Protection, siege and escape: What my body has done

1

My body has shaped a particular dynamic with the social world around me. It is the high wall I have hid behind, and through different stages of my life I have been grateful for it, for the blows it has received on behalf of my heart and mind. Since I was a child, people have assumed that I play aggressive sports, making them weigh every word they spoke with me. My body created the distance needed to protect myself, and whoever accompanied me. This was a comfort for my female friends, and inspired envy and occasional bullying from young males. I made a real effort to learn to play aggressive sports to satisfy other peoples’ assumptions. As the girl in me developed identifiably female features, she needed to defend herself more and more in a body that was provocative and confusing for people who couldn’t automatically assign it a gender.

At times, the image you have of your own body is the exact opposite of the image others have of you. I finally gave up on learning aggressive sports as a teenager, when I realized I simply didn’t like them. In my youth there was a growing fanbase for wrestling, but I could not join it. I shut my eyes during violent scenes in films. 

My mind discovered the magic of reading and the thrill of writing, theater and cinema. My heart won this round. I avidly read and wrote in high school while my body continued to transmit the message to the world that I was capable of aggression, so you’d better be careful.

There are deep losses that result from your mind moving in one direction while your body moves in the opposite one. I lost by drowning in the stereotype my body invited; I did this because I thought it was safer. 

At some point I realized the state of siege I was living in, simply by living here, but also the siege I had imposed on my body by molding it to a character that I had not chosen. This character was entrapped by the constant praise it received from family and acquaintances: a woman worth a hundred men. Our society enjoys comparing women to men as a way of celebration, but what’s really being celebrated is the power that society gives to men. With time, my awareness grew, and so did the sharpness of my tongue as I countered the “hundred men” attack whenever it was mentioned. But the siege continued in many, many ways.

My voice was a constant site for battle in my teenage years. As I grew, its pitch became rough. I wasn’t aware of the change. I lived with the spontaneity of a body that was growing into a large physique and a voice that boomed with an annoying echo. But it bothered my parents, who thought it was unsuitable for a girl. They had to consult scientists and medical specialists. They dragged me to the doctor who, after examining my vocal chords, firmly told my mother: “She has no medical problems, this is just the way her voice is which is not necessarily a bad thing.” My mother was embarrassed as she tried to phrase the next question. The doctor pre-empted her wittily: “Many girls and women have deeper voices, and some are even singers!” The visit to that doctor became a family joke and I decided to sing by order of medical science, although only for loved ones. 

In high school, I decided that I want to write, and I worked in school radio and journalism. We prepared the morning newscast, for someone other than me, someone with a feminine voice, to read. My voice implicated me in daily predicaments: casual hallway conversations with my colleagues — whether serious or amusing — would cause a racket. Female teachers hated the way I expressed myself and commented on it sharply and aggressively with entitled maternal authority. 

But the male teachers were divided into two camps, one camp completely spurned me for the pitch of my voice, which was deeper and louder than theirs. The other camp watched out for everything I did in class and outside it. I was subjected to vengeful behavior by one of them: he was a blond teacher, vain because of having ‘lighter’ skin, who had quite a large physique with a prominent blond mustache and a face that was overly flushed. The students feared his voice and so he was responsible for school security and the canteen. He ran after the schoolgirls with a long stick, using it to hit their bodies wherever it could reach as they ran away from him in the schoolyard after recess. We were a group of students who were able to escape this treatment, because the administration saw that we worked in theater and journalism and represented the school in competition. This gave us leverage, and we traded our hard work for moments of mischief.

This teacher was a patriarchal harasser who enjoyed boundless authority: authority he did not have over the subject he was supposed to teach. Our relationship was silent and guarded until he found a loophole: my contribution in editing a student magazine about the Gulf War in 1998. The issue was called “The Voice of the Students.” He reported this to the administrative government office the school operated under, and kept me for some time in the school canteen. Single-handedly, he collected all the copies of this magazine from the students. Hours passed before I finally left the canteen after a few of the girls had managed to hide some copies, and the administration rejected his request to expel me. 

After I spent those hours in the canteen, and then over the span of three years, we discovered that he had harassed many schoolgirls, but no one felt they could file a complaint against the teacher responsible for school security. The school administration — made up mostly of women — saw him as the shepherd tending to the herd.

