunteer that I know comes up after she was attacked while trying to help another woman. Her face is stoic. She wants to go into the bathroom and be left alone. I can hear her crying through the door, which she’s left open. I stand frozen, unsure whether stepping inside would be an invasion. So I tell her that I am sitting right outside the door, but will not come in. She cries, says she needs to check herself for injuries. I wait. 

More and more women come upstairs in various states of injury and shock and loss. There is blood and tears and how will I face my family and where is my sister, she was standing beside me, where is she, I held on to her for as long as I could, where is she, where is she.

The people who fought their way into the circles of attack are hurt too. I hear about blades and guns and we’re not prepared and it’s never been like this, we never thought it could be.

I step out onto the balcony for some air and off to one side there is someone crying. Her friend was attacked. “It’s just, it’s her, you know?” she says. 

There are fireworks in the sky.

People are in various states of reaction. Some panic, others find private corners to cry. A few take moments to sit in silence and steady themselves. If someone had mapped out the energy in the space using colored lights, it might be inchoate and dissonant and beautiful.

K has her eye on a small video camera, pointing down at hell. I look down from the balcony onto the square at one point and all I can see are the moving, circular mobs of men, the arms raised, the screams audible.

Later, in that mid-summer week of 2013 when one dictator replaced another and everyone called it salvation, we intervened in hundreds of attacks in the square. Then, abruptly, unbelievably, it was over. We went home and tried to make sense of what had happened in a revolution that betrayed everyone at one point or another because it belonged to no one. 

I write in circles, because at the center is a violence that is too dark. I could confront it with my flesh when I was part of a physical, immediate struggle, when I was part of the impossible organism we had created together. But now, in this stillness, I cannot meet its gaze.