Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian revolution 2015020493, 9781138929869, 9781138929876, 9781315680873

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Translating Dissent

Discursive and non-discursive interventions in the political arena are heavily mediated by various acts of translation that enable protest movements to connect across the globe. Focusing on the Egyptian experience since 2011, this volume brings together a unique group of activists who are able to reflect on the complexities, challenges and limitations of one or more forms of translation and its impact on their ability to interact with a variety of domestic and global audiences. Drawing on a wide range of genres and modalities, from documentary film and subtitling to oral narratives, webcomics and street art, the 18 essays reveal the dynamics and complexities of translation in protest movements across the world. Each unique contribution demonstrates some aspect of the interdependence of these movements and their inevitable reliance on translation to create networks of solidarity. The volume is framed by a substantial introduction by Mona Baker and includes an interview with Egyptian activist and film-maker, Philip Rizk. With contributions by scholars and artists, professionals and activists directly involved in the Egyptian revolution and other movements, Translating Dissent will be of interest to students of translation, intercultural studies and sociology, as well as the reader interested in the study of social and political movements. Online materials, including links to relevant websites and videos, are available at http://www.routledge.com/cw/ baker. Additional resources for Translation and Interpreting Studies are available on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal: http://cw.routledge. com/textbooks/translationstudies. Mona Baker is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Manchester. She is author of In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation (second edition, 2011) and Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (2006), and editor or co-editor of several reference works, including the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (second edition, 2009); the four-volume Critical Concepts: Translation Studies (2009); and Critical Readings in Translation Studies (2009). She is Founding Editor of The Translator (1995–2013), and Founding Vice-President of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies.

“This is a volume of uncommon urgency, intellectual range, and political importance. Translation, which occupies the crossing point of discourse and power and which affects all networks of word, image and sound, must now stand near the centre of any study of global activism. The richly diverse set of contributors, the activists and scholars, the creators and analysts, located in and out of Egypt, uncover both the conceptual depth and the social force in the contemporary tasks of the dissenting translator.” Michael H. Levenson, William B. Christian Professor of English, University of Virginia, USA “If you think you know what translation means, think again. This fascinating book uncovers translation as a political act that is negotiated within the spaces that lie between cultures and languages, between the local and the global, between the translatable and the untranslatable. With rich contributions from activist translators, journalists, writers, film makers, scholars, graphic and graffiti artists, all involved in ‘translating’ the Egyptian revolution, Mona Baker has produced a provocative and enlightening volume that will change the way you think about protest, language, culture, politics and translation. It also provides insight into the chaos and complexity of the Egyptian revolution from the perspective of many of the actors involved, highlighting the role art, culture and language play in shaping our perceptions of contemporary political reality, and our understandings of violence, emotions, power, resistance, solidarity, and revolution.” Dr Cristina Flesher Fominaya, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and author of Social Movements and Globalization: How Protests, Occupations and Uprisings are Changing the World (Palgrave 2014) “Four years into the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Translating Dissent showcases translation in its broad sense as a new, radical space of intercultural negotiation where discursive and performative representations of revolt in the local and global context take place. By focusing on the recent developments in Egypt and its ongoing contests over freedom of speech and the role of political activism and dissent, the contributors to the volume have brilliantly demonstrated the possibilities offered by translation to create networks of solidarity. The field of translation and cultural studies is that much richer for their efforts.” Faten I. Morsy, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Ain Shams University, Egypt “Reading these essays one is struck by the enormous force of creative energy that prevailed during the height of protest in Egypt. The writing underscores the ethical and political role that language, and especially translation, played in broadcasting the multi-media responses to events taking place on the

ground. The writers reveal a newly imagined collective consciousness of an alternative global future. These essays ensure that this vision will remain an active force for human rights and international solidarity.” Moira Inghilleri, Director of Translation Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA “Rarely has scholarly work on translation been transformed into such an affective experience. The choice to let people write from the streets and from their hearts has resulted in a book that is about much more than translation. This is a book about solidarity, and it is itself an act of solidarity. It tells stories that cannot be found elsewhere, that convey not the meaning of the revolution, but the feeling. Rather than offering us a coherent work on ‘translation’, the book brings the reader into the uncertain world of the Egyptian revolution, in which every form of translation becomes a political act that inspires, moves, depresses and challenges the reader.” Marianne Maeckelbergh, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Leiden University, the Netherlands, and author of The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy (Pluto Press 2009) “In no other book did the term translation acquire its full significance in revolutionary networking that characterizes modern times. With the Egyptian Revolution in its focus, this is a valuable companion to all those who were or will be part of any protest movement around the globe. Brilliant.” Mourid Barghouti, Palestinian poet and author of I Saw Ramallah “Translating Dissent offers a compelling case study of language, art, and the mediating powers of translation during the Egyptian Revolution. The range of authors—from Cairo’s own artists, writers and film-makers to non-Egyptian activists and scholars—details translational strategies in a place-based context of revolution and dissent while expanding our understanding of translation itself. Building from Baker’s illuminating introduction to the micro-studies that follow, the volume reveals translation’s ongoing, if insufficiently recognized role in forging local solidarities as well as global networks.” Sandra Bermann, Cotsen Professor of the Humanities & Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA “This book offers a radical rethinking of translation and translators. By bringing together scholars of translation studies and social movements with a range of activists, it problematizes the unseen but crucial role of translation in protest and social activism. The reflections of activists on translational

practices in documentary films, subtitling, web comics and street art position translation in its broadest sense as central to protest and dissent across the world.” Hilary Footitt, University of Reading, UK “The rich studies and personal reflections that Mona Baker has collected here put translation at the dynamic centre of political praxis, while opening up the concept of translation itself, rethinking its meaning and scope by training a wide-angle lens on oppositional activism in and for Egypt since 2011. Examining a varied array of media and translational contexts, the contributors give eloquent voice to the intersections of physicality and narrative, language(s) and (other) visual forms, commitment and sheer determination that Egypt’s many oppositional acts of translation have demonstrated.” Marilyn Booth, Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Oriental Institute and Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK “As new and established forms of activism swiftly move between local and global realities, translation, in its many forms, becomes integral to the life of social and political movements. Translating Dissent makes visible precisely this kind of deep and deeply influential translation, allowing us to hear its multiple voices.” Loredana Polezzi, Cardiff University, UK

Translating Dissent Voices from and with the Egyptian revolution

Edited by Mona Baker

All royalties from the sale of this volume are donated to Hisham Mubarak Law Centre, founded in 1999 by the late Ahmed Seif El-Islam and other human rights activists to defend victims of torture and arbitrary detention in Egypt.

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Mona Baker The right of Mona Baker to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Translating dissent : voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution / edited by Mona Baker. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Translating and interpreting–Egypt–History–21st century. 2. Translating and interpreting–Political aspects–Egypt. 3. Egypt–History–Protests, 2011- 4. Arabic language– Translating. I. Baker, Mona, editor. P306.8.E3 962.05’6014–dc23 2015020493 ISBN: 978-1-138-92986-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-92987-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-3156-8087-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Sunrise Setting Ltd, Paignton, UK

In memory of Radwa Ashour Egyptian novelist, scholar, translator, political activist, and lifetime campaigner for Palestinian rights

1946–2014

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Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Permissions 1

Beyond the spectacle: translation and solidarity in contemporary protest movements

xii xiv xvi

1

MONA BAKER

PART I

Narrating revolution: historicizing revolutions 2

A wish not to betray: some thoughts on writing and translating revolution

19

21

WIAM EL-TAMAMI

3

Changing frames and fault lines: notes towards a map of a revolution’s shifting narratives

33

KHALID ABDALLA

4

Translation and diaspora politics: narrating the struggle at ‘home’ and ‘abroad’

45

HELEN UNDERHILL

5

The contemporary epoch of struggle: anti-austerity protests, the Arab uprisings and Occupy Wall Street

60

TODD WOLFSON AND PETER N. FUNKE

PART II

Translation as political intervention

75

6

77

Text and context: translating in a state of emergency SAMAH SELIM

x

Contents

7

Ethical reflections on activist film-making and activist subtitling

88

SALMA EL TARZI TRANSLATED FROM ARABIC BY ROBIN MOGER

8

What word is this place?: translating urban social justice and governance

97

SHERIEF GABER

9

Revolutionary poetics and translation

107

TAHIA ABDEL NASSER

PART III

Challenging patriarchy

123

10 Translation and solidarity in Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution

125

LEIL-ZAHRA MORTADA

11 On translating a superhero: language and webcomics

137

DEENA MOHAMED

12 An archive of hope: translating memories of revolution

148

HODA ELSADDA

PART IV

Translation and the visual economy of protest

161

13 Translating emotions: graffiti as a tool for change

163

BAHIA SHEHAB

14 Democratic walls?: street art as public pedagogy

178

JOHN JOHNSTON

15 Pharaonic street art: the challenge of translation

194

SORAYA MORAYEF

16 Translating Egypt’s political cartoons

208

JONATHAN GUYER

PART V

Solidarity, translation and the politics of the margin

223

17 Interview with Philip Rizk

225

Contents

xi

PART VI

Epilogue

239

18 Moments of clarity

241

OMAR ROBERT HAMILTON

Index

245

Figures

1.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 7.1 9.1

10.1 10.2

10.3 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7

Addition of #OccupyCabinet in the subtitles of a Mosireen documentary Action postcard from a demonstration in London, June 2014 Placards raised at a demonstration in London, June 2014 Action flyer, Birmingham, November 2014 Campaign material, London, November 2014 Placement of captions and subtitles in some Mosireen videos Photograph of Ahmed Fouad Nigm wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh, accompanying Sinan Antoon’s translation Choice of subtitling language on YouTube Opening screenshot of Words of Women videos: “Herstory – to remind History” appears in English only Replacing of masculine o and feminine a with x Qahera – a webcomic superhero Qahera rejecting feminist assumptions about Muslim women (Part 1: Brainstorm) Part 3: On Sexual Harassment, in English and Arabic Part 2: On FEMEN Opening panel of Part 4: On Protests, in English and Arabic Part 5: On Music, Sort Of (English and Arabic) ‘No to stripping the people’ Stencilling on the Tank Wall Close-up of stencilling on the Tank Wall Alaa Abd El Hamid’s inverted flag eagles ‘After Blood’ mural Three female figures on the Tank Wall, by Mozza ‘Rebel Cat’ campaign

12 53 54 56 57 91

113 128

130 134 138 139 142 143 145 145 169 170 171 171 172 173 174

Figures 13.8 Close-up of ‘Rebel Cat’ campaign, by Bahia Shehab 13.9 Full view of ‘After Blood’ mural with ‘Rebel Cat’ images added 13.10 The Tank Wall whitewashed after June 2014 14.1 Loyalist memorial painting in Belfast, Northern Ireland 14.2 Free Derry Wall, Northern Ireland 14.3 ‘One’: Graffiti in Derry and Dheisheh 14.4 Graffiti depicting Gika and other martyrs; Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo 14.5 Memorial paintings, Mohamed Mahmoud Street 15.1 Mural of women heading to battle by Alaa Awad, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo 15.2 Mural of women in mourning accompanied by a black panther, by Alaa Awad, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo 15.3 Mural depicting Ma’at from the Book of the Dead and the goddess Hathor, by Alaa Awad, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo 15.4 First part of a mural replica from the tomb of Sobekhotep, by Alaa Awad, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo 15.5 Second part of a mural replica depicting the tomb of Sobekhotep, by Alaa Awad, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo 15.6 Mural of Tutmoses III, by Alaa Awad, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo 15.7 Mural of Luxor landscape, by Alaa Awad, Kasr El Eini Street, Cairo 16.1 ‘Militant on psychiatric couch’, by Anwar 16.2 ‘Can I pretend to protest?’, by Makhlouf 16.3 ‘The Presidential Race’, by Walid Taher 17.1 Testimony of Aboudi, video by Mosireen, 16 December 2011 17.2 Non-stop Security Attacks in Simon Bolivar Square, video by Mosireen, 28 November 2012 17.3 Why Riot?, video by Mosireen, 18 March 2013 17.4 The Remnants of Colonialism: Eye Witness of the Square Massacre, 8 April, video by Intifadat Intifadat, 9 April 2011

xiii 174 175 175 181 187 187 188 188 195

198

199

200

200 201 202 215 216 218 228 234 235

237

Acknowledgements

Despite having edited numerous books and journal issues over the past 20 years, I found this volume exceptionally challenging. The ups and downs, the uncertainty, and the upheaval that characterized the political landscape in which it was conceived permeated every aspect of the project: from persuading activists with more pressing concerns to invest in reflecting and writing about a relevant aspect of their experience, to constantly adapting the plan of the volume and having to identify new authors as a number of initial contributors – some either too traumatized by the events of the past two years or too busy attending to colleagues in prison, or both – were unable to find the mental space necessary to write. Nevertheless, working with the contributors who finally submitted essays for the volume has been a privilege and a humbling experience. It taught me more about humility, integrity and solidarity than anything I have read or written in my long career as an academic. I am grateful to Ahdaf Souief for advice on publishing outlets and for her moral support during the course of planning this project. Yasmin El Rifae provided considerable support during the initial stages, in particular helping me identify a number of contributors and commenting on the initial plan of the volume. Loredana Polezzi’s feedback on the publishing proposal gave me confidence in the value of the collection and, in particular, of broadening the concept of translation to link different modalities of expression and avoid treating contiguous aspects of the complex experience of revolution as discrete categories. I was able to devote my time over the past two years to examining the use of translation in the context of the Egyptian revolution, and editing this volume, thanks to an 18-month full-time Fellowship funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, under the title ‘Translating the Egyptian Revolution: Activist Use of Translation to Connect with Global Publics and Protest Movements’. The project has also benefited from additional support provided by the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester. I am grateful to Louisa Semlyen at Routledge for her continued support of my research, even when it does not quite fit into the established academic

Acknowledgements

xv

model, and to Laura Sandford for assisting with various aspects of production. I am also grateful to Natalie Foster at Routledge and to my co-editors of Critical Perspectives on Citizen Media, Luis Pérez-González and Bolette Blaagaard, for endorsing the proposal to include Translating Dissent as the first title in the series. I would like to thank Mark Nickolas, Founder and Principal of Mosaic Films, for permission to reproduce the photograph of Bahia Shehab, taken during the filming of Nefertiti’s Daughters (www.mosaicfilmsnyc.com), and Ted R. Swedenburg (www.swedenburg.blogspot.com) for permission to use the photograph that appears on the book cover. I am grateful also to Henry Jones for compiling the index and for his assistance with uploading material to the Translating Dissent section of my personal website (www. monabaker.org). Mona Baker 1 May 2015

Permissions

The editor and publisher wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyrighted material in this collection: Ted R. Swedenburg for the cover photograph HarperCollins Publishers for excerpts from ‘Writing’, in Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories by Charles Bukowski, © 1996 by Linda Lee Bukowski, which appear in the essay by Wiam El-Tamami Brandt and Hochman Literary Agents Inc. for excerpts from ‘Why Write’, from RED: PASSION AND PATIENCE IN THE DESERT by Terry Tempest Williams, © 1998 by Terry Tempest Williams, originally published in Northern Lights magazine, summer 1998, which appear in the essay by Wiam El-Tamami Jadaliyya for excerpts from Sinan Antoon’s translation of Ahmed Fouad Nigm’s poem ‘This Script is My Script’, available at www.jadaliyya.com/ pages/index/3258/this-script-is-my-script-by-ahmad-fuad-nigm, which appear in the essay by Tahia Abdel Nasser Mona Anis for excerpts from her translation of Ahmed Fouad Nigm’s poem ‘Bahiyya’, in I Say My Words Out Loud, available at www.princeclaus fund.org/files/docs/Poetry%20Book%20by%20Ahmed%20Fouad%20 Negm_%20I%20Say%20My%20Words%20Out%20Loud.pdf, which appear in the essay by Tahia Abdel Nasser Middle East Research and Information Project for excerpts from Elliot Colla’s translation of Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi’s poem ‘The Will to Live’, available at www.merip.org/mer/mer263/people-want, which appear in the essay by Tahia Abdel Nasser Mark Nickolas, Mosaic Films, for the photograph of Bahia Shehab Mohamed Anwar for his ‘Militant on psychiatric couch’ cartoon, which appears in the essay by Jonathan Guyer Makhlouf for his ‘Can I pretend to protest?!’ cartoon, which appears in the essay by Jonathan Guyer Walid Taher for his ‘The Presidential Race’ cartoon, which appears in the essay by Jonathan Guyer

1

Beyond the spectacle Translation and solidarity in contemporary protest movements Mona Baker

This chapter maps out the space of translation within the political economy of contemporary protest movements, using the Egyptian revolution as a case in point and extending the definition of translation to cover a range of modalities and types of interaction. It identifies themes and questions that arise out of the concrete experiences of activists mobilizing and reflecting on what it means to work for justice, both within and across borders, and to attempt to effect change at home while conversing with others who are fighting similar battles elsewhere. I argue that if our networks of solidarity are to become more effective and reflect the values of horizontality, non-hierarchy and pluralism that inform contemporary protest movements, translation, interpreting, subtitling and other forms of mediation must be brought to the centre of the political arena and conceptualized as integral elements of the revolutionary project. Translators, likewise, must be repositioned as full participants within non-hierarchical, solidary activist communities.

Deep translation, as opposed to crisis translation, deliberately moves beyond image and spectacle, with the intention of building international solidarity networks that are nonetheless firmly rooted in the granular struggles of a particular place. (Samah Selim, p. 84) In order to fight back we must connect, we must communicate, we need to learn solidarity, we must translate in more ways than just verbal translation, we must attempt a translation of the streets, a deep translation. Collectively we must move on to somewhere new. (Philip Rizk, p. 237) The Egyptian revolution has captured the imagination of audiences across the world and provided a model of citizen activism that is widely thought to have inspired other movements of protest in the USA and Europe, including the Occupy and 15-M movements (Teleb 2014; della Porta and Mattoni

2

Mona Baker

2014:125). Despite the large volume of articles and books written about the revolution (Khalil 2012; Souief 2012; Sowers and Toensing 2012; Korany and El-Mahdi 2012; Gregory 2013; Golson et al. 2014; Salem 2015, among many others), one aspect that has received no attention in public or academic circles so far concerns the language-based practices that allow Egyptian protestors to contest dominant narratives of the events unfolding in Egypt since January 2011 and, importantly, to connect with, influence and learn from other place-based movements1 and from global movements of collective action. Even the collection by Golson et al. (2014), which focuses on language and rhetoric and their impact on Egyptians’ evolving sense of identity, does not engage with issues of translation, understood in the narrow or broad sense. The only notable exception is Mehrez (2012), who reports on a collective project undertaken in 2011 as part of a seminar on ‘Translating Revolution’ at the American University in Cairo. Using the Egyptian revolution as a concrete case in point, this volume examines the role of translation in shaping the space of protest from a variety of perspectives that include, but are not limited to, the scholarly universe of translation studies and social movement studies. It brings together a range of Egyptian and non-Egyptian activists, as well as activist scholars engaged with a variety of struggles, in order to think through the many facets of translation and the way they impact the evolving political landscape today. Together, this diverse range of contributors draw on first-hand experience to reflect critically – some for the first time – on the different meanings and uses of translation in contemporary activism. They do so in the context of a domestic movement of protest that is nevertheless embedded in and seeks to engage with global movements of collective action and with global publics – much like any other placed-based movement today, from the antiausterity movement in Greece and much of Europe to the Green Movement protests in Iran, and from the Girifna resistance movement in Sudan 2 to the Gezi Park protests in Turkey. As such, the volume does not set out merely to offer an analysis of different facets of translation by those who have thought about and analysed the practice for many years but, equally importantly, it sets out to begin a conversation with activists who have so far largely taken translation for granted, despite their heavy reliance on it as they strive to forge networks of solidarity. Deeply frustrated with the failure of all current forms of language, both verbal and visual, to effect change, many of the contributors question much of our received wisdom about how to communicate across borders and media, how to nurture networks of solidarity, and how to learn from past mistakes and envision a new world. As Omar Robert Hamilton argues in the final contribution to the volume, the momentous and deeply traumatic events of the past few years are forcing us to rethink everything, including our use of language and translation, as we look to the future: “If there is to be speech,” he suggests, “it should be of something new, something that still has no language for the reality that it might create” (p. 244).

Beyond the spectacle

3

Against this background, in choosing the contributors and the themes for this volume I have not sought to reproduce the discourses and methods of the many books on revolution, dissent, and especially on the politics of translation, that often fall short of reflecting the way people experience the violence and vigour of revolution and political mobilization on the ground. 3 Instead, I have tried to work from the outside in, rather than the inside out: from where the activists and their translational praxis are to where the discipline of translation studies is or thinks it wants to be. Conscious of activists’ deep frustrations with the hijacking of their struggle by ‘expert’ academic and media figures4 who have little first-hand experience of the events they analyse – a theme that figures prominently in many of the essays in this volume – I have deliberately prioritized first-hand accounts of engaged activists, irrespective of whether I agree with their view of translation, however defined and conceptualized. 5 Whether or not their ideas about translation are always what translation scholars would like them to be, the experiences of these highly reflective activists shed light on the dynamics and complexities of a wide range of translational practices in protest movements, in ways that academics who are not totally immersed in the movements cannot hope to achieve. The reflections of these activists are particularly insightful when they reveal the interdependence of various movements and their inevitable reliance on different forms of translation to create networks of solidarity. The volume also deliberately places a wide range of styles of writing, and of experiences, alongside each other. At one extreme, there are powerful, emotional pieces by writers such as Wiam El-Tamami and film-makers such as Omar Robert Hamilton, and, at the other, analytical essays by activist scholars of politics and sociology such as Todd Wolfson, Peter Funke and Helen Underhill, who draw on scholarly research and literature. The mix of styles and the combination of creative, visceral writing and research-based contributions brings different worlds together, or rather attempts to nurture the space of overlap between the two worlds since they are never completely separate. What all the contributions, including researchbased essays, have in common is that their authors are deeply involved in social and political movements, whether in Egypt or elsewhere, and this experience clearly informs their writing – and, where relevant, their research. Hence, in designing their research, activist scholars adopt values that inform contemporary activism and social movements across the world today, as described by Wolfson and Funke in this volume. In choosing her interviewees for a study that examines the translation practices of diaspora Egyptians post-30 June 2013, for example, Helen Underhill strives to “challenge homogenizing representations that circulate within narrations of the Egyptian struggle, and the rigid categories that emerge from such representations – diaspora, migrants, foreigners, activists, Islamists, secularists, revolutionaries, among others” (p. 47). The same principle of challenging false divisions that undermine solidarity is evident in the conscious choice by Mosireen – one

4

Mona Baker

of the activist collectives discussed in several contributions – of its polysemous name, one potential interpretation of which is that it is a misspelling of Masriyeen, meaning ‘Egyptians’. The pun, like Helen’s choice of her interviewees and her refusal to put labels on them, is intended to challenge attempts to set different types of ‘Egyptians’ off from each other and from non-Egyptians and imply that some – especially those who speak a foreign language and presume to challenge authority – are not genuine members of the polity (Baker, forthcoming). This volume similarly aspires to challenge such false divisions, not only between activists and academics, but also between Egyptians and non-Egyptians. Alongside prominent Egyptian activists like Khalid Abdalla, Hoda Elsadda and Bahia Shehab, it also features contributions by non-Egyptians – whether working in Egypt or elsewhere – who share the same dream of creating a better world for all, and, importantly, the same set of values that have informed contemporary movements of protest since at least the Zapatista uprising in January 1994. It does so in the belief that the struggle against neo-liberal policies and heightened levels of repression is the same everywhere, from Tahrir and Gaza to Oklahoma and Ferguson, and that its success rests on the ability to tell stories “in a way that allows them to be heard” (p. 40), both globally and locally, as Khalid Abdalla argues in his contribution – not only in order to counter hegemonic narratives promoted by powerful institutions but also to allow activists to build networks of solidarity across linguistic and national boundaries.

Translation and solidarity in contemporary activism The ability of contemporary movements to effect change and stage a robust challenge to existing power structures, Melucci explains, “hinges on the symbolic capacity to reverse meaning to demonstrate the arbitrariness of . . . power and its domination” (1996:358). Soraya Morayef (pp. 197–200) demonstrates how such a symbolic reversal of meaning is actualized in the work of Alaa Awad, an Egyptian street artist who painted graffiti on the walls around Tahrir Square between 2011 and 2013 using pharaonic styles and themes. Pharaonic art is traditionally understood as “supporting the status quo and a form of propaganda intended to glorify the ruling pharaoh”, and yet Awad was able to turn it into “a street performance that subverts the established art form and empowers anti-regime protests in modern-day Egypt”. This ‘rewriting’ or ‘retranslation’ of established, dominant codes, Morayef argues, “took something away from the state – something that had upheld the sanctity of the state – and gave it back to the people”. Recent responses to heightened levels of repression and the increased risks of physical protest on the street across the world offer further examples of this type of symbolic challenge to power. The ‘nano demonstrations’ that swept through many cities in Russia in 2011–2012 involved staging dramatic flashmob protests using toys instead of human

Beyond the spectacle

5

beings, and were so successful that “The Forbes Magazine included nanodemonstrations in Barnaul on its list of ‘The 12 loudest art protest actions in Russia’” (Nim, in press). The activists who thought of this innovative form of protest exposed the fragility of power when they forced the police to seek formal advice from the prosecutor’s office to determine whether protests involving non-human participants constituted public events and therefore required prior authorization from the authorities, and when the organizers of the third nano demonstration humoured them by filing an application for a demonstration “to be attended by ‘toys from Kinder Surprise (one hundred pieces), Lego figurines (one hundred pieces), toy soldiers (twenty pieces), soft toys (fifteen pieces), miniature cars (ten pieces)’” (Nim, in press). Spanish activists responded to the draconian measures taken by their government to outlaw protest in July 2014 in similarly creative ways. The first hologram protest was organized in Madrid by No Somos Delito, a platform of over 100 groups, on 10 April 2015 (Flesher Fominaya and Teti 2015).6 It involved “a screening of a previously filmed holographic protest” which used holograms, written messages and ‘shout outs’ collected online through the campaign webpage.7 The film was screened in front of the Spanish parliament, in the presence of spokespeople from No Somos Delito and the media. Neither type of action (nano demonstrations or hologram protests) is intended to replace the presence of real protestors on the street, nor to suggest that activists are willing to accept restrictions on access to public space. What this type of symbolic challenge manages to do, with minimal risks, is raise awareness among the wider public, challenge and expose the arbitrariness and lack of imagination of those in power, and provide a further platform for connecting individual activists and groups and hence expanding the network of protest. Beyond creative, dramatic responses such as nano demonstrations and hologram protests, Melucci’s analysis suggests that activists have to transform a variety of codes in order to “modify the symbolic relationship with the world”, that they must – and do – engage in the kind of “destructuring of meaning which opens up the way for other modalities of experience beyond instrumental rationality”, and that one of their biggest challenges is to “subvert shared criteria of codification, the obligatory set of signs with which the social order seeks to impose a reality which is solely its own” (1996:358). This is a project that is deeply embedded in the politics of language and translation, especially if one accepts Melucci’s more specific claim that “it is enough to structure reality using different words for the power monopoly over reality to crumble” (1996:358). Many of the contributors to this volume explicitly subscribe to one or another version of this view, as evident in Sherief Gaber’s discussion of the challenge of translating the nomenclature around urban social justice and urban governance in Egypt, and his assertion that “[u]ncovering and developing new terms for the Egyptian city – or any city – is . . . a process of uncovering the mechanisms and tools that can create leverage to change the city” (p. 105).8 The question

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of creating an aspirational terminology features prominently in several other contributions, including the essay by Khalid Abdalla, and recalls one of the defining features of new social movements, namely prefiguration. Prefiguration involves a commitment to creating the future in the present, by not allowing the present to shape or constrain the horizon of possibility and by rejecting the traditional logic of ‘the ends justify the means’. In prefigurative politics, “change is brought about in the transformation of individual or collective practices, and must start in the ‘here and now’” (Nunes 2005:304). Restricted so far to organizational and interactional modes of restructuring the present in the image of the desired future, extending the powerful concept of prefiguration to the use of verbal, visual and aesthetic languages to construct an alternative world in the here and now would allow us, as I have argued elsewhere (Baker, forthcoming), to pose the kind of challenge to the symbolic order that Melucci advocates.9 As we do so, translation, interpreting, subtitling and other forms of mediation must be brought to the centre of the political arena and conceptualized as integral elements of the revolutionary project. Melucci’s contention is echoed in various ways in more recent work on new social movements. This “has taken a decisively communicative turn”, according to Lievrouw (2011:57), and now recognizes that the central challenge for movements today is ‘translating’ their particular concerns to other sectors of society, as well as globally, by employing appropriate idioms, signs, narratives and rhetoric. And yet, despite such statements in the social movement studies literature, and the growing interest in the political impact of translation within and beyond the field of translation studies (Niranjana 1992; Tymoczko 2000; Baker 2006; Inghilleri and Harding 2010; Stahuljak 2010; Hess 2012; Rafael 2012; Inghilleri 2012, among many others), little has been done to examine such discursive interventions nor, specifically, the concrete role played by translation in contemporary social and political movements – to ask how, in effect, social movement actors conceptualize and practise various forms of translation, and to what ends. With very few exceptions (Pérez-González 2010; Talens 2010), the few studies that have attempted to address this issue in recent years have mostly focused on interpreting in the World Social Forum (Boéri 2005; Hodkinson and Boéri 2005; Boéri 2008, 2012; Boéri and Maier 2010; Doerr 2012; Manuel Jerez et al., n.d.). Similarly, despite the fact that recent uprisings in the Middle East in general and the Egyptian revolution in particular have commanded the attention of a very sizeable section of the academic community as well as intellectuals at large, not to mention the general public, very few studies have engaged with the politics of interlingual, intralingual and visual mediation by the actors themselves – the film-makers, street artists, writers, translators, cartoonists, creators of comics and poets, among others – and the way this mediation intervenes in negotiating concrete political reality. Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East (Downey 2014) is an interesting exception for the wide

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range of artists and activists it brings together from across the region, but the collection is restricted to issues of visual culture and does not engage with translation as such. The diverse senses of translation It goes without saying, though it remains a seriously neglected issue, that discursive and non-discursive interventions in the political arena are heavily mediated by various acts of translation, and that this is precisely what enables protest movements to connect and share experiences across the globe. This volume explores the role of translation – understood in both its narrow and broad senses – in negotiating the space of protest at the local and global levels. In its narrow sense, translation involves rendering fully articulated stretches of textual material from one language into another, and encompasses various modalities such as written translation, subtitling and oral interpreting. This type of translation is part of the fabric of practically all oppositional groups, in Egypt and elsewhere – from the written translation of statements and campaigns by groups such as No to Military Trials to the subtitling of videos by collectives such as Mosireen and Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution. As Rizk (2013) explains, it is translation that allows activists involved in a group such as Mosireen to connect with protest movements elsewhere and to see themselves “within a broader struggle and not an atomized battle against local dictatorship”. In its broad sense, translation involves the mediation of diffuse symbols, experiences, narratives and linguistic signs of varying lengths across modalities (words into image, lived experience into words), levels and varieties of language (Standard Written Arabic and spoken Egyptian, for example), and cultural spaces, the latter without necessarily crossing a language boundary. As such, it also encompasses the use of languages other than Arabic in the case of the Egyptian revolution (or Turkish, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, etc. in other cases) in writings and discussions about the revolution (any revolution), the use of (forms of) Arabic (or Spanish, or English) in addressing regional audiences, as well as the journey of visual and musical artefacts across social and national boundaries. All these different types of translation are practised every day, by every group of activists in every protest movement and every activist initiative across the globe, though they may remain largely hidden from view. For example, the implications of the tension between spoken Egyptian and Modern Standard Arabic and the need to ‘translate’ between them as part and parcel of the political project are evident in the essay by Hoda Elsadda, who focuses not on translation, as narrowly understood, but on the process of collecting and archiving the testimonies of women involved in the Egyptian protests since 2011. Practically all the interviews held in the Women and Memory Forum oral history archive were conducted orally in spoken Egyptian and translated into Standard Arabic for the purposes of archiving the testimonies in written