I came to loathe my voice and the problems it caused me. This monster needed to be contained so that my life could improve, and the nuisances could end. I tried for a few days and then forgot about it. My pitch rose in excitement and anger and I continued to hear the same nasty comments. I gave up trying to change what I did not want to change! I paid a high price for taking that road and eventually quit trying for good at university, when I discovered the act of chanting in protests.

Chanting political slogans steered me toward the revelation that my voice did not come from my throat but rather from my sense of it, from words we speak that warm hearts and stir feelings. Within seconds, a bridge was extended, and a process of reconciliation began. 

There were more men than women at most protests, and they chanted the smarter, catchier chants. They were ready, carried on shoulders, above the masses of human heads like Sufi masters, and the waves of young people who desired a leading role in the communal chanting would rush forward toward them. Contributions from women were scarce until my generation — ready for competition — showed up. Women who screamed slogans and chants. Among them, my voice was ready to soar and when it did, I was suddenly in an exquisite and personal moment of celebration.

My newfound pleasure was, however, ruined by the Islamic parties — including the Muslim Brotherhood, if they happened to join a protest I was at before the revolution — who refused to chant after a woman. Whenever I would raise my voice, their sudden silence would try to defeat me. Their objection was followed by the sound of a man chanting to lead his people and their voices would rise in power after their silence. All of this changed when the right moment arrived. In their darkest rage, the seas of protesters did not care about the gender of whoever was chanting. My voice and I came face to face in the most intimate encounter to ever occur between us. Ten years ago today my voice rose as I chanted for those whom I did not know, who did not know me. We heard women’s voices chanting along every path leading to Tahrir Square, and it was a sign of revolution.

(2)

I began working in journalism with the same attitude, building walls between myself and my colleagues in a profession whose story was partly written by Fathy Ghanem. My generation of women journalists inherited his story of how some women had built their careers by stepping on the shoulders of their lovers: the big kahunas of the profession. These toxic stories haunt every successful journalist who could procure some publishing space and rise to little eminence. It became implied that a woman journalist has nothing but her body to offer. I saw men overwhelm women with poisonous smiles, while others met with them privately in their offices, ready to pounce if they got a sliver of green light, but most likely without getting even that. The young journalists sat across the desk from their male bosses, trembling and cautious. Some maneuvered while others refused politely. The maneuvering continued in the hallways of newspapers; newsrooms talk about the gorgeous journalists; desk rooms bursting with male voices as though at a wrestling ring as they assess the bodies of new journalists. The department head who publishes about women’s issues sits in the investigations unit surrounded by his choir of male editors to check out the bodies of female colleagues as they walk by in the office corridors. 

I have heard stories from the icons of the contemporary generation of journalists, stories about the tycoons of this profession, stories of harassment and sexual assaults and stories of passion exchanged over the body of a cheated wife, or of winning over a woman after chasing her for months and years because she was property to be bragged about. Now, after we have been flooded with testimonies of sexual assault, I have heard the same people meekly say, ‘Harassment never existed in our days!’ The day will come when the values of Egyptian journalism, built on exploitation and denial, will collapse.

My friend, in her seventies, tells me the painful story of how she loved journalism and grew attached to her job as a field reporter after university. Then she ended her career after marrying her colleague, an older journalist at the magazine where she worked, because he was a brilliant writer. No matter how hard she worked, they would always say that she rose to prominence by stepping onto his shoulder. She left her dream besieged there, in the hallways of newspaper offices to this day. 

At the beginning of my engagement with politics and journalism, there were no serious conversations about sexual assault, even between comrades who were women. Our experience was young and fresh and idealistic. We chanted against the prisons we did not know, and we chanted for freedom without knowing the hefty price we would have to pay. We inherited a history of activism that did accept questioning. With time, the dark stories every woman activist had with men in political movements came to be known, from sexual exploitation to complicated marital infidelities. What was clear then was that women did not share these stories among themselves. They remained dark secrets, staining only the women involved. Men monopolized the narratives of these relationships while women were left isolated and cut off even from their comrades in gender.

