Cairo: My City, Our Revolution - Essay Example

Cairo: My Our Revolution The literary output of Arab male is usually contextualized within its national, cultural and canonical setting. For instance, Naguib Mahfouz is immediately associated with Egyptian literature, while Khalil Gibran is recognized as a Lebanese poet, and Nizar Qabbani as a prominent figure in the modern Syrian literary landscape. In contrast, their female counterparts are often classified and marketed as “Arab women writers.” The grouping of writings made by Arab women mostly acts as a subset of both women and post-colonial studies. The categorization of Arab writing often extends into and encompasses the Middle Eastern and North African women’s studies. Although these classifications represent appropriate categories, they are extremely general. The rise in cases of sectarian conflicts around the Arab world and spread of Islamism after pan Arabism has necessitated the interrogation of the significance of the word “Arab”. Nonetheless, as is often the norm, the cultural classifications tend to be hard to change or transform. Nevertheless, the crude act of lumping female authorship in the Arab World into the category of “Arab women’s writing” undermines the diversity and varying experiences of Middle Eastern women. Conflating Islam with an Arab identity, this genre erases the historical, cultural, and sociopolitical distinctions that mark the lives of Arab women. In fact, it perpetuates what Miriame Cooke describes as the “Arab woman myth” (17). According to Cooke, Arab women within this genre are “more than victims. They live apart, far from places that give space to speech. Their mouths are covered, and their voices are strangled” (20). The category/ classification ‘Arab women’s writing’ tries to give to the ex-colonizer the odalisque when it is at its worst level. This leads to a sexualized (although politically correct) view in regard to the Oriental other. As such, the economic and socio political effects of de colonization have led to the creation of a peculiar reversal. Therefore, an oriental woman has generally become the writer (Arab woman writer) who mostly sells to the ex (colonizer) her captivating story which is characterized by extreme oppression, liberation and consequently the acceptance of western norms/values. In this light, the category of “Arab women’s writing” can be seen as a kind of conscious literary fetishizing of the self in which the teller performs the empowerment of the Western reader. However, there are texts within this genre that subvert the typical tropes and formulaic conventions of these monolithic metanarratives. Soueif’s Cairo: My City, Our Revolution is such a text. Authors often encourage their audiences to view Autobiographical writings as primarily communicative processes of linguistic or literally practice and not as just manifestations of specific moments of history or not as constructive and psychological processes of the self. Thus, autobiographies are in most instances characterized recurrent and common experiences in addition to the extra textual or textual elements that elicit responses from the audience. Personal narrations in most cases elicit the effect of authenticity and truth in the reader’s minds. Authenticity effects are central to a people’s perception of writing as having the power to subjectively show or convey social and political experiences. Authenticity thus relies on the narrative and stylistic features of the author’s work. These characteristics have often been neglected in traditional autobiography narratives. Through an emphasis on cultural and linguistic hybridity, Transnationalism, communal identity, personalizing the political and politicizing the personal, Soueif weaves a narrative that functions as an act of political, cultural and literary dissent at a local and global level. Soueif opens to the world a different Arab world dotted by political motivation via her refined collective autobiography which covers the Egyptian revolution. Thus, she showcases a world (Arab) that is consciously aware of the neo imperial and colonial oppression. Additionally, soueif paints this Arab world as a region where the realpolitik’s domain is made up according to the gender solidarity and heterogeneous ethnicity which supersedes the limitations of religious and national identification. Soueif chronicles a personal tale of the eighteen day Egyptian uprising. Subsequently, she inserts an epilogue in the text. From a reporter’s standpoint, she analytically and descriptively presents her narration of the uprising in such a way that she brings her audience closer to her world. To bring her non-Egyptian audience closer, Soueif employs a stylistic writing. Her text’s primary audience is non-Egyptian. To best make the foreign audience comprehend the text, she includes two almost similar maps of Cairo city in the first and last parts of her book. Furthermore, she highlights specific locations of prominence on the maps. Although the maps look identical, they have their difference; the first map depicts Cairo city while the second map represents a zoomed view of the revolution area of Cairo. As such, the difference between the two maps represents the two elements (city and revolution) contained in the book’s