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form, with various consequences and reactions from the interviewees. Some, for example, were unhappy that their narratives had undergone this type of translation, arguing that “a shift from colloquial to Standard Arabic detracts from the authenticity of the written text and distorts the style and character of the narrative” (p. 157). Similar tensions relating to the choice of a given language variety in translation are evident in the contribution by Deena Mohamed, who explains that “topics like sexism, misogyny and patriarchy were largely unacknowledged and relatively little talked about in Egyptian society” when she was creating her webcomic Qahera, and that one of the main challenges she faced in translating from English into Arabic was that “[t]here were no words for these concepts in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, and Standard Arabic equivalents felt alien and melodramatic in the context of a webcomic” (p. 141). Translation – in its narrow and broad senses – also permeates the personal experience of individual activists involved in revolutionary movements, as evident in many of the essays in this volume. Writers like Wiam El-Tamami, who focus mostly on the complexities of translating lived experience into words, also reveal in passing that translation in the narrow sense was very much part of their everyday experience of the revolution: October 2011. The Maspero massacre. Army APCs mowing down peaceful protestors in front of the state television building. Friends and I translated the eyewitness accounts as they came in, unable to comprehend the horror of the words we were trying to transcribe from one language into another. (p. 24) The same contributor would typically move between the different senses of translation unproblematically, and with no attempt to differentiate between them: There were many more testimonies of torture and abuse, arbitrary arrests and military trials in the months to come. But it would still be some time before I would attempt to translate the turmoil into words of my own. (p. 24) The same pattern of alternating between different conceptualizations of ‘translation’ and the same sense of pervasiveness of all types of translation in the revolutionary experience are evident throughout the volume. While most of Jonathan Guyer’s essay focuses on the nitty gritty of interlingual translation of Arabic cartoons into English, he also argues that “[c]artoonists themselves are in a sense performing a particular type of translation: they are turning the day’s news into a series of words and

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symbols” (p. 209) and, further, that “[a]ny narrow act of translation is deeply linked to the broader translation – how Egypt, or any other place, is presented to a global audience” (p. 220). Likewise, Tahia Abdel Nasser alternates between the broader, more metaphoric sense of translation, stating for example that Arabic poetry produced since 2011 “translated and documented the development of the revolutionary movement” (p. 108), and the narrower sense of interlingual translation, to which she devotes most of her discussion. Helen Underhill’s essay deploys several conceptualizations of translation and reveals that interlingual translation has been part of the activism of diaspora Egyptians even before June 2013, and that they regularly translated reports and subtitled videos as part of their political mobilization. Focusing on the production and subtitling of documentary film, Philip Rizk goes further by explicitly distinguishing three types of translation in the context of the Egyptian revolution: translating the street to a local audience, subtitling from Arabic into other languages to inform the outside world of what is going on and strengthen networks of solidarity, and subtitling documentary films produced by other protest movements into Arabic for a local audience, again to exchange experiences and extend networks of solidarity. Others, like John Johnston, discuss fascinating examples of visual translation across struggles, as in the appropriation of the iconic Free Derry Wall mural in Belfast by Palestinians for a mural that appears on the wall of the Dheisheh refugee camp in the West Bank. Here, the Belfast message “You are Now Entering Free Derry” is replaced by the bilingual “You are Now Entering Free Dheisheh/ ‫”ﺃﻧﺖ ﺍﻻﻥ ﺗﺪﺧﻞ ﺍﻟﺪﻫﻴﺸﺔ ﺍﻟﺤﺮﺓ‬. This form of visual-cumtextual translation, Johnston argues, points to “the capacity of street art to translate revolutionary realities across cultural and linguistic boundaries” (p. 191) and thus effect “a bond of solidarity between peoples and context” (p. 95). The difference between this form of translation and the appropriation of canonical works like The Merchant of Venice (Abend-David 2003) and Antigone (Selaiha 2011) to intervene in the political reality of another culture is arguably one of degree, not kind. Interestingly, in rethinking the role of subtitlers in collectives such as Mosireen, film-maker Salma El Tarzi (p. 95) explicitly compares her own work on adapting a novel into a film with the work of translators: Writing the script, I realized, was a form of translation – translating a literary text into the language of cinema. I began to see my vacillation between a slavish obedience to the text and presenting it from my subjective viewpoint as similar to the dilemma experienced by subtitlers working on films. Other types of translation are evident within and across the essays themselves. Both Bahia Shehab and John Johnston discuss the well-known Tank vs Biker mural in Cairo at length. Each brings in a different set of experiences

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to interpret the mural for his or her readers and makes connections that the other contributor does not make, just as individual translators inevitably produce different interpretations of the same work. The differences in interpretation of this single mural recall Venuti’s definition of translation as “a process by which the chain of signifiers that constitutes the sourcelanguage text is replaced by a chain of signifiers in the target language which the translator provides on the strength of an interpretation” (1995:17; emphasis added). This entire spectrum of translational activity, which is part of the fabric of all protest movements, remains quite hidden from view, taken for granted, unexamined and unproblematized – not only by scholars of translation and social movement studies, but also by the activists themselves. Salma El Tarzi makes this very clear in her contribution to this volume: “The truth is that I have no idea who translates my films. I don’t know their names, I don’t know what they look like, and I certainly don’t discuss the film with them” (p. 90), a rather odd situation for a collective that genuinely believes in collaborative work and non-hierarchical structures, as she herself has come to recognize. Hence the urgency of engaging in the kind of conversation this volume attempts to initiate. The essays in this volume begin the conversation and offer some insights into this practically uncharted territory, but much remains to be thought through and interrogated. For the time being, irrespective of how we understand ‘translation’ and wherever we attempt to draw its boundaries, what is important in the context of protest movements is to recognize that the contours and effectiveness of every instance of translation – however defined – are deeply contingent on its ability to connect to the movement as a whole and to actualize the values that inform the political project in which it is embedded, as I have argued elsewhere (Baker, forthcoming). Rethinking translation in protest movements The values that inform contemporary social movements differ significantly from those that oriented traditional politics, as discussed by Wolfson and Funke in this volume (see also Flesher Fominaya 2007; Maeckelbergh 2011). They include a commitment to horizontal, non-hierarchical forms of interaction; rejection of representational practices; an embrace of diversity and pluralism; “an internationalism based on strong solidarity and communication between activists all over the world” (Maeckelbergh 2009a:8); and a belief in the strategic use of prefiguration. All these values are evident in the work of collectives involved in the Egyptian revolution, such as Mosireen (Baker, forthcoming), and in the individual essays in this volume. They are also evident visually on the walls of Cairo: as Johnston points out, for example, Cairo murals “exemplify a democratic process of visual enquiry. There is no artistic hierarchy at play, as naive paintings sit alongside and at times on top of highly skilled works” (pp. 185–6). In this respect,

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street art in Cairo reflects very different values from those that inform the street art of Belfast, which is mired in the antagonisms and divisions of traditional politics and much more focused on claiming and defining territory as belonging to one party or another. The limited number of publications that have engaged with interlingual translation and its position within this new political landscape have mostly focused on the World Social Forum, as mentioned earlier, and hence shed little light on processes of mediation within place-based movements like the Egyptian revolution, the Sudanese Girifna initiative, or the Gezi Park protests. What they do reveal, and what is also evident in the case of the Egyptian revolution, is that translation is undertaken almost entirely by volunteers who are committed to the same set of values that inform new social movements (Baker 2013). At the same time, these studies point to a persistent tension between the volunteers’ conceptualization of their role – as primarily political activists who are able to mediate linguistically between fellow activists – and the conceptualization of that role by nontranslators in the movement, who often seem unable to think of translators as anything other than service providers positioned outside the main struggle (Boéri 2008; Baker 2013). The same pattern of interaction between activist translators (mostly subtitlers in this case) and activist film-makers is evident to a large extent in the case of the Egyptian revolution (Baker, forthcoming) and is critically reassessed in this volume by Salma El Tarzi, a film-maker and member of the Mosireen collective. It is a pattern that needs to be urgently revisited and critiqued. We need to prefigure a more productive mode of interaction between non-translators (be they filmmakers, writers, urban planners or other types of activists) and those who offer their specific skills as translators, interpreters and subtitlers in support of the same cause, and as part of the same political project. Reassessment of the relationship and pattern of interaction between translators and non-translators is necessary if our networks of solidarity are to become more effective and reflect the values of horizontality, non-hierarchy and pluralism to which most activists subscribe. Several of the contributors to this volume demonstrate growing awareness of this issue, and a willingness to rethink practices involving translation in future. Looking back at the work of Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution, for instance, Leil-Zahra Mortada admits that: [w]ith hindsight, it is now clear that it would have been more productive to involve the subtitlers in the creative process from an early stage. After all, for the majority of viewers, who do not speak the interviewee’s language and are not familiar with the cultural codes and references she deploys in telling her story, the subtitles are the only way into her world. They therefore cannot be divorced from the film-making process nor, indeed, from the political project as such. (p. 135)

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Figure 1.1 Addition of #OccupyCabinet in the subtitles of a Mosireen documentary.

In revisiting this issue, as Salma El Tarzi’s contribution makes clear, the burden of effecting change cannot fall on the shoulders of non-translators alone. Translators not only “must be allowed” but they must themselves “claim . . . a greater degree of freedom”, as El Tarzi argues (p. 92). They must adopt an active role and be willing to experiment with new and innovative ways of actualizing the vision of the future in the practices – including linguistic practices – of today. There is evidence that at least some do, even in collectives like Mosireen where film-makers as well as subtitlers mostly operated in extreme crisis situations, as described by Samah Selim in this volume, that left them little time to reflect on the nuances of subtitling choices and how they might amplify the revolutionary message and strengthen the political project beyond the confines of the original text or film. The subtitler or subtitlers of one of the Mosireen documentaries discussed by Philip Rizk on p. 228, Testimony of Aboudi,10 was clearly thinking of how they can advance the political project rather than simply reproduce the original text when they decided to add the hashtag #OccupyCabinet in the subtitle shown in Figure 1.1. Interventions of this type are fully coherent with the political project and cannot be theorized within traditional models of equivalence and faithfulness to the source text. But what I have been arguing for is a much more radical rethinking of the parameters of translation within protest movements, a rethinking that involves reconceptualizing translators as full participants within non-hierarchical, solidary activist communities.

Concluding remarks One issue I have not touched on so far, although it features in several contributions, concerns the use of social media and digital technologies, recognized by Wolfson and Funke (this volume) as one of the defining features of new social movements. Social media is an important space of protest that is permeated by various forms of translation, but its role in the Egyptian revolution has been seriously exaggerated in shallow analyses

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that claim the uprising was elite-driven, planned and executed by a Twitter and Facebook generation (Baker and Guthrie 2014). These and other reductive explanations of all revolutions in the Middle East by media and academic ‘experts’ are well documented in Azeez (2015), who links them to broader strategies historically used to undermine uprisings in the region and explain them away as “mere attempted failures at capitalist modernity and nationalism by a few hopeful Westernized or Western-supported Orientals importing foreign philosophies, ideals and concepts” (2015:120–1).11 In the specific case of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, Azeez points out, “political commentators attributed the revolutions to ‘social media’ and the ‘shy American intellectual Gene Sharp,’ or the ‘Obama factor,’ ‘Google Earth,’ ‘Israel’s democracy’ or even the know-how of a Serbian organization” (2015:129). Like El-Tamami (p. 24), I do not wish to traffic in such facile storylines. Most of the essays in this volume make reference to various Arabic lexical items or stretches of text. These appear in Arabic script and where relevant are accompanied by a transcription in Latin alphabet, to allow the non-Arabic speaker to refer to the term or phrase if it is the subject of analysis or commentary. Transcription is a form of translation in its own right, and as such always involves decisions that reflect the position of the transcriber/translator. I have deliberately avoided the complex scholarly apparatus associated with the study of Arabic as a foreign language and culture and with orientalist work, an apparatus that would make the text less accessible to a broader range of readers and position most of the contributors, including myself, outside their ‘cultural habitat’ and zone of comfort. Where a widely circulating lay spelling is available, as in the case of Ittihadiya and Rabaa Al Adawiyya, I have used it. Otherwise, I have adopted a system described by Ahdaf Souief in Cairo, My City, Our Revolution (2012), which she believes was initiated by Arab bloggers, including the use of the numeral 7 to represent ‫ﺡ‬, as in al-7ayy (‘neighbourhood’) and the numeral 3 to represent ‫ﻉ‬, as in masha3a (‘commons’). Souief outlines the two main features of this system of transcription in the front-matter of her book as follows: 1. Where there is a traditional accepted – and unique – spelling in Latin letters for an Arabic sound [it is retained]. As in: gh for ‫– ﻍ‬ like the French ‘r’; kh for ‫ – ﺥ‬as in the Scottish ‘loch’. 2. Three sounds are written as numerals: The hamza, ‫ء‬, pronounced as a glottal stop in the middle or at the end of a word, is written as a 2. So, if we were doing this in English, the cockney ‘butter’ would be written as ‘bu2er’. The ain, ‫ﻉ‬, a soft vibration in the back of the throat, is written 3. The ‘heavy h’ ‫ﺡ‬, is written 7.

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Apart from these conventions, I represent long vowels by doubling the relevant vowel rather than adding a line above, as in scholarly transcriptions of Arabic, thus faraagh 3aam rather than faraˉgh 3aˉm (‘public space’). I have also prioritized transcriptions that reflect the way Egyptians pronounce the item in question (thus maghood zaati rather than majhood thaati). Finally, like the volume as a whole, the overview I offered in this introductory essay has been less concerned with surveying the literature as such than with teasing out themes and questions that arise out of the concrete experiences of activists mobilizing and reflecting on what it means to work for justice, both within and across borders, and to attempt to effect change at home while conversing with others who are fighting similar battles elsewhere. Beyond the few, central issues I have focused on so far, there are other themes covered by the contributors that cut across many genres and types of practice, including film-making, poetry, cartoons, webcomics, graffiti, archival projects, urban planning, and creative writing. Among other things, contributors discuss the role of translation in situating the Egyptian revolution within broader struggles, especially in the global South; fault lines in translating events between contexts and the interpretative lapses that threaten meaningful solidarity; the challenge of translating complex, lived experience into streamlined, intelligible narratives; the ethical and political import of aesthetic forms of intervention such as poetry and their potential for giving new life to revolutionary ideals during moments of crisis; the transformative power of translation as a space of interaction between immediate, local concerns and global perspectives on issues such as sexual harassment and misogyny; the role played by subtitling in empowering Egyptian women by connecting them to networks of rebellion across borders; the reclaiming of public space and the challenge of translating new concepts in urbanism into Arabic; the process of constructing historical continuities, ruptures and narratives as a creative form of selective translation; the challenge of contesting official narratives by translating and archiving personal testimonies; the impact of the experience of translating in a state of emergency on our understanding of concepts such as ‘profession’ and ‘objectivity’; ethical contours of the activist film-maker/ subtitler relationship; the translation and packaging of political satire rooted in local contexts for a global audience, and much more. All these topics are relevant to and have resonance for protest movements in many different parts of the world. I have not been able to do them enough justice in this introductory article, nor to categorize them under clear-cut headings for the purposes of structuring the volume. Ignoring the extensive overlaps among essays, I grouped them according to the most prominent theme in each, under four broad headings: (1) Narrating revolution: historicizing revolutions; (2) Translation as political intervention; (3) Challenging patriarchy; and (4) Translation and the visual economy of protest. The interview with Philip Rizk (‘Solidarity, translation and the politics of the margin’) offers one activist’s critical analysis of the still unfolding

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narrative of the Egyptian revolution and the place of translation within it. The volume concludes, as it starts, with a visceral piece of writing by Omar Robert Hamilton: ‘Moments of clarity’. Like the opening essay by El-Tamami, Omar’s reflections remind us that the spectacles we watch on our television screens bear little relationship to the experience of revolution on the ground; that revolutions are complex, highly affective experiences that cannot be rationally dissected and packaged into coherent, structured blocks of text capable of conforming to scholarly standards or media expectations.

Notes 1 ‘Place’ in ‘place-based movements’ is understood as “a particular geographical territory and people’s culturally and historically informed experience of, and engagement with, this territory” (Stephansen 2013:512). See also Selim (this volume). 2 See www.girifna.com (last accessed 30 April 2015). 3 There are of course notable exceptions, especially in the literature on social movement studies, including the work of Marianne Maeckelbergh (2009a, 2009b, 2011), Juris (2005, 2008), Mehrez (2012) and the collection by Notes from Nowhere (2003), among others. 4 General distrust of the media and of mainstream institutions – including academia of course – is identified by Wolfson and Funke (this volume) as part of the contemporary logic of social movement politics, with the Indymedia initiative as one type of activist response to these institutions. Although not discussed in the contribution to the current volume, Leil-Zahra Mortada’s involvement in Indymedia and in training Indymedia volunteers in Iraq during the 2003 invasion points to long-standing, concrete connections between Arab activists and the Global Justice Movement. See the video recording of Leil’s plenary at the Globalizing Dissent conference in Cairo, 6–8 March 2015. Available at www. monabaker.org/?p=1202 (last accessed 30 April 2015). 5 This means that many of the essays do not conform to the established scholarly model of writing – a model which is increasingly being questioned, especially in the context of studying protest movements (Luchies 2015). The collection deliberately departs from this model where applying it seems irrelevant, and focuses instead on attempting to engage a broad audience that is likely to be less concerned with how many references each article lists and whether it pays tribute to canonized authors, and more interested in making new connections and understanding events from the perspective of those engaged in them. 6 A video recording of the actual protest can be viewed at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QnT-Az3kKlY (last accessed 30 April 2015). 7 See www.hologramasporlalibertad.org/en.html#home (last accessed 30 April 2015). 8 Gaber also asserts that “attempts to transform the native language, by infusing it with specialized terms, borrowed words, and even excavating terms from popular or historical use, go hand in hand with concrete efforts to transform the city” (p. 100). 9 This is clearly the kind of project that feminism and queer activism have long pursued, and often with much more recognition of the role of translation than is evident in contemporary protest movements. 10 www.youtube.com/watch?v=MChw2kqlRG8&feature=youtu.be (last accessed 30 April 2015).

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11 Rizk (p. 227) refers to the same pattern when he argues that “the narrative of 25 January that has gained the most traction amongst elites both in and outside Egypt is that the revolt was flamed by an Internet-savvy middle-class milieu” and that “this narrative would later clearly reveal itself to be part of the strategy of the counter-revolution’s undermining of the revolution”.

References Abend-David, Dror (2003) ‘Scorned My Nation’: A Comparison of Translations of The Merchant of Venice into German, Hebrew, and Yiddish, New York: Peter Lang. Azeez, Govand Khald (2015) ‘The Thingified Subject’s Resistance in the Middle East’, Middle East Critique 24(2): 111–35. Baker, Mona (2006) Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account, Abingdon & New York: Routledge. Baker, Mona (2013) ‘Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action’, Social Movement Studies 21(1): 23–47. Baker, Mona (forthcoming) ‘The Prefigurative Politics of Translation in Place-Based Movements of Protest: Subtitling in the Egyptian Revolution’, submitted to The Translator. Baker, Mona and Alice Guthrie (2014) ‘Speaking Freely: Mona Baker’, Free Word, 9 June. Available at www.freewordcentre.com/blog/2014/06/speaking-freelymona-baker/ (last accessed 30 April 2015). Boéri, Julie (2005) ‘Babels and the Politics of Language at the Heart of the Social Forum’. Available at www.academia.edu/512895/Babels_and_the_Politics_of_ Language_at_the_Heart_of_the_Social_Forum (last accessed 30 April 2015). Boéri, Julie (2008) ‘A Narrative Account of the Babels vs. Naumann Controversy: Competing Perspectives on Activism in Conference Interpreting’, The Translator 14(1): 21–50. Boéri, Julie (2012) ‘Translation/Interpreting Politics and Praxis: The Impact of Political Principles on Babels’ Interpreting Practice’, The Translator 18(2): 269–90. Boéri, Julie and Carol Maier (eds) (2010) Translation/Interpreting and Social Activism, Granada: ECOS. della Porta, Donatella and Alice Mattoni (eds) (2014) Spreading Protests: Social Movements in Times of Crisis, Colchester: ECPR Press. Doerr, Nicole (2012) ‘Translating Democracy: How Activists in the European Social Forum Practice Multilingual Deliberation’, European Political Science Review 4(3): 361–84. Downey, Anthony (ed.) (2014) Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East, London & New York: I.B.Tauris. Flesher Fominaya, Cristina (2007) ‘Autonomous Movements and the Institutional Left: Two Approaches in Tension in Madrid’s Anti-globalization Network’, South European Society and Politics 12(3): 335–58. Flesher Fominaya, Cristina and Andrea Teti (2015) ‘Spain’s Hologram Protests’, Open Democracy, 22 April. Available at www.opendemocracy.net/can-europemake-it/cristina-flesher-fominaya-andrea-teti/spain’s-hologram-protests (last accessed 30 April 2015). Golson, Emily, Loubna Youssef and Amanda Fields (eds) (2014) Toward, Around, and Away from Tahrir: Tracking Emerging Expressions of Egyptian Identity, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Gregory, Derek (2013) ‘Tahrir: Politics, Publics and Performances of Space’, Middle East Critique 22(3): 235–46. Hess, Maya (2012) ‘Translating Terror: The (Mis)application of US Federal Prison Rules in the Yousry Case’, The Translator 18(1): 23–46. Hodkinson, Stuart and Julie Boéri (2005) ‘Social Forums after London: The Politics of Language’, Red Pepper. Available at www.redpepper.org.uk/Social-forumsafter-London-The/ (last accessed 30 April 2015). Inghilleri, Moira (2012) Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics and Language, New York & London: Routledge. Inghilleri, Moira and Sue-Ann Harding (eds) (2010) Translation and Violent Conflict, special issue of The Translator 16(2). Juris, Jeffrey S. (2005) ‘Social Forums and their Margins: Networking Logics and the Cultural Politics of Autonomous Space’, Ephemera 5(2): 253–72. Juris, Jeffrey S. (2008) Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization, Durham, NC, & London: Duke University Press. Khalil, Ashraf (2012) Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Korany, Bahgat and Rabab El-Mahdi (eds) (2012) Arab Spring in Egypt: Revolution and Beyond, Cairo: American University Press. Lievrouw, Leah A. (2011) Alternative and Activist New Media, Cambridge: Polity Press. Luchies, Timothy (2015) ‘Towards an Insurrectionary Power/Knowledge: MovementRelevance, Anti-Oppression, Prefiguration’, Social Movement Studies, published online 13 January 2015. DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2014.998643. Maeckelbergh, Marianne (2009a) The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy, London & New York: Pluto Press. Maeckelbergh, Marianne (2009b) ‘Reinventing Democracy’, Red Pepper. Available at www.redpepper.org.uk/Reinventing-democracy/ (last accessed 2 February 2015). Maeckelbergh, Marianne (2011) ‘Doing Is Believing: Prefiguration as Strategic Practice in the Alterglobalization Movement’, Social Movement Studies 10(1): 1–20. Manuel Jerez, Jesús de, Juan López Cortés and María Brander de la Iglesia (n.d.) ‘Social Commitment in Translation and Interpreting: A View from ECOS, Translators and Interpreters for Solidarity’. Available at www.translationdirectory.com/ article366.htm (last accessed 14 July 2015). Mehrez, Samia (ed.) (2012) Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, Cairo: American University Press. Melucci, Alberto (1996) Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nim, Evgenia (in press) ‘Nanodemonstrations as Media Events: Networked Forms of the Russian Protest Movement’, in Mona Baker and Bolette Blaagaard (eds) Citizen Media and Public Spaces: Diverse Expressions of Citizenship and Dissent, Abingdon & New York: Routledge. Niranjana, Tejaswini (1992) Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context, Berkeley: University of California Press. Notes from Nowhere (eds) (2003) We are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism, London: Verso. Nunes, Rodrigo (2005) ‘Networks, Open Spaces, Horizontality: Instantiations’, Ephemera 5(2): 297–318.

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Pérez-González, Luis (2010) ‘Ad-hocracies of Translation Activism in the Blogosphere: A Genealogical Case Study’, in Mona Baker, Maeve Olohan and María Calzada Pérez (eds) Text and Context: Essays on Translation and Interpreting in Honour of Ian Mason, Manchester: St. Jerome, 259–87. Rafael, Vicente L. (2012) ‘Translation and the US Empire: Counterinsurgency and the Resistance of Language’, The Translator 18(1): 1–22. Rizk, Philip (2013) ‘Interview with Philip Rizk by Shuruq Harb’, ArtTerritories, 20 May. Available at www.artterritories.net/?page_id=2997 (last accessed 1 February 2015). Salem, Sara (2015) ‘Creating Spaces for Dissent: The Role of Social Media in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution’, in Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs (eds) Social Media, Politics and the State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, New York & London: Routledge, 171–88. Selaiha, Nehad (2011) ‘Antigone in Egypt‘, in Erin B. Mee and Helene P. Foley (eds) Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 343–72. Souief, Ahdaf (2012) Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, London: Bloomsbury. Sowers, Jeannie and Chris Toensing (eds) (2012) The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt, London: Verso. Stahuljak, Zrinka (2010) ‘War, Translation, Transnationalism: Interpreters in and of the War (Croatia, 1991–1992)’, in Mona Baker (ed.) Critical Readings in Translation Studies, London & New York: Routledge, 391–414. Stephansen, Hilde C. (2013) ‘Connecting the Peripheries: Networks, Place and Scale in the World Social Forum Process’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 49(5): 506–18. Talens, Manuel (2010) ‘The Languages of Tlaxcala: A Short History of a Long Walk’, in Julie Boéri and Carol Maier (eds) Translation/Interpreting and Social Activism, Granada: ECOS, 19–24. Teleb, Ahmed R. (2014) ‘The Zeitgeist of Tahrir and Occupy’, Truthout, 10 February. Available at www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21776-the-zeitgeist-of-tahrir-andoccupy (last accessed 30 April 2015). Tymoczko, Maria (2000) ‘Translation and Political Engagement: Activism, Social Change and the Role of Translation in Geopolitical Shifts’, The Translator 6(1): 23–47. Venuti, Lawrence (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility, London & New York: Routledge.

Part I

Narrating revolution Historicizing revolutions

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A wish not to betray Some thoughts on writing and translating revolution Wiam El-Tamami

For a long time I was afraid and unwilling to write about the revolution, struggling with the impossibility of translating the immensity, intensity, and sometimes absurdity of the upheaval – within us and without – into words that make sense, that can convey something of the experience without reducing its unfathomability. What does it mean to write without betraying? Is it possible to bring such irreconcilable elements into a cohesive whole that nevertheless belies its own incoherence? That limns, somehow, the mechanisms of life, of being human, even in a time of senselessness? The struggle to explore a writing that contains these questions rather than submitting them to the tyranny of conclusions slowly began to assert itself as an act of resistance in the face of more dangerously simplistic narratives. These delivered headlines and soundbites devoid of experience and meaning, and filled to the brim with easily digestible answers, which not only gave a funnelled perspective to those watching from afar, but began to divide the city and its people into camps existing, almost, in different spheres: those attempting to engage with the revolution on an experiential level and those who tried to hide from it behind the shield of their television screens. This personal essay offers a chronicle of this struggle, exploring the role of personal narrative in attempting to translate an experience as all-encompassing as revolution.

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Wiam El-Tamami Wiam El-Tamami is a writer, translator, teacher and literary editor. Born to Egyptian parents, she has lived in Vietnam, Kuwait, England, Egypt and Turkey, and has spent much of her adult life running away from and returning to Cairo. In May 2010 she landed back in Cairo after a stint of living in South East Asia, intending to leave again soon, but something compelled her to stay. She ended up being part of and being transformed by the years of upheaval to follow. Her writing about the revolution has been driven by a need to understand the small and daily meanings of upheaval, to find an essence beyond the political headlines and fed narratives. Her work has appeared in Granta, Jadaliyya, Banipal, Alif, and in various anthologies. In 2011 she won the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize. She is currently based in Istanbul, where she writes and translates, practises and teaches yoga, cooks, wanders, ponders, and dreams, some nights, of Cairo.

I I remember sleeping on the floor on the night of 28 January 2011. I remember our clothes smelling of vinegar, tear gas, and the thick black plumes of smoke we had seen our city explode into that day. I remember milling around the streets that lead to Tahrir that uneasy morning, joining a few small, scattered protests, waiting and wondering when, if, something bigger would begin. My friend Shadi was interpreting for a French radio journalist and I remember that we went back to her hotel for a moment to recharge her equipment and, as we stood on the balcony of her seventh-floor room, I remember that we saw Abdel Moneim Riad Square erupt into a battlefield before our eyes. One of my most salient – and surreal – memories from that day is standing on that balcony, looking down at that everyday square so known to me, now the scene of a battle between people and police, and back over my shoulder into the room, where a television was broadcasting Breaking News and that very same scene, from the very same angle. The Al-Jazeera news crew were filming from the next room. My head felt as though it had split into two screens. People came down, in unbelievable masses, from the bridges. The building across from us went up in flames. Tear gas began to fill the air and rivers of people poured into the hotel lobby like refugees from a natural disaster, all of us choking on the white gas and black smoke, passing around cloth masks and vinegar-sodden towels to hold over our mouths. Sometime after nightfall the battle started to die down, as the police began to withdraw from the streets. In this moment of uncertain reprieve, Shadi and I decided to try to make it to our friend Salam’s flat. It had always been a gathering place, but since all telecommunications had been severed that day, there was no way of knowing whether anyone was there or what had happened to our friends.

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We cut across Abdel Moneim Riad Square, now dark and eerily deserted, an upturned police truck still smouldering under the bridge, and past the Egyptian Museum, which was now being guarded against looters by a citizen watch committee. We walked through a downtown shuttered and dark as we’d never seen it before: our flashy, raucous, neon-lit downtown now a post-apocalyptic landscape of small fires and bands of young people walking around in an almost drunken haze of discovery that the streets, for the first time in their lives, were theirs. We finally arrived into the embrace of our friends, who whooped, “We did it! We did it!” I was so grateful for their embrace, but part of me felt wide-eyed and far away.

Only this moment This small flat, a few streets away from Tahrir, was where we would camp out for the next two weeks, going to the Square every day and coming back to sleep at night. One night there were over 20 people crammed into that tiny apartment. Our lives had become only this moment. Though I was there, though I could not but be there, though I was as amazed as we all were by the miracle of the Square, this living, breathing expanse of our imagination; though I experienced, in the collective way that experience was now, the surges of hope and anger and renewed determination – that feeling of distance, of being at a remove from my own body, never quite went away. I envied others their ability to lose themselves, their euphoria uncontained; I even envied them their tears. The first time I cried, I was holding a can of chickpeas in my hand. I was not in Tahrir; nothing tragic had just happened. It must have been sometime during the first week of February. When my parents found out that I was in the Square – rather than safe at home in Maadi as I had been telling them all along – they insisted, panicked, that I come to see them. My mother picked me up downtown. When we arrived in their staid, middle-class neighbourhood, a half hour’s drive away, she wanted to go to the supermarket. I followed her in like an automaton, bewildered by the elevator music, the people pushing trolleys, the pile of imported avocados. It was my first day away from the Square since it all began. I remember holding a can of chickpeas in my hand and feeling the tears, suddenly, on my face. I could not tell you what those tears meant. Only that they were my first inkling of lacunae that existed, just beyond my realm of comprehension, both inside myself and in the city.