It goes without saying that since the men controlled these stories, sexual assault and exploitation were abandoned causes. Even worse, bringing up these issues was declared a distraction to those working in the public space and political activism. This is most apparent in the comments of leading figures, both men and women, of the 70s leftists whenever public opinion becomes engaged with a testimony of sexual assault for some days. Finally, something that puts Nasserists and Communists on the same page. 

Our political mothers did not pour out their testimonies to the public as the women of my generation are doing. Very few of the women of older generations expressed their plight. At the heart of it was Arwa Saleh who left our world through a window, leaving behind her narrative to confront our generation, the generation that rose on the debris of hers. I have thought about this many times. Did Arwa leave only because she could speak? Does speaking up save us or kill us?

Many women of the 70s generation cowered in marriages and seemingly stable family lives that were actually imploding. They made an effort toward normalized and traditional patterns of relationships, despite their claims of political progressiveness. Perhaps they wanted to defend themselves or somehow subvert the stereotype, advocated by the all-virtuous state authorities, that communists are sexual perverts.

The only battle I lived through in which men of the opposition were concerned with sexual assault was the day women protesters were sexually harassed at the Journalists Syndicate, a day that came to be called the Black Wednesday of 2005. The survivors and their supporters decided to blow up the case on a local and international level, and their lives turned to hell because they insisted on prosecuting the predators. Although the opposition used this incident to embarrass the regime, it never became an imperative cause on our political and activist agenda. Instead, violations against women remained secondary in the school of contemporary activism. The widespread state of denial which overcame the opposition in the face of complaints by women who were sexually exploited by activists, prominent journalists and artists are not at all strange. They would accuse women of sabotage, of conspiring against the movement and working with state security: rotten accusations that are still in use to this day. 

It’s only after women started coming forward with testimonies of harassment and assault in the last three years that liberal and leftist parties adopted regulations and bylaws to sanction sexual transgressions. It is most likely that, before this moment, such cases were not taken up seriously in conversation. While political slogans dominated the revolutionary moment, hundreds of women made enormous efforts to establish groups to fight sexual harassment in the Square. Revolutionary groups responded to this cause with aggression; some of them went so far in their denial of the violence that was taking place that they claimed harassment was only happening in order to taint the image of the Square. But as the violence against women increased, and after we had witnessed things that we wish we could erase from our memories forever, denial was no longer possible.

I remember a night at the Journalists Syndicate when women first mentioned the virginity tests they were forced to undergo by Egyptian military personnel after they had been arrested, bearing the cruelty of this horrific physical examination amid the revolutionary moment. They were doubted, defamed and their stories were denied. If it were not for them, this crime would not have become known to the public and we would never have known the high price women paid to take part in the Egyptian revolution. It is telling of what the Egyptian woman faces in her current struggle that the man who defended this practice has now become president, asserting ultimate virtue in his men invading the vaginas of detainees.

In the current moment, women are fighting battles on all fronts. We are witnessing the biggest wave of women speaking up for themselves and the problems they face. It has not been easy. They are paying the price with defamation and imprisonment because they dared to step away from the system of fake values associated with the Egyptian family. In light of recent events, conversations about consensual relationships, marital rape and redefining harassment and sexual exploitation are being opened. We would not have dared to discuss these issues in public in the not-so-distant past. That we are doing so now only shows that a revolution has happened here.

(3)

For years, I lived under the skin of the girl who could hit anyone, at any moment. My body was familiar with physical engagement; it had been trained to attack by daily encounters on the street, the metro and while reporting. After being consistently generous with my physical energy when I or those around me felt threatened, I realized that this was not my best element. I was pushing my body, forcing it to engage in battles that were heavy at times, and it would emerge from those battles exhausted and unable to comprehend the violence that had taken place. It took my mind years to understand all the defense tactics of this body.

While retracing common histories with friends, I discovered that I shut out every violent encounter right after it had happened. Friends recall things they witnessed me doing, things which I do not remember. My mind is in denial of past actions and when I try to recall them, I see a bottomless black abyss within. Only my body recalls, as it keeps the memory of a baton hitting the back or of a painful shoulder to itself. I came to the realization that I treat my body like a shield from actual pain. But the body stores this pain and lets it out at an exact chosen moment. When this happens, no painkiller will take effect. When the body speaks, one comes to know it, to truly know this body as it recalls the shock it has stored from a moment we thought we had passed.