title Soueif’s work is categorized as an autobiographical writing since the narrator, protagonist, and author all come together and subsequently offer a fact based personal and subjective political happenings/ experience. Thus, the author structures the story in a diary like style. When based on autobiography theory, Soueif’s writing Cairo: my city our revolution does not fall into the classification of a memoir or a diary but rather comes out as a hybrid autobiographical text. From the beginning, the author of the text presents herself as both a reporter and an active participant or demonstrator during the Egyptian revolution. Moreover, she depicts herself as an Egyptian national narrating first hand experiences of the revolution. She thus combines her nationality with another identity element. Therefore, as she becomes a reporter, documenter, historian, and observer of the Egyptian revolution, she brings into focus the female intellectual self while presenting the historical happenings via a participant observer view. As such, her work comes out as a hybrid narrative which is characterized by the intersection of memoir, diary, history, journalism and testimony. In the opening Preface, Soueif states, “Jean Genet, in his book that I most admire, Prisoner of Love, writes: ‘I am not an archivist or a historian or anything like it… This is my Palestine revolution told in my own chosen order.’ I cannot say the same. This story is told in my own chosen order but is very much the story of our revolution.” Integral to the Continental tradition of authorship, the autobiography, as a genre, occupies a unique history that suffuses the autobiographical ‘I’ with Western colonial and neocolonial ideology. The sovereign ‘I’ adopted by Genet implicitly invokes the rational, coherent, autonomous, masculine, Western individual known as the ‘the universal human subject’ or simply ‘man.’ According to Smith and Watson: Cultural attachment to this autobiographical ‘I’ signals an investment in the subject of “history” and progress for this “man” is the subject who traveled across the globe, surveyed what he saw, claimed it, organized it, and thereby asserted his superiority over the less civilized ‘Other’ (27). Transforming from exposition to prophecy and from polemic to lyrical while simultaneously mixing varying world views into images, the prisoner of love thus cannot be succinctly defined; however, in manner akin to T.S. Lawrence, Genet re-appropriates and claims ownership over the Palestinian narrative. Post-colonial theorists have often come to the realization that autobiography is one of the west’s concepts that is ingrained with the process of neo imperialism and colonialism (Smith, Watson, 10). The post-colonial theorists regularly posit that since the autobiographical ‘I’ is basically a western element (colonizer), the previously colonized subject becomes complicit if she takes up the ‘I’ construct. Hence, she thus gets involved in the colonizer‘s individualism romance. Spivak queries whether social groupings who are mostly not represented politically can find a voice to speak for themselves. She came up with this question while on assignment on patriarchal and colonial discourses (1). As an Arab woman, writing in the tongue of the former colonizer, Soueif destabilizes the construct of the sovereign ‘I.’ In reclaiming the narrative of the city, and emphasizing the communal rhetoric of revolution, Soueif posits a dual consciousness, the self as culturally defined and the self as different from the cultural perception. Hence, she appropriates a hybrid literary space to assert a rooted-cosmopolitan identity, subvert the politics of language and experience and reshapes the paradigm of national identity in the narrative. Bearing this comment in mind, Soueif’s work can be read as a nuanced collective autobiography. As a type of transgression, the collective autobiography depicts an identity search that is taken to entail both the post-colonial and female concepts. Authoring an autobiography depicts a transgression since the art of focusing on the person (individual) challenges the collective ideal. Nonetheless, on a wider perspective it (collective autobiography) is transgressive primarily because it bridges the individual and communal borders. Thus, the collective autobiography becomes a place where both the other and the self-converge. The author’s (Soueif) narration is seen as being communal since she is accompanied by her family members from the onset of her narration. The author’s change from the use of ‘we’ to a singular ‘I’ clearly illustrates her aim and objective of associating herself with others: So we ran through the underpass, scrambled up the bank and found ourselves within, inside and part of the masses… Close up like this it was people, individuals persons with spaces between them- spaces into which you could fit…we stood on the island in the middle of the road and that was the moment I was part of revolution” (6). This crucial moment illustrates the author merging singular personal consciousness with her fellow demonstrators thereby creating a different new identity. The new identity is the self as being part of other demonstrators, in this instance at the bridge. Moreover, the self also encompasses the other demonstrating