Storylines For a long time, I was afraid and unwilling to write about the revolution. In those early days, it was some time before we began to realize that Tahrir

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Square was being beamed into homes around the world, with a very particular, rather facile storyline: the people of Egypt had come heroically together to demand – those words so beloved of Western pundits – freedom and democracy. It was the story of the hour, a hot commodity. I did not wish to traffic in it. Our experience was, of course, far more textured and complex. Most of the local media were telling a very different story: of a foreign plot to destabilize Egypt, of this same Tahrir Square being overrun with paid agents and armed thugs, junkies and whores. Millions of people were against the revolution. Millions cowered in their homes in fear. Meanwhile the Square itself was shifting every day, absorbing the news and turning it into jokes and themes that rippled through the crowds; to say nothing of our shifting heads and hearts and states of mind. The upheaval was everywhere, in everything. So I dared not write because I was afraid, too, of a different kind of betrayal: how could I even begin to capture, to translate, the immensity of what was happening all around us, and within?

Translating testimonies On 9 March, barely a month after the heady victory of the fall of Mubarak, the army stormed Tahrir Square and destroyed the remaining tents. Our friend Aly Sobhy was among those arrested. While in military detention, he was tortured and sexually violated. He and others who were arrested were forced to appear en masse before a military ‘tribunal’ that took place in a mess hall. They were filmed, shackled, in front of an impressive pile of weaponry they had supposedly been seized with, and this footage broadcast on state television. When Aly was freed following a massive campaign for his release, I read his testimony with aching laughter and with tears. He had written it as though he was sitting across from us at a downtown coffee shop, narrating the story with that humour that was so Egyptian and all his own. I set about translating it with a friend. And so it was that I began to translate testimonies and subtitle videos, in an attempt to get out to the world what was happening, as the ‘transition process’ became riddled with mystery and violence and the revolution had to confront a far more difficult foe: the public’s beloved military. There were many more testimonies of torture and abuse, arbitrary arrests and military trials in the months to come. But it would still be some time before I would attempt to translate the turmoil into words of my own.

Maspero and Mohamed Mahmoud October 2011. The Maspero massacre. Army APCs mowing down peaceful protestors in front of the state television building. Friends and I translated the eyewitness accounts as they came in, unable to comprehend the horror of the words we were trying to transcribe from one language into another.

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On Friday 18 November, we went out to Tahrir in force to protest military rule, which was becoming ever more synonymous with repression and brutality and the same lying, denying media machine. We went out, and then, as night drew near, most of us went home, save for a few dozen people who decided to stay in the Square and stage a sit-in. Most of them had been wounded in the revolution’s first days, and had yet to see any change. It probably would have ended there – the sit-in would have tapered off eventually – except that the following morning, on Saturday, Central Security Forces violently stormed the sit-in. Hundreds of people poured back into the Square for support. I remember sitting at home that afternoon, trying to understand what was happening, when the image of a young activist whom I’d met the previous summer, and who was friends with several of my friends, suddenly popped up on my Facebook feed. He had lost his right eye in the clashes. On Sunday, Hani, one of my closest friends, was caught in a pincer of army and police as they ambushed the Square, by now full of people again. His became one in a heap of bodies upon which the uniformed men fell, raining down sticks and vengeful blows. By some miracle something broke and he managed to run for his life, his head split open and bleeding, and was rushed to the emergency room. On Monday our friend Abdalla was hit by a live bullet in the leg that shattered his shin bone. I began to write. I wrote as the Square swelled to a size and energy that had not been seen since those first 18 days in January–February. It was the second wave of our revolution, this time angrier and more violent. I wrote of the incessant wail of ambulance sirens carting the wounded off from the front lines on Mohamed Mahmoud Street; about the ragged beats banged out, in time with the chants, on the iron railings surrounding the Square; about stumbling through a landscape of toxic gas. I wrote, too, about the sweet-potato carts and the pumpkin seeds with their white salt-coats and the cotton-candy man on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, his stick of fairypink floss strapped to his back and waving madly amidst the fighting. I wrote about Hani returning to the Square the very day after his injury, with a bandaged head and arm. About heading to the usual restaurant for lunch, and teasing him about ordering his usual, and the comfort of that small predictability. About the waiter who now had small dark pellet holes in his face. I wrote about Abdalla’s jokiness in his hospital bed, despite having had to bleed for seven hours outside the surgery ward while one after the other an unrelenting stream of young people in even more critical condition – bullets to the head and chest – were hauled in. I wrote as public opinion began to tip, once again, in favour of the revolution, as videos spread of officers dragging dead bodies into a garbage heap, as scores more were killed and thousands injured and the Military Council’s repeated claims that not a single bullet had been fired began to grow thin. Once again I was assailed with questions and doubts about how

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I can possibly write without betraying all this, but writing was a wave that surged over and through me, sending me stumbling on. I tried to ground myself in the details. I wrote as the politicians “dithered and dallied in their back rooms” (El-Tamami 2011), as the momentum of the week began to wane with no political gains. I finally finished the piece, blind and streaming with the pain and stupor of the week, and sent it to an editor, not knowing whether this raw, garbled mass of experience was even readable, bewildered when he called it extraordinary. When it came out, Hani and Abdalla – the two people I had written it for – read it and were heartened. And some others – some strangers, some friends – wrote to me from far away to say that they had been worried and confounded by the recent mess of events, but that this brought them into the fold of what was happening, in a way the news did not. Several people mentioned one particular line: This is what they don’t tell you on the news – about the pockets of normalcy that always exist, persist . . . . (El-Tamami 2011) I had written it without giving it much thought, but it was a phrase – ‘pockets of normalcy’ – that would continue to come back to me and form a backbone to my writing about the revolution over the coming years.

Through the cave It was another year and a half before I would complete and publish anything else about the revolution. I tried to write many, many times in the interim, but the senselessness of the situation, the increasing polarization, and the din of lies and opinions, delusions and manipulations, left me floundering. It was only in moments of extreme urgency that I found something in myself that could push me through those moments when I “above all, wished for silence” (El-Tamami 2013a). Each time, the discrepancy between what I sat down to write and what came out was a surprise. In July 2013, I wrote a piece about the volunteers who, in the absence of any response from the army or police, were putting their own lives at risk to extricate women from the spate of mob sexual attacks that had reached fever-pitch in Tahrir Square. That autumn, I wrote a quieter piece about my sister and her apartment and the dark July we spent there, with two cats for company, following the military coup. Some time later I wrote a text in fractured verse, as meaning and coherence became more and more elusive. As most everyone who writes creatively will say: writing hurts. I think one of the reasons it is so painful is that it throws up, with every word and every line, so much self-doubt, so much fundamental fear. It is the process of tearing oneself down, over and over and over again, peeling away so

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many layers of pretence, of who you wish to be and how you wish to sound: a meditation where you are battling it out with the monkey mind on the open page. You are moving through a cave with only the dimmest of flashlights. You flash it here and there, hoping to catch a true sound echoing back, a reflection of water, something old and carved on the wall. Often you go a long, solitary way before you alight on something. You follow its trail for some time before losing it again. Then you have to put your head down, batting away those voices and ghosts all the while, and continue. For me the usual pain of writing was magnified because I was trying to write in the midst of the fire, of the din – because I was trying to whittle down, to translate, a time that was monstrously inscrutable into words and sentences that were legible – and because I was writing about things that were already so painful and that I did not want to keep going through, again and again, in the cave. And the sometimes crippling self-doubt was compounded by the fact that I was writing about a collective experience whose magnitude and responsibility felt immense: How can I possibly capture this? And who am I to write, anyway? As it turns out, the magnitude and the urgency of it all not only amplified the pain and struggle, but also, paradoxically, forced me through it. The revolution gave my writing soil to root in. All the more so when I would read people’s responses and began to feel, to allow myself to believe, that I had managed, I had somehow managed to write without betraying. And that it is important to try.

II I write as a form of translation. I write in a solitude born out of community. I write out of ignorance. I write because I believe in words. I write because I do not believe in words. (Terry Tempest Williams, 1998, ‘Why Write’) When I think, now, about what it means to write without betraying, this unpublished fragment, written in October 2013, comes to mind: The worst days for me have been the ones spent indoors, watching something horrific unfold. Watching and listening through the blind filter of information, inhaling an ever-hungering ‘feed’. Information means nothing. It doesn’t tell you how things feel, what is happening beyond the screen. Down the road people are sitting at a sidewalk coffeeshop, smoking shisha. One street away a woman leans out of her balcony, hanging up the washing. In the next neighbourhood a children’s birthday party is taking place and someone is shopping for shoes.

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For me, some of the most difficult days in the past four years of upheaval were the ones I spent at home, rather than there, wherever there was. Though the kinds of news I was following were mostly reliable reports, mainly on Facebook and Twitter, from pro-revolutionary sources, something about following the news – any ‘news’ – made me feel paralysed, helpless, and more afraid. When I went out again, forcing myself out of this spell, I was invariably surprised by what I would find: I found myself staring at the sunshine bathing the asphalt, the woman on the corner with her crate of fresh herbs, her piles of parsley and mint, cilantro and spring onions, the greenness of things. The metro heaving with people, the market outside the station selling mangoes and shoes, the Zamalek kids in Zamalek cafés, the sound of dice against backgammon boards coming from the coffeeshop down the road, the two young men who whizzed by on a motorbike shouting to each other animatedly, against the wind, about breasts. It all filled me with a vague astonishment, a grey ghost moving among people who were, implausibly, still living. (El-Tamami 2013a) Even in the most unlikely moments, life went on; not only in the streets of the same city, or the same neighbourhood, but sometimes even in the very epicentre of an event, as I was to discover again and again: As we gathered around in a circle to be briefed, some part of me was bewildered at the red nails of the girl standing next to me, at the smiles on people’s faces, when on mine tragedy must have been writ large – a sort of newcomer’s naiveté: I had not yet had time to recalibrate, to normalize. But I soon began to realize, as we walked into Tahrir, that it was still more or less Tahrir. Being away, listening too closely to the news – especially in these panic-fueled days – makes one misunderstand, forget the pockets of air. The square was still the square: crowded with different kinds of people, many men, many women, families, children; standing around, a few walking here and there with their hand-painted signs, others clustered in conversation, or sitting in studied silence, as though waiting. It was revolution-as-usual, normal as we now knew it. And in the midst of this familiar, this innocuous Tahrir, 89 cases of mob sexual assault had been reported [in three days of mass protests] since June 30. (El-Tamami 2013b) And that was just me – being away for a day or two, following news from mostly reliable, pro-revolutionary sources. What did this mean for the

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many people who had been watching state media since the revolution began, huddled in living rooms manned by speaking screens, growing more and more fearful of the street just beneath their window? For me, it was always better to be outside – to be part of the living, breathing organism of whatever was going on. To know it with the body, to take it in with the senses, with the soul. To witness those pockets of normalcy – how people adapt, integrate; absorb and improvise, create and evade; inject lightness and sometimes even humour into very extreme moments. To engage with it, in short, and to share it – rather than remaining obediently seated within the circle of isolation that the news inks around you. Never was I so aware of the massive chasm between the ‘news’ and lived experience as I have been in these past four years, when our country was on the news. How divisive the news seems to me now, how alienating; it purports to bring us closer, to make us tuned into the world around us, ‘aware’ of ‘what is happening’ – but it seems to me now that the opposite is true. I am not even referring to the multiplicity of ideological agendas directing the telling of the news, and their deliberate distortions and manipulations: I am referring to the basic, bare-boned format itself. The very claim of impartiality, of factuality, is dangerous and disfiguring, in particular when imparted with such a tone of authority. The modes of telling: reporting that a rock, somewhere, dropped into water, while telling nothing of the water, of the ripples. The focus on death, catastrophe, and on political machinations grinding on. The headline, the zoom-in, the soundbite. The news – even from the most ‘respectable’ sources – seems to me an elaborately orchestrated pornography of drama and desperation that we have somehow mistaken for a profoundly explanatory anatomy and imbibed in lieu of touch, in lieu of a dance. An intentionally flat schematic that we have come to regard as a living picture of our world. It seems to me that relying on the news for our understanding of the way things are – whether in our own neighbourhood or on another continent – is an elaborate way of staying home, a tray of easily digestible (and daily refilled) assumptions about the world balanced comfortably on our laps. I feel now that it is essentially about fear. And perhaps fear, at its root, is about exerting control. Perhaps it is a way of telling populations: This is how you would be without us: 17 people killed in a bomb blast. You are not told that three blocks down from the blast is a small grocery shop. You are not told that above this shop lives a woman whose marriage is far happier than yours.

Into presence The news is essentially about how many people died today. What if it were about how many people lived? How do we, the living everywhere, go on? How do we make meaning, how do we create our lives, in times of upheaval and elsewhere? (Could it

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be that it is not so different?) What did we eat, how did we love, what did the streets look like to us today? What did we do to evade the currents of life, what did we do to distract ourselves (the underside of our consciousness, those cutting-room shards)? What jokes did we make, what words did we not say? This, I believe, is what personal narrative has the potential to do: to counter those dangerously simplistic and alienating reports by bringing people into the fold, into presence. Providing a conduit of access: ‘being there’ rather than ‘knowing what happened’. I am thinking, now, about some of the ways in which personal narrative can do this. And I think the main thing is for the writer to go in blind: the fewer the intentions and preconceptions, the impositions of the mind – how you wish yourself or the events you are narrating to be perceived – the slimmer, perhaps, the chances of manipulation. The second is to ground oneself in the details: lived, felt, sensed. The peripheral can be just as important as the seeming ‘focus’. Revolution is this, too, it’s the sweet-potato cart and the girl with the red fingernails. Simply to go in alert, blind, and sniff out the details that feel the most pressing. And not to attempt to explain them too much, trusting that the details will tell their own stories, form their own patterns and imprints. To approach it all with a quizzical and enquiring mind, a puzzling-over. To include your questions, like spaces, like a breathing dough. And in all this, one must embrace one’s deepest subjectivity. (Who am I to write about this? I am I.) This, I believe, is true of all writing: by moving with some measure of faith through the labyrinth of your own self, you might find that you arrive at a place shared by many – an underground of human experience. I was fortunate to feel this tangibly because I was writing about an experience that was already so incontrovertibly collective, and the immediacy of publishing and being read in the midst of this meant that I could feel, every time a piece came out, how and whether it reverberated, carried something of the essence of what we’ve been through – to people near as well as far. It became clear to me, somewhere along the line, that I was writing for both; and that I was writing, also, for a more fundamental reason. I was trying to translate the experience to myself. And in so doing, sometimes it translated for others, too: sometimes people wrote to say that I had written what they felt but could not express. I often wrote about – or from a place of – my own confusion, bewilderment. About feelings of inbetweenness, muddled, unspoken. I stopped trying to reconcile irreconcilable elements or reach steady conclusions. I tried to write coherent pieces that belied the situation’s incoherence – to keep the fault lines intact, the cracks. To allow myself, and the picture, to remain fractured. To say what I could not otherwise say.

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Why I write I left Cairo eight months ago, in the spring. I am in Istanbul now, watching diagonal flurries of snow outside my window. I am thinking once again about Saul Steinberg’s words (1967): “Drawing is my way of explaining to myself what goes on in my mind.” I went to Cairo for a short visit in the autumn, and when I came back, I began to write after a silence of six months (El-Tamami 2015). I wrote about my visit. It took me two-and-a-half months to write about those nine days, and they were some of the most wrenching weeks of writing that I’ve been through. When it was finished, I wondered for the first time – the first real time in my life, certainly the first time since the revolution began – whether writing was worth it. The immense loss that I had been trying to keep at bay since I left, the immense void of this time in our revolution, came and took up residence in my room. I tried to avoid it, I tried to skirt around it, but I was forced to look at it, to walk through it again and again, to house myself in it and write. I allowed it to take me apart, to show me a few of the places inside myself that I had been trying to keep out of reach. But writing can be this, too. Making your home in despair, feeling out its rooms, working deep into the darkness and thus, somehow, funnelling a mysterious path through. There is something about this act of writing, of creation, that, even when telling of despair, flies in the face of it. And perhaps it flies, too, in the face of erasure. The narrative can be – is being – unravelled, rediverted; but can these sensory details that limn our days, once written, once shared, be unfelt? often it is the only thing between you and impossibility ... it blasts the darkness. (Charles Bukowski, 1996, ‘Writing’)

References Bukowski, Charles (1996) ‘Writing’, in Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories by Charles Bukowski, New York: HarperCollins Publishers. El-Tamami, Wiam (2011) ‘Revolution Revived: Egyptian Diary, Part Two’, Granta, 7 December. Available at www.granta.com/New-Writing/Revolution-RevivedEgyptian-Diary-Part-Two (last accessed 24 February 2015). El-Tamami, Wiam (2013a) ‘This July’, Granta, 31 October. Available at www. granta.com/New-Writing/This-July (last accessed 24 February 2015).

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El-Tamami, Wiam (2013b) ‘To Willingly Enter the Circles, the Square’, Jadaliyya, 30 July. Available at www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/13273/to-willingly-enterthe-circles-the-square (last accessed 24 February 2015). El-Tamami, Wiam (2015) ‘Cairo: September 2014’, Granta, 28 January. Available at www.granta.com/New-Writing/Cairo-September-2014 (last accessed 6 March 2015). Saul Steinberg Talks (1967). Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yvWEJr2dpE (last accessed 6 March 2015). Williams, Terry Tempest (1998) ‘Why Write’, Northern Lights (Summer).

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Changing frames and fault lines Notes towards a map of a revolution’s shifting narratives Khalid Abdalla The story of the Egyptian revolution carries a heavy burden. Its many tales travel across contexts and experience, within Egypt and beyond it, influencing movements and revolutions while building dreams and threatening them. Solidarity fundamentally entails sharing an interpretation of a story. How that story is told and retold has political and historical implications that are as much about the current moment as they are about the future. Political events are hard to follow at the best of times, and solidarity is broken when the thread of a story is lost or events within it become subject to confusingly competing narratives. At stake is not only solidarity within the Egyptian revolution, but also a story of change and how it happens, or might. Over the past years I have worked with a range of forms and collaborators to engage in telling many of the stories of the Egyptian revolution. With each form and each language, each event and each audience, comes a framework within which those stories can be told and shared. In this essay I reflect on what I see as some of the key fault lines in translating events between contexts as a way of searching for the map that underlies so many shifting narratives.

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Khalid Abdalla Khalid Abdalla works as an actor, producer and film-maker, but also in cultural production, alternative media, and as an activist. He is a founding member of three collaborative spaces in Cairo – Zero Production, Mosireen and Cimatheque. Khalid has acted leading roles in Hollywood films, including United 93, The Kite Runner and Green Zone. He also has two upcoming films from the Arab world: In the Last Days of the City and The Narrow Frame of Midnight. In documentary film, he has producing credits on In the Shadow of a Man and the upcoming film The Vote. He also appears as himself in the Oscar-nominated The Square. Born in Glasgow and brought up in London, he lives in Cairo.

Wherever we are from and whatever our relationship with events in Egypt, one of the great challenges of the last few years of the revolution (and counter-revolution) has been to maintain a level of clarity over what story we are in, retrospectively and prospectively. Time and again, the ground underneath every perspective’s narrative has disappeared, reappeared, and then shifted; been brought into doubt, validated and scorned. This process of continuous reading and rereading has been exhausting, not only for those who feel an urge to fight for one story or another, but also for the wider audiences of events in Egypt whose investment in what happens has had an effect on their local struggles, and indeed vice versa. A series of feedback mechanisms, like concentric ripples of water moving in and out, has gradually turned to noise for everyone. Looking back as a way of looking forward, there are so many fundamental questions to ask that the effect is silencing. Silencing because the sheer volume of interconnected questions makes it difficult to find a point from which to begin. Meanwhile, there is a strangely comforting romance to the various laments grasping at forgiveness for the sense of loss and powerlessness. It is hard sometimes to distinguish reflection from nostalgia, and work out what forms of reassessment are valuable. In this essay I hope to tentatively describe a kind of map to some of the narratives that it seems to me have shaped the last four years in Egypt. I do so, not because I believe a complete map is possible, or indeed that a process of mapping can produce a universal method of reading events and interpreting them to each other, but rather because I have observed a pattern in my concerns over these last few years that has continually returned to the tension between different ideas of how change happens and the way in which this writes the story we believe we are in while in turn affecting the actual choices made in our lives, often with devastating political consequences. While at many moments multitudes have seemed to share an interpretation of events, or even appeared to participate in and witness them together, with the passing of time stories have diverged radically, with severe consequences. Insofar as solidarity of whatever kind entails sharing an interpretation of a story, it seems worth attempting to excavate some of

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the narrative architecture underlying the current slew of conflicts and confusions, not so much as a way of searching for harmony, but as a way of searching for the fault lines whose tensions we have seen unleash both extraordinarily productive and destructive potential. Perhaps if those fault lines are more clearly identified we can make better use of them, or at least build strategies around them. While an essay doesn’t seem to me the place to answer questions of this scale, it might be a place to confess to them. As such, confusion is as much a part of what I am able to express as whatever moments of clarity I manage to claim. The only truth I can stand by here is that my thoughts are stuttering and these are the fragments I am currently able to present. That said, I do believe that somewhere within the fog of these thoughts are the landmarks of what guided myself and others in searching for some of the stories and images that have become part of the body of interventions into events as they happen, and which have in turn taken a place in relation to the collective memory. The circumstances of how and when a story is given form, whether in writing, in images, sound, or otherwise, is part of its essence. In a sense, this is also what I am attempting to trace, or retrace: the relationship between form and content within the material circumstances of a revolution, and the way in which this affects the spheres of influence a story given a particular form can have.

Ideology versus narrative One of the major difficulties in laying out the fault lines between perspectives on events is distinguishing between an interpretation that is motivated by an ideological point of view, and one that reflects adherence to a narrative. Sometimes the words ideology and narrative seem interchangeable; at other times they seem easily distinguishable, or to add to each other. We tend to think of ideology as something static, or abstract, like a Platonic idea in the ether, but there are clear ways in which ideas are embedded in actions, and the concrete experience of them alters what they are. If, quite simply, I believe that the only way out of a crisis is through a leader, and that a president must be chosen quickly, a series of actions will follow, and the sooner that leader is found the better. The way in which I follow the story builds from the value systems inherent in my perspective. However, when my story seems to have hit its perceived target, but the results of that story do not fit the presumptions on which the story is founded, my experience of the narrative begins to come into conflict with the ideas on which everything seemed based. The narrative shift forces a reassessment of the original perspective, and in turn puts into relief the key moments that validated the story I believed I was in, making everything seem something else. My ideological perspective becomes deeply entwined with the material experience of its consequences and ever more difficult to distinguish. This continuous flux between narrative and ideology somehow

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makes the ideology something to be discovered retrospectively, or in the living rather than abstractly or at the outset. Many are those who have said they cannot abide killing who end up justifying massacres. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly the case that what we think we believe has a huge effect not just on how we interpret what happens around us, but also on what we do, and in turn what happens. Within the Egyptian context there are many clear ideological differences that affect how the narrative of events is experienced and fought for. For example, perspectives on systems of government, and whether exclusionary structures of power are more suited to our circumstances than inclusive ones, or the relationship between brutality and social injustice. Some see causal links between divergence from religious observance and society’s ills, others see it in quite the opposite way. Some consider revolutionary violence inspiring, others find it an inevitable liability. With each perspective comes a framework for investing in one narrative over another, and over time a range of paths are built that diverge and intersect at different points, depending on the priorities of one perspective’s interests over another’s. But while it might be possible to write an exhaustive list of the major issues that represent ideological differences across the entire political spectrum, I am more interested here to try to probe the narrative challenges posed by the circumstances of a revolution, and in turn some of the tensions between people who seem to hold roughly similar beliefs, but whose experience of attempting to hold on to those beliefs over time appears to write a completely different story. Perhaps some of what lies beneath those differences is an ideological difference, but perhaps it is also a narrative one. The intensity with which beliefs are challenged or held often corresponds to the way in which the moments which put them to the test are experienced, that is if they are experienced at all. While to a certain extent translating between contexts projects the presumption that it is only knowledge that separates people, things are of course not so simple. Labouring under the presumption that ‘if only people knew, things would change’ doesn’t stand the test of experience. People often know and might as well not care.

Revolutionary stakes and turbulent ground A revolution is a period of massive social change in which the narratives underlying structures of power are brought violently into question. So fundamental is the assault that the most basic pillars of authority’s story are threatened with complete destruction. Because narratives have abstract qualities, it can be easy to forget how concrete their consequences are. A story might be easy to change in words, but if that story has organized all your relationships and what you tell yourself about why you have made the decisions you have laboured for over your entire life, the consequences of changing it no longer become so abstract. Scale the conceptual frameworks embedded in those narratives into buildings, institutions, laws,

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cultural norms, and suddenly the burden of a simple story can become overwhelming. Changing the story, or even claiming the right to choose a different one, can become a site of extreme contention, often with bloody consequences. Abstract ideas and concrete realities are not the same, of course, but the journey between them is shaped by the stories we tell and how they are interpreted. The stronger the narrative, and the more successfully it occupies space in people’s imaginations, the more likely is its version of how things are to dominate and direct their energies and choices. The severity of revolutionary circumstances increases the stakes for everyone because the distance between abstract demands and concrete realities appears to collapse, at least momentarily. Where once it seemed that an entire lifetime could pass without seeing substantial change, the events of a day appear to completely alter the balance of power. The shifts are so radical that the room for political niceties all but disappears, and softly held positions are forced to discover their blunter edges. Invisible power is forced to become visible as the restructuring of the political order forces every block to come to the surface and defend its interests, whether with guns or reason. The stories this produces are overwhelmingly powerful because they make manifest the way things prefer not to be seen. During the four years that followed the initial uprising, the grand narratives of the revolution in Egypt changed four or five times at least. The victors became the vanquished, the murderers protectors, the heroes spies, the torturers patriots. The very territories and spaces of the revolution, from Tahrir to the streets, dates and anniversaries, became clash-points over stories of what happened or what people believed what happened was meant to promise. Is 25 January the anniversary of the revolution, or a day commemorating the police? Did we have two revolutions? Were the events of 30 June a revolution or a coup? Can the Muslim Brotherhood be considered ‘secular’? Who killed who on what day? Who is conspiring to kill and destabilize the country? Is it our duty to obey or to challenge? A step deeper in the narrative structure of the story takes you into questions of how you interpret the process of a revolution. If you believe a revolution is a moment in which speedy reform is possible, you will have to overcome serious disappointment if that proves not to be the case. If you interpret revolution as a massive demonstration aimed at changing the government, you will not understand why changing the government doesn’t seem to quell the ferment. If you believe a revolution is a process intended to change the way the entire state apparatus is conceived, you will interpret any action of the state as an attempt to thwart your objectives. Within each framework, lives are lived, dreams are built, stories are told, frustrations are encountered. Any time the dramaturgical framework changes and steers away from the one you have lived for, you will suffer disappointment or anger. The more the framework changes, the greater your exhaustion and bewilderment. The harder it is to hold on to the thread, or keep people with you.

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I start from the presumption that a revolution is a sign of failure. It is a sign that the lives of vast communities of people have become so abominable, and the mechanisms of change so decrepit and corrupt, that the only strategy left to begin a process of change is mass social action of overwhelming magnitude. When there are no longer any convincing methods of internal reform available and the result is devastating, the only way out must rely on sites of power at a clear disadvantage because they are outside traditional power, and therefore likely to be less organized. At the moment of rupture everything controlled by the state – armies, legal institutions, parliaments, political parties, unions, meeting places, prisons, centres of culture and education, capital, media, infrastructure – is in the hands of people who have benefited from or found a way to negotiate with the old order. As such, in the apparently ideal situation in which a well-organized revolutionary force magically sweeps to power, its best hope is to take over the shell of a functioning infrastructure constructed to serve old interests, and then find a way to deal with the entire retinue of employees and agents whose way of doing things is over – at least according to the revolutionary forces. Which is to say, more likely, parts of the old state remain and fight to stay in power, the organs of the state disable the possibility of change – not least because they are already dysfunctional – and the country enters a complicated wrestling match between old and new powers fighting for their version of the future. During this period of change, or rather this period of revolutionary struggle over change, the different ideas underlying beliefs in the kinds of space of possibility opened up by revolution come squarely into conflict. They fundamentally affect strategic priorities and the focus of interests. If I believe that building political parties in the immediate aftermath of a revolution is essential to shaping the future of that revolution, the wildly untameable swings of revolutionary protest will be a huge frustration to my desire to direct people’s energies. If on the other hand I consider the idea of building parties and reforming governmental systems during a period of such turbulence to be akin to building a house during an earthquake, I will be hugely frustrated by energies lost to a project I am sure will collapse without even having provided sanctuary. We have not been in the same story over these last four years, or rather we have not been projecting the same story onto events, or the future of those events. We have been fighting for different definitions of what is becoming as it happens, not just what we abstractly believe in. This is as true for different camps within the revolution, as it is for those who have opposed it. The multiplicity of narratives is inevitable, and indeed healthy. The chant of ‘one hand’ has fascist undertones fairly described, because the dream that everyone could or should think the same thing is dangerous.1 But insofar as revolutions depend in large degree on solidarity of mind and spirit amongst a critical mass of people, it is important to keep a live sense of the tensions that exist between different perspectives, because the

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moment they are bridged has the power of collective epiphany. Working to achieve that shared consciousness in the present is a very different task from achieving it retrospectively, or even with people far away, because the consequences of current thoughts have the potential to become a concrete threat to the status quo, which is also to say there is a price paid for them in the labour of people’s lives, if not their actual blood.

Fault lines Every major period in the revolution has been marked by a master narrative built on a major lie that serves authority’s interests, followed by the process of the lie being broken down and partially or totally destroyed. In crude terms, the sequence has been as follows. First it was that the police state was strong enough to be unpunishable and that maintaining the status quo, no matter the price, was in the best interests of Egyptian citizens. Second it was that the army were the protectors of the revolution and placed their citizens’ interests above their own. Third it was that the Muslim Brotherhood were a secular force for democracy that represented an inclusive vision for the future of the country. As I write in March 2015, it has been for some time now that the Muslim Brotherhood is the biggest threat to Egypt’s future, that security can be re-established with violent, exclusionary force, and that in the absence of an alternative the army will bring sufficient prosperity to the country by holding it together with an iron grip. Clearly, the last of these is the most complicated and so the hardest narrative to break, much as part of it has already fallen apart. The original version was that the army and the police have learned the lessons of the first two waves of the revolution, and have returned to protect their citizens. Of course alongside these master narratives, there have been other major battlegrounds over narratives. Particularly over the political process and in turn the story of how change happens. Four elections, three referendums and five constitutional declarations later, the question of how to institute change weighs heavily. There are those who believe that during a revolution the structure of power must be changed from within the existing state apparatus, and there are those who believe that negotiating with the state in such critical circumstances is counter-productive because it legitimizes counter-revolutionary authority. The journey with these narratives is not so much sequential as it is embedded within the readings given to various moments and opportunities within the process of events, and particularly whether they are described as won or lost. Again, what is essential about these readings from within the experience of a lived revolution is how they scatter energies, not just the rights and wrongs of the positions themselves. Each occupies the imaginative concerns of individuals and what they believe is possible and so worth making personal sacrifices for. The reading that follows from each also has consequences for the psychological journey made through the inevitable turbulence and losses.