Now, as my consciousness remembers some of those emotional moments, I feel their deep reverberations because as the Vietnamese writer Vu Tran writes, “What is forgotten quickly is only bound to be remembered more.”

Does this mean that I have completely survived the aftermath of terrible harassment? Of course not.

These are matters which women tackle using all possible defense mechanisms starting with trying to forget the incident or pretend that it did not happen, until it resurfaces years later as if resurrected with all the painful details. This requires a long journey for the self, one which has no certain outcome: will we find revelation, and be able to heal the pain in the places it truly resides? Or will we find more bleakness, be led to more silence? Perhaps I have survived recognizable forms of harassment at university and workplaces, but this came at a price of no less enormity. Bullying and mocking; faces that are blatantly perplexed at this strange body passing amidst a storm of eyeing and predatory behavior. Eyes search my body for signs of the femininity which my voice destroys. Others are even more baffled if I act spontaneously and confidently, thinking that being forceful and daring are behaviors that belong only to men. A woman must be timid and wait patiently for support, and for saving. Once they determine my gender, we arrive at the point where “a woman worth a hundred men” is said to express admiration, and “manly woman” is said to condemn and mark my body as odd. This was a survival that felt like drowning. 

The memory of the body is foggy, unclear, it singles out some emotions without their larger context, merely hands violently groping sensitive body parts violently. This moment does not go away nor does its effect lessen with the passage of years. We are all beaten in every protest that ends with police attacks, but our bodies receive them doubly. Every predator knows how to hurt women and how to hurt the sense of masculinity in their men. We all know how burying these happenings was the golden solution to brush off the heaviness of the moment. This cycle of hell continues to roll on quite efficiently. As women who experienced most of the political events of the past 20 years, we have yet to witness safe public gatherings in this country. Not even the peak of our collective euphoria the night when Mubarak was ousted was safe: the night the state of utopia ended, making way to the more violent and exhausting aftermath.

Like many women who have endured injuries by tear gas, bird pellets or harassment, I have at times been pushed to physical engagement. Four years after the revolution started, my body began signaling its pain, loudly and repeatedly. At first, I imagined that there was nothing strange to it; the body falls ill occasionally. I rose above it all, and denied the nature of my ailments and their timed appearances. I was convinced that being on medication for weeks would fix what had malfunctioned. This did not work, and my life was on hold as I could not get out of bed without help on some days. I slowly came to discover three chronic illnesses: high blood pressure, a herniated disc and chronic sinusitis. I was only in my early thirties.

For some time, I was angry at my body’s weakness, rejecting its helplessness and decline at such a young age. But mine was not an individual case; everyone around me was truly suffering. There is no better explanation than “post-traumatic stress.” There was my body speaking of what my mind could not quickly process. I monitored the pain and by forcefully trying to remember certain incidents, I began to touch upon its true source.

Whenever the pain in my neck was aggravated, I would start to feel every strike, every blow my neck had taken. Surprisingly, a specific moment — one I had thrown in the pit of my memory — came back to me: being surrounded by informants and police officers at the entrance to Ismail al-Mufatesh Palace in Mounira, in downtown Cairo, who beat me badly during one of the protests in anger over Khaled Said’s death. I tried to fight them and then decided to play defense and protect my head and my partly torn clothes. The vertebrae in my neck took all the beatings, and my body stored this incident in its memory, without processing it through my mind which tried to deny its occurrence. Through summoning this image, I watched my body’s movements when it was under attack to realize that for years it was my neck that bore the consequences of every violent clash that I was part of.

Based on this, I came to realize the depth of my bodily hindrances. I returned to my soul, to try to repair it from the memory of assaults I had imagined I had already processed. It was a long journey. I was supported by friends and a great support network with shared experiences in surpassing pain. They remain the only good to be harvested in these years of dire dictatorship.

Only now do I realize that without all the astounding things that have happened and which continue as direct echoes, pushing this society to revolt since January 2011, I would have been imprisoned in a body I did not know in a bubble of useless political work that does not see how the freedom of this country starts with the safety and freedom of my body. On the tenth anniversary of the revolution, I find myself in need of creating boundaries between a moment that has passed, never to return, and the infinite hope for an encounter with my new voice, sometime soon.