masses in the whole of Egypt. it is under these instances that the author identifies herself with the masses. She thus belongs with the people participating in the revolution. Verena Klemm argued that the poly biography or collective autobiography is vital for a writer in the diaspora since it accommodates the isolated and exiled people. In this sense, Soueif can be read as a cosmopolitan Shahrazad, who emphasizes female agency by narrating the female subject back into national and revolutionary discourse. Contesting the perceived ‘muted’ cultural status of Arab women, Soueif’s approach explores an alternative notion of subjectivity that is simultaneously individual and collective, and indigenous and diasporic. By avoiding cynicism, over sentimental narration and hyperbole, the author (Soueif) achieves this goal. Soueif takes time to illustrate the city’s (Cairo) intricate mosaic of contemporary social and political lives despite experiencing first-hand the memorable, life changing and extremely traumatizing experiences: liberals and Islamic fundamentalist, thugs and rebels, conservatives and feminists, and the common people and the elites. She also adds a personal touch to the narrations. The author writes an open ended text because she acknowledges that the process of transformation from dictatorial rule to democracy is a very complex and difficult one. As a result of this, she employs a humorous politically charged prose in the text. Soueif goes ahead and gives some information about the revolution thereby reminding her audience about the determination and courage exhibited by the Egyptian people who could no longer bear to be oppressed. To create a better and good future for themselves and generally for the society, the people revolted against the oppressive regime. She states that it is optimism which propelled the people to demand for change on 25 January. The Egyptian citizens would not have gone to the streets to demonstrate if they had not been optimistic. This turn of events points to the fact that optimism is every person’s duty (186-194). Soueif’s Cairene narrative is characterized by interruptions of past reminisces, and occasional glimpses and insights into the future. For example, after the withdrawal of Egyptian police from the war and subsequent takeover of the army on January 28th, the text shows some nostalgic instances from the past brought to the present: The memory of her “younger self, ablaze with love and poetry and […] sitting, leaning across the table from the man I love, the man who has followed me from London to Cairo. “ Such memories are often brought to the fore throught the entire narration when the major areas where the revolution took place are visited. In the text, the author in most instances compares the past with the present. Admittedly, most of the memories which are aroused by the present moment are often family related. The constant shift exhibited in the text might be as a result of the author spending a lot of her time abroad. As a result, Cairo city has metamorphosed to occupy a sentimental/mental setting instead of just being a normal place. The geographical distance experienced by the author has created a non-permanent distance which enables her to make strikingly visual changes. She attaches a personal history to the Egyptian revolution. Memories flood her with a whole sense of personal history. She writes a narration where she places Cairo city in the center surrounded by a continual state of flux due to these extensions which are mostly temporary. Rather than presenting the city’s biographical account, it provides a lifetime autobiographical narrative. It encompasses both the present and the past where the city of Cairo comes out as the self’s metaphor, as she remarkably shifts across time, narratorial and stylistic boundaries. The author furthermore uses a ‘concrete now’ situation to go back into memory lane which is shaped by present incidents, places, events and people. Cairo is characterized by the always sense of personalization, emotional dimension and intimacy. Through the use of anecdotes and memories in the text, the author manages to achieve the characteristics of Cairo during the revolution. For instance, the demonstrators and the army clash at her aunt’s house/ apartment. The government buildings which previously were symbols of political and military power are now locations of civic battle (10-11). Partly a memoir, partly a chronicle of the Uprising, the text is both intimate and public. Soueif writes in her introduction that the book is "an intervention, rather than just a record" (xiv). The author’s narrative also differs from the traditional chronicles in that she abandons following a linear chronological order in the text. This is another vital characteristic wwhich distinguishes the text from the general traditional chronicles. She moves months forward and backward while at the same time inserting them into each other. Places, experiences, and times are in most instances juxtaposed whilst stories are being interwoven. This characteristic involves the audience since the readers’ memories are evoked. This change of the narration might be taken to further the significance of female individuation and textual authority oppressed by dictatorial structures. The