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Change itself is often dreamed around as a linear process. Like a story. The sense of opportunities won and lost, and in turn how the process is valued, shapes the weight of judgement as to whether it would have been better to take one direction or another – as if somehow the story of what happened should aspire to be lean. The shortest route to change is considered best, and any deviation represents time and energies lost. Sadly, while this desire remains ever present, the process of change proves to be endlessly frustrating. It requires acts of inhuman stamina, repeatedly. Indeed the sequence of attempts to make shortcuts often maps the longest route. But stamina comes at a price. When a revolution begins it is because the possibility of change has already come too late. The crisis that precipitates a revolutionary moment has consequences the scale of generations, if not the entire lives of several. Ultimately we are talking about education, health, infrastructure, justice, employment, basic freedoms and rights, food and water. The people who bear the brunt of this crisis are of course the poor, particularly those whose circumstances are already unbearable. The frustrating process of change makes it more unbearable; so much so that a return to older situations begins to look attractive, and calls for change begin to look and sound as if they are sustained by people with the simple privilege of time, even. Within these circumstances any promise of betterment becomes attractive, particularly if you have the power to deliver it. Abstract hopes for the future are nothing compared to the food on my plate today. So, better the devil you know. Until, once again, the promises prove to be lies with even heavier consequences, and ‘becomings-revolutionary’, a phrase I will come to shortly, are unleashed again.

The infrastructure of stories The power of stories exists not only in the stories themselves, but in the ability to tell them in a way that allows them to be heard. The way the world is constructed enables certain stories to be told easily and others to require extraordinary labour, and sometimes carry life-threatening risks. The infrastructure that lies beneath stories has a concrete territory and it has an abstract one. The concrete spaces are the many buildings, organizations and spaces that produce and carry stories – whether TV stations, production companies, radio stations, newspapers, cinemas, the Internet, universities or books. The abstract spaces are the heritage of thoughts and ideas within a given culture that make certain stories more familiar and digestible, and others more challenging and less accessible; the more familiar the more dominant, the more challenging the harder to share or reach. The danger is to presume that stories and ideas are simply abstract, because this presumption renders invisible the fact that the concrete world and the way it shapes ideas of what is possible or true is, more often than not, a reflection of dominant ideas in the service of power’s story of the

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way things are and should remain. Some stories are interesting, and others are boring, but that doesn’t correlate to which are dangerous to power and which are convenient. Telling stories during a revolution relies on the tools, resources and structures at hand. The shifting ground of a revolution provides moments in which certain of these circumstances work to a particular narrative’s benefit, and others where they don’t. When those in power derive significant authority from the claim that they do not kill or torture, for example, but they actually do so in public, a camera can simply capture the story that proves they are lying, and share it immediately with the simplest of edits. The resources required are minimal, the tools are at hand, and the energy needed to capture and share the story is relatively manageable. Even digesting it takes little effort from an audience’s perspective. When, however, the narratives that must be challenged are no longer visible, or become more complicated, the resources required to find ways to formulate the argument or capture the images and stories that disprove a convenient lie are of an entirely different scale. Consequently the domain of narrative production becomes taken over by those with access to resources and the various relationships with capital and power this represents. In turn, the balance in the volume of stories shared from one side or another shifts dramatically, alongside the ability to control not only what can be said and what cannot, but how it can be said and where. Negotiating these narrative shifts is also an existential issue insofar as it raises the question of what risks are worth making and organizing your life around. When the needs of storytelling fit the circumstances of someone’s life the impact is manageable or even beneficial, but when a particular story requires years of someone’s life to be produced the balance of priorities changes. Territories open up and close down accordingly as the balance sheet of risks and returns alters, not just for individuals but whole communities. That said, the peak of a revolutionary moment is one in which many of these considerations dissolve long enough for different organizing principles to guide action. The question gradually becomes how to keep that space of possibility alive long enough to fight beyond its moment, while continuing to speak from what originally motivated it.

‘The concrete problem’ versus ‘the current becomings of people’ The concrete problem is how and why do people become revolutionary? And fortunately historians can’t prevent them from doing so. It’s obvious that the South Africans are caught up in a becoming-revolutionary, the Palestinians are caught up in a becoming-revolutionary. Then, if someone tells me afterwards, “oh you will see, when they have won, if their revolution succeeds, it will go badly, etc.” well, first of all, they won’t be the same, there won’t be the same kinds of problems, and then a new

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Khalid Abdalla situation will be created, and once again becomings-revolutionary will be unleashed. The business of men, it’s in situations of tyranny, of oppression, effectively it’s to enter into becomings-revolutionary because there is nothing else to be done. And when someone tells us afterwards, “oh, it’s not working out,” we aren’t talking about the same thing, it’s as if we were speaking two different languages – the future of history and the current becomings of people are not at all the same thing. (Gilles Deleuze 1996/2011, ‘G as in Gauche’)

At the beginning of this essay I claimed I would attempt to describe a kind of map to some of the narratives that have shaped the last four years in Egypt. I believe I have failed – or at least the map seems so incomplete to me that were I to relive the last four years I’m not sure what I would do with these fragments. But somehow I have to take comfort in what I have been able to learn nonetheless, and exist in a space of overwhelming uncertainty that I consider part of overcoming a situation I frequently find unbearable. Embodying that space in its various scales of manifestation seems to me a revolutionary challenge that repeats itself over time. The map has to remain blind. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have patterns, or topographical elements that are recognizable and reoccur. Perhaps the most important concept for me within the struggle to describe the fault lines in interpretations and accounts of revolution is the idea of ‘becoming’, as used here by Deleuze. It identifies most accurately a way in which material circumstances can exist but be challenged, as an uncertain gesture towards the future to free oneself from the past. When something is becoming, it has not yet become, but nonetheless it has a space in the present. Revolutionary change will always be caught in the complexity of a search for an alternative built from the fabric of a dream at the horizon, radically enmeshed in the material circumstances of a present that has been constructed by dogmas inherited from the past. Processes of revolutionary change are always lurking somewhere in a situation of becoming. The moment of rupture, however, is a moment of radical becoming rather than actualization. This distinction underlies some of the greatest strategic differences because it describes the rhythm of compromise. If you cannot see or do not believe in what might become, the focus point of your political interest becomes ever more based on a sense of structures imaginable from the present, and so the closer the point of submission to the way things are. But if the way things are is truly unliveable – above all, as a present for the future – eventually you have no choice but to explode no matter what, like Bouazizi2 in Tunisia, because the entrapment of an unbearably awful present covers generations to come; not only your life, or those of your children, but possibly far beyond. The weakness of that moment is somehow always judged from the privilege of a disembodied experience of what the material circumstances of

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revolutionary change are presumed to be, rather than what they are in the becoming, as lived. Judgement comes far away in time or space, with the ideological and narrative distance that entails. The gap between the two frameworks of interpretation is truly a space that requires translation, because these ‘two languages’, as Deleuze describes them, sound almost exactly the same but have radically different meanings. Somehow the world of news and the plainer dogmas of a historical perspective create presumptions about events, and how they are to be read, that miss the nature of what moments are in the living, particularly when they are being lived for. The issue is not so much a failure to represent what events feel like or what happens in them, but rather a failure to understand the logic of how they are motivated in the present, and indeed how and why certain stories and images become part of them. There is a significant difference between trying to tell a story about something that happened, and sharing the images and stories that have an ability to become part of the dynamics of the event itself. In turn the issue has deeply political consequences insofar as it becomes a question of how to position yourself during a revolution, by which I mean what you actually do with your body, but also how you strategize more broadly in attempting to achieve your goals. The circumstances of history unfolding are not negotiable. You cannot wish an alternative situation in terms of the concrete realities that surround you. But you can interpret things in a multitude of ways, each of which has real-world consequences for the decisions you and others make in their life as lived, individually or collectively. I believe this terrain of becoming, and the imagination that surrounds it, is a key territory in the struggle over change. The most I can hope for here is to have done my best in offering some fragments towards describing it – to what end, I really don’t know, but I hope to live for finding out even so.

Notes 1

2

‘One hand’ ‫ ﺍﻳﺪ ﻭﺍﺣﺪﻩ‬is a chant and slogan often used to signify unity between different factions. Its most frequent usage is as a shortening of the chant ‘The people and the army are one hand’ (‫)ﺍﻟﺠﻴﺶ ﻭﺍﻟﺸﻌﺐ ﺍﻳﺪ ﻭﺍﺣﺪﻩ‬. It has been used widely over different stages of the Egyptian revolution, sometimes as a way of silencing dissent within protestors’ ranks, sometimes as a way of encouraging the army to take the protestors’ side, and at other times as a way of communicating support for the army’s actions. Amongst those who do not support the army’s actions it has increasingly become interpreted as a chant meant to intimidate people into silence. Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi was a Tunisian street vendor whose act of self-immolation is widely considered to have sparked the Tunisian revolution and everything in its wake. He set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 after having his goods confiscated and being humiliated by the police. His last words are reputed to be “How do you expect me to live?” His death became a symbol of a general condition in the region.

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Reference Deleuze, Gilles (1996/2011) Gilles Deleuze from A to Z, with Claire Parnet, directed by Pierre-André Boutang, translated by Charles J. Stivale, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. For a summary, see http://truthbeauty.s3.amazonaws.com/DeleuzeA-Z.pdf (last accessed 14 April 2015).

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Translation and diaspora politics Narrating the struggle at ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ Helen Underhill

As mobilization connected to the 2011 revolution continues inside Egypt and beyond its borders, the translation and narration of particular moments and actors shapes and further complicates various understandings of the struggle. This essay draws on the experiences and perspectives of British-Egyptian and Egyptian migrant activists in the UK to illustrate how and why they used translation as part of their mobilization online and at demonstrations in the UK and in Egypt. It also engages with translation in its broader sense as a way of understanding how groups within one movement in the UK contribute to the representation of Egypt’s continuing struggle. By focusing on the various ways in which the events that unfolded after 30 June 2013 are retold, the essay demonstrates the power of translation and narration to divide and the importance of understanding the various spaces and practices of diaspora politics to the contemporary global political context and to the continuation of Egypt’s revolution.

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Helen Underhill Helen Underhill graduated with a degree in linguistics and worked as an adventure travel tour guide before training as a teacher. After a decade in secondary education, she began to formalize her interests in the various intersections of learning, development, political activism and social change through research. Particularly inspired by her travels in the Middle East and North Africa region and the affinity gained for Egypt during this time, her PhD examined the mobilization of diaspora and transnational activists before, during and since the Egyptian uprising of 2011. The global focus of Helen’s work allows her to remain connected to researching and teaching various dimensions of international development, humanitarianism, education and politics. She recently contributed research for the Chronic Poverty Report and Oxfam.

Across the world, the Egyptian diaspora and migrant Egyptians not only observed the 25 January revolution from a distance, but many actively participated and continue to mobilize in Egypt’s struggle across and within various transnational spaces. Indeed, many Egyptians who had been living abroad travelled to Egypt during the first 18 days of the revolution to be present at the protests, while many more held demonstrations outside embassies, television stations, in squares and outside famous landmarks in London, New York, Rome and other capitals. The participation of Egyptians living abroad is also evident in online spaces – on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The Egyptian revolution and continuing struggle thus exemplify the transnational nature of diaspora politics, on- and offline: people with differing connections, identities and histories mobilized within and across various spaces, their praxis incorporating acts of translation and narration that have become central to understanding the context in which they continue the struggle today. This chapter explores translation within the context of diaspora politics, specifically the mobilization of British-Egyptians and Egyptians living in the UK during and since the 25 January revolution. The research is based on fieldwork conducted throughout 2014, predominantly with activists in the UK, though some aspects of the study were explored in Egypt. Fieldwork included attending demonstrations and events related to Egypt in the UK and observing activism in online spaces such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs. The voices I invoke in what follows are drawn from some of the 28 extended semi-structured interviews I conducted, with names changed to preserve anonymity. Conscious of the complexities associated with the unfolding events in Egypt, I quote at length in some instances, prioritizing the way the activists articulate their views and concerns, in the hope of allowing the depth and richness of their insights and reflections to emerge and inform the interpretations that arise from this essay. All participants in the study had been active in some form of social or political action during or since 25 January 2011, and identify with a range of political

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and ideological positions. I interviewed almost as many male as female participants, diaspora and long-term/temporary migrants, and activists whose age range extended from the late teens to early seventies. One of the main objectives of the research is to challenge homogenizing representations that circulate within narrations of the Egyptian struggle, and the rigid categories that emerge from such representations – diaspora, migrants, foreigners, activists, Islamists, secularists, revolutionaries, among others. I avoid narrow labels, instead highlighting the context in which my interviewees’ activism took place and the activists’ own understanding of their subjectivities, experiences, positions and sympathies. I begin with a brief discussion of interlingual translation. Through examples from fieldwork in the UK and Egypt, I show that activist praxis (for example, choice of language and use of specific words) is a source of tension insofar as it involves circulating a particular narrative that is inevitably at odds with other understandings of the struggle. I then turn to a broader conception of translation to connect activist praxis in the period following 30 June 2013 to the overarching narrative that emerged in popular representations. In examining the use of and response to the term coup, I argue that understanding such core signifiers is central to exposing the divisive nature of homogenization that characterizes most acts of narration (Baker 2006). Working within and across transnational spaces, I argue, diaspora and migrant activists draw on both senses of translation to create, challenge and circulate particular narratives and representations of people, groups and moments within the continuing struggle.

Globalizing the political Figures detailing the numbers of Egyptians living abroad are far from conclusive. Karmi (1997) suggested that 22,582 Egyptians were living in Britain towards the end of the last century, but this figure has barely increased since, with the 2013 census estimates putting the number at approximately 29,000. Despite these unconvincing census reports, there is no doubt that the diasporic contribution to Egypt’s economy is hugely significant; between 2005 and 2013, remittance inflows to Egypt increased sixfold and were predicted to reach $20 billion US dollars by the end of 2013, representing approximately 7.5 per cent of Egypt’s GDP (World Bank 2013). The financial implications of a large diaspora are clear: the Egyptian diaspora provides important support for individual households and the domestic economy (IOM 2010). But alongside their important financial contribution, Egyptians living abroad are also important actors within Egypt’s social and political context: a cursory glance at the backgrounds of prominent voices within the struggle reveals the globalized nature of political mobilization – Mohamed ElBaradei, Ahdaf Soueif and Mohamed Soltan are just three examples of Egyptians who are living or have lived abroad and who, in different ways, have invested their energies in a politics of resistance at ‘home’.

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The prominence of transnational activism has gradually increased within studies of social movements, particularly in relation to discourses of globalization and online mobilization: academic scholarship recognizes that processes of social change and resistance are enacted within a global context. In terms of the 25 January revolution, this globalized resistance lens brings to the fore activists who, through various ancestral connections, feel part of Egypt’s ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991). A globalized resistance lens illuminates the important role of the Egyptian diaspora and migrants within a struggle that challenges bounded understandings of the nation state, showing how the Egyptian revolution is enacted in, through and by globalized and transnational spaces, praxis and actors. Emerging from the recognition that spaces of contestation are increasingly shaped by various processes of globalization is a need to understand the different actors who mobilize within, across and beyond those global spaces, and how and why they mobilize. The current analysis of translation and narration within the praxis of diaspora politics attempts to address this need and is based on the understanding that “networks of influence that transcend both the territorial and the formal are crucial features of contemporary politics, although they are often overlooked” (Lyons and Mandaville 2010:135). These networks of influence are shaped by translation and acts of narration through which activists create, challenge and circulate particular understandings and representations of people, groups and events. The transnational nature of diaspora and migrant activists creates an alternative dynamic that comes to characterize these translations and the process of narration: living within and across two nations, two ‘imagined communities’, means that the resulting narratives are informed by multiple identities and alternative experiences. As one of my interviewees puts it, diaspora are “in both places but not fully in either of them” (Rana, September 2014). Different activists in the diaspora then mobilize for different reasons and with different intentions, and the mobilizations are rarely the product of the same trajectory. Activists in the diaspora may be portrayed within a broad narrative of ‘the Egyptian abroad’ or within competing narratives of the Egyptian revolution, but their mobilization and their narrations tell many, diverse stories of identity, belonging and struggle for social and political change.

Dilemmas of language and translation in diaspora politics Translation is an important dimension of activist praxis that rarely features in studies of social movements and protest, or even studies of transnational activism. Despite the inherent if implicit ‘trans-’ dimension of diaspora, translation similarly remains unrecognized in our understanding of diaspora politics. In the case of the Egyptian struggle, observing, participating and reflecting with activists aligned with many political and ideological positions reveals some of the dilemmas associated with a

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diasporic transnational reality. Living in an English-speaking country, individual activists often made conscious decisions about their choice of language at demonstrations, reflected on their use of interlingual translation, and explored the significance of speaking and translating particular words and meanings in both Arabic and English. As well as exposing translation as activist praxis, their choices evoke concerns of identity and belonging, intention and audience. Language choice and acts of interlingual translation convey, mediate and complicate notions of resistance, solidarity and diasporic identity within the transnational spaces of being ‘at home abroad’ (Sheffer 2003). Knowledge and use of a language create both a ‘we’ and an ‘other’, because as Bermann (2005:3) argues, “language has always been a defining feature of national identity, even – especially – when this ‘nation’ has become diasporic”. Diaspora and migrant activism therefore reflects the entanglement of multiple identities and belongings – British, Egyptian, religious, political, ideological – as activists engage within and across different nationally defined and transnational spaces. Throughout and since the 25 January revolution, Egyptians (BritishEgyptians and migrants) held events and demonstrations in various spaces across the UK. Political activists organized workshops, conferences and lectures at universities, doctors established networks with colleagues in Egypt to provide training and assistance for coping with the medical needs that arose out of the uprising (Ashraf, 60s, doctor with dual citizenship), and various fundraising events were held to “support families of the martyrs” (Omar, 20s, British-born Egyptian IT professional). Amid the many locations in which Egyptians demonstrated since January 2011, a key space that continues to hold symbolic power is the area outside the Egyptian Embassy in Central London. As one activist notes (Sami, 20s, British-born Egyptian student): The Embassy, obviously, is their stronghold here in the UK basically, and protesting in itself was a red line in Egypt and in the Egyptian mentality, so for you to say I’m going to go and protest outside the Egyptian Embassy . . . it was sort of like a red line, but we said, there is no more, there is no more treading or sitting on the fence. During the first 18 days, Egyptians travelled from across the UK to protest outside the Embassy with other Egyptians and, for the majority, this signified their first step into direct political activism. Occupying the space outside the Embassy continues to be an important act of resistance and opposition. Many activists described difficult interactions with staff at the Embassy and the feeling of being subjected to the regime’s authoritarian ways even within the UK, a feature of the diasporic relationship with Egypt also noted by Fawzy (2012). To cross that ‘red line’ by directly confronting the regime echoes the gatherings at the Ittihadiya

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Presidential Palace in Cairo on 5–6 December 2012: different ‘nation’, same strategies of resistance. Importantly, however, the symbolism of protesting outside the Embassy is rendered more defiant and conveys different positionings through the languages activists employ. Chanting slogans in Arabic foregrounds Egyptian identity; participation is framed as ‘we’, and the shared knowledge and understanding of a national language represents a shared knowledge and understanding of ‘being Egyptian’, despite doing so outside Egypt’s national borders. Here, while the Embassy represents the regime, the activists outside represent ‘the people’. Echoing the slogans of Tahrir in the language of Tahrir translates diaspora and migrant Egyptians’ place within the nation, and, importantly, as part of Egypt’s ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991). Activists outside the Embassy, then, chose to chant predominantly in Arabic during the first 18 days of the revolution as a direct challenge to the regime, and in order to position themselves as part of the Egyptian polity. But they also wanted UK-based media to convey their solidarity with the protestors in Egypt, and hence at demonstrations conducted away from the Embassy in particular, English featured more heavily on both placards and in chants. These choices, shaped by space and purpose, continued throughout the struggle. Spoken Arabic remains central to mobilizing at the Embassy while English is generally more evident in public spaces across the UK. Tensions around language and translation have become more visible since 30 June 2013. Alongside many other previously established groups related to the 2011 revolution, a movement that focused on the ousting of President Mohamed Morsi and the subsequent violence emerged, including groups such as British Egyptians 4 Democracy, R4B1A London, Birmingham Egyptians and #ANTICOUPLDN. Regular (almost weekly) protests were held between July 2013 and August 2014, most often at the Embassy. These featured chants, slogans and speeches predominantly in Arabic, with banners either in English or in both languages. One of the key organizers of these events (Omar, 20s, British-Egyptian IT professional) raised concerns about language choice and translation in these events when I interviewed him, in particular questioning the dominance of Arabic at demonstrations: Possibly because of media maybe – the main media reporting are Arabic channels. But the people who live here speak English so it’s more important we do it in English and I have friends who don’t speak Arabic but they are against the coup but they don’t understand what’s going on . . . we need more English. We need to spread the message and it won’t happen if we don’t talk in English because they don’t understand. This activist was one of many whose reflections on language and translation exposed the tensions associated with engaging in diaspora politics.

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If the group’s objective was to raise awareness among the British public then the Embassy (tucked away on a side street in Mayfair with little passing footfall) may not be the best location to achieve this, and the use of Arabic may contribute to representations of the activists as the ‘other’ within the UK. If, on the other hand, the main intention is to express solidarity with protestors in Egypt, could the combined use of English and Arabic become a strategic praxis that enables activists to reach a wider audience, including the British public? Could it convey the activists’ transnational and Egyptian identity successfully? How does this tension play out at the many demonstrations where activists used both languages, typically Arabic for chants and slogans (identifying with the revolution by using the language of the revolution) and English for speeches? The interlingual dimension of diaspora politics can generate problems and dilemmas, but, as I will attempt to demonstrate next, it can also be harnessed effectively within activist praxis and reflect the globalized political context of resistance and opposition within which Egyptian activists mobilize.

Translation as diaspora praxis Diaspora activists navigate a transnational space in which their bilingual identities and skills can be put to good use and can provide them with a specific role as activist translators. Here, translation can become a praxis through which diaspora bridge their different identities, moving between and demonstrating their belonging to each ‘nation’. Just as 25 January ushered in an intense period of mobilization for many activists within the diaspora who return(ed) regularly to Egypt to participate in demonstrations and sit-ins, or who became spokespeople within global popular and news media, the mass demonstrations and subsequent detention of Mohamed Morsi in June/July 2013 provided another opportunity for the Egyptian diaspora to step into the role of activist translators. Some UK-based Egyptians, including a small number who had also been at Tahrir during the first 18 days, travelled to Egypt specifically to participate in the sit-ins at Rabaa Al-Adawiya and Al-Nahda. They spent periods ranging from 2 to 47 days in the sit-ins, and some found purpose in deploying their identities as both British and Egyptian through the praxis of interlingual translation. The majority of diaspora and migrant Egyptians who flew to Egypt during the sit-ins at Rabaa and Al-Nahda report attending primarily to contribute to the numbers, but they also put their bilingual skills to good use (Sami, September 2014): I would be tweeting from Rabaa in English, trying as much as possible to refute all the rumours that were being said, all the silly things – people being tortured on the stage, there’s bodies under the stage, all these silly things. I was just tweeting. I was in touch with the journalists just trying to get the word out in English of what was actually happening,

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Helen Underhill I would translate things. I was helping out with the media team that was in Rabaa, translate things, put things on social media, write for Facebook pages, Twitter and making sure that all languages were pretty much covered . . . that was that, that was the level that we could help. There was a period when we had a chance to go up on stage – that was amazing – and we went up on stage me and two of my friends and we spoke in English and Arabic. I spoke in English and my friends in Arabic. The main idea was to say we’re guys from London and we’re here with you guys in the camp, we’re camping out with you guys and also it was a message to the UK, to the English community around the world, internationally, that we’re Londoners and we’re camped out with the people in Rabaa.

Interlingual translation, in this case, becomes a space of transnational solidarity where both national identities come together. The ‘we’ and ‘other’ are no longer in collision; instead, British and Egyptian identities strengthen each other. Translation serves to bring both national identities into focus, to fuse them in such a way as to give each identity purpose and meaning. Interlingual translation has been part of the fabric of political engagement for activists based in the UK throughout the struggle, rather than merely in the post-June/July 2013 period. They have generated and contributed to reports for media coverage, established networks with Egyptians in Egypt, the UK and overseas, acted as spokespeople in English, translated and subtitled videos, documents and reports. Just as the Syrian diaspora have been referred to as ‘brokers’ within the media (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti 2013), Egyptians living abroad demonstrate the transnational nature of citizen journalism and the role played by diaspora in shaping narratives and representations, not only through acts of interlingual translation but also, as I argue below, through more diffuse acts of narration.

Representing the struggle from ‘abroad’: narratives of ‘the coup’ Throughout the 25 January revolution and continuing struggle, diaspora and migrant activists told many stories, in many contexts. They interpreted events from their own perspectives and retold them in the course of protesting and engaging politically. I explore some of these retellings below, focusing specifically on the post-30 June 2013 context and narration of the coup. Reference to the events that unfolded after that date as a coup – the term that anchors the current analysis in processes of translation and narration – is hotly debated, with much commentary (academic and popular) available that makes a case for or against it.1 My decision to focus on this term is not intended to contribute yet more commentary on shades of meaning and technicalities of use. Rather, I aim to show its embeddedness within narrations of the Egyptian struggle and, by connecting it to activist praxis and

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perspectives, demonstrate that acceptance or rejection of the term coup in the Egyptian context is divisive, corrosive and remains a significant challenge for building effective opposition and resistance to Egypt’s military rule. “It was a coup, you know it was . . .” One particularly memorable incident that demonstrates the intensity of emotion associated with referring to the June/July 2013 events as a coup occurred during a conversation in March 2014 with Yusef, a highly active British-Egyptian in his early 30s, a Morsi supporter who believes the ousted president should be reinstated. We were walking together and chatting, after I had interviewed him, when he suddenly stopped and said, “I want to know what you think . . . You know it was a coup don’t you? You know it was!” To Yusef and other ‘anti-coup’ protestors, framing the events that led to Sisi’s ascension as a coup is an essential element of their narrative because a coup represents a rupture in the revolution, the antithesis of democracy, and is central to their narrative of the continuing events as revolving around the issue of legitimacy. In the months following Mohamed Morsi’s ousting, particularly up to the first anniversary in August 2014 of the Rabaa massacre, some activists embedded the term coup within the names of groups, as hashtags on social media, on banners, flags and videos. Postcards (Figure 4.1) and placards (Figure 4.2) used in London demonstrations during that period show how the ‘anti-coup’ movement juxtaposes coup and democracy to connect them

Figure 4.1 Action postcard from a demonstration in London, June 2014. Photograph by Helen Underhill.

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Figure 4.2 Placards raised at a demonstration in London, June 2014. Photograph by Helen Underhill.

in the minds of their audience, by setting them textually and visually next to each other to suggest that they are intrinsically related as irreconcilable opposites. These campaign materials were designed for distribution at demonstrations and feature heavily in the activists’ continued praxis. Employing terms such as coup, democracy, elected and dictatorship that (apparently) have established definitions and accepted understandings invokes various historical narratives, both domestic and global, that allow the activists to speak to both audiences – at home and abroad – simultaneously. “The reality is more complex . . .” An alternative perspective on the same set of events is adopted by another Egyptian activist based in the UK, who rejects the term coup on the basis that it oversimplifies a highly complex context. With similar emotional candour to Yusef, and without directly being asked about the use of the term, Fouad, a Coptic Christian migrant in his late 20s and son of a highprofile Egyptian political activist, expressed anger and frustration at the normalization of the term coup within the popular narrative in the UK: What [was] really annoying to me [were] the reflections in the media for example. If you take the BBC, for example, the way they covered 30 June – it was completely one-sided. I know there were atrocities that happened, especially at Rabaa, which is totally unacceptable, but still they always present it . . . the word coup itself makes me furious. Because it takes the complexity of the situation away and puts it in one word that doesn’t . . . So what comes to your mind when you hear the

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word coup? That army came in and just took out a freely elected president? The reality was completely more complex than that. We spent the whole year, people were revolting against the Muslim Brothers, hundreds of people actually died. I know it’s not turning into what we wanted but using the word coup is . . . you are taking away the whole complex situation out of context. You are actually belittling and diminishing the strife of millions of people who went down against . . . It makes me really angry. Fouad went on to reflect on how the group he had formed in January 2011 with three other Egyptians living in the UK disbanded, largely because of their disagreements about the events of and following 3 July 2013. While they had been supportive of the 30 June protests, had organized solidarity demonstrations in the UK, and were united in condemning the massacres that followed, the contention around the army’s actions on 3 July proved too corrosive, and they have not organized any demonstrations as a group since. Fouad’s comments and the disbanding of an organized and motivated activist group expose the relationship between opting to narrate the events between 30 June and 3 July as a coup and the ensuing frustration and division that characterized political life in 2014 and continues to do so today. Narrating Morsi’s removal as a coup arguably conceals the struggle of Egyptians across the world, who continued to mobilize during Morsi’s presidency. It also plays into a Western discourse of democratization, one which suggests that transitioning from authoritarian rule to democracy should follow a particular path. Activists like Fouad and many others who regularly travelled from the UK to attend demonstrations during Morsi’s leadership disrupted the popular narrative of democratization and the streamlined narrative of 30 June. These contested narratives of the specific set of events surrounding Morsi’s ousting and the military takeover continue to feed the division that endures today because they force activists and Egyptians in general to engage with broader narratives of security and stability and face up to the structures of power that promote them in order to maintain a tight grip on the country. As the Egyptian regime began to implement more draconian measures to suppress any form of opposition, new narratives were elaborated by activists on both sides of the coup debate. The expression divide and conquer began to appear in many conversations, with increasing regularity and resignation, sometimes invoked with a sense of humour tinged with sadness and regret. While division and anger persist at the individual and familial level, some UK-based activists – whether (mis-)labelled anti-coup, proMorsi, Muslim Brotherhood, revolutionary, leftist, or pro-/anti-regime – are beginning to narrate the events in a language that often converges, whether intentionally or not. Within the ‘anti-coup/Rabaa/pro-Morsi movement’ – or as Sami calls them, “the pro-human, pro-justice, pro-humanity camp” – references to

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the ‘coup’ became less overt following the first anniversary in 2014 of the Rabaa massacre. Many activists aligned with this movement described themselves as being ‘for democracy’, and in the later stages of 2014 broader notions of democracy, human rights and freedom were articulated more prominently within their campaign materials: “Birmingham Egyptians and Egyptians for Democracy would like to invite you to show your solidarity and support to all pro-freedom and democracy prisoners in Egypt . . . Come along and stand for the rights of these prisoners.” (Figure 4.3). Similarly, at demonstrations and online, other UK-based Egyptian activists campaigning against military rule highlighted specific cases and grievances, such as the detention of journalists and high-profile activists like Mahienour el-Masry and Alaa Abdel-Fattah, and protested against specific laws and decrees that prevented freedom of assembly and expression. Alongside photographs of individuals, such awareness-raising action

Figure 4.3 Action flyer, Birmingham, November 2014. Photograph by Helen Underhill.

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Figure 4.4 Campaign material, London, November 2014. Photograph by Helen Underhill.

employed recognized political terminology to narrate this stage of the struggle. Just as the ‘anti-coup’ movement had done in the period following Morsi’s ousting, activists adopting different perspectives on the events invoked an antithesis to democracy – in this case fascism (Figure 4.4) – to challenge the audience into confronting the violence that ensued from these events.

