Requiems and dreams: The struggle for Egypt’s memory

A Roman emperor I can’t recall was once told that his people were hungry and angry. His advisor warned him of a possible uprising and revolt. The emperor responded calmly to the panic in his advisor’s voice: “Well, give them bread and circuses.” …Welcome to the Military Show of the Tahrir Skies. I wrote this from a balcony overlooking Tahrir Square in early July 2013, before battling to squeeze it into 140 characters for a tweet, happily re-expanded here.

I watched the masses march into the square and heard the gods say: “Let the games begin.” At 6:30 om, the military began its spectacle of jet-cloud heart shapes and flags. A flag left behind some red smoke, tainting the clear blue skies and triggering me to relive old traumas and struggles.

Red has always painted my socialist dreams and anarchist discoveries, has always been my basic reality. It suddenly became my deepest fear. I sat with my friend and we drank our sunset tea, surrounded by balconies that proudly hosted megaphones broadcasting old, nationalistic, Nasser-era songs. My heart started to sink as the sun sank into horizon and the sky darkened. Green laser beams welcomed the army helicopters as they penetrated the sunless sky.

The laser pointers of July seemed the most celebrated Tahrir accessory in this round of protests. With all these special effects and sounds in place, I felt I was in a video game and decided to engage. I touched the helicopters with my extended fingers and the laser lights carried me back in time to December 16, 2011. This is how memory functions and reliving is experienced: I lived the past as if it was happening all over again.

It was nighttime and I was surrounded by flames, blood and my chaotic revolutionary family, into which I was born when we first marched into Tahrir. I could see Islam, aged 12, directing his laser toward the cabinet building and exposing a sniper, who calmly decided to snipe him: This laser killed innocence and witnessed the birth of a struggle against a military it was now welcoming to the same sky! Islam, my Peter Pan, died (his laser pointer fell with him to the ground) and was registered as an unknown martyr. But at that instant Kazeboon was born to defy the lies told about him and the other “street children” we were accused of sponsoring to fight and die. It was to his soul that we continued to dedicate street screenings exposing those who oppressed us under different banners, whether of nationalism or religious fascism.

It seemed that the role of Kazeboon was to expose a military council that failed to manage a country and violated its people’s dignity and right to life. As it turns out, Kazeboon did more than expose. It became a collective consciousness through which our narrative was stored and preserved into the collective memory I have written about previously.

The Orwellian months of propaganda and oppression that followed June 30 polarized some of us, traumatized others and seemingly manipulated a nation into conformity. Obedience seems to be the goal of this regime and those who fell for it dismissed this great historical finding: Obedience and conformity result in more atrocities and crimes against humanity than rebelling ever did.

To fight notions of obedience and conformity we have to understand how they become ingrained in societies subjected to tyranny. The emperor gives us a daily circus in sky, land, canal and sea. We have taken up a bloody domestic sport called “war on terror” and normalized torture practices. Promises of AIDS and Hepatitis C cures, much like Gamal Abdel Nasser’s claims of a “jeep submarine that will rule the sea,” were celebrated without much noticeable logical questioning.

If we’re living an Orwellian Egypt in the making, are we still able to write our own ending, to fight Big Brother? We have our very own ministry of love, the ministry of torture as described by George Orwell in his novel 1984, together with our own ministry of truth, Orwell’s ministry of propaganda and revisionism. We have living proof that his was no fiction to read for pleasure, but a prediction and warning to nations like ours that are on the path to total conformity, perhaps even falling in love with their own Big Brothers.

Those of us in need of healing, those awaiting justice, find ourselves in an arena of societal struggles over collective memory. We’re not just struggling against the treacherous world Orwell described but also to preserve and tell our story of this struggle. This documentation, this battle over memory, is key in maintaining the struggle for justice and ensuring retribution and proper healing.

We are fighting a protest law out to silence the slightest whisper of freedom that tells our story. Not only do we have to fight for our voices and rights: We have reached the point of having to fight against the vaporization of our existence by the ministry of truth, by official media and regime lies, revisionism and manipulation. We are struggling for Egypt’s collective memory.