author adds her sentimental feelings and melancholy over the present towards Cairo. In addition, she exhibits nostalgic characteristics for a past filled with glory. She yearns for optimism and reconciliation of the future. Thus, there is a clear merge between the city and Soueif. The city adopts a motherly personality in the text: "The city puts her lips to our ears, she tucks her arm into ours and draws close so we can feel her heartbeat and smell her scent, and we fall in with her, and measure our step to hers, and we fill our eyes with her beautiful, wounded face and whisper that her memories are our memories, her fate is our fate" (9). Soueifs detailed and jubilant narration of the revolution is brilliantly juxtaposed with Cairo’s portrayal while under the corrupt and despotic Mubarak government. The Mubarak regime reduced "Cairo into a clown" (43). The author portrays the happenings before the revolution and thereafter the events which contributed to the revolution: "Streets were dug up and left unpaved. Sidewalks vanished. Prime and historic locations became car parks. Streetlights dimmed. Nothing was maintained or mended (43). Hence, one of the main projects of the revolution was to save the city that has been "de- graded and bruised and robbed and exploited and mocked and slapped about" (45) and to "reclaim our country" (7). Here Soueif links the permeating sense of decay, stagnation and loss that is part of Cairo’s urban life as a being a major mind state in the author’s individual and collective consciousness. It this fusion of space, individual subjectivity and collective solidarity that allows the author to view the revolution as a personal reclamation of the city when she states, “my city is again (9). Soueif subversively and playfully re-appropriates colonial and neo-imperial images of oppressed Arab womanhood. According to Said, within the framework of Orientalist discourse, Arab society is often reduced into a submissive female figure waiting to be unveiled and liberated by a virile colonial presence (309). In her description of Cairo, Soueif reconfigures this colonial discourse of rescue. Under Mubarak’s regime, Soueif personifies Cairo as a battered maternal figure in need of a liberator. However, the task of freeing her from militaristic patriarchal despotism becomes a collective communal duty rather than a contemporary manifestation of the “White Man’s Burden” that is framed within human rights rhetoric. Lazoghli is another interesting site where, in the authorial imagination, a clash between past and present, domestic and public, feminine and masculine erupts. Under the nostalgic lens of the past, memories of Lazoghli are tied to an imagined gendered domestic sphere of female solidarity and bonding. For instance, she states, “Unlike Ataba which was always connected with the bustle and commerce, and Abdeen which was the royal and then presidential palace, exclusively Lazoghli, for me was the bridal setting up a new home; a home that was an alternative to how my parents did things (29).” In her discussion of female dynamics within her natal family, Soueif posits the domestic as a space where roles are negotiated rather than imposed, and a site for feminine creativity and resourcefulness. While washing her deceased aunt’s curtains, she admires “pleat between her fingers and thought how Toufi had always done that: made do and patched up and fixed the world with results of originality and elegance” (30). More importantly, Lazoghli is the sphere where female personality unfolds, and the body is explored and places of sensuality, sexuality, and subversion. “Lazoghli was freedom with a prime seat at a summer cinema every night. From here I watched River of Love, The Other Man, Rumor of Love, A Beginning and an End” (30). At the same time, the domestic sphere echoes the multicultural nature of the city itself. “Though small, Toufi’s Lazoghli residence has a salon and sofra whose very names reflected the two dominant cultures to which the Egyptian bourgeois was in thrall: French and Turkish” (30). Hence, Toufi’s home, like Cairo/Masr is a harmonious syncretism of East and West, local and foreign. Like the maternal figure of Cairo, private female spaces become areas of personal growth. However, this memory of domestic serenity is juxtaposed with the bordering, encroaching masculine sphere of political power embodied in the state’s repressive apparatus. “Lazoghli was disappearances, Lazoghli was torture, Lazoghli was the Dakhleyya and the State Security Intelligence Bureau, the Mabahith Amn el Dawla. It was also the Corner’s Office which habitually covered up the crimes of the Dakhleyya” (31). For Soueif, Lazoghli becomes an imagined site where semiotic experience is undermined by the symbolic order. The 2011 revolution, as an organic, inclusive grassroots movement that emphasizes unity and creative dissidence can be interpreted as a semiotic revolt again the state’s militaristic despotism. Cairo/Masr, as nurturing feminine force in the autobiography, becomes the muse for the resurgence of the semiotic. Perhaps the most important site presented in the narrative is Tahrir Sqaure or Maidan al Tahrir. As the iconic heart of Egypt’s modern history, civic institutions, and site of its national/cultural