Conclusion Egyptian activists living in the UK mobilized at every stage of the Egyptian struggle, and many viewed their role as one of giving voice to fellow Egyptians who were (or are) unable to speak in an increasingly repressive and prohibitive environment. In doing so, they collectively became victims of a state-endorsed narrative of ‘the traitor’, ‘the dangerous foreigner’, with many now reconciled to being unable to return to Egypt. Interestingly, in elaborating and promoting narratives of ‘the foreigner in our midst’, the state reaffirms the important role the Egyptian diaspora and migrant Egyptians play in the struggle. If they had no impact or made no contribution, they would be of no interest and the state’s narrative would be redundant. In exploring aspects of their continued mobilization, I have suggested that activist, engaged Egyptians living in the UK experience the same anger, frustration and division felt by many who live in Egypt. Stories of estrangement and discord pervade their reflections on the post-30 June 2013 period, whether in relation to families (immediate and extended), friends or activist

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groups, both in the UK and in and between Egypt and the UK. Only a handful of the activists I interviewed reported that their relationships with family and friends remained intact. In almost all cases, the rest attributed the divisions and estrangement they experience(d) to disagreements about ‘the coup’. But as time passes and stories are retold, the need to find a new language to understand and translate the complex events that have been unfolding since 2013 is becoming more urgent and remains an essential prerequisite for the creation of a meaningful and effective narrative of opposition. Critical pedagogues such as Paulo Freire (1970, 1973) argue that opposing and resisting dominance requires critical thought and ‘conscientization’ to expose and challenge the structures that sustain hegemony. Processes of critical thought can unveil the limiting nature of signifiers and labels, furthering reflections on the structures that are enabled by the divisions these labels create. The comments of Nour, a British-Egyptian in his late 20s, show that some are beginning to reflect on these labels – reflection that is necessary to create an alternative narrative: It was not questioning whether it was a revolution or a coup – they should have been asking “now what?” Call it a revolution call it a coup call it a revcouplution, it does not matter. It has happened now and these things are never textbook . . . While activists may adapt the language they use to speak about the events, there is a set of deeply emotional ties – to a particular word or phrase – that lies beneath the surface and calls for sensitive translations that can give rise to new and productive understandings. New understandings also require critical reflection that involves reassessing our positions and biases, and our place within structures of power and resistance. The linguistic choices we make are central to the way we arrive at a particular translation of events, but to overcome the divisive power of a specific narrative we also need to understand how we arrive at a given position. No one translation or narrative exists in isolation – they intertwine and complicate, resist and divide, and in order to resist the power of one narrative we must be cognizant of the context in which it is elaborated, including that which lies within ourselves. Although diaspora and migrant activists in the UK may have conflicting positions on the narrative of ‘the coup’, there is growing convergence in terms of questioning the wisdom of an Egypt with the military at the helm. A significant challenge presented by simplifying and reductionist narratives such as those revolving around ‘the coup’ is how to overcome the binaries they create and hence their divisive power. As Nour, and others in this study, illustrate, creating a narrative of an alternative future is infinitely harder because we are so used to telling and retelling stories of the past. Narrating shapes and is shaped by the language, understanding and

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translation of possibility, and finding a new language to speak about the past is therefore an important dimension in Egypt’s continuing struggle to create a better future.

Note 1 For particularly interesting analyses of the term, see Giordani (2013) and Mada Masr (2013).

References Andén-Papadopoulos, Kari and Mervi Pantti (2013) ‘The Media Work of Syrian Diaspora Activists: Brokering between the Protest and Mainstream Media’, International Journal of Communication 7: 2185–206. Anderson, Benedict (1991/2006) Imagined Communities, London: Verso. Baker, Mona (2006) Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account, London: Routledge. Bermann, Sandra (2005) ‘Introduction’, in Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (eds) Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1–10. Fawzy, Sameh (2012) ‘Egyptian Migrants in the UK: A Reading after the 25th of January Revolution’, in A Study on the Dynamics of Arab Expatriate Communities: Promoting Positive Contributions to Socioeconomic Development and Political Transitions in their Homelands, Cairo: International Organization for Migration (IOM) & League of Arab States, 41–54. Freire, Paulo (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York & London: Continuum Press. Freire, Paulo (1973) Education for Critical Consciousness, New York & London: Continuum Press. Giordani, Angela (2013) ‘Keywords: Revolution/Coup d’état’, Jadaliyya, 1 August. Available at www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/13309/keywords_revolution-coupd’état- (last accessed 2 April 2015). IOM (2010) A Study on the Dynamics of the Egyptian Diaspora: Strengthening Development Linkages, Cairo: International Organization for Migration. Karmi, Ghada (1997) The Egyptians of Britain: A Migrant Community in Transition, Working Paper, CMEIS Occasional Paper 57, Durham: University of Durham, Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Lyons, Terrence and Peter Mandaville (2010) ‘Think Locally, Act Globally: Toward a Transnational Comparative Politics’, International Political Sociology 4: 124–41. Mada Masr (2013) ‘Excuse Me Sir, is it a Coup?’, Jadaliyya, 5 July. Available at www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12687/excuse-me-sir-is-it-a-coup- (last accessed 2 April 2015). Sheffer, Gabriel (2003) Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. World Bank (2013) Migration and Development Brief 20, Migration and Remittances Unit, Development Prospects Group. Available at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ INTPROSPECTS/Resources/334934-1110315015165/MigrationandDevelopment Brief20.pdf (last accessed 2 April 2015).

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The contemporary epoch of struggle Anti-austerity protests, the Arab uprisings and Occupy Wall Street Todd Wolfson and Peter N. Funke1 This chapter examines the relationships, points of inspiration and contradictory dynamics that characterize the current epoch of social movement politics and global protests. The central argument is that with the progression of neo-liberal capitalism since 1980, a shared logic of social movement politics has emerged. This logic spans from the Zapatistas and the Global Justice Movement, to the more recent ‘Arab Spring’ and Occupy-type demonstrations. Originating in the global South, this meta-logic has been globally transmitted, translated and adapted to particular locations and times. We argue that the new meta-logic thrives on multiplicity, emphasizes radical participatory democracy, the innovative use of new (and old) media, and the heterogeneity of political struggles.

Peter N. Funke

Todd Wolfson

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Todd Wolfson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, USA. Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, his research focuses on the convergence of new media and social movements and he is author of numerous articles and the recently published book Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left. Todd is also a co-founder of the Media Mobilizing Project (MMP), which uses media and communications as a core strategy for building a movement of poor and working people in Philadelphia and beyond. MMP has been recognized as a national leader both in using media as an organizing tool and in advocating around the intersection of poverty and technology. Alongside MMP, Todd is on the board of Taxi Workers Alliance of Pennsylvania and the leadership team of 215 People’s Alliance. His scholarship and work in the community have been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Knight Foundation and the Dodge Foundation. Peter N. Funke is Assistant Professor of Government at the University of South Florida, Tampa. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and his Vordiplom from the Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on social movements, new media and class under globalizing capitalism. Peter has done participatory observational research on the Global Justice Movement and the World Social Forum as well as on groups and activists in the Tampa Bay area. His work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Miami-Florida European Union Center of Excellence at Florida International University. His publications have appeared in Studies in Social Justice, Globalizations and New Media & Society. Currently Peter is working on a book-length study tentatively titled The Contemporary Epoch of Contention: From the Global Justice Movement to Occupy Wall Street and Anti-Austerity Protests. www.peterfunke.net

Towards the end of 2010, Egyptian Internet activist and Google executive ‫‘( ﻛﻠﻨﺎ ﺧﺎﻟﺪ‬We are all Wael Ghonim created a Facebook page, in Arabic, titled Khaled Said’) to document the murder of a young Egyptian computer programmer, Khaled Said, at the hands of plain-clothes police.2 Within a day of establishing the Facebook group, thousands of Egyptians joined the page to express their grief and rage over Said’s death. Some weeks later, Ghonim used the Facebook page to initiate a call for Egyptians to occupy Tahrir Square and demand true democracy on 25 January 2011, which is National Police Day. Ghonim’s appeal merged with many other streams of resistance and organizing that were materializing across Egypt, such as Asmaa Mahfouz’s vlog3 on 18 January 2011, also calling on Egyptians to demonstrate on 25 January. In the weeks to follow, the Egyptian uprising began in earnest, with thousands occupying Tahrir Square. Following the initial occupation,

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the uprising grew and a short time later Egypt and the world began to witness one of the most awe-inspiring revolutions of the twenty-first century. After the initial wave of contention subsided, Ghonim reflected on the role of technology and strategy in the Egyptian uprising and across North Africa. He argued that we are witnessing the outlines of a ‘Revolution 2.0’. Looking back at the struggles across the twentieth century, Ghonim (2013) maintains that the old model, ‘Revolution 1.0’, had charismatic leaders and political parties at its centre and used conventional political strategies. In converse, through the window of the North African uprisings as well as the European antiausterity protests and the US Occupy Wall Street encampments, Ghonim contends that we have seen the outlines of a new strategy for social change. In this new model, revolutions are leaderless, non-hierarchical, networked and improvisational, with multiple groups and strategies playing important roles. The revolution in Egypt, and more importantly the analysis by Ghonim and others who have made similar arguments – among them Castells (2012) – offer a starting point for this essay, where we argue that the logic in this contemporary wave of struggle, or Revolution 2.0, actually emerged decades before the ‘Arab Spring’, in relation to tectonic shifts in both global capitalism and information and communication technologies. More specifically, and taking the uprisings of 2011 as our point of departure, we make three arguments. First, we argue that the defining characteristics of this latest protest wave did not emerge in 2010, but rather it stretched back to the rebellion of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in the early 1990s. We believe this longer view of history helps us to envision the outlines of a broader epoch of contention, with two waves, which we call ‘Global Justice Wave’ and ‘Spring Wave’. Second, building on the work of scholars and activists who maintain that new social movements are informed by the transforming nature of communication technologies, we contend that social movement politics is impacted by the shifting dynamics of capitalism. As such, while the current ‘Spring Wave’ (anti-austerity, Arab uprisings, Occupy Wall Street) can be regarded as distinct from the protest wave of the EZLN and the Global Justice Movement (including the Indymedia initiative and the World Social Forum), it is also a constitutive part of the same ‘epoch of contention’ (Funke 2014, Wolfson 2014) as both waves are linked by a shared meta-logic of movement politics. This new logic of activism is tied directly to massive shifts in the global economy that have taken place in the latter half of the twentieth century. Finally, we look at some of the core characteristics of contemporary struggles and protests. Chief among them are the use of social media by participants and activists; the desire for implementing horizontal and prefigurative forms of organizing; the embrace of diversity and equality of agents and struggles; a decision-making process based in consensusfinding grassroots democracy; and a distrust of established actors, such as parties and unions as well as the existing political institutions, writ large. Building on this we outline some concerns about the strategy of action of this new ‘Revolution 2.0’ in the concluding section of this essay.

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The contemporary logic of social movement politics: from the EZLN to the Arab uprisings With the ascendance and implementation of neo-liberal policies, massive shifts have emerged within the global political economy, from the dominance of a finance economy and free trade to the growing casualization of work and the increasing privatization of what were once public goods (Harvey 2005). The consequence of these economic transformations has been increased economic instability and inequality, which in turn has sparked far-reaching demonstrations around the globe. These demonstrations, we argue, are part of a broad cycle of resistance that is marked by a diverse yet consistent logic of resistance. While there were many points of origin for this cycle of struggle and logic of protest, we locate the focal roots of this epoch of contention in the EZLN uprising in southern Mexico, which took place on 1 January 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. From there, this embryonic movement logic travelled northward to the United States, emerging in a different context, to hit the streets of Seattle, where 80,000 demonstrators mobilized against the Third Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999. During the ‘Battle of Seattle’, protestors directly challenged the power of global capitalism, shutting down the WTO meeting. This moment also led to the birth of the Indymedia movement and later to the emergence of the first World Social Forum in 2001, which carried forward a burgeoning logic of social movement protest. Building on the strategies of this period, the more recent wave of protests is exemplified by the Arab uprisings4 as well as the anti-austerity protests of the 15-M movement in Spain and Greece and Occupy-type protests and encampments, from New York to Frankfurt and Hong Kong. These two seemingly distinct waves of protests constitute the broader epoch of contention (Funke 2014, Wolfson 2014). While the current logic of resistance is keyed to the transformations of neo-liberal capitalism, it also developed in conversation with previous periods of movement politics: the Old Left and the New Left. 5 As historians have argued, the Old Left spanned from the turn of the twentieth century until the end of World War II, and the period was dominated by the labour movement and the development of political parties. The principal inspiration of the Old Left was the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Correspondingly, the New Left movements of the 1960s/1970s were deeply influenced by the Maoist revolution in China, and like the Old Left they congealed around questions of class, but they also focused on race, gender and imperialism. Alongside the influence of previous periods of movement politics, contemporary movement organizing has also been shaped by the technological transformations of the information age. The use of these technologies by activists and organizers, in particular social media and other emerging digital technologies, has facilitated a sea change in how activists organize,

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mobilize and publicize. We argue that these three factors, the transformation in the economy, the emergence and impact of the Internet and other digital tools as well as the history of emancipatory movements, laid the groundwork for the contemporary logic of resistance. We have identified five core characteristics of this contemporary logic of resistance that set it apart from prior movement politics and allow us to identify what we call the ‘Global Justice Wave’ of the 1990s/2000s and the more recent ‘Spring Wave’ as part of the same broader epoch of contention. These characteristics are as follows: 1 2 3 4 5

An acceptance and embrace of the diversity and equality of actors and their different struggles. The use of social media by participants and organizers, elevating it to play an infrastructural role for movement politics. A commitment to leaderless and prefigurative forms of organizing. A decision-making process based in consensus-finding grassroots democracy. A distrust of institutional actors such as parties and unions as well as the existing political institutions writ large.

Taking each of these characteristics in turn, one of the core attributes of contemporary organizing is a belief that all forms of struggle are equally important. In this sense, no particular front of resistance, whether it is the struggle over class-based exploitation or racism and patriarchy, has priority over other points of struggle. The vision, then, is to build a network of interconnected struggles, where all these forms of resistance are equally important and, while acting in solidarity, are able to maintain their autonomy and right to dissent. A second characteristic of the contemporary epoch of contention and its two constitutive waves of resistance is a deep engagement with and use of technology in general and social media in particular. Arguably traceable to the EZLN’s use of the Internet in its struggle with the Mexican state, and the subsequent formation of the Indymedia network, the Internet and its technologies have taken centre stage in social movement politics with the emergence of an information- and technology-driven form of neo-liberal capitalism. While movements have used technology differently, some of the core attributes are the use of social media to popularize struggles while employing its networking power to knit different actors and issues into a collective tapestry, though one where all actors maintain their autonomy. A third characteristic, prefigurative politics, emerged out of the anarchist movement and movement praxis of the New Left in the 1960s more generally. The concept of prefigurative politics means a commitment to create within the movement the practices, structures and vision that can actualize now the society activists wish to build in the future. Prefigurative politics also reverses the means–ends logic, as the means now trump the ends

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and are no longer only in the service of the goals the movement aspires to achieve. In the case of contemporary movements, prefiguration tends to mean refraining from creating long-term strategic plans, while building non-hierarchical organizations through direct democratic processes. In line with the prefigurative and horizontal or leaderless forms of organizing that characterize this new epoch, the dominant decision-making mechanism in contemporary movement-based groups is direct democracy and consensus-based decision making. This can be contrasted to decisionmaking processes adopted in representative forms of democracy, where leaders are voted in, occupy specific positions in a hierarchy, and exercise varying degrees of power by making decisions for the larger movement on the basis of their place in the hierarchy. Finally, within contemporary movements activists and organizers tend to distrust hierarchically organized institutions such as parties and unions as well as the state and its established mechanisms. This distrust is grounded in a belief that these bureaucratic entities and institutions tend to mirror, perpetuate and recreate the injustices activists and organizers struggle against. From this perspective, engagement with any part of the establishment, including state institutions, can at best lead to minor achievements and at worst to the co-optation of movements and groups. Looking at the broad contours of this logic of social movement practices, we argue that it developed in conversation with the history of left-based organizing as well as in relation to the material world or political economy that activists inhabit. In this sense, while it is clear that contemporary activists are responding to their perception of the successes and challenges of previous movement logics, the new logic is informed by the nature of neoliberal capitalism, including shifting technological dynamics. To be clear, however, we are not arguing that the particularities of protest forms from the EZLN to the Arab uprisings are identical. The shared meta-logic, defined by the five broad core characteristics outlined above, is of course coloured by space and time, and thus finds different and diverse manifestations in the jungle of Chiapas, the streets of Seattle or Porto Alegre, in Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park or the Puerta del Sol Square in Madrid. Nevertheless, the shared context of neo-liberal capitalism and new information and communication technology, as well as the movements’ willingness to embrace the core characteristics discussed above, allow us to identify all these different events as constituting a distinct epoch of contention, which ranges from the EZLN to the Arab uprisings. In the following section we first lay out our understanding of how capitalism and movement politics interact, to also show how neo-liberal dynamics induced the current movement logic. We then provide some illustrations from the current epoch of contention, indicating how it informs the arc of protests and mobilizations from at least the EZLN and the Global Justice Movement to the anti-austerity protests, the Arab uprisings and Occupy Wall Street protests.

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Neo-liberalism and the logics of social movement politics Capitalism is a historical, dynamic force that changes over time and across space, with shifts in the way it operates going beyond the strict economic spheres to remake the cultural logic of a given period (Jameson 1990). For Fredric Jameson, the shift towards what he calls ‘Late Capitalism’ spawned a new logic of art, culture and self that prioritizes fragmentation, individuation, flexibility, decentralization; in short, the postmodern. In this sense, and contrary to many other observers who regard the shift from the modern to the postmodern as merely a new cultural phenomenon, Jameson argues that the postmodern is generated by the shifting characteristics of neo-liberal capitalism. Building on Jameson’s insights, scholars such as Ong (1999) have begun to assess the transforming logic of social life under neo-liberal capitalism and in the process have identified shifting logics and practices of social movement activists (Funke 2012, Juris 2008, Wolfson 2012). The neo-liberal transformations of capitalism have thus altered the contours, logics and trajectories of resistance in general and social movement politics in particular. As we mentioned earlier, scholars have often distinguished between the ‘Old Left Movements’ of trade unions and labour parties of the first half of the twentieth century and the ‘New Left Movements’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas the Old Left Movements emphasized class-based politics and the struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie, the New Left Movements, while still focusing on workingclass struggle, also highlighted other intersectional concerns such as race and gender. Studying the innovative strategy of New Left movements, as they intersected with the limits of Fordist capitalism and the emergence of postindustrialism, sociologist Alain Touraine advanced New Social Movement theory (NSM). He argued that social struggle was moving away from the realm of work to what he described as “the setting of a way of life, forms of behavior and needs” (Touraine 1988:25).6 Touraine thus predicted that struggles around economic inequality would disappear and social movements would focus on issues of identity. While this was not the case for the New Left, the movements that emerged in the 1980s and thereafter did focus more on identity politics and less on questions of class and capitalism. The transformation in strategy, structure and governance of social movements, then, must be linked to shifts in the nature of the political economy in order to more fully understand their development, progression and implications. Industrial capitalism, characterized by mass production and a focus on economies of scale, defined the context of the Old Left movements. Extensive plant structures, conveyor belts and dockyards ran on comparatively rigid production, and work patterns induced standardized mass consumption and fixed gender roles and sexual norms. Correspondingly, the Old Left

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movements built mass parties and unions, hierarchical organizational structures and rather fixed understandings of race, gender and sexual orientation. Movement and party organizing was mostly done on the shop floor or in working-class neighbourhoods, where the movement’s constituency tended to work and live together in similar conditions, leading to a physical and cognitive/cultural proximity that allowed workers to share experiences and build solidarity. Labour unions and political parties tended to use hierarchically organized governing structures to engage and negotiate with similarly organized owners and government officials or to mobilize their constituencies for protests and strikes. The New Left Movements, on the other hand, emerged in the 1960s, during a period which ushered in changes to production, distribution and consumption. Patterns shifted from more standardized to more individualized and flexible production and consumption. This in turn started to shift the nature of the workforce as Fordist ‘conveyor-belt’ style work was replaced with more flexible arrangements typified by part-time, outsourced and sub-contracted forms of labour. This new flexible work experience has been characterized as informal and often precarious. In this period – which is marked by the 1973 Oil Shock that spurred low growth rates, rising inflation and increasing unemployment – employers faced rising national and international competition as liberalization and deregulation policies were implemented, and they advanced anti-union campaigns to increase productivity by driving down labour costs. While labour, and in particular rank-and-file workers, fought back, Reagan’s 1981 destruction of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) and Thatcher’s defeat of the long miner strike in 1983–1984 are symbolic of the end of the ‘Fordist compromise’. The end meant an intensifying war on labour and the beginnings of large-scale neo-liberal restructuring policies.

Movement logics from the EZLN to the Arab uprisings and Occupy Wall Street To recap, with the emergence of neo-liberal capitalism and the correspondent rise of new information and communication technologies like the Internet, a novel logic of movement politics has emerged. This logic embraces a diversity of actors and struggles, seeks to implement leaderless and prefigurative forms of organizing and relies heavily on social media to both broadcast the message or frame of the movement and help forge the infrastructure of social movement organizations. In what follows we illustrate our contention that this logic, expressed in the current ‘Spring Cycle’ of protest – ranging from the protests in North Africa and the Middle East to the anti-austerity protests in Europe and Occupy Wall Street – has surfaced much earlier. We first delineate the logic’s core characteristics through an analysis of what we have called the ‘Global Justice Wave’, extending

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from the EZLN in the mid 1990s to the broader Global Justice Movement of the early 2000s, to then highlight this same meta-logic operating in the current ‘Spring Wave’. EZLN: beginnings of the current movement logic The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rose up out of the Lacandon Jungle on 1 January 1994, on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect. The EZLN largely consisted of Mayan farmers who believed that with free trade across North America their ability to make a living through subsistence farming would be undermined by the influx of cheap goods, particularly corn, from US-based agribusiness. The EZLN thus declared war on the Mexican state, taking over the capital of Chiapas as well as multiple ranches and radio stations. The armed skirmish with the Mexican military lasted a few days. Overmatched by the Mexican firepower, the EZLN retreated into the mountains of Chiapas. At this moment, supporters of the EZLN took to the Internet to end the armed struggle. Within days, hundreds of supporters swarmed into Mexico City and Chiapas demanding a ceasefire, while international solidarity campaigns lobbied Western governments. Shortly thereafter the Mexican government agreed to an armistice, and the two sides signed a peace accord that gave the EZLN some autonomy over certain areas in Chiapas. In the years leading up to this conflict, during the struggle and in the years to follow, the EZLN forged a strategy of political resistance that has since influenced activists in various parts of the world. At the heart of this strategy was the belief that all sectors of the oppressed should join the EZLN, as equal partners, in resistance against the Mexican state and neoliberal globalization. This vision exemplifies the acceptance of the diversity of agents suffering under the same oppression: neo-liberalism. Six thousand delegates joined the EZLN in August 1994 after it called for a National Democratic Convention, and hundreds of supporters joined it at its various ‘Intergalactic Encounters’. As mentioned above, a second core strategy of the EZLN was to use media, including the Internet, to broadcast its message during the struggle with the Mexican military. Members of the EZLN built on this use of media by calling on activists, organizers and journalists across the world to build an intercontinental “network of communications among all our struggles and resistances” (Zapatistas 1998). A few years later, activists and organizers in the United States and Canada seized on the Zapatista call for a shared network of communications, and as the Internet became more popular they were able to build the first Independent Media Centre in Seattle during the anti-World Trade Organization protests in 1999. After Seattle, the idea of self-published news provided by organizers, activists, citizens and community journalists became infectious, and within a few years the

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Indymedia movement grew from one local centre in Seattle to over 100 media centres across the world, creating news in 30 languages on every continent. The swift growth of the Indymedia movement created a global communications network that linked struggles across space and issue. The final core strategy of the EZLN that is important for our purposes here is a commitment to direct democratic practice. Within the EZLN this was called ‘Command-Obeying’ and involved the leaders leading through obeying the larger will within the EZLN. This practice was based on a long tradition of community decision making amongst the Mayans. These three core strategies were adopted by the Global Justice Movement, which added additional elements to forge the contemporary logic of struggle we discuss next. The Global Justice Movement: consolidating the current movement logic The particular logic which we argue informs the current ‘Spring Wave’ of struggle can also be seen in the development of the Global Justice Movement in general and the World Social Forum and the process it became in particular. From the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 that shut down its Ministerial Conference to the anti-Group of Eight protests such as the protests by an estimated 200,000-strong group of demonstrators in Genoa in 2001 that culminated in police violence and one protestor killed; the 15–16 February 2003 global anti-war protests, which saw ten to twenty million people demonstrating against the looming Iraq War to the various editions of the World Social Forum from Porto Alegre to Mumbai, Nairobi and Tunis – in all these protests and events, the diversity of actors and struggles is clearly visible. The World Social Forum process has involved much networking, to thicken linkages and networks across space and time, and to further coalesce the alter-globalization movement. The Indymedia centres in particular have introduced the use of (new) media as a crucial tool for movements today, a tool that has since been actively used by Occupy and many of the uprisings across North Africa. Similarly, the desire for horizontal and grassroots democracy and consensus-based decision making is readily observable at the World Social Forum, among other initiatives. In effect, the focus at forums is often not at all on reaching overarching decisions but rather on prefiguring relationships during the multi-day events that express the ways in which activists and organizers hope to structure relationships for society more generally. The forums thus seek to ‘merely’ act as open spaces for the exchange of ideas, interactions and potentially coordinating future activities. Finally, a distrust of institutional actors is also displayed at social forums, at least in principle, as the Charter of the World Social Forum stipulates that no party or governmental organizations are allowed to participate in the events.7

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The logic of the Spring Wave: anti-austerity, Arab uprisings and OWS The same meta-logic that informed the ‘Global Justice Wave’ in the initial years of the twenty-first century informs the most recent ‘Spring Wave’. As such, both waves, we suggest, are constitutive of the current epoch of contention. From anti-austerity protests in various European countries to the so-called Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street encampments, the five characteristics discussed above inform protests and mobilizations. The diversity of actors during the instantiations of the current movement epoch was easily observable. Participants included groups that fought unemployment, students challenging debt, labour unions, groups fighting for affordable housing, healthcare and education, and many others. Similarly, for the Spanish Indignados as well as of course for the protesters in various Arab countries, the use of social media was instrumental in organizing action in networked or rhizomatic structures, thus making redundant, or even bypassing, traditional communication channels used by older and more institutionalized actors. Without the infrastructure of the more established actors such as unions and parties, social media like Facebook and Twitter became vital tools of communication across the vast array of participants and potential participants, bringing them out on the streets and into the squares. The belief in leaderless movements was a cornerstone of the ‘Spring Wave’ and was practised across various protests. Occupy Wall Street arguably symbolized these leaderless structures and prefigurative ways of organizing most directly. The bulk of the Occupy movement’s work was done in general assemblies that included hundreds if not thousands of people. These became both the symbolic embodiment of a new form of politics and the practical manner in which activists sought to enact collective, consensus-based decision-making practices. The logic and practice of the general assemblies, and the collective structure of Occupy more generally, provide insight into the new participatory forms of direct democracy that are dominant across social movements today. The practice of direct democracy and the adoption of horizontal patterns of interaction eschew hierarchies and enact the logic of prefigurative politics. This is exemplified by the fact that the process of decision making in general assemblies was considered more important than the decision itself. It is through practices of this type that activists believe they can structure new, open, equal social relations that are not premised on power and hierarchy. The activists and organizers involved in the Spring Wave also believed in leaderless movements and in horizontality, as is evident in Philip Rizk’s assertion that the protests in Egypt “remained significantly leaderless” and that activists “confronted a repressive hierarchical and hegemonic state apparatus using horizontal tactics” (2014:35). Anti-austerity protests in Europe have similarly sought a ‘new politics’ divorced from the old parties

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of the left, centre and right, as evident in the emergence of Syriza in Greece and the founding of Podemos in Spain.

Conclusion From the 2010 anti-austerity protests in Europe and the subsequent ‘Arab Spring’ which began in Tunisia and Egypt, to the Occupy encampments throughout the globe, the particular movement logic we detailed above has led to impressive mobilizations across the world. The emergent logic of this ‘Spring Wave’ of resistance is deeply tied to the patterns and strategies of social movement practices of the EZLN and the Global Justice Movement, or what we call the ‘Global Justice Wave’. Together these two waves make up a broader epoch of contention. The meta-logic that connects these waves relies on the acceptance of a diversity of actors and struggles, the extensive use of social media, a desire for adopting horizontal, leaderless forms of organization and consensus-based decision-making processes that can bypass established actors as well as state institutions more generally. Without downplaying the successes and possibilities of this movement logic, in the conclusion we want to mark some of its inherent challenges and shortcomings. The primacy placed on diversity and equality of struggles, we contend, is a challenge in terms of developing long-term movement-building strategies as it does not offer a mechanism to congeal this diversity into novel formations that move beyond the acceptance of diversity and towards generating new syntheses and intersecting struggles, and thus beyond a mere politics of solidarity. The emphasis placed on accepting the diversity and autonomy of struggles might explain the ease with which mobilizations and movements tend to disintegrate. Moreover, much has been made of new technologies in general and Internet-based social media in particular in this epoch of contention. While Internet-based media have dramatically impacted movement organizing as we sought to show in this essay, we have argued elsewhere for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between (old and new) media and contemporary social movements (Funke 2014, Wolfson 2014). The successful use of old and new media depends on important contextual issues, such as access to technology, and geographic as well as scalar aspects of a movement’s constituency, calling for a more careful assessment of the use and impact of media in contemporary activism. Leaderless forms of organizing and consensus-based decision making similarly create their own challenges. The lack of institutions and rules often leads to the privileging of those activists and participants with greater social and cultural capital. Moreover, the time and energy needed to engage in direct forms of democracy such as the general assemblies of Occupy encampments tend to exclude those participants who do not have the means to participate while tending to their own survival (read: jobs and family). This makes it hard for movements to broaden their base and link

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with the mass of the working class, thus forging partial movements that cannot connect the social forces necessary for real change. Finally, excessive distrust of institutional actors breeds romanticism around the prospects for change, leading people to believe in the capacity to change the world without taking power. The recent movement-powered electoral success of Syriza in Greece as well as the possibilities opened up by the growing popularity of Podemos in Spain suggest that there is a need to rethink this distrust of institutional politics. Both Syriza and Podemos might provide us with valuable lessons on how to extend left movement politics into the existing state apparatus.

