There had been warnings in plenty, wherever you turned your face, and yet, I was taken by surprise on 25 January. For days I felt dazed, elated, and worried sick all at the same time. 'What next?' was my first question. I had to confess that my own experience had made me thoroughly sceptical of all revolutions -- indeed, of all ideologies, national projects and political causes. In all my cherished remembrances of youthful energy, deep faith and selfless rebelliousness, I could find plenty of sympathy with the demonstrators, but no refuge from doubt. God! All we, my generation, have gone through! The glorious hopes, dreams, sacrifices! And, finally, 1967 and terrible disillusionment; then a victory, in 1973, the moral and material fruits of which were soon robbed by ideological bigots, fortune seekers and social climbers. Then the rise of the tide of religious fundamentalism and its seeping deep into the basic layers of society, so much so that democracy, mechanically applied in the absence of its true spirit, and in the presence of poverty, ignorance, and a long tradition of intellectual oppression that puts a definite ceiling on free thought and wilfully suppresses free choice and the spirit of inquiry in the name of religion, morality, the sacred heritage, cultural authenticity, the general good, or the public weal, seemed to me like a terrible threat, promising nothing but doom and gloom. The alternative was worse: a soulless capitalist, military dictatorship that voraciously sapped the energy of the nation, corrupted its morals and depleted its material and spiritual resources.
But this revolution was different, I argued with myself. It was not thoroughly planned and was largely spontaneous -- nothing like the 1952 military coup d'état in whose shadow I had lived for close on 60 years. But then, what next? For if this revolution was not simply fuelled by a longing for democracy, but was also a protest against chronic unemployment, social injustice, the rising cost of living and the lack of a clear future for millions of young people, the question was, as someone wrote somewhere on the net, "when the bricks stop flying, what will Egyptians do to empower their fellow countrymen to better their lives"? It is true, I thought, as this same writer went on to say, "while the fighting rages in Tahrir Square, the wealthiest abandoned downtown Egypt years ago, and built Californian-style gated communities on the edges of the desert named 6th of October, and Kattameya Hills. These Egyptians walled themselves off from the rest of the country, living much better than the average American, I assure you. If the roots of this revolt are over economics, then replacing a dictator won't be enough."
Yet, for a while, Tahrir Square seemed like a Utopian republic, where, as Yusef Rakha wrote, "Egyptians -- Islamists, Copts, seculars, liberals, leftists, even the angry rabble ... [were] ... able to live productively and peacefully together;" where "all that is civic and public and state-operated about life was smoothly undertaken with infinitely more efficiency and conscience than anybody had ever known anywhere in Egypt." Rakha (a dear, dear friend in spite of our difference in years) went on to say: "In Tahrir, spaces were opened up and, for the first time in our lifetimes, we could see that once the regime left us alone we had a lot more in common than we had ever thought possible; there is a necessary and beautiful space where we can all be together …".
This took me back to the late 1950s, when, as school children, we were herded to Tahrir Square in buses, pumped full of enthusiastic slogans, given little flags to wave, and made to sing national songs after Mohamed Abdel Wahab, who was there in the flesh, like a glorious, ruddy moon (this is how his face looked to me then), momentarily and miraculously descended to earth. Then too, Tahrir Square, indeed the whole of Egypt, had seemed like a utopia where freedom, dignity, social justice and equality were upheld principles. Rakha and his generation, however, luckily or otherwise, were not rushed into Tahrir Square by a charismatic national leader with a definite political programme. In Tahrir Square, in the late 1950s, we had no Islamists amongst us; our future Egypt was to be a democratic, secular, socialist state, we believed. That it would not become either democratic or socialist, and would be secular only in name and outer gloss, we were later to discover at a terrible cost.
Nevertheless, I wondered, shouldn't a revolution have a 'brain", a clear ideological vision, declared goals and basic principles, and a manifesto? This has been an irking question since 25 January. When questioned about these very same points on the BBC Arabic Service, a prominent Islamist said: "Suffice it that we agree on bringing down the regime. This is our common goal now. Our ideological differences and political visions will be sorted out (fought out?) later." Rakha, among many others, acknowledges as vital factors in the success of the revolution the logistical help provided by the very well organized Moslem Brotherhood and the positive neutrality of the army.