This struggle has come to us as naturally as our destiny since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. We engaged organically in activities we thought had no labels, only to discover that what we thought we invented in the streets had labels and scientific definitions, and that our revolution had become a case study for people all over the world.

The collective memory we’re fighting for is manipulated by the regime, but we remain strong and resist, keeping score and remembering correctly and collectively until justice is one day served so our traumas can heal and we can find closure.

We keep memory alive through the digital technology that often counters the official narrative and state media. Memorialization has become a fundamental human right and a tool for healing and for celebrating those who gave their lives for freedom. Civil society initiatives play an important role in this memorialization by documenting ongoing human rights violations and becoming the primary mechanisms through which we honor victims in absence of state-sponsored efforts to commemorate or even acknowledge them. Flags depicting martyrs have led our memorial marches and demonstrations, and the chant of “we won’t forget” captures this struggle for justice and memory.

Monuments and museums that physically mark past violence and repression are another arena of societal struggles over memory. An arena in which both governments and social forces embody memories and enforce narratives. A monument to the police was erected at the center of Tahrir Square in an attempt to erase or transform it as a physical marker — as if by changing Tahrir’s function, the nation would banish it from memory. Following the same logic, the Rabea al-Adaweya Mosque is now used as a service area for security forces.

More often than not we have failed to rename streets after our martyrs, but we recently celebrated the triumph of officially renaming a street after Mohamed Mostafa Karika, killed by the military during the cabinet sit-in clashes of December 2011. The struggle for commemoration continues as more martyrs fall.

Reclaiming public space was seen by many as one of the few successful stories of this revolution, and inspired Occupy movements around the world. Our artists reclaimed cultural spots for their art. “The street is ours,” was a slogan that cheered on young people as they fought for their right to public space. Now the fight is back on and more vicious than ever.

Campaigns like Kazeboon helped in the memorialization process by using public space to show videos countering the official versions of events narrated by the military council and conveyed through state media. Kazeboon was so successful in reaching the broader offline public that the military council established the National Military Media Committee in early January 2012 to counter our narrative of current and past events.

This revolution lacked organization, it’s true, but it showed an abundance of artistic expression. We successfully promoted activism via art. Graffiti tells our story and no matter how many times it’s erased we continue to paint, as we continue to revolt and breathe, despite a law against street graffiti. Music, poetry and tweets fight for Egyptians’ collective memory.

In a clearly polarized nation, there are many contenders for Egypt’s memory. We fight for a history that’s different from those enforced by the Muslim Brotherhood or the military or those who couldn’t care less. We’re fighting for our narrative, which has been attacked and abused by Brotherhood and military.

We continue to fight for our position in this contest over places, memorials and graffiti. We kept score against the military council, then against the Brotherhood, as we currently keep score against the bloodiest regime of them all. We now face Big Brother himself and although it seems we are on the losing side, I feel a new wave of rage is heading his way. It’s a wave that’s still forming and pushing through many obstacles — polarization, media control and propaganda — making victory seem impossible. But such were the conditions that lead up to January 25.

The police and military ask us to let go of memorialization and move toward reconciliation without justice. They do this through pushing rhetoric around “We got rid of Brotherhood for you.” They ask us to accept Big Brother, or they will make us accept through the torture of the ministry of love. They appear to have succeeded when you look around and see so many people under Big Brother’s spell. However those of us fighting conformity still present a threat as we resist his propaganda apparatus and stand firm on the principles of our revolution, free of ideological aspirations and united by a cause.

Judging by the revolutionary spirit I’ve come to know, I expect that many of us will not submit to an Orwellian end. Millions have submitted their hearts to the propaganda apparatus and thousands of those rejecting it have been targeted, killed, detained, tortured and raped. This does not mean the fight for collective memory and justice is over. We’re willing to die before also becoming tamed into the kind of conformity and obedience that will spill more precious blood.

“Mekameleen” (We are continuing) is not an empty romanticized slogan. It’s an important tool for our mental health against depression, defeat and trauma. It is surviving the injustices and our path to healing. We will continue to document our story, fight the state's narrative and hopefully even create a new alternative, a victorious one. The struggle for collective memory will be our fight until Big Brother falls, transitional justice is achieved and the wounds of Egypt have healed.