Notes 1 We would like to thank Mona Baker for invaluable editorial guidance and suggestions for this chapter. The chapter is collaboratively written, and the authors’ names therefore appear in random order. 2 The story of the launch of the English page is documented by ‘frenchman’ at www. dailykos.com/story/2011/02/17/946150/-History-of-the-Revolution-on-Facebook (last accessed 5 April 2015). See also www.elshaheeed.co.uk/2012/01/26/the-storyof-we-are-all-khaled-said-english-facebook-page-1-of/ (last accessed 5 April 2015). 3 Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgjIgMdsEuk (last accessed 5 April 2015). 4 As Joya et al. (2011) have argued, the Arab uprisings were as much about economic inequality and poverty as they were about democracy. 5 We recognize that there are problems in thinking of stages because they obscure dissonance in a particular period and they miss continuity across periods. Following Jameson (1990), however, we find them useful in deciphering the cultural dominant of a particular period. 6 It is important to mark the difference between the New Left movements of the 1960s/1970s and the New Social Movements (NSMs) that emerged on the heels of the upheavals of the late 1960s. While the movements of the New Left were still deeply influenced by Marxism, the theorists who analyse New Social Movements base their analysis partly on the movements and partly on the scholarship of postindustrialism. Scholars of post-industrialism, such as Daniel Bell (1976), attempted to transcend both Marx and the concepts of capitalism and class, arguing that the post-industrial age was a time of abundance, where people did not suffer materially. For this reason, we would argue, there is a gap between New Social Movement theory, which moved away from class, and the actual movements of the New Left, which were still struggling around issues of economic inequality. 7 It has to be noted, however, that despite their stated goals, the forums have been criticized for being dominated by large non-governmental institutions as well as other well-funded organizations. Indeed, Manji (2007) describes the Nairobi Forum as “more a World NGO Forum than an anti-capitalist mobilisation, lightly peppered with social activists and grassroots movements”.

References Bell, Daniel (1976) The Coming of Postindustrial Society: Adventure in Social Forecasting, New York: Basic Books. Castells, Manuel (2012) Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Funke, Peter (2012) ‘The Rhizomatic Left, Neoliberal Capitalism and Class: Theoretical Interventions on Contemporary Social Movements in the Global North’, International Critical Thought 2(1): 30–41. Funke, Peter (2014) ‘Building Rhizomatic Social Movements? Movement-Building Relays during the Current Epoch of Contention’, Studies in Social Justice 8(1): 27–44. Ghonim, Wael (2013) Revolution 2.0: The Power of People is Greater than the People in Power: A Memoir, Boston: Mariner Books. Harvey, David (2005) A Brief History of Neo-liberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1990) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Joya, Angela, Patrick Bond, Rami El-Amine, Adam Hanieh and Mostafa Henaway (2011) The Arab Revolts against Neo-liberalism (Socialist Project: Socialist Interventions Pamphlet Series). Available at www.socialistproject.ca/documents/ ArabRevolts.php (last accessed 3 April 2015). Juris, Jeffrey S. (2008) Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manji, Firoze (2007) ‘Word Social Forum: Just Another NGO Fair?’, Pambazuka News, 26 January. Available at www.pambazuka.net/en/category.php/features/ 39464 (last accessed 5 April 2015). Ong, Aihwa (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rizk, Philip (2014) ‘2011 is Not 1968: An Open Letter to an Onlooker’, in Anthony Downey (ed.) Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East, London & New York: I.B.Tauris, 30–8. Also available at www.roarmag.org/2014/01/egyptian-revolution-working-class/ (last accessed 27 February 2015). Touraine, Alain (1988) Return to the Actor: Social Theory in Postindustrial Society, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wolfson, Todd (2012) ‘From the Zapatistas to Indymedia: Dialectics and Orthodoxy in Contemporary Social Movements’, Communication Culture and Critique 5: 149–70. Wolfson, Todd (2014) Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Zapatistas (1998) ‘Second Declaration of Le Realidad: Closing Words of the EZLN at the Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and against Neo-liberalism’, in Greg Ruggiero (ed.) Zapatista Encuentro: Documents from the First Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and against Neo-liberalism, New York: Seven Stories Press, 31–58.

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Part II

Translation as political intervention

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Text and context Translating in a state of emergency Samah Selim

This essay explores some of the problems associated with activist translating in revolutionary historical moments like the one that began in Egypt in 2011. Using my experience of working as a subtitler with the radical video collective Mosireen in 2012–2013, I reflect on how the process and experience of translating in a state of emergency – when the state mobilizes its arsenal of violence on the streets – profoundly shapes how we think about terms like ‘profession’ and ‘objectivity’, and about the roles of both translator and audience in building effective cross-border virtual solidarity networks in real time. I also broadly distinguish between what I see as two closely related and equally urgent modes of political translating work: crisis and building. While the former is defined by transposable and widely circulating spectacles of violence and resistance, the latter seeks to mobilize the broadest possible array of socially embedded source texts (tracts, statements, press conferences, testimonies, manifestos, analysis) in order to fully territorialize the spectacle and give it political meaning. I argue that building effective and sustainable international solidarity networks absolutely depends on this kind of multi-directional, territorializing translation work, particularly at this time, when militant popular movements are exploding across the globe.

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Samah Selim Samah Selim is Associate Professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University, USA. She co-directs the literature module of the Berlinbased postdoctoral research programme ‘Europe in the Middle East; the Middle East in Europe’ and is a member of the Mataroa Research Network, a Greek initiative that brings together scholars, activists and culture workers for a radical, commons-based Mediterranean. Her academic research focuses mainly on modern Arabic literature. Selim is also an award-winning literary translator. Her interest in translation has taken new directions with the beginning of the 2011 revolution in Egypt. In 2012 she joined the Mosireen collective’s video subtitling unit and has since been doing freelance translation and subtitling on social media and for Egyptian left political organizations.

I want to begin this essay on the politics of activist translation with a reflection on the question of place. I will begin by considering the relationship between translation and the place or ground from which the translator works, as a way of thinking about how and when translation becomes a radical or dissident practice (via a detour through Edward Said’s understanding of criticism). What I will be suggesting is that translating revolution (or translating-in-revolution) is a form of commitment not only to words and meanings but equally to specific places with deep political, cultural and semantic histories, and that it is only from this grounding of translation that the kinds of international solidarities we seek in moments of mass insurgency become not just possible but effective and meaningful. This question of place has occupied me for quite some time now – as a translator certainly, but also as someone who has spent her life moving from place to place, between languages, between cognitive and affective zones. This is one of the reasons why the spirit of Said’s work speaks to me so powerfully. In one way or another, Said spent his whole life thinking through this very question, the question of what it means to be in or out of place, and how the answer defines how we act in the world as artists, writers, critics and thinking human beings more generally. The Arab revolutions crystallized this question in my mind – the question of place – when I found myself on the streets of Cairo, like thousands of others, facing gas and bullets in the name of a set of abstract ideas. But were these ideas really so abstract? The gas and bullets made them tangible and concrete of course, but what really made them meaningful was that they were being fought over here, together, in this place, on this street, where the ghosts of so many had also lived and loved and fought. It is these kinds of legacies that live through us in one way or another, so powerfully that we are moved to offer our lives for them. Working with the radical video collective Mosireen through 2012 and 2013 deepened and honed my understanding of translation as a kind of toolkit of revolutionary practice and consciousness. In the second part of

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this essay I try to think about two different modes of translating-inrevolution, what I call the crisis mode and the ‘deep’ or ‘building’ mode; how the latter requires a form of being in place and how it is also absolutely essential to constructing the effective solidarity networks that radical activism depends on.

The place of the translator These days people talk a lot about globalization as having produced a kind of universal existential condition that is essentially post-nation and postmodern, and defined by global flows, migrancy, social media, cosmopolitan subjectivities, hybrid identities, and so on. These are all ways of thinking about the world as a map of unbounded movement and selffashionings. But the fact remains that most human activity on the planet is rooted in (though obviously not determined by) the material conditions of a place or a series of places. Across the world, work, sociability and politics are, in a very basic sense, conducted within territorially and linguistically bounded spaces shaped by deep and specific political-economic structures. Place in this sense generates memory and language. Indeed, place and language are mutually constituting forces. We inhabit language in much the same way we inhabit the physical territories of our daily lives. We live and breathe it, celebrate it, fight over it and struggle to make it speak truth. In this sense, place is not simply coterminous with the nation state. It is the set of material conditions from which effective political struggle becomes possible. Suspicion and nostalgia are the two poles between which critical attitudes towards place tend to unfold. In the social sciences, place is largely understood, for better or worse, as globalization’s other – the bordered, hermetic zone of authenticity, ethnocentrism and privilege (Cresswell 2004).1 In the literary humanities, the modern condition of exile marks the ambivalent space of freedom between irretrievable or spectral places. Edward Said brings these two threads together in The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), but seeks to go further. In an attempt to elicit a radical politics of reading, and to territorialize communities of struggle beyond narrow or reactionary notions of the nation, he defines place as culture (1983:8; emphasis in original): The readiest account of place might define it as the nation, and certainly in the exaggerated boundary drawn between Europe and the Orient . . . the idea of the nation, of a national-cultural community as a sovereign entity and place set against other places, has its fullest realization. But this idea of place does not cover the nuances, principally of fitness, belonging, association, and community, entailed in the phrase at home or in place. . . . I shall use the word “culture” to suggest an environment, process, and hegemony in which individuals (in their

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Eliciting the “range of meanings” that Said speaks of is the job of secular criticism, 2 a politics and method that is the book’s subject and practice. Culture in this formulation is a system that includes both closeness and distance, hegemony and resistance to it, criticism and the institutional investments of the critic. What most interests me in this passage, and in Said’s subsequent elaboration, is the notion of place as both an environment and a process in which individuals, texts and institutions are ‘embedded’. The term connotes ‘attachment’ in the bodied sense, and prefigures Said’s incisive critique of (post-)structuralism in the book and his passionate call, here and of course elsewhere in his work, for a method of reading that fully belongs in the world, articulated as a place of domination, conflict and freedom. This bodying of the critic into the world shows us that place is an essential site of the production of knowledge in both its hegemonic and resistant forms, and that the critic and her work are always implicated, for better or worse, in the power relations that shape the process of knowledge production. The same holds true for the translator. Ironically, we don’t often think of translators in relation to place, in the same way we do authors and texts. Translators traffic in language. Language is of course a powerful marker of territory, and yet translators seem to belong to no clear place; they are professional mediators of one kind or another, of uncertain provenance and residence, paid by the word. Translators translate for all kinds of reasons: money, influence, vocation or faith (in humanism, religion, liberation, etc.), but we don’t often think of translation as a form of attachment in the sense described above; of translators being ‘embedded’ – in Said’s sense3 – in a systemic cultural ‘environment and process’, in the same way that critics and their work are embedded. Even less common is the idea of the translator as critic. Like the exile, the translator seems to move in the in-between that is no place (the site of the translator’s invisibility) without the benefit of the contrapuntal vision elaborated by Said out of the mobile, doubled locations of exile.4 In what follows I want to think about the kinship between translation and criticism as Said defines it, but also about how and when translation becomes a form of bodied attachment, or commitment to place, particularly in revolutionary historical moments like the one that transpired in Egypt in 2011. What I want to argue is that translating in what I call in the subtitle of this essay ‘a state of emergency’ lays bare the specific location or ‘place’ of both translator and translation in ways that are otherwise much less visible. The literary translator is always, to greater or lesser degrees, conscious of the social and intertextual world in which the translation is embedded, and while some material traces of this larger world clearly mark the translation – in

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paratextual forms like introductions, glossaries and footnotes, for example – the literary translation stands on its own, living and breathing in the target language by virtue of its universally legible generic apparatus. In fact, publishers and readers usually prefer that a translated novel or poem be produced as an autonomous work of art or a cultural artefact (the less paratext or information, the better), and that is why literary translators can afford to be eclectic in their choice of texts and periods, and why they seem to be invisible. The kind of radical, territorializing translation that I discuss here, however, requires not just some mastery of language and generic codes but detailed, quotidian, participatory knowledge of the broader social and political contexts in which the text is embedded; the condition of being ‘here’, sur place – ‘in place’. The condition of being sur place as I use it here is not limited to physical presence. Presence can also take the form of commitment to a place and struggle that produces a form of profound cognitive and emotional investment. Said’s discussion of the essay as a mode of worldly critical affiliation to the text is equally pertinent to the translation (1983:50; emphasis in original): The central problematic of the essay as a form is its place, by which I mean a series of three ways the essay has of being the form critics take, and locate themselves in, to do their work. Place therefore involves relations, affiliations the critics fashion with the texts and audiences they address; it also involves the dynamic taking place of a critic’s own text as it is produced. The translation also positions itself in relation to the world of the text in ways that can be described in political terms. By thinking about the place of the translation we can also think about how it intervenes into a nexus of power relations that shape particular sites of struggle. Relation, intention and production are the three modes of affiliation that Said goes on to describe in the passage cited above. All three modes give us a framework through which to revisit the whole question of the translator’s positioning vis-à-vis the text; of objectivity and professionalism as abstract ideals of translation practice. How does the translator choose the text to be translated? How does she relate to that text and make a point of entry into it? Does the translation ‘identify, or identify with’ the text of its choice? Does it attempt to mediate between text and reader in some way; to comment, critique or interpret, or does it ‘stand to one side of them’? How far is it willing to go, as translation, in framing and contextualizing the text for the reader? What is the method by which the [translation] permits history a role during the making of its own history . . .? What is the quality of the [translation]’s speech toward, away from, into the actuality, the area

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Relation, intention and production are then the three central modes of affiliation that locate the translation – and particularly the kind of translation I’m talking about here – in the deep context (environment and process) that Said calls actuality. This type of translation is not and cannot be ‘neutral’, and I mean this both in the broader ethical – or what I would prefer to call, political – sense, and in the pragmatic or ‘professional’ sense. In times of revolutionary crisis, the dissident translator is a partisan, fully present in non-textual actuality, in place. This being-in-place is itself a form of intimacy that works in and through language; what Gayatri Spivak (2008) has called ‘lingual memory’, the subterranean archive of a language growing in time and space. It is only in and through this consciousness and this intimate positioning that the knowledge produced by the translator – and which is expressed in the translation – can effectively intervene to change the world, rather than simply surveying it.

States of emergency Let me illustrate what I mean via a reflection on my own experience of translating during the revolution in Egypt, an experience I’m sure is similar to that of many of my translator comrades. In the autumn of 2012, I joined the translator network of the radical video collective Mosireen via a call for volunteers on social media. I had been doing literary translation work for a decade by then, in conjunction with my work as a scholar of Arabic literature in the USA and Europe. The 25 January uprising was, for many of us who lived abroad, an irresistible magnet that made us drop everything and fly to Egypt. I was lucky enough to have been present in Cairo throughout most of the major post-Mubarak events, beginning with the July 2011 occupation of Tahrir Square, through the demonstrations, battles and massacres that punctually marked the following two years: the Maspero massacre (October 2011), Mohamed Mahmoud clashes (November 2011), the Port Said Stadium massacre (February 2012), the Ittihadiya Presidential Palace clashes (December 2012), the battle of Al-Muqattam (March 2013), and so on. The Mosireen archive remains perhaps the most complete visual history of the Egyptian revolution to date, and any visitor to the website5 will be struck, not only by its comprehensiveness, but by the urgent sense of presence that each piece of this history impresses on the viewer. When I joined Mosireen in 2012, I was already familiar with their work of documenting the uprising on the streets of Cairo and the major Delta cities, much of which I had personally witnessed. I saw my work for them as an adjunct to this witnessing, and I found that there was a remarkable, almost seamless

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continuity between the presence of witnessing and the work of translating. In the heat of the battles, many of which lasted for days, new videos would be uploaded to YouTube by the Mosireen film-makers and sent on via email link to the translators’ network for immediate subtitling, sometimes as many as five or six a day. I would often find myself rushing back from the fighting and tear gas to whichever friend’s apartment I would be squatting in at the time to do a speedy subtitling job on a video document of the battle I had just left at the doorstep, with panicked people coming and going in a steady buzz of TV, laptops, cell phones and frantic discussions all around. This is what I mean by a state of emergency. The emergency was out on the streets, but it was also a central part of the translation process. The uprising in Tahrir Square was a global event, not only because the unthinkable had suddenly become possible in a world that had supposedly reached the end of history, but because of the unprecedented spectacle of revolution, in a world awash with the ferment of revolt unfolding on myriad screens. I believe that people all over the world instinctively understood that what was happening in Egypt had a direct bearing on their own collective destinies, and this is why Tahrir became an inspiration and a symbol for the radical protest movements that sprang up everywhere in its wake, mostly in the form of Occupy (Washington, New York, Oakland, Sydney, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, etc.). Globally, insurgent desires, social media and the ubiquity of the iconic image are what made these kinds of connections possible in a historically unprecedented way. Translation was of course central to this process. The mainstream media outside the region could only go so far in helping people to understand what was happening in Egypt. The spectacle of violence and resistance largely spoke for itself, particularly during the first 18 days, and news outlets along with social media were famously awash with images of both. Mubarak’s resignation on 11 February 2011, however, and the subsequent clearing of Tahrir Square, initiated a new phase in the uprising, one shaped by deep politics as much as by concerted state violence and popular resistance: constitutional debates, the formation of political blocs and parties, the various backroom negotiations and alliances struck between political actors and the ruling junta, all of which also played out on the same streets periodically washed with blood. Very little of this reached the outside world, especially after the fraught presidential elections of 2012, when the world media, the liberal political establishment and even broad sections of the left, comfortable in the certitude that democracy had won the day, simply turned to other matters. I will come back to this point later, in connection with the question of solidarity, but first I want to make a brief conceptual distinction between two types of dissident or militant translation work. The first, what I call ‘crisis’, translation, is done in the urgency of the moment, when a specific event or series of events require immediate dissemination to the outside world, on the order of ‘this is happening now!’. The circulation of the image

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is the raw material of this type of translation, subtitling and captioning being two of its major modes. Crisis translation mainly focuses on the spectacles of violence and resistance of the kind that quickly became universally legible emblems of a new dissident global order somewhere around 2011: we all remember the images of protestors being attacked by rifles, tear gas and pepper spray, or being mauled by police officers and soldiers from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti and Gezi Parks. The massive popular mobilization that took place in various locations was also such an emblem, and translations of signs, chants, slogans and snap interviews were produced, often in close to real time, as a prelude to virtual international mobilizations. With this type of translation, the translator is fully and deeply implicated in the fighting, so to speak. She is not merely a facilitator or a kind of vessel for language, but is conscious of the specific political work to be done by the translation, in much the same way as a protest organizer or a barricades builder. It is not just that lives are at stake, but that the translator is part of a collective project of liberation, however narrowly or broadly conceived. This consciousness has real, practical consequences for translation strategy. The translator is not merely translating the literal slogan or chant but rather the semantic and political power of that slogan or chant, often by deliberately resorting to choices in words and phrasing that will resonate and inspire beyond the specific territory of struggle. Crisis translation is ultimately an emergency call for solidarity, and what it can certainly do is influence world opinion and alert international communities of dissent to critical nodes of insurgency in particular places, from New York to Rio de Janeiro. This is obviously an empowering practice, and can lead to important international initiatives like the New York-based War Resisters League (WRL) ‘Facing Tear Gas Campaign’, which emerged in 2011 in collaboration with activists in Egypt, Palestine and Bahrain and eventually spread to include other countries where US-manufactured tear gas was being used to brutally suppress popular protest movements.6 The initiative began with a tumbler featuring photographs of men and women who had been gassed in these different places of insurgency, holding up signs describing the experience in various languages with translations. But if we think of the translator as being responsible to a particular struggle, located in a particular place, we must ask the question of whether this kind of episodic crisis translation is enough. The constant circulation of image and spectacle on social media can easily give way to a kind of touristic voyeurism that forecloses, or at least stalls, the possibility of real solidarity – rather like the dubious politics of what came to be called ‘clicktivism’ 7 in the wake of the Occupy movements. Deep translation, as opposed to crisis translation, deliberately moves beyond image and spectacle, with the intention of building international solidarity networks that are nonetheless firmly rooted in the granular struggles of a particular place. The film-makers and translators at Mosireen worked from the trenches of the Egyptian meedan (square, street, battlefield)

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but always with one eye to other uprisings: the Arab/African ones of course, but also Occupy in Europe and the USA, as well as radical international labour movements. French subtitles were made for a series of Mosireen videos specifically targeting Tunisian audiences at the Carthage International Film Festival in 2012. The collective also made a series of videos in 2012 on the uprisings in the Egyptian industrial sector and worker control of abandoned and newly nationalized factories, and links were forged with the Argentine factory recovery movement that emerged in the wake of Argentina’s massive debt default of 2001.8 A documentary on the recovery movement at the Argentine Zanon factory was subtitled into Arabic and screened for the Egyptian workers on strike at the Suez-based Iffco Refinery. A message of solidarity from the Zanon workers for striking Ceramica Cleopatra factory workers was also translated as part of this Mosireen initiative and screened for the workers in Egypt.9 Many Mosireen videos were featured on the labournet.tv website with Spanish and German subtitles in addition to English.10 These kinds of targeted translation efforts are the building blocks of sustained political information campaigns and collaborations. In the other direction, the WRL ‘Facing Tear Gas’ initiative began to incorporate longer testimonies, video and comics on tear gas economies. It eventually grew, first, into a multi-pronged campaign targeting the Pennsylvania-based multinational tear gas manufacturer Combined Systems Inc., then into a campaign to end militarization of the police in the USA as well as the export of deadly riot control gear abroad. The 2013 campaign against Urban Shield – an annual SWAT team training event and multi-million dollar weapons expo held in Oakland California – successfully forced the Marriott Hotel chain to back down from future hosting of the expo. The WRL was able to ‘translate’ and mobilize the spectacles of violence around the world that dominated social media into a fully territorialized programme of resistance and solidarity based in local US struggles that then reached out once again to implicated movements abroad. A benign political voyeurism is not the only potential danger resulting from an exclusive focus on crisis translation. Misconstruction and misunderstanding of complex histories and political economies of domination and struggle can also be a consequence, with serious implications for the possibility of effective cross-border solidarity and movement building. This was most evident in the case of Egypt in the wake of the 2012 presidential elections, when fellow-travelling progressive and left circles and movements in the USA were lulled by the liberal discourse of democratic transition and the politics of Islamophobia at home into, at best, a kind of complacency; at worst, an instinctive hostility to the intense struggle against the rising tide of violent Islamist politics under Muslim Brotherhood rule. Especially here, spectacles of violence and resistance were not enough to illuminate the local specificities of who the parties to this particular battle were, and what exactly was at stake. The translator’s commitment to the place of struggle entails responsibility for eliciting this deep context

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and making it legible to insurgent communities and movements abroad, even when this kind of intervention explicitly marks a political position that might trouble the waters of what we call ‘professionalism’. Foreign language news coverage and analysis tends to be not only superficial, but fatally coloured by neo-liberal and Eurocentric political paradigms that obscure rather than illuminate the particular histories and dynamics of conflict and struggle in insurgent spaces abroad. In the ‘building’ mode of translation, the translator’s responsibility must include a concerted effort to produce real-time translations of all kinds of local political texts that define the parameters of conflict and action in the here and now (news items, interviews, press conferences and press releases, testimonies, opinion pieces and analysis, etc.). It would, in addition, ideally include material from the at-home archive of revolution and counter-revolution, as a means of grounding the present in the past and thereby rendering it meaningful to other linguistic and political communities within its own fully actualized historical logic. This kind of territorializing and movement-building translation work clearly requires an organized collective effort, based on flexible, voluntarist and non-hierarchical principles, as described in detail by Mona Baker in her work on global-reach activist translator networks (2013). The common project that might bring individual translators (professional, amateur, scholarly, etc.) together into such voluntarist networks brings us back to the question of the translator as a bodied and partisan social actor embedded in concrete linguistic and political territory. I began this essay by trying to think, with Said, of place or the condition of ‘being at home’ as a movement of radical affiliation and criticism that takes place, first and foremost, on the ground of what Said defined as ‘culture’. My argument was that place – language/text, historical territories and social geographies, but also concrete political struggles – is a necessary launching point for the kind of radical worldly criticism that Said calls for. Place, then, is also a powerful form of narrative in the sense discussed by Baker (2010); a set of re-membered stories about who we are and who we must become in order to make our desperate worlds the habitations we dream of. This is the narrative that binds dissident communities together the world over, including, essentially, translator communities that carry the deep meaning of place over into the interstitial spaces where global action becomes possible.

Notes 1 See in particular the chapter titled ‘Reading a Global Sense of Place’, in which Cresswell outlines the political debates on place in relation to globalization studies through a presentation and close reading of essays by David Harvey and Doreen Massey. 2 Said never really defined secular criticism in The World, the Text and the Critic, apart from laying out what Stathis Gourgouris calls “a practice” of reading: “an

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experimental, often interrogative practice, alert to contingencies and skeptical toward whatever pretends to escape the worldly” (2013:12). It is hard to avoid the negative political connotations of ‘embedding’ in relation to anthropologists and translators post-2003 Iraq invasion. It should be clear to the reader that Said uses the term in a completely different sense that is diametrically opposed to the US military version. Said developed the concept of contrapuntal reading in his 1993 work, Culture and Imperialism, as a way of eliciting the repressed colonial subconscious of texts that make up the literary canon. Said’s personal and intellectual biography of course made him particularly well suited to undertake this critical, back-andforth movement between different texts and histories. One could argue that reading contrapuntally was Said’s way of ‘translating’ the text back into the colonial geography that it works to make invisible. www.mosireen.org (last accessed 28 December 2014). See www.facingteargas.org/ (last accessed 24 December 2014). See www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/24/clicktivism-changed-politicalcampaigns-38-degrees-change (last accessed 25 January 2015). See interview with Philip Rizk, this volume. I am grateful to Katherine Halls and Philip Rizk for excavating this material from the Mosireen translator network archive for me. Labournet.tv is part of the international LabourNet network for union organizing. It describes itself as “a living audiovisual archive of the labour movement. We consider ourselves part of a movement with the aim of fundamentally changing social relations. The Internet is our means to promote an exchange of experiences, a process of learning from past struggles, and solidarity. For this purpose, present-day and historical films from all continents are collected. Our focus is on the situation of the workers, their (self-) organization, labour disputes and working conditions, and ideas for social alternatives. Labournet.tv also produces its own contributions concerning current events, in order to make visible current struggles and the perspective of the working population”. See http://en.labournet. tv/ (last accessed 24 December 2014).

References Baker, Mona (2010) ‘Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community’, in Maria Tymoczko (ed.) Translation, Resistance, Activism, Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 23–41. Baker, Mona (2013) ‘Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action’, Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 12(1): 23–47. Cresswell, Tim (2004) Place: A Short Introduction, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Gourgouris, Stathis (2013) Lessons in Secular Criticism, New York: Fordham University Press. Said, Edward (1983) The World, the Text and the Critic, Boston: Harvard University Press. Said, Edward (1993) Culture and Imperialism, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Spivak, Gayatri (2008) ‘More Thoughts on Cultural Translation’. Online transcript of paper delivered at the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies conference Borders, Nations, Translations. Available at www.eipcp.net/transversal/ 0608/spivak/en (last accessed 24 December 2014).

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Ethical reflections on activist film-making and activist subtitling Salma El Tarzi Translated from Arabic by Robin Moger This essay reflects on a number of issues from the perspective of a filmmaker who has been deeply involved in the events unfolding in Egypt since January 2011. The issues in question concern the creative input of translators and the extent of their ownership of a work to which they have contributed voluntary labour, how and why subtitles may be taken into consideration from the very beginning of the process of making a film or a video, and the ethical contours of the activist film-maker/ subtitler relationship. As a film-maker, I have a very clear line dividing my work as an activist making videos for a collective such as Mosireen, which I do anonymously and without claims to ownership, and my other work that I make as an artist or independent film-maker. With videos I produce for a collective, I am always open to anyone suggesting or even adding or changing elements of the film, as long as within the group we know we share the same political agendas and goals. Within this context, do subtitlers have the same right to intervene as others? Have film-makers like myself been taking them and the dynamics of the subtitling process into consideration as we produce our videos? The essay reflects on these issues and their implications for the principles of equality and solidarity that drive activist collectives such as Mosireen.

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Salma El Tarzi is an award-winning documentary film-maker. She received her BA in Film Directing from the Egyptian Cinema Institute in 1999. Salma worked as an assistant director and producer on several mainstream films and television commercials. Her documentary debut was in 2004 with the short documentary Do You Know Why?, for which she received the silver award at Rotterdam Arab Film Festival. Since then she has directed several documentaries for Al Jazeera as well as the Red Cross Delegation. In 2013 she won the Dubai Film Festival Award for Best Documentary Director for her film Underground/On the Surface. She is a member of the Mosireen collective as well as Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment (OpAntiSH).

I never would have imagined that facilitating a workshop on translation in grassroots media could raise so many questions in my mind, occupying me for weeks without leading to any answers; that reflection would only lead to more questions, branching off and multiplying until I found myself confronted with the eternal existential enquiry: who am I, and how do I present myself to the world? Let me begin with some basic and undisputed facts. I am Salma El Tarzi, 36 years old: a director, political activist and member of the Mosireen1 media collective. Thus far all is clear and uncomplicated. This is how I have always categorized myself, setting down clear dividing lines between each descriptor and the next, and taking comfort and satisfaction in this separation. . . until the day of the workshop, 2 which blurred all these dividing lines and left me in a state of embarrassed confusion. To start with, I should confess that I had never taken the slightest interest in the theme of the workshop. A workshop on translating grassroots media videos had nothing to do with me: it concerned those translators who generously volunteer their time to work on films created by groups like Mosireen. Mosireen was organizing the workshop, and as a member of the collective, I offered my services as facilitator. That was all there was to it. I had planned my day as follows: I would make sure the trainers had the space and equipment they required. I would wait for the trainees to turn up, then I would introduce them to their trainers. When everyone was settled in the hall I would leave them to it and continue working on the script for my film in peace – though I would make sure I was close by the door to the hall in case they needed me for any reason. And indeed, everything went according to plan, nice and easy, until the moment the whole thing broke down completely as a result of a miscalculation in timing: the workshop started and the trainers began introducing themselves while I was still standing in the centre of the hall. I found myself in an extremely embarrassing position: my only way out was to walk the length of the hall right through the middle of the space occupied by the trainers and trainees. Leaving in this manner would naturally be taken as a sign of disrespect, so

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I had no choice but to sit down in the nearest chair and listen to the introductions, then aim to withdraw quietly when everyone was occupied with their work. One of the trainers began by outlining the plan for the workshop. Suddenly, it was as though a bucket of cold water had been tipped over my head, for she announced that one of the most important points they would be discussing was the division that currently existed between those making the videos and the subtitlers. Subtitlers, she explained, are treated as nothing more than guest workers, without any valid views of their own, as opposed to being partners with the right to offer contributions and observations like any other member of the team. I felt ashamed, as though the trainer had read my mind and knew about my plan to escape the workshop. Wasn’t that precisely my attitude towards those translators present in the hall (all of whom happened to be women) and towards the workshop itself? At that moment, I understood the poignancy in her voice and became aware of a truth that, through ignorance or arrogance, I had always ignored: that these subtitlers are volunteers just like me. They give their time and energy because they believe in a cause, just like me. In fact, they believe in the same cause as me. If they didn’t, they would not be spending their time translating my and my group’s videos for free, nor would they be putting up with us, the film-makers, acting superior and sidelining them. The truth is that when I make a video for Mosireen, my relationship with it ends the instant the group, having first made their comments and observations, agree to show it; the word group here most certainly does not include the translators who will subsequently subtitle it. The group is limited to my fellow film-makers from the collective. The truth is that I have no idea who translates my films. I don’t know their names, I don’t know what they look like, and I certainly don’t discuss the film with them.

Rethinking the relationship between film-maker and subtitler What I have said up to this point may seem emotional, prompted by a personal sense of guilt, an opportunity for a bit of self-flagellation, and to a large extent that is probably what it is. And yet, isn’t volunteering to work for a cause in which one believes a personal matter? Are we not motivated by a very personal desire to bring our deeds in line with our principles and our sense of responsibility towards the world? Isn’t the basis of our work self-denial (or so we would like to believe): working in a spirit of togetherness for a cause? Isn’t our greatest fear that we might fall into the trap of making our activism a means of achieving personal glory? Isn’t that why we choose to join a collective, because we believe in the values of cooperative endeavour? And here I was, turning my back on the group that silently shares my cause and my work. Just accepting their contribution as a given, as though the films spontaneously translate themselves. As if by magic!