With the benefit of hindsight and the wisdom of old people I could have told dear Yusef Rakha that a revolt cradled between the wings of the military and Islamic bigots could not lay the foundation for a free, civil and democratic society. Elated as I was that people had finally got up enough courage to say 'No' and 'Enough', I could not help telling one of my students one night, when everybody was celebrating the army taking charge of the country, that since I had lived all my life under the rule of the military, I had hoped I would be free of them before I died.
In all my life I have learnt one thing: never to argue with the military or with self-proclaimed 'true believers'. A dialogue in either case is at best futile, at worst, bloody and vengeful. While the former have military might; the latter have no fewer supporters than God Himself. How could one conduct a dialogue with people who would not even acknowledge your individual rights as a human being, a free thinker, and a free arbiter in matters of faith, gender roles and sexual identity? Islamic fundamentalists have no truck with such issues; they possess truth, the whole truth, and so help them 'their' god. Such a god as they uphold thought it worthy to sanction the killing of unbelievers -- a sanction that culminated in the Luxor massacre, on 17 November 1997, not to mention the almost lethal attack on Naguib Mahfouz and the assassination of Farag Fouda, among others.
Media reports from Tahrir Square on the first day had sentimentalized and romanticized the event, comparing it once to a merry carnival and commending the self-restrain of the security forces. It made the whole thing seem disturbingly unreal, and I was strongly reminded of Fernando Arrabal's Picnic on the Battle Field. Even the whitest of revolutions must have its fair share of innocent victims and martyrs; when the regime finally bared its ugly face and the first martyrs fell, the revolution became real -- an open struggle for power, as all revolutions, indeed, ultimately are.
And, like all revolutions, this one brought out the best in people and the worst. It was hardly 10 days old and still fighting for survival, when the demented scramble to claim the largest bite possible of the prospective cake began. It was sickening to watch. The will of the nation, which had seemed unified behind its youth, soon splintered into many self- interested fighting factions, each with its own agenda and each claiming sole possession of Truth and Right. The first principles of democracy and human rights -- principles the revolution champions had hoped to instate -- namely: the right to differ without being called a traitor and the right of a defendant to be considered innocent until tried and proven otherwise -- were shamelessly trampled on in the media. Daily, rumours spread like wild fire, ignited by old feuds, petty grudges, vengeful impulses and greedy ambition, leaving in its wake many an innocent victim and shrouding the truth in thick, impenetrable clouds of smoke. Rather than honourably seek out the truth and verify the facts, the media has turned it, wittingly or otherwise, into a hazy, ever elusive ball, feverishly bandied about by grim contesters and impossible to glimpse but for a fleeting second.
You know what happened afterwards; the referendum on the constitutional amendments, maliciously turned into a sectarian fight between Muslims and Copts, felt ominous and seemed to confirm my worst fears. Casting about for a ray of hope, I decided to put aside for a while the wisdom of age (my daughter had told me she had had enough of it, that it was thoroughly depressing and futile, and that every generation had to fight their own battles according to their altered circumstances) and set forth in search of hope; and I found it, albeit fleetingly, in the community of young theatre people.
While the storm was fiercely raging all over the country, and Mubarak was still acting deaf and grimly holding on to power, Cairo's independent theatre troupes, many of them had already been in Tahrir Square from Day 1, took turns at fighting alongside the revolutionaries and improvising, singly or in impromptu coalitions, short performances to cheer up everybody, ease out the long hours of waiting for the good news, or the next eruption of violence, and generally keep up the morale.
Of the spate of shows created in the first flush of the revolution, the most moving were the ones that documented this historical event through the testimonies of people (artists or otherwise, alive or dead) who actually took part in the Tahrir demonstrations, told real stories of other demonstrators, and paid homage to the Tahrir martyrs. These were: Sabeel's Tahrir Stories, put together and directed by Dalia Basiouny in a ritualistic vein, and Halwasa's confessional By the Light of the Revolution Moon, written and acted by Hani Abdel Naser, Mohamed Abdel Mu'iz and Ahmed Fu'ad and directed by Hani Abdel Naser. Delivered in person or by proxy, the testimonies there had the authentic ring of truth; they were simply phrased and candidly delivered, had no trace of empty rhetoric or hollow sounding heroics; they intimately dwelt on what going to Tahrir Square had been like and what it had meant and done to the testifiers. In all, one major theme was 'breaking the barrier of fear and feeling empowered'. Another was recovering a sense of belonging to something called Egypt and taking pride in the fact, together with a sense of dignity and personal worth. If the revolution has done nothing else and achieves nothing in future, this alone would be enough and well worth all the sacrifices.
[b]Changing Arab Identity[/b]
Another theatrical production of Dalia Basiouny was put on under the title Solitaire in March at Rawabet. "A revolution cannot be televised," Dalia (the founder of Sabeel, an independent theatre troupe established in Cairo in 1997, and one of that generation of committed artists, intent on making theatre an "act of positive consequence"), says in it, quoting some American song. Originally, this dramatic monologue was one of three, representing different generations of Egyptian women, in different socio-political contexts and at different historical junctures -- a mother of the 1960s' generation and her two daughters -- and voiced at crucial moments of painful self-discovery and identity definition.
In one of the monologues, Dalia had drawn on her own personal experiences in New York, as an Arab Ph.D. student, after 11 September. Using a fictional persona -- an expatriate, Egyptian, Muslim pharmacologist, happily married and with a charming little daughter -- as a thin disguise to achieve a measure of dramatic objectivity as writer, she had drawn a memorable character, racked by questions of identity, torn between loyalty to the old homeland and the new adopted country, striving to find her own bearings in a fast-developing cosmopolitan culture, and grappling with the new world order's double moral standards, historical prejudices, hegemonic drives and palpable injustices.
Like Dalia herself, her dramatic persona is a Sufi at heart, in search of peace and harmony, and the founts of spiritual energy at the mystical heart of the world. But she is also a determined political activist who believes for a while that demonstrations and sit-ins can stop the war on Iraq and the rabid campaign against Muslims in the West, and force the super powers to give some attention to the plight of the Palestinians. Without real religious convictions of its necessity, she nevertheless wears the Islamic veil in sympathy with her fellow Muslim female sufferers. She is sadly disillusioned, however, vows to quit demonstrating, having realized its futility, and seriously considers becoming officially an American citizen, as her easy-going and 'practical' husband had long advised, and taking the loyalty oath.
Disenchanted with the efficacy of public, popular protests, as Dalia was upon coming back from the States, she, nevertheless, rushed to Tahrir Square on 25 January. And there, her faith was restored. The original monologue was promptly rewritten to connect the events of in the United States to the Egyptian Revolution, highlighting both events as main catalysts in the change the world has been, and will be, undergoing in the 21st Century. With her meagre funds, she decided to stage the re-written monologue at Rawabet, at her own expense, and it came across as a confessional monodrama about self-discovery and the slippery path connecting private and public spaces, the personal and political, and aesthetics, truth and reality.
Professional and more technically sophisticated than any of the records of the Revolution I have seen so far, Dalia's Solitaire -- a multi- media performance that, true to her Sabeel troupe's objective, focuses on 'promoting women's work, researching ways of integrating theatre and video to create non-traditional plays and perform them in alternative spaces,' as Dalia states in the play's programme -- sheds light on the changing identity of Arabs in the past decade and feelingly, humorously and wittily documents the crisis of identity, brought about by world events, that she experienced in her sojourn abroad, and her tormenting search for peace with self and the world.
With a few simple props, meticulously chosen and thoroughly elegant -- a screen at the back for video projections, a cushion on the floor, stage centre, placed in front of a small brazier, a slim, modern chair, upholstered in gaudy red, with a small side table on one side, and a large shawl that eventually serves as an Islamic veil -- and evocative, mood-sensitive lighting, Dalia, plainly dressed in turquoise, with her long, curly hair let down, introduced the performance as a personal, private ritual into which we were for this once admitted, and deftly proceeded to cross the narrow, slippery path between fact and fiction, reality and artistic truth. Sincere as she invariably sounded, she was careful throughout to preserve for her audience a certain aesthetic distance that allowed them to critique her narration as an eyewitness account of a reality mediated through theatrical representation. That the performance prodded you to question the narration even while you were artistically persuaded to credit its truth, was a mark of profound intellectual integrity and artistic proficiency.
Hopefully, more performances of similar integrity will follow and young artists will begin to look candidly at the not too bright picture of the present and all the dangers and challenges that lie ahead.