struggles, Tahrir embodies the collective consciousness of a nation. To claim Tahrir is to claim legitimacy and control the character of Egypt. “El-shar3eyya m’nel-Tahrir-legitimacy comes from Tahrir” (Soueif 14). Soueif portrays it as the “holy grail” for generations of Egyptian revolutionaries. Hence, when describing the moment she first witnessed the revolution on the news, she found herself “transfixed” by the visual image of Tahrir (10). In this sense, Soueif writes herself into the “nation’s collective gaze”: Our sense of national or regional identity is closely linked to the nation’s collective gaze images of the urban at the physical attributes of landscape … iconic images of the urban … have themselves been … incorporated into popular and official imaginings of national identity. (Jaworski and Thurlow, 7) The Egyptians viewed the square as a place of political vents and actions. The square transformed the people’s imaginations since it became a place where people fought for their dignity and freedom. At the time of the revolution, Tahrir square was re-appropriated by the people to become a sphere of agency, dissidence, and solidarity, a “home place” (Khatib 151). In describing the scenes of civic cooperation, artistic expression and political engagement within the Tahrir, Soueif celebrates the carnivalesque features of the revolution. In emphasizing the festive nature of the political performance of protests, Soueif invokes the image of Egyptian solidarity to counter the overwhelming power and rhetoric of the state. More importantly, she links this solidarity to larger encompassing political phenomenon of the Arab Spring by revealing moments of transnational cooperation between Egyptian, Tunisian, and Palestinian revolutionaries. Equally important, she counters monolithic coverage of the Egyptian revolution that present it as a unique and spontaneous by rooting it in the wider history of dissidence in Egypt. The theme of hybridity extends to Soueif’s use of language. In her spelling of Arabic sounds, Soueif acknowledges the hybridizing nature of the Arabic language itself. With the advent of cyberspace as forum for expression, mobilization, and dissent, Arab youths have transformed their native language. They’ve replaced the Arabic alphabet with Latin letters and Arabic numerals. In utilizing this new language, Soueif is tapping into an emerging literary sphere, or ‘subaltern counter publics’ to use the term coined by Nancy Fraser, and new forms for new subversive or alternative literary genres, languages and styles that are adjacent or parallel to mainstream literary centers. This especially evident when we take into consideration the integration of her nephew and nieces’ blog entries at the end of the autobiography. In “Can the Subaltern Speak,” Gayatri Spivak posits subaltern speech as mediated by elite cultural others. In writing the text in English, rather than depending on translation, Soueif safeguards the “authenticity” of her narrative and engages with language in a complex and hybrid manner. The metaphor of femininity extends from Cairo to the revolution. It is worth noting, first, that ‘Cairo’, ‘City’ and ‘Revolution’ are feminine nouns in Arabic, which explains the power of language over imagery, as the author intentionally uses “her” instead “its” in reference to Cairo, and thus transfers this metaphor of womanhood from Arabic to English. This metaphor is further emphasized by identification between author and her city, describing the text as “a story about me and my city” (8). My City in Arabic is translated to Madiniti. Soueif’s city, which is located in the pluralistic communal fluid spirit of Masr / Cairo, transcends identity politics and specific state ideologies; in contrast, Mubarak’s city, his Madinati Project, is elitist, artificial and exclusionary; thus emphasizing his alienation from the masses and his disconnection from the realities of Egyptian society. In constructing a narrative of communal transnational identity voiced in a hybrid language, Soueif challenges a local culture of female exclusion and silence that historically trafficked in women’ s behavior as a foundation of cultural representation, as well as an international market that capitalizes on neo-Orientalist representations of Arab womanhood. Through the genre of autobiography she rewrites the female experience into local collective memory and global discourses of political dissent. Just as the shabab’s graffiti have acquired profound collective meaning, Souief’s record of personal and communal mental imprints resists repressive state policies of erasure, censorship and collective forgetting. Works Cited Cooke, Miriam. Women claim Islam: Creating Islamic feminism through literature. Routledge, 2000. Print Hala Kamal. “Women’s Memoirs of the Egyptian Revolution: Mona Prince’s Ismi Thawra and Ahdah Soueif’s Cairo: My City, Our Revolution.” Print Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Women, autobiography, theory: a reader. Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Print Soueif, Ahdaf. Cairo: My City, Our Revolution. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012. Print Khatib, Lina. Image politics in the Middle East: the role of the visual in political struggle. IB Tauris, 2012. Print Read More