The mattering of Egyptian life

On the morning of January 24, 2015, a large hole sat in the middle of Midan Tahrir.

The memorial to security forces that had previously occupied the center of the square, and that had been subjected to repeated vandalism and graffiti from activists who claimed it had co-opted the memory of the revolution, was dug up by government workers in the weeks prior to the revolution's anniversary without any official mention of what would replace it. Instead, bulldozers and barriers sat scattered on top of uneven mounds of sand and debris, and the space that had so often been dynamically host to bodies, tents, stages and banners over the last few years was reduced to a construction site in disarray, emptied of memory.

On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, not far from the anti-monument in Tahrir, a demonstration organized by the Socialist Popular Alliance Party snaked its way through the center of Cairo. The small group carried banners and a wreath of flowers dedicated to the revolution’s many martyrs, chanting “bread, dignity, freedom” as they headed towards Tahrir, where they planned on laying the wreath. After briefly stopping in Talaat Harb Square, state security forces fired Birdshot and tear gas into the protest without provocation, killing Shaimaa Al-Sabbagh, a 30-year-old activist from Alexandria.

The responses to Sabbagh’s death have been radically diverse: activists and revolutionaries in Egypt argue that she was murdered by a military regime that has lost all regard for human life, the state officially denies all responsibility for her death and instead offers the absurd theory that it was actually another demonstrator that shot and killed her, and conservatives have gone so far as to suggest that she deserved being killed just for having participated in a demonstration, equating protest with terrorism. No videos or photos have emerged of the precise moment she was shot, preserving just enough uncertainty for these different narratives to circulate online without interruption, figuring her life as mattering (or failing to matter) in deeply conflicting ways.

Sabbagh’s death should prompt us all to consider under what conditions lives actually matter and how they come to do so. It is horribly inadequate to declare, borrowing from recent conversations in the US, that “all lives matter” as some form of abstract universal truth, when it is so painfully obvious that some lives come to matter much more (or far less) than others. Indeed, at the very heart of the issue is the struggle to understand the complex processes of mattering themselves, the manifold practices, forms and relations that forcefully call things to matter for us and for others. What diverse assemblages produce the mattering of Egyptian life?

I would like to say that mattering has to do with memory, but only if we understand memory not as something curtailed to the past but rather as a lived experience and relation of the present. These diverse forms of mattering come to be through the activities of individuals and communities, and also include materialities and environments that are far more complex and queer than what we would simply call human. The monuments built of stone, the digital photographs, texts and videos circulated in pulses through networked fiber optic cables, the chants that cut through the air and echo off of the sides of buildings, the still-wet spray paint dripping down the surface of a police barrier, the flock of birds that collectively cry out after a gunshot, the used tear gas cannister laying in the gutter: all of these constitute forms of expression that carry the past into the present, an active memory of what is passed but not yet fully past, forms of matter that may possibly come to matter.

In post-revolution Egypt, so many have died under such unjust circumstances and have failed to manifest as having mattered. Mattering, after all, is never universal or uniform; things and lives matter to varying extents for different people, and for others sometimes they don’t matter at all. A life only matters when it calls into being new things in the present, even when it may no longer be fully in the present itself. These forms of mattering invite the creation of new alliances and ways of being-together in the world, new ways of saying “we”, that themselves have the potential to set into motion new matterings. We are all incessantly differentially involved in these motions, picking up and collecting things as we move through life and carrying them along with us, continuously involved in making things matter again and again with the repetition of actions and gestures.

One of the ways that Sabbagh’s death came to matter with such intensity was through the prolific sharing of an affectively powerful photograph of her just after she had been shot. The image is framed in a way that emphasizes her stare off into the distance, her face and sweater dabbled with blood while she is being embraced by her colleague, capturing a fragile life on the precipice of a senseless death. The image took on an acute gravity that attracted many to identify with her, and to assert that Sabbagh would continue to matter for their lives. In the numerous protests that took place the following day on the revolution’s anniversary, many used her name in their calls to revolt.

It’s important to note that Sabbagh’s death also specifically mattered in the way that it did because it took place the day after the Egyptian state imposed a seven-day period of mourning for Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, who passed away from a pneumonia infection at the age of 90. The period of mourning included the cancellation of the planned celebrations for the anniversary of the revolution as well as national police day, both of which uncoincidentally fall on January 25. Abdullah’s passing prompted leaders from all over the world to visit Saudi Arabia to pay their respects, pronouncing how much his life had mattered to them. When these various heads of state acknowledge only the lives that reaffirm their own importance, they engage in the most conservative of ethical postures: that it is only themselves that matter, and by extension those that support them in their mattering.

These state discourses of mourning appear as particularly empty when considering the broader contexts that they occur within. Large numbers of Egyptians perish every year from crumbling infrastructure, traffic accidents, poverty and pollution, and yet there are no state monuments to those that have starved from malnourishment nor are there weeks of mourning for those that have died in Egypt’s prisons. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood have been killed en masse by security forces, and not only are they not publicly mourned (political polarization has meant their deaths do not matter for many), but reports of their murder have been repeatedly censored. It is clear that these people do not matter to the state, or perhaps they only come to matter when they are revolting and even then only as a matter to be exterminated. Sabbagh’s death is exceptional because of how it has mattered to so many, and how it could potentially come to make the myriad lost lives of the revolution matter in ways that we cannot anticipate.

After her death, Sabbagh’s body was transported back to her home city of Alexandria where a funeral procession was held. As they carried her body through the streets, those that attended chanted against the regime and demanded that those that killed her be held accountable. In Cairo, security forces canceled memorials for Sabbagh, citing security concerns, and the Ministry of Interior has continued to release statements denying their culpability in her death, claiming that media accounts have “failed to convey the reality.” In truth, the ministry cannot undo the way that the reality of Sabbagh’s death has continued to matter as new revolts emerge. Less than a week after her murder, a group of women organized a demonstration on the street where Sabbagh was killed. Holding signs while chanting, “the Ministry of Interior are thugs” and “down with military rule,” the women converged in the face of security forces and Sisi supporters on the edge of Talaat Harb Square, risking their own lives to carry the unresolved matters of the past into the present.

Tragically, and too often, we only come to value lives after they have already been extinguished. Once someone is gone, there is nothing we can do to undo history and bring them back. What can be done, however, lies in the way that their life and death can come to substantially change matters in the present. There are innumerable ways in which memories can give new form to the lives that we wish were still here, resonating with new pasts that we continue to create in the condensation of every passing present moment. Whether Sabbagh’s memory finds life in protests, in memorials, in graffiti, in photographs, in birds’ calls, her life persists in the ways it continues to call things that matter.