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Figure 7.1 Placement of captions and subtitles in some Mosireen videos.3

And yet, does responsibility for this separation fall on the film-makers alone, or should the translators shoulder part of the blame? And what do the translators themselves think of it? Why have none of them ever objected? Why is it that not one subtitler from the Mosireen group has protested or passed comment on any aspect of the group’s work, not even in connection with translation-related issues? I remember one example of a common pattern that the trainers brought to the attention of attendees at the workshop. The pattern involves film-makers placing captions at the bottom of the screen, for example to state the name of the speaker. Given the constraints imposed by the subtitling software, this forces the subtitlers to layer the translations over the caption, which is already burnt into the film, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the viewer to read either text (Figure 7.1). So, this business is too complex to be addressed by indulging in selfflagellation or throwing parties for subtitlers to show that we appreciate their work. Perhaps what we need to do is to re-examine the film-making process as a whole, so that subtitling becomes an indivisible part of it, instead of just a bolted-on extra. This might entail taking the subtitling into consideration from the outset – as is done with other elements such as photography, editing and sound engineering – thereby turning subtitlers into participants (or, more correctly: subtitlers thereby becoming participants) in this process. More importantly, we must adopt a broader vision of the film and its audience. Are we targeting a local audience first and foremost, or do we want to bring the message to a wider audience, believing as we do that we are all fighting the same system everywhere, whether in Egypt or Mexico, in Greece or in Oakland? If the latter, then it is crucial for subtitlers to be able to exercise their judgement, to add whatever they deem necessary to enhance the foreign audience’s understanding of the issue at hand. Their intervention might take the form of a narrative intertitle

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added at the beginning of the film to explain the context of the events being depicted. Or it might involve exploring different options to convey different elements of the shot on-screen, from background chants and songs to graffiti and posters – details which, if they were to be ignored and the translation confined to the main dialogue and narration, would deny the foreign viewer a full understanding of the moment. Assuming the necessary technology can be made available, this might require subtitlers to place their translations of these various elements in different areas of the screen. Discussion of these and similar issues between film-makers and subtitlers could well prove fruitful and may produce practical solutions to various difficulties, possibly even developing the technology required to achieve these goals. For any of this to work there needs to be common political ground. But this point hardly needs stating, as I can’t imagine a translator volunteering to help spread ideas that go against their own principles. I can’t picture a conservative, right-wing translator volunteering to translate a film on sexual diversity, for instance.

Understanding the translator’s ethical dilemmas I tried putting myself in the translator’s place, and bearing in mind that translation is his or her means of engaging in political activism, as in the case of the subtitlers who work with us at Mosireen. I then realized that subtitlers must be allowed – and must claim – a greater degree of freedom in producing film translations for foreign audiences who may not be fully acquainted with all aspects of the events depicted and the context in which they occurred. I imagine that the greatest challenge subtitlers face is not translating the dialogue of a character with whose positions they agree, but rather translating the dialogue of an individual whose principles and views clash with their own. For instance, as an opponent of military rule, I would personally have great difficulty translating a speech by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, President of Egypt at the time of writing, in which he accuses revolutionaries of being agents and traitors. I would definitely not be able to take a disinterested approach to translating the words that come out of his mouth on such an occasion. In fact, there would be little point in me translating such a speech because I wouldn’t be doing so with the aim of conveying a particular political message – rather, I would feel obliged to add my (or the group’s) point of view in one form or another: by adding explanations and comments in parentheses, sarcastic asides, putting scare quotes around words like ‘traitors’, etc. Here is another example. Irrespective of my own views on the Muslim Brotherhood, I understand what the media is trying to achieve by adopting the widely used designation ‘the terrorist Brotherhood group’, particularly in the context of announcing another police or army break-up of a Brotherhood demonstration by force. The insistent use of ‘terrorist’ in this case is designed to condemn and demonize demonstrators, who are in fact

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the victims in such incidents, and to absolve the authorities of responsibility and justify their use of force on the grounds that the protestors are members of a ‘terrorist group’. Am I obliged to retain the word ‘terrorist’ when I translate such texts? I think in this case I would drop ‘terrorist’ and settle for ‘the Muslim Brotherhood group’. When I discussed this particular example with a friend while writing this essay, he pointed out that my approach could be considered unduly patronizing towards a non-Arabic-speaking audience. It might be better, he argued, to convey the message within the context of the film as a whole, rather than by manipulating the subtitles. I told him of another approach which was mentioned during the workshop that launched me into the current reflection on volunteer subtitling. A group of Spanish activists, who call themselves Ansarclub Subtitlers,4 produce subtitled versions of speeches given in English by the former Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar, in which they add their own commentary to ridicule him or expose his lies. For example, in one such speech Aznar argues (in English) that the West needs to defend Israel in order to be able to defend itself. The subtitling into Spanish is interjected with sarcastic remarks: in a screenshot discussed at the workshop, the subtitle reads ‘Por que no dices eso en casa, Ansar?’ (‘Why don’t you say that at home, Ansar?’), alluding to the fact that these views would not be favourably received in Spain. Such examples raise even more questions about the function of subtitles and the role of subtitlers. More doubts, more confusion!

Translation in the context of individual versus collective output So far, I have had no difficulty expanding my horizons, confessing the limitations of my outlook and recognizing how important it is that translators enjoy a measure of freedom and independence. After all, I have been talking about the positioning of subtitlers in relation to their work on political videos made by grassroots media organizations. My name does not appear on these videos, they are disseminated in the name of the collective, and their main focus is not on individuals like myself but rather on an issue or a cause in which the group as a whole believes. We all work together to ensure they reach the greatest possible number of viewers around the world; we put our individuality aside for the sake of the cause. ‘I’ has no place here. But I don’t find myself quite so accepting and tolerant when I contemplate applying these principles to the work I produce in my name, to the work I make for my own personal glory. Let me remind you that I usually make a clear distinction between those films I make anonymously, as part of my political activism, and others I produce in my name: Salma El Tarzi, who presents herself to the world as a director. I have to admit that as soon as I started contemplating how the higher principles I’ve been discussing might apply to my own work, I was gripped by utter panic. My absolute

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control over my work is under threat! Here they come, those reckless translators, ready to pounce on my artistic property, eager to alter it, to soil it with their additions. They will change the dialogue, distort the aesthetics of my shot with subtitles scattered across the screen, disrupt the rhythm of my film with their explanatory graphics and text. Let’s redress the balance and return to sanity: I make the film, and the nice, traditional subtitler translates the dialogue just as thousands of films have been translated before . . . thank you! These were the thoughts racing through my head as the trainer took us through examples of work by a Chinese group pioneering a new form of ‘creative’ subtitling: granting themselves the right to add new elements to the image on-screen; indeed, even to remove elements; making the subtitles part of the fabric of the visual image – a fundamental component of the shot, as opposed to the traditional line-at-the-bottom-of-the-screen. I confess that, despite my alarm, I was unable to fight back a growing feeling of admiration for the idea of using the subtitles as another visual element and the endless possibilities it held for me, as a director. As I thought about this, the trainer began to show us another concrete example of this form of creative subtitling. The example came from a Russian film, I seem to remember, 5 and the scene showed a man in a swimming pool. As he swam, he began to hear a voice in his head, which caused him to suffer a nosebleed. Most of the scene is shot underwater. The subtitles appear as red droplets, like blood from his nosebleed; they form a sentence then dissolve into the water and vanish, to be replaced by the next subtitle. As I watched this example, a new and disorienting train of thought came into my head. I no longer felt quite so comfortable with the categories into which I divided my work nor the way I kept my work as a ‘director’ separate from my output as a ‘political activist’. For even when a film does not make a straightforward political statement like the videos I produce at Mosireen, it remains, one way or another, an expression of the same principles and ideas. I am the same person, with the same opinions, and the comforting line that I believed separated my personae as director and political activist was in truth a figment of my imagination. And then again, didn’t I claim to be a fervent believer in the concept of creative commons? Why then do I find it so difficult to accept the simple proposition that a translator from China can translate one of my films without any control on my part? Would it not be more productive to see the translation as an opportunity to bring my film to the attention of a Chinese audience who speak neither Arabic nor English, the latter being the default language I choose for subtitling my works? But then, how could I be sure that Chinese viewers would be receiving my ‘authentic’ point of view rather than the point of view of some translator I don’t even know? As I thought through these implications, I realized that I have difficulty accepting (or admitting the reality of) the idea of a film leaving the control of its maker as soon as it emerges into the wider world. Perhaps controlling the life of one’s work used to be easier, before the advent of YouTube and similar sites

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that make it possible for films to circulate beyond the control of their creators and official distributors. But the fact is that I have no objection to my films circulating on the Internet, being disseminated beyond my control, and generating no income in return. My problem is not that of a producer making a loss through piracy. I am all for art and information being made available to everyone. It’s not the money, it’s the panic I feel at the idea of my work leaving my creative control; the difficulty of accepting that my work takes on an independent existence when it encounters its audience. In short, I refuse to cut the cord. As I mentioned earlier, the Mosireen workshop coincided with my preparations for a new film. I was working on a cinematic interpretation based on a novel, and initially found myself locked in a struggle between a sense of obligation towards the literary text and the desire to let my imagination run free and re-examine the subject matter from my own personal point of view. If I could not do that, then why was I turning the novel into a film in the first place? Writing the script, I realized, was a form of translation – translating a literary text into the language of cinema. I began to see my vacillation between a slavish obedience to the text and presenting it from my subjective viewpoint as similar to the dilemma experienced by subtitlers working on films. Thinking about this problem and the issue of how much freedom could be given to or claimed by the translator, I came to the conclusion that classifying some works as ‘art’ and others as grassroots media productions is perhaps not the most fruitful way forward. Maybe it is more realistic to classify films based on the subtitler’s relationship with the work and its makers. In other words, on whether a subtitler is paid to translate a film by the film-makers or is undertaking the subtitling as a personal initiative, independently of the film’s original creators. Take my cinematic treatment of the literary text, for instance. In addition to the fact that the original author of the novel had granted me creative licence to adapt his text, he also – and more importantly – was not necessarily expecting me to convey his viewpoint to my film-going audience, whereas we film-makers do expect translators to bring our vision to a foreign audience, and also, perhaps, to a language that the film-makers may not speak at all, which de facto denies them the opportunity to review the translation. Within the traditional relationship between the film-maker and the paid subtitler, I – a director entrusting the translation of my film to a subtitler – expect this translation to be an uninflected and faithful transmission of my point of view. This requires a good deal of trust, and a willingness to gamble, too, particularly when the translation is into a language I am not familiar with. But we can approach this relationship in a different way. We can think about a new kind of relationship between subtitler and film-maker, and draw up a working plan that takes the foreign audience into consideration from the outset, and thus start thinking through the translation process with the subtitler from the earliest stages. This new scenario might allow us to think of and implement creative solutions. The dialogue between film-maker and subtitler will give subtitlers more

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space to express their vision, so that it harmonizes with that of the filmmakers. This is especially pertinent if we move away from the traditional freelance model, in which the translator provides a purely linguistic rendering, to one where the subtitler is an integral part of the production team and equally responsible for conveying the spirit of the film. The outcome could be termed an ‘official translation copy’, in the same way that directors have their own ‘director’s cut’, i.e.: a version of the film as the directors produced it, created at the very beginning of the process and free from interventions by producers and distributors. The official translations of any film would remain limited to a set number of languages, while hundreds of other translated copies will continue to exist outside the film-makers’ control. Their existence is a fact of life that has to be accepted, and with a little open-mindedness, film-makers such as myself might be able to perceive the positive side of this widespread and unregulated dissemination. Not too long ago, I would never have given a second thought to the issue of translation and its complexity. But now, after a translation workshop that lasted no more than six hours, a whole horizon of opportunities, possibilities and questions has opened up before me. As I conclude my thoughts on the subject, I can’t help but think of the translator who will translate this very piece and what he or she might think of what I’ve had to say about translators and their work. Will he or she, for example, have noticed my consistent attempts (in Arabic) to use both the male and female forms of nouns such as ‘translator’ and ‘subtitler’ in my attempt to convey a commitment to gender neutrality?

Notes 1 www.mosireen.org (last accessed 3 January 2015). 2 This was a workshop for volunteer subtitlers, particularly those associated with Mosireen. It was coordinated by Katherine Halls, Danya Nada and myself, and delivered by Luis Pérez-González and Mona Baker at ADEF (Arab Digital Expression Foundation), Cairo, on 30 April 2014. A video recording of the event is available on the Translation Studies Portal: www.translationstudiesportal.org/ar/ media/entry/subtitling_workshop and www.monabaker.org/?p=1891 (last accessed 3 January 2015). 3 Screenshot from No BP Gas Project without Our Consent, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh8nwXugNgs (last accessed 3 January 2015). 4 According to the workshop leader, Luis Pérez-González, this is a parody of George Bush’s incorrect pronunciation of Aznar’s name during several of their joint press conferences. For more information on this example, see Pérez-González (2013:169). 5 Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor) (2004) directed by Timur Bekmambetov. IMDb entry: www.imdb.com/title/tt0403358/ (last accessed 7 January 2015).

Reference Pérez-González, Luis (2013) ‘Amateur Subtitling as Immaterial Labour in the Digital Media Culture: An Emerging Paradigm of Civic Engagement’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19(2): 157–75.

8

What word is this place? Translating urban social justice and governance Sherief Gaber

Alongside the political transformations that Egypt has witnessed since 2011, there has been a concomitant transformation within Egyptian cities and a wealth of civil society initiatives seeking social justice in the urban environment. Architectural and planning practices, local NGOs and rights groups have sought new languages and new terminology to deal with the phenomena on the ground and to intervene in shaping the new landscape. Issues of language arise particularly clearly in attempts to translate new concepts in urbanism into Arabic, concepts such as the right to the city, participatory planning and budgeting, and various descriptions of public space and rights to access. Public space is often described in Egypt as ‘state land’, resting ownership and control within the government, with detrimental effects. Direct translations of ‘public space’ are unwieldy and lack resonance. At the same time, Arabic terms often have no ready equivalents in English. These terms have older histories and roots within Egyptian culture, and many are now attempting to deploy them to advance contemporary social justice demands. This chapter seeks to examine some of the nomenclature around urban social justice and urban governance in Egypt, looking both at the challenges of translating contemporary international concepts into Arabic and the opportunities for unique activism afforded by words and concepts that are specific to the Arabic language.

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Sherief Gaber Sherief Gaber is a researcher and urban planner living in Cairo, whose work focuses on housing and the right to the city. He has worked on and with projects such as the Egyptian Right to Housing initiative, creating documentary videos on housing rights, and the Cairo Urban Solidarity Initiative, looking at informal upgrading schemes and neighbourhood-level activism. He is also involved in research related to issues of public space, community planning and governance, looking at everything from the role of street vendors in the Egyptian city with CLUSTER (Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, Training and Environmental Research) to the informal systems of governance and management that are exerted over city spaces. Sherief’s work has appeared in the Cairobserver, Mada Masr and other outlets on urban and Egyptian issues. In addition to his work in urbanism, he is a founding member of the Mosireen independent media collective.

The period following the tumultuous 18 days in Egypt in 2011 (25 January to 11 February), which culminated in the overthrow of the former president Hosni Mubarak, saw an explosion within activist, civil society and community-led efforts to achieve social justice goals. Within the specific arena of urbanism and the right to housing and the city, popular committees – formed initially as neighbourhood watches – attempted to expand their work on neighbourhood improvement and advocacy. New initiatives emerged to champion local governance, civil society and social justice in the city, and popular protests called for basic services and improved conditions in the poorest neighbourhoods of the country. At the same time, as the city became an urgent political issue, the informal sector likewise exploded, and Cairo in particular experienced a boom in unpermitted construction,1 encroachments by street vendors hawking their wares on arterial roads, and sidewalk cafés proliferating seemingly endlessly. With the old regime gradually re-establishing itself, despite the fall of Mubarak, 2013 saw a rapid resurgence of the idea of ‘state prestige’. Particularly after the extensive crackdown on Islamists, supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi, as well as political activists, the state quickly moved to reclaim territory it had lost since the uprising in 2011 and the security vacuum that followed it. Extending the system of control beyond the repression of political dissent, there has been a crackdown across Egypt on informal and unpermitted building, street vendors, sidewalk cafés, and other expansions and encroachments into public space. Throughout this characteristically spectacular campaign, which saw deployments of Central Security Forces and military police evicting street vendors from downtown Cairo, as well as the use of dynamite to explode unpermitted buildings behind Cairo’s Supreme Constitutional Court, the resounding rhetoric has been one of reclaiming the ‘state’s lands’, ‫ﺍﺭﺍﺿﻰ‬ ‫ﺍﻟﺪﻭﻟﺔ‬. An executive order issued in October 2014 has gone as far as designat-

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ing public utilities and infrastructure (including streets and sidewalks) as military installations, with transgressions against them carrying the threat of military trial.2 In a tour through al-Zawiya al-Hamra in October 2014, 3 Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb succinctly warned: “We want to clean our country up, and anyone who lays a hand on the state’s land will have it cut off” (emphasis mine).4

Translating the language of the city The fact that urban issues and activism increasingly became part of social and political consciousness, coupled with the extensive changes to the city itself, have required activists, academics and professionals to develop a new language to document new phenomena as well as advocate for change. At the same time, the state, continuing to reassert itself, uses its own language to describe urban spaces and the actions taken upon them. Both languages – the activists’ and the state’s – are often borrowed, translated from the discourses of American and European urban planning, and brought into Arabic awkwardly, or at worst through garish cognates. Literal translations of key concepts fail to reflect or do justice to the existing conditions in Egypt. On the other hand, the languages used in the street and by the state often describe vastly different phenomena, distinct from both the language of practitioners and the borrowed languages of Western urbanism. Take, for instance, the arm of the state dedicated to historic preservation and improvement, the National Organization for Urban Harmony. Their name in English, besides the awkwardness of the neologism used,5 avoids directly translating the Arabic in order to create the acronym NOUH, Arabic for Noah: a pun generated through multiple successive translations. That an organization ostensibly dedicated to “embrac[ing] all activities that aim at improving the visual image of cities, villages and new urban societies”6 would associate itself with the deity-chosen survivor of a biblical flood meant to wash away a humanity-gone-wicked is itself a rather succinct summary of the state’s view of contemporary Cairo. The state sees possession and control of public space as a primary component of its own prestige and ability to project power and authority. Any notion that these streets and sidewalks are public space, much less commons or common land, is put aside by the conceptual weight of the Arabic equivalent of the phrase ‘state land’, araady ad-dawla/‫ﺍﺭﺍﺿﻰ ﺍﻟﺪﻭﻟﺔ‬, a compact expression with little room for complexity or interpretation. The closest, indeed, this phrase can bring us to any notion of a shared public space is only through the many layers of proxies whereby the government is projected as a representative of the public good or popular will, which in Egypt is strained both by the heavily centralized decision-making structure as well as the policing mentality of the state and its agents. Where, then, do we find public space? How can we excavate it from the unilateral possession and control of the state, and how can we talk about it when so many of the terms

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we would use are loaned, either awkward in translation or awkward in application, borrowed from notions of space or spatial organization in the European or American city that have no analogues in the Egyptian city? Even more pressingly, how do we activate those kernels of public space, of transformation, that exist in the Egyptian city but not in the current lexicon of planning and urbanism? Rather than a comprehensive survey of the literature and academic language used in the field of Middle Eastern urbanism, what I offer here is an enquiry based on my own experiences and those of others who have worked in the field of urbanism in Egypt, have attempted to communicate concepts and ideas to citizens, and have reflected on how citizens communicate concepts both to professionals and to one another.7 The focus of the enquiry is fundamentally on how people within the city speak of the city as such. It is also on how attempts to transform the native language, by infusing it with specialized terms, borrowed words, and even excavating terms from popular or historical use, go hand in hand with concrete efforts to transform the city.8 As a starting point, we can consider the phenomenon of the word ‫ﻋﺸﻮﺍﺋﻴﺔ‬/ 3ashwa2yya being commonly translated as slum, the latter long seen within the professional community as a derogatory and problematic term. The Arabic word does not quite align with slum, and has a nuance unmistakably related to the notion of order and control of space put forward by the state. 3ashwa2yya, which derives from the Arabic root for ‘random’, refers not to the poor conditions of housing as slum does, but to the informality of that housing, its existence as random or unplanned relative to the planning and control of the state. Whereas the slum emerged in urban planning practice in the United States in the early twentieth century, related to public health movements and a discourse about the sanitary city, 3ashwa2yyaat (plural of 3ashwa2yya) in Egypt arise out of an explosion in the informal sector as the state proves unwilling and unable to meet its housing obligations, and as housing and urban planning leaves the centralized control of the state apparatus. In both cases, the terms are used derogatorily, but the sense of each term ties it to a specific set of urban political conditions and complicates the task of translating one for the other. Deboulet (2009: 206) notes of the term that both the state and the “paranoid upper classes” of Cairo deploy a “denigrating language [that] borrows, reinforces, and fuses together a system of negative social signifiers, linking, for example, informality and marginality, informality and disorder, informality and poverty, and informality and rural origins or provincialism”. It is the informal nature of these settlements, first and foremost, that causes anxiety within the state and among the well-to-do. Contrasting with the notion of the 3ashwa2yya, promulgated by the state and taken up by a certain media rhetoric afraid of the poor they do not understand, is the term ‫ ﻣﺠﻬﻮﺩ ﺫﺍﺗﻲ‬/ maghood zati, used by residents to describe their self-built housing. The term literally means ‘self-effort’. Embodied in this designation of a particular type of housing is the individual and community effort expended in building it, highlighting its

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modesty and the poor public services provided to it with a sense of pride. When residents describe their living conditions as ‫ ﻋﺸﻮﺍﺋﻲ‬/3ashwaa2y (adjective, meaning ‘relating to/of a 3ashwa2yya’), they usually do so to point a finger at the government that has marginalized and neglected them; the buildings are their self-effort, but the ‘randomness’ is a product of other forces. Thus, simply translating 3ashwa2yya as slum fails to grasp both the fear felt by the state in relation to these neighbourhoods, which are out of its control and considered an affront to the projected image of stability, and the residents’ own ‫ ﻣﺠﻬﻮﺩﺍﺕ ﺫﺍﺗﻴﺔ‬/ maghoodaat zateyya (‘self-efforts’), the term they use not simply to refer to self-building, but also to the effort they themselves put into building their homes and neighbourhoods. What happens to public space in such areas, neither planned nor provided for by the state, and at the same time built by its residents, where the building typology is tied with a certain notion of community? What does one call the spaces outside the walls of buildings in informal neighbourhoods – narrow alleyway spaces and streets in areas where entire families share one or two rooms between them? Visiting these neighbourhoods reveals that their streets are not quite public space, that much of what we would see as private life is necessarily practised beyond the building envelope, and that walking through the streets is itself nearly intrusive with people living so close to the street. In these areas, thinking of public space in a traditional sense is confounded by the configuration of the home, of the alleyway, of the neighbourhood. The difference between walking through these neighbourhoods uninvited and being invited or escorted by a resident is enormous. Does the anonymous flâneur necessarily have all the same rights to wander and observe when being in public is nearly the same as entering the private space of the dwelling? And even if she does have these rights, is there impropriety in their exercise?

The concept of public space and the Egyptian reality Public spaces in Egypt, shockingly few in number, do not exist by design, stymied by centralized decision making and a weak municipal governance structure, heavy-handed security suspicious of assembly and gatherings of people, and moralistic desires to exert control over public behaviour, particularly that of the youth. The language of the state reflects its methods and goals: the street is not public property to be managed or administered by the government, but ‘state land’, ‫ ﺍﺭﺍﺿﻰ ﺍﻟﺪﻭﻟﺔ‬/ araady ad-dawla, a term loaded with the full ideological weight of the nation and its need to project control and prestige. Sidewalks are treated like national borders, to be secured and guarded. Where people seek to use or cross them they can only do so by permission and for specific purposes. The default is closure or restriction, and any opening or usage beyond mere traffic is dealt with not as an administrative issue but as a security consideration. This logic has already been carried out to the extreme. A protest law passed in December 2013 places severe restrictions on public assembly.

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Even more seriously, a decree passed in October 2014 stipulated that ‘vital and public facilities’ are under the protection – and more importantly, jurisdiction – of the armed forces. There are two important features of this decree: the first, most obvious, is the fact that blocking roads or interfering with the smooth, sanctioned usage of public space is now a matter of military security and warrants a court martial; the second, however, is that these public spaces are themselves considered ‘facilities’ and ‘installations’, not public space, much less spaces of sociability, interaction or community. Here, the words used by the state to describe what we might see as public space are already incorporated into a security/strategic language: the extension of military law over them is not a change in category then but only one of degree. The words that practitioners and professionals use for public space, moreover, feel stilted and even archaic; they are literal translations of the term that do not reflect the lived experience of space and public space within the Egyptian context. I do not highlight this issue from the perspective of a relativist; public space is not a priori different because of inevitable differences in cultural and social reality. Rather, public space, as a configuration of property and property rights, exists on a spectrum of those rights; even within the English-language context it is subject to qualification, regulation and different meanings, depending on different contexts. In Egypt, several different terms are used to translate public space: ‫ ﻣﺠﺎﻝ ﻋﺎﻡ‬/ magaal 3aam, ‫ ﻓﻀﺎء ﻋﺎﻡ‬/ fadaa2 3aam, ‫ ﻓﺮﺍﻍ ﻋﺎﻡ‬/ faraagh 3aam, and others. All these terms approximate the phrase but fail to incorporate one or more important elements of its meaning, and this renders them difficult to use in advocacy and awkward, if not incomprehensible, on the street. Additionally, many of these terms change even among professionals the moment one moves from Egypt to another Arab country, with little room for reconciliation between dialects. In their recent book, the Decolonizing Architecture collective seeks to escape this problematic lack of the right word by employing the term ‫ ﻣﺸﺎﻋﺔ‬/ masha3a, literally ‘commons’, and deriving its original meaning from land that was collectively cultivated by multiple farmers, to evoke shared spaces that may not neatly fall into the established lines of ownership and control (Petti et al. 2013). While admirable in its simplicity, and perhaps one of the better options linguistically, the term is unfortunately associated in Egypt with derelict property or absentee landlordism, and would itself require rehabilitation were it to be deemed useful in communicating and conveying the types of spaces the authors of that text wish to put forward. The tragedy of the commons, that hackneyed phrase beloved by all proponents of individual, free, simple property ownership, becomes a pun, doubly a tragedy since the word we might have used to rehabilitate public space is in current usage a source of stigma. The ideology that relates the public to dereliction has filtered through into everyday language in this case, and the denigration of the public realm by the state is completed in discourse that reinforces the sense of abandonment.

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Practitioners readily admit their frustrations with the various terms used as equivalents to public space, noting that the borrowed language/ terminology is difficult to work with in Arabic. The problems of borrowed language are a symptom of the gap that exists between sites of production and sites of consumption of knowledge. Some of the imported terms are inherited from colonial legacies and administration; others simply fail to map neatly onto the conditions on the ground. With the vast majority of available critical terminology and literature being produced in other languages (and in other contexts), the growing Egyptian community of critical urbanism and practitioners focused on urban issues and social justice in the city have had to make do in many cases with unsatisfactory, borrowed language. The Egyptian academy, meanwhile, has remained mired in formalism and a technical training model that leaves little room for the development of critical terminologies; instead of supporting nascent movements, the educational system for architects and planners in Egypt is part of the problem.

Innovative translation: towards an inspirational language of the city This is not to say that professionals and activists in Egypt are unable to describe the world, or that they are dependent on Western ideas and imports for their work. There is a whole other series of languages and terms beyond both the formalism and ‘statism’ of the official discourse and the awkwardness of the borrowed terminologies. Alternative ways of referring to placespecific phenomena are often found in classical Arabic, as terms that predate the import of Northern terminologies are discovered to have a certain level of sophistication and fit and to lend themselves to critical contexts. The term ‫ﻋﻤﺮﺍﻥ‬/3umraan, used as a translation of the English word urban, for instance, is more comprehensive or descriptive in its Arabic meaning than urban, perhaps closer to the English phrase built environment, encompassing not merely the urban but also areas of human settlement that include rural areas. Here, 3umraan does not replicate the town/country split that underlies Northern planning discourse, but gains its significance from Ibn Khaldun’s Prolegomena, which contrasts the anthropogenic built environment with unsettled areas and desert. Ibn Khaldun’s text also dwells on the concept of ‫ﻋﺼﻴﻴﺔ‬/3asabiyya, translatable as ‘group loyalty’, ‘solidarity’, or even ‘tribalism’. This word exists in common discourse, both in its negative and positive connotations, but also potentially encompasses social and communitarian bonds essential to understanding the Egyptian city. It is not that these bonds cannot be described using English terms, or that 3asabiyya refers to a unique type of social bond – even Ibn Khaldun saw the concept as universal in his time. Rather, the term focuses attention on certain aspects of the community bond and solidarity between its members. Recovering these classical words

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and deploying them in critical and professional contexts allows us to reconfigure the analytic units used to describe the city and its social formations: it allows us to develop alternative configurations to those derived from Northern histories of property and urbanism. Such a shift in perspective is just as useful for scholars of the Egyptian city as it is for those of American or European cities. Similarly, there is a significantly rich set of meanings and understandings encoded in the words that laypersons use to describe the places in which they live, words such as ‫ ﺍﻟﻤﻨﻄﻘﺔ‬/ al-mantiqa (literally ‘area’), ‫ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﺭﺓ‬/ al-7aara (literally ‘alleyway’ or ‘lane’) and ‫ ﺍﻟﺤﻲ‬/ al-7ayy (literally ‘neighbourhood’), were these to be translated critically rather than literally. Their best translations into English might for instance be found in American slang terms: block or hood, rather than street or neighbourhood. These terms effectively combine the physical configurations in question with a communitarian ethos embodied in these places by the (largely marginalized) communities using the terms. The terms that people use are important: they not only have deep contextual meaning but also a high degree of specificity, since they are often if not always developed and used for discrete phenomena and spatial configurations people engage with. Such terms are developed for their circumstances, and are as a consequence far more accurate than the alternative – namely, abstract terms and categories that often over- or under-describe. Academics and professionals cannot create such terms from scratch, because such terms are never created from whole cloth, but are constructed through usage, experimentation and interaction with and naming of the environments in which people live. Academics and professionals can, however, seek to document and understand these terms (and the experiences and situations that are their referents), thereby explaining their (potential) meanings and translating them in such a way as to change our understanding of the ideas behind them. Translation here takes the specificity of these terms and attempts to draw out what is universal or global within them. The goal is a reciprocal one, wherein people create the terms that they use to describe their environments, and professionals learn these words, learn from them, and work with people to bring about just ends in the spaces that people themselves associate with: streets, neighbourhoods, cities, regions and beyond, expanding their significance in the process. Furthermore, by focusing on the space generated by the languages of their fellow citizens, professionals and activists can direct their efforts towards enhancing those issues that people most care about, and creating change not in abstract sites unconnected to lived experience but in the concrete divisions and phenomena that people natively perceive as they experience the city. As I have already indicated, we lack a language of public space in many respects, and more generally a language to frame issues of social justice in the city, because public spaces have been denied to us, or have been co-opted and engulfed by the state and its own systems of ownership and control.

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Public spaces have been denigrated and excluded from our vocabularies. The issue here is thus one of aspirational terminology, perhaps, of actively creating terminology to describe the spaces we desire, spaces we want to bring into existence. The creation of such an aspirational terminology would take as its starting point the everyday language of the streets, the language used to describe those streets, and would imbue it with both political potential and theoretical sophistication. Thus far, the one-way transfer of knowledge from the West has forced us to set terms and refer to practices that are rarely coherent with the existing conditions in our cities. Even if the outcomes of a socially just city are the same in Chicago as they are in Cairo, the cities are vastly different, as are the tools and resources that are available to build more just cities. An aspirational language of the city recognizes this, and recognizes that local terms alone are not sufficient, but their deployment is a necessary condition for helping to kindle the imagination and create possible spaces within the existing city. Uncovering and developing new terms for the Egyptian city – or any city – is in this sense a process of uncovering the mechanisms and tools that can create leverage to change the city.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6

7

Not all unplanned and unpermitted construction was the work of ordinary citizens encroaching on the state to carve out a space for themselves and improve their daily lives. Much of the building since 2011 is arguably the work of pirate developers seeking to make a quick profit from shoddy and often unsafe construction projects. ‫ ﺍﻟﺴﻴﺴﻲ ﻳﺼﺪﺭ ﻗﺎﻧﻮﻧﺎ ﺑﺎﻋﺘﺒﺎﺭ ﺍﻟﻤﺮﺍﻓﻖ ﺍﻟﺤﻴﻮﻳﺔ ﻣﻨﺸﺂﺕ ﻋﺴﻜﺮﻳﺔ ﻟﻤﺪﺓ ﻋﺎﻣﻴﻦ‬Shorouk Newspaper, 27 October, 2014. www.shorouknews.com/news/view.aspx?cdate=27102014& id=74568e6f-e3b5-43e6-916c-9d51e785d20d (last accessed 6 February 2015). Al-Zawiya Al-Hamra is a housing development unit constructed during former President Anwar Sadat’s time in order to relocate people from Boulaq (a poor district of Cairo). The history of this part of Cairo is documented in detail by Ghannam (2002). ‘‫ ﻻﺯﻡ ﺗﺘﻘﻄﻊ‬،‫ ﻭﺍﻟﻠﻲ ﺣﺎﻁﻂ ﺇﻳﺪﻩ ﻋﻠﻰ ﺃﺭﺽ ﺍﻟﺪﻭﻟﺔ‬،‫ ’ﻋﺎﻭﺯﻳﻦ ﻧﻨﻀﻒ ﺑﻠﺪﻧﺎ‬Quoted in Al-Watan Newspaper, 27 October 2014. See www.elwatannews.com/news/details/585210 (last accessed 28 January 2015). The Arabic term used for ‘urban harmony’ (which is not used as a concept or idiom in Anglophone planning literature) is al-tanseeq al-7adaary / ‫ﺍﻟﺘﻨﺴﻴﻖ ﺍﻟﺤﻀﺎﺭﻱ‬, which could also be translated, more literally perhaps, as ‘civilizational coordination’, with all the weight the word ‘civilization’ usually carries in Egyptian political discourse. www.urbanharmony.org/en/en_defintion.htm (last accessed 17 July 2015). See the organization’s 2010 document titled International Competition for the Urban Design and Harmony and Historic Conservation of Opera and Ataba Squares, Cairo, Egypt, published by the Ministry of Culture. Available at www. urbanharmony.org/en/en%20ataba%20T-O-R.pdf (last accessed 6 February 2015). The average person in Egypt has incredibly sophisticated interactions and negotiations with the city, with public space and with the urban environment on a daily basis. On the other hand, Egyptians by and large do not speak about these issues in the abstract, and at times they likely lack the specialized vocabulary for

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talking about such concepts in general terms. This is not, however, unique to Egypt, and the proportion of people living in any major city around the world with the same relationship to their built environment is likely to be very similar. I largely avoid historical terminology and concepts. On the one hand, delving into this area is beyond my expertise, and on the other hand, while such historical legacies and concepts are potentially valuable in a comparative context, examining the extant city and language are the primary practical concern here. After all, in a city which in the last 50 years (at most) has seen a radical transformation of its very nature, not to mention an explosion in built area and population, it is clear that the compressed present holds overwhelming sway over the city, more so than its medieval past.

References Deboulet, Agnes (2009) ‘The Dictatorship of the Straight Line and the Myth of Social Disorder: Revisiting Informality in Cairo’, in Diane Singerman (ed.) Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 199–234. Ghannam, Farha (2002) Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo, Berkeley: University of California Press. Petti, Alessandro, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman (2013) Architecture after Revolution, Berlin: Sternberg Press.

9

Revolutionary poetics and translation Tahia Abdel Nasser

The poetry recited in 2011 in the context of the Egyptian revolution, and its later translation into a variety of languages, contributed to local and global understandings of that historical moment. This essay examines some of the ways in which new poetic production in 2013–2014 extends and reconfigures the revolutionary movement in Egypt, the difference between the new poetics and the poetry inspired by the 2011 revolution, and the effect that translating new poetry concerned with the events that have been unfolding since 2011 can have on global understandings of the unfolding narrative of the uprising. I argue that the poetry of Tahrir published in 2013 renews the revolutionary ideals epitomized in the poetry that appeared in 2011. The poetry of Amin Haddad, as a case in point, translates the dreams and aspirations of Tahrir, resituated in 2013 and 2014 with the publication of a new volume. I examine Haddad’s poetry against English translations of poetry since 2011 and argue that translation of this new poetry is an ethical and political act that simultaneously reads and registers the iterations of Tahrir and the developing narrative of revolution in the contemporary local poetry scene.

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Tahia Abdel Nasser Tahia Abdel Nasser is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo, and a writer and translator. She writes on postcolonial, Arabic, Latin American and Anglophone literature and has worked and lectured on revolutionary poetics and a literary archive of the Egyptian revolution. Her work has appeared in Mahmoud Darwish: The Adam of Two Edens (2000), The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (2001), Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Journal of Arabic Literature, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Jusoor and Dictionary of African Biography (2011). She is completing a book on Arabic, Anglophone and Francophone autobiography in the Arab world and working on a novel. Her next book project explores Arab and Latin American literary and cultural exchange.

Egypt’s 2011 uprising inspired a profusion of revolutionary poetry – in the form of both new poems and a revisited canon – that played an important role in political mobilization and in documenting an important revolutionary moment in contemporary Egyptian history.1 Arabic poetry of the period translated and documented the development of the revolutionary movement, starting from the mythical 18 days in January–February 2011, and in this sense constitutes part of the archive of the revolution. Scholarship on Egypt’s revolutionary poetics is still limited, however, and much of Egypt’s literary production since the revolution remains largely unknown outside the Arab world. 2 In particular, much of the poetry produced during this period has not received sufficient critical attention and has found no translators, partly perhaps because of the challenges of poetic translation in general and that of translating colloquial Egyptian poetry in particular. In what follows, I attempt to demonstrate how the rereading and the translation of poetry are both deeply influenced by the changing contexts of the revolution and the problems of poetic translation. The poetry under consideration sustained the 2011 revolution by acting as literary witness of revolutionary demands and state-sponsored violence. In Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, the poet and human rights advocate Carolyn Forché demonstrates how poetry documents and preserves the memory of national movements. Forché sought “to understand the impress of extremity on the poetic imagination” and to collect poems that “bear the trace of extremity within them”, producing as a result an anthological archive of what she terms “poetry of witness” (1993:30). A “poetry of witness” offers evidence of events – often what is elided from public memory and official history – where the witnessing is not a mere “recounting” but rather an “ethical or political act” (Forché 2012:138, citing Jacques Derrida). Significantly, Forché’s definition of the term ‘witness’ highlights the role of reception and interpretation of poetry, a role that becomes important in the context of Egypt’s recent history because of the centrality of poetry in creating understandings of the revolution. ‘Witnessing’, in the words of Forché, is

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a mode of reading rather than of writing, of a reader’s encounter with the literature of that-which-happened, and its mode is evidentiary rather than representational. The poem inscribes the risky crossing, marked by that which happened, bearing the legible trace of extremity, at the same time enacting the rupture of the first-person, and hence voicing its ghost-like status, marking as it was marked, incising the wound in its inception and henceforth holding it open to the reader’s encounter . . . an evidentiary mode beyond mimesis, . . . a textual encounter in the manner of an ethical act. (2012:141; emphasis in original) As Forché goes on to argue, “the poem makes present to us the experience of the Other, the poem is the experience, rather than a symbolic representation” (2012:146). Poetry of witness, then, appears in a context where poets observe and experience the events they invoke. Given the archival implications, poetry composed during the Arab revolutions can be seen as constituting evidence and reflecting political agency, rather than offering representations of events, a living archive that has the power to contest regime-sanctioned narratives both during and after the first 18 days of the revolution. Yet how can the poet’s experience be translated when critics have long conceptualized poetic translation as a form of imitation, and on the whole neglected its political and ethical dimension?

The challenge of translating revolutionary poetry There has been more explicit engagement in recent years with the political and ethical role of translation in general, rather than poetry translation in particular. Gayatri Spivak notes that translation is “the most intimate act of reading” and a form of ‘surrender’ to the original, yet she also observes the need to craft a “responsible translation”, focusing on the ethical dimension of the encounter in her own Bengali–English translation (2005:93–4). Similarly, Damrosch argues that “the translator has an ethical responsibility to do justice to the original, though a variety of strategies can certainly be employed to that end” (2003:167). The poetry translator’s attempt to attend to matters of ethics and politics is complicated – as it is in translation in general – by the difficulty of obtaining a balance between fidelity to the original and the exigencies of the idiom of the target language. Alastair Reed, one of the translators of Pablo Neruda’s poetry, explores the vagaries of Spanish–English poetic translation and concludes that “[s]ome poems, mainly through linguistic accident, manage to bloom in other languages; others can never quite arrive, in which cases the translation proves only an accurate gloss, an English key to reading the original” (1981:xvi). More so than the translator of other types of text, the translator of poetry has to deal with ambivalence, rhyme and metre, and aspires not only to carry over the meaning of the poem, but also to capture traces of the original and communicate something of the context

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in which the poem is embedded. Bilingual editions attend to some of the problems of poetic translation by allowing a bilingual reader to tease out a range of possible interpretations by juxtaposing the poem to its translation on the adjacent page. Ultimately, however, as Galvin notes, the translation of a poem is often something of an echo, “by putting one’s ear to the seashell of a text, one hears the ocean as it is whispered by the translator, rather than the original waves” (2014:367). In the case of the Egyptian revolution, translators deliberately use dialect, colloquialisms and rhyme, where possible, to replicate the register, rhythm and music of Egyptian colloquial poetry produced since 2011, as these are not merely cosmetic aspects of a poem but contribute directly to affect and are hence dimensions of the poem’s ethical import. Idiomatic expressions, metre, rhyme, ambiguity, puns and polysemy all pose considerable challenges to translators and complicate the task of producing an ethically responsible and politically effective poem in the target language. In translating poems produced during and since 25 January 2011, a translator has to contend with the fact that each poem is embedded in a specific moment, and each rereading or translation will inevitably embed it in a different context: as one poem translates one context, the first 18 days of the revolution, its appearance or translation in another context, upon an anniversary of the revolution for example, subjects it to further interpretation. An ethically responsible translation would strive to highlight the complex changes from 2011 to 2013 in Egypt and demand that the reader re-examine an important context by being in all contexts at once. The publication of the translation can synthesize different contexts, lending other interpretations to the poem in each context. The act of translation also requires the translator to contextualize the poem within a body of revolutionary poetry produced since 2011, a larger archive of poetry produced by some of the most prominent poets who contributed to the contemporary literary scene of the Egyptian revolution. The reception of the new text, the translation, will then reveal the difference between a work’s life in its original context and a new life, in a new context, that calls for multiple interpretations. As Samah Selim argues, translation “typically rewrites the web of discourses, codes and conventions of the literary text in keeping with the conflictual and intensely social nature of its cultural histories” (2010:319). An ethically responsible literary translation communicates cultural difference and the conflictual cultural history in which the poem is embedded. One concern, given what Baker calls the “discursive power” exercised by translations and their potential for representing especially ‘Third World’ subjects “in ways that cater for the expectations of the target audience” (2014:16) rather than do justice to the complexity of their own settings, is how to translate the revolution without reifying it or imposing particular interpretations on it for a target readership not already steeped in the events and aware of their implications. Global interest in the revolution since 2011

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aggravates this potential pitfall and makes it even more important for the translator not to misrepresent or streamline stages, events, people, ideologies and other elements that make up the complex tapestry of the revolution. For ultimately, what the translator of poetry in this context is involved in is making a public national archive accessible globally and generating a range of powerful interpretations of key moments in contemporary Egyptian history. In this sense, linguistic and stylistic choices assume ethical importance and shape the reception of the revolutionary narrative elaborated in the poem.

A poetic archive of the revolution Colloquial ( ) poetry played an important, mobilizing role in Tahrir Square during the first 18 days of the revolution (Abdel Nasser 2014). One particularly prominent poet associated with the revolution is Abd al-Rahman al-Abnudi (1938–2015). Al-Abnudi is one of the founders, together with Fouad Haddad (1927–1985) and Salah Jaheen (1930–1986), of an important movement of Egyptian poetry known as ‫( ﺷﻌﺮ ﺍﻟﻌﺎﻣﻴﺔ‬shi3r al-3amiyya/colloquial poetry) in the early 1950s. 3 The 2011 revolution witnessed a nostalgic revisiting of the repertoire of these and other poets who wrote in 3amiyyah and were known for adopting an Arab poetics of national commitment and liberation. The global public was first introduced to the poetry of the revolution in early February 2011, largely through translations of a famous fragment of al-Abnudi’s widely circulated poem ‫ ﺍﻟﻤﻴﺪﺍﻥ‬/Al-Meedan (‘The Square’).4 The poem played an important part in political mobilization on 6 February 2011, the date on which it was circulated, before Hosni Mubarak’s resignation on 11 February. Set in Tahrir Square, it celebrates the revolution of the youth and the downfall of the regime. The poetic speaker evokes ‘the state of geriatrics’ (‫ﺩﻭﻟﺔ ﺍﻟﻌﻮﺍﺟﻴﺰ‬/dawlat al-3awageez, a reference to the dominance of old as opposed to young people in government) and the miracles of youth (al-Abnudi 2012; my translation): ‫ﺍﻗﺘﻠﻨﻲ! ﻗﺘﻠﻲ ﻣﺎ ﺣﻴﻌﻴﺪ ﺩﻭﻟﺘﻚ ﺗﺎﻧﻲ‬ ‫ﺑﺎﻛﺘﺐ ﺑﺪﻣﻲ ﺣﻴﺎﺓ ﺗﺎﻧﻴﺔ ﻷﻭﻁﺎﻧﻲ‬ ‫ﺩﻣﻲ ﺩﻩ ﻭﻻ ﺍﻟﺮﺑﻴﻊ؟ ﺍﻻﺗﻨﻴﻦ ﺑﻠﻮﻥ ﺃﺧﻀﺮ‬ ‫ﻭﺑﺎﺑﺘﺴﻢ ﻣﻦ ﺳﻌﺎﺩﺗﻲ ﻭﻻ ﺃﺣﺰﺍﻧﻲ؟‬ Kill me! Killing me won’t bring back your state. I write in blood a new life for my homeland. Is this my blood or spring? Both are green And do I smile in joy or sorrow? In producing a translation of this poem, I focused on amplifying the voice of the poetic speaker, who envisions a new life and offers hope. This, I

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thought, was more important for the current context than the musicality of the poem, its rhyme scheme, and the specificities of its colloquial register. Ahmad Fouad Nigm (also Negm) (1929–2013)5 has long been known for his political poetry, which he had been producing in 3amiyya from the late 1960s and which has been a source of inspiration for all political movements in Egypt since then, including the student movements of the 1970s. His poetry resonated in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in 2011. The revolutionary scene was replete with references to Nigm’s ‘Bahiyya’, a poem composed in colloquial Egyptian Arabic and sung by the late Sheikh Imam (Imam Eissa, 1918–1995), with whom Nigm collaborated between 1965 and 1980 on the composition and performance of political poetry. Nigm’s poetic lines: ‫ ﻳﺎﻡ ﻁﺮﺣﺔ ﻭﺟﻼﺑﻴﺔ‬/ ‫‘( ﻣﺼﺮ ﻳﺎﻣﻪ ﻳﺎﺑﻬﻴﺔ‬Beautiful Mother Egypt / Wearing a tarha and a long robe’)6 reappeared in marches staged in solidarity with the Egyptian revolution throughout the world (Radwan 2011a). The recitation of the lines evokes the return of Egypt to the political field and the restoration of its former grandeur in the Arab world. Nigm’s Egypt (Bahiyya) is youthful, feminine, maternal and traditional. Singers in the Square invoked Nigm as a fellow poet who represented an ethic of continued revolutionary struggle. The Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, for example, composed a poem in 2011 centred on the revolutionary poet, Nigm, in Palestinian scarf (keffiyeh) and flag, in Tahrir Square. Saadi’s song and recitation metaphorically returned the legendary poet to Tahrir Square, where his poetic activism belongs, in a revolution infused with his legendary revolutionary fervour. Sinan Antoon’s translation of another colloquial poem by Nigm appeared at a moment when Arab revolutionary movements demanded the redeployment of symbols of revolution from an Arab revolutionary archive. As such, Nigm’s poem circulated his dreams in a new context and appeared to have been penned in the twenty-first century, though it was composed in 1971. The translation highlights an engagement with an Arabic poetic revolutionary and national archive of colloquial Arabic poetry at an important historical moment. In this poem ‫‘( ﺍﻟﺨﻂ ﺩﺍ ﺧﻄﻲ‬This Script is My Script’), Nigm lays claim to Palestine’s “olive shore” and Arab land (Antoon 2011): ‫ﺍﻟﺨﻂ ﺩﺍ‬ ‫ﺧﻄﻲ‬ ‫ﻭﺍﻟﻜﻠﻤﺔ ﺩﻱ‬ … ‫ﻟﻴﺎ‬ ‫ﻏﻄﻲ ﺍﻟﻮﺭﻕ ﻏﻄﻲ‬ ‫ﺑﺎﻟﺪﻣﻊ ﻳﺎﻋﻨﻴﺎ‬ ‫ﺷﻂ ﺍﻟﺰﺗﻮﻥ ﺷﻄﻲ‬ ‫ﻭﺍﻷﺭﺽ ﻋﺮﺑﻴﺔ‬ ... ‫ﺍﻟﺨﻂ ﺩﺍ‬ ‫ﺧﻄﻲ‬

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‫ﻭﺍﻟﻜﻠﻤﺔ ﺩﻱ‬ … ‫ﻟﻴﺎ‬ ‫ﻻﻛﺘﺐ ﻋﻠﻲ ﻛﻔﻲ‬ ‫ﻭﺍﻟﺤﺒﺮ ﻣﻦ ﺩﻣﻲ‬ ‫ﻳﺎﻫﻤﺘﻲ ﻛﻔﻲ‬ ‫ﻳﺎﻋﺰﻭﺗﻲ ﺿﻤﻲ‬ This script is my script These words are mine O my eyes cover the pages with tears The olive shore is mine The land is Arab ... This script is my script These words are mine My blood is ink I will write on my palm: O my grit, let’s go on! O my comrades, come along! References to script, blood and ink explicitly align the poet with revolutionary action and hence the then current events on the Egyptian street. References to the olive groves of Palestine in the poem and Sinan Antoon’s (or Jadaliyya’s) choice of a photograph of the Egyptian poet in Palestinian keffiyeh (Figure 9.1) further embed the poem in the revolutionary moment, in which Palestine was and remains an important theme.

Figure 9.1 Photograph of Ahmed Fouad Nigm wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh, accompanying Sinan Antoon’s translation.

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The first lines of the Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi’s celebrated poem ‫‘( ﺍﺭﺍﺩﺓ ﺍﻟﺤﻴﺎﺓ‬The Will to Live’) migrated from Tunisia to Egypt in early 2011 and inspired the well-known revolutionary chant ‫ﺍﻟﺸﻌﺐ ﻳﺮﻳﺪ ﺍﺳﻘﺎﻁ ﺍﻟﻨﻈﺎﻡ‬ (al-sha3b yureed isqaat an-nizaam/‘the people demand the overthrow of the regime’), not only in Egypt but across the Arab world. Al-Shabbi’s poem asserts the value of life through references to the cycles of nature and, implicitly, agency and action as necessary for the fulfilment of a people’s aspirations (Badawi 1975:157–68). ‫ﻓﻼﺑﺪ ﺃﻥ ﻳﺴﺘﺠﻴﺐ ﺍﻟﻘﺪﺭ‬ ‫ﻭﻻﺑﺪ ﻟﻠﻘﻴﺪ ﺃﻥ ﻳﻨﻜﺴﺮ‬ ‫ﺗﺒﺨﺮ ﻓﻲ ﺟﻮﻫﺎ ﻭﺍﻧﺪﺛﺮ‬ ‫ﻣﻦ ﺻﻔﻌﺔ ﺍﻟﻌﺪﻡ ﺍﻟﻤﻨﺘﺼﺮ‬ ‫ﻭﺣﺪﺛﻨﻲ ﺭﻭﺣﻬﺎ ﺍﻟﻤﺴﺘﺘﺮ‬

‫ﺇﺫﺍ ﺍﻟﺸﻌﺐ ﻳﻮﻣﺎ ﺃﺭﺍﺩ ﺍﻟﺤﻴﺎﺓ‬ ‫ﻭﻻﺑﺪ ﻟﻠﻴﻞ ﺃﻥ ﻳﻨﺠﻠﻲ‬ ‫ﻭﻣﻦ ﻟﻢ ﻳﻌﺎﻧﻘﻪ ﺷﻮﻕ ﺍﻟﺤﻴﺎﺓ‬ ‫ﻓﻮﻳﻞ ﻟﻤﻦ ﻟﻢ ﺗﺸﻘﻪ ﺍﻟﺤﻴﺎﺓ‬ ‫ﻛﺬﻟﻚ ﻗﺎﻟﺖ ﻟﻲ ﺍﻟﻜﺎﺋﻨﺎﺕ‬

Elliott Colla’s translation of the poem recreates the poetic effects of the lines in the context of the ongoing events, which were replete with chants, slogans and a musicality that came to be associated with the Square (Colla 2012): If, one day, the people want to live, then fate will answer their call. And their night will then begin to fade, and their chains break and fall. For he who is not embraced by life’s passion will dissipate into thin air, Woe to him whom life loves not, against the void that strikes there, At least that is what all creation has told me, and what its hidden spirits declare. Colla’s translation creates a different rhyme scheme (aabbb) in order to convey the musicality of the lines used for a revolutionary slogan. It is a bold translation that prioritizes musicality, rhyme and new linguistic variations, creating a song (nasheed) that reflects the mobilizing power of the original. By mid 2011, Egyptian poets had published a number of poetic volumes dedicated to the revolution (Yusuf 2012). These included a volume by Helmi Salim (1951–2012), a poet of the 70s generation and a member of the experimental poetry group /Ida2a 77 (Light 77), so called because it was founded in 1977. Salim’s collection of eight poems, ‫ﺍﺭﻓﻊ ﺭﺃﺳﻚ ﻋﺎﻟﻴﺎ‬ (‘Hold your Head Up High’; Salim 2011), drew on imagery and allusions to Arab culture and Latin American historical and political contexts (see also Tilib 2011). One particularly interesting poem was written between February and May 2011. ‘The Military’ revisits the mistrust of the military prevalent in contexts ranging from Latin America to the Arab World (Salim 2011:30):

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‫ ﻣﻨﻘﻠﺒﻴﻦ ﻭﻗﻼﺑﻴﻦ‬/ ‫ ﻭﻧﺮﺍﻫﻢ ﻣﺴﻜﻮﻧﻴﻦ ﺑﺸﻬﻮﺍﺕ ﺍﻟﺴﻠﻄﺔ‬/ ‫ﻛﻨﺎ ﻧﺨﺸﻲ ﺍﻟﻌﺴﻜﺮ‬ We used to fear the military/And see them possessed by the lust for power/Coup-organizers and fickle. (my translation) In this poem, and throughout the volume, Salim also makes allusions to Spanish and Latin American military dictatorships. Both Chile’s Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) and Spain’s Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), the latter murdered by Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War, are invoked in the context of a brutal military history, as is President Salvador Allende (1908–1973), murdered in 1973 during the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet: ‫ﻛﻨﺎ ﻧﺨﺸﻲ ﺍﻟﻌﺴﻜﺮ‬ … ‫ﻓﻬﻢ ﻗﺘﻠﺔ ﻧﻴﺮﻭﺩﺍ‬ ‫ﻫﻢ ﻣﻦ ﺭﺷﻮﺍ ﺍﻟﻠﻴﻨﺪﻱ ﺑﺮﺻﺎﺹ ﺍﻟﻐﺪﺭ‬ ‫ﻭﺭﺷﻮﺍ ﻟﻮﺭﻛﺎ ﺑﺮﺻﺎﺹ ﺍﻟﻐﺪﺭ‬ We used to fear the military ... For they are Neruda’s murderers Who gunned down Allende with bullets of betrayal, And gunned down Lorca with bullets of betrayal. (my translation) Salim’s references to Neruda and García Lorca, poets commonly associated with rebellion in the context of Spanish and Latin American dictatorships, embed his poetry within a global rather than merely local revolutionary archive. García Lorca is widely known for his revolutionary poetry, and Neruda similarly articulates a Third World revolutionary sensibility in his epic poems. Written in 2011, at a time when the Egyptian military were thought to be supporting the revolution, the poem begins with an idealization of the military and with poetic images depicting Egyptians celebrating the presence of soldiers and tanks in Tahrir Square. Salim reads a change in the perception of the military in the Latin American and broader Arab contexts (the coup in Chile and murder of García Lorca and persecution of communists and Islamists across the Arab world), on the one hand, and the more recent moment in Tahrir on the other. He highlights the shift in the perception of the military, murderers of Allende and García Lorca in the Spanish and Latin American contexts, as he asserts: ‫ﻛﻨﺎ ﻧﻜﺮﻩ ﺭﺍﺋﺤﺔ ﺍﻟﻌﺴﻜﺮ‬ ‫ﻭﻧﺮﺍﻫﻢ ﺃﺣﺬﻳﺔ ﻗﺎﺳﻴﺔ ﺍﻟﻮﻁء‬ ‫ﺗﺪﻭﺱ ﺍﻟﺰﻫﺮﺍﺕ ﺍﻟﻤﻨﻔﺘﺤﺎﺕ ﺑﺤﻘﻞ ﺍﻟﺪﻧﻴﺎ‬

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Tahia Abdel Nasser ،‫ ﻭﺟﻮﺩﻳﻴﻦ‬،‫ ﺷﻴﻮﻋﻴﻴﻦ‬،‫ﺇﺳﻼﻣﻴﻴﻦ‬ ،‫ﻭﻟﻜﻦ ﺍﻟﻌﺴﻜﺮ ﻓﻲ ﻣﺼﺮ ﺍﻟﻐﻀﺒﺎﻧﺔ ﺻﺎﺭﻭﺍ ﻣﺨﺘﻠﻔﻴﻦ‬ ،‫ﺍﺧﺬﻭﺍ ﻭﺭﺩﺍ ﻣﻦ ﺻﺒﻴﺎﻥ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﺭﺍﺕ‬ ،‫ﻭﺣﻄﻮﻩ ﻋﻠﻲ ﻣﺎﺳﻮﺭﺍﺕ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﻓﻊ‬ .‫ﻣﺴﺮﻭﺭﻳﻦ ﻭﺣﻨّﺎﻧﻴﻦ‬

“We used to hate the smell of the military”, who “trample . . . Islamists, Communists, and existentialists”, but the military in “the angry Egypt” of 2011 have become “different” (my translation). The poem’s focus thus swiftly turns from the global context to the miraculous change in the behaviour of the Egyptian military in the context of Egypt’s revolution. Here, Salim offers a revised perception of the military that would later be overturned when persecution by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces began to generate increasing discontent, especially after May 2011. For the specific moment in which it was written, however, the poem creates a common ancestry for the military and the youth of Tahrir Square. The concluding lines echo a ‘collective song’, a slogan that circulated widely during the first few months of 2011: ‫ ﺍﻳﺪ ﻭﺍﺣﺪﺓ‬،‫ ﺍﻟﺠﻴﺶ‬،‫ﺍﻟﺸﻌﺐ‬/‘The people and the military/Are one’.

Towards a new revolutionary poetics Amin Haddad is a poet whose steady poetic production and commitment to revolutionary ideals emblematize Egypt’s revolution. There are more complex explorations of aspirations, ideals and futures envisioned in his poetry, and in the later work of other poets like him, than in the early poetics of the uprising. The poetry volume ‫‘( ﺍﻟﺤﺮﻳﺔ ﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﺸﻬﺪﺍء‬Freedom is from the Martyrs’), published in 2013, is dedicated to the martyrs (al-shuhada2) of the revolution. It opens with a poem composed on 27 January 2011, about the renewal of aspirations and dreams. A second poem written on 7 February 2011 is prophetic, looking forward to a future without injustice. The volume takes elaborately reworked metaphors drawn from the revolution, spanning the period between January 2011 and December 2012, and uses them to trace aspirations for freedom, unity and justice by invoking recurrent images of martyrs hovering over Tahrir Square, citing letters from martyrs, and referring to journeys to paradise. The poems are replete with colloquialisms, allusions to martyrdom and revolution, and intertextual references to colloquial Egyptian poetry and popular songs. The volume captures many details of quotidian realities and revolutionary changes during that period. Given the fact that the volume was not published until 2013, and considering the complexity of translating poems composed in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, both the volume as a whole and the individual poems remain untranslated. Anyone attempting to translate these poems now will have to face the challenge of communicating the specificities of the context in which they are/were embedded and the impact of the powerful images Haddad

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invokes, which are specific to that moment. As we have seen in the case of Salim’s poem above, poems composed in early 2011 and published in 2013 inevitably take on different meanings in the new context. Although the poems in Haddad’s volume are ordered chronologically, in terms of the dates on which they were written and the specific events of the revolution they depict, they speak to the reader and translator at a moment in which different experiences and sentiments are prevalent. An early poem from the revolution, composed on 16 February 2011, differs dramatically from later poems with regard to its full inventory of revolutionary demands: ‫ﺍﻟﺸﻌﺐ ﻳﺮﻳﺪ‬ ‫ﺍﻟﺸﻌﺐ ﻳﺮﻳﺪ ﺍﻟﻮﺭﺩ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﺒﺴﺎﺗﻴﻦ‬ ‫ﺍﻟﻮﺭﺩ ﻳﺮﻳﺪ ﺍﻟﺸﻌﺐ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻤﻴﺎﺩﻳﻦ‬ ‫ﺍﻟﺸﻤﺲ ﺃﻛﻴﺪ ﻫﺎﺗﻨﻮﺭ ﺍﻟﺴﻨﻴﻦ‬ ‫ﺍﻟﻔﺠﺮ ﺳﻌﻴﺪ ﺑﻨﺼﺮ ﺍﻟﻤﻨﺘﺼﺮﻳﻦ‬ ‫ﺍﻟﺤﺐ ﺑﺮﻳﺪ ﻣﻦ ﻣﺼﺮ ﻟﻠﻤﻼﻳﻴﻦ‬ ‫ﻭﻣﺼﺮ ﻧﺸﻴﺪ ﻏﻨﺎء ﺍﻟﻤﺼﺮﻳﻴﻦ‬ The People Want The people want the flowers in the gardens The flowers want the people in the squares The sun will light up the years Dawn is happy with the victory of the victors Love is a letter from Egypt to millions And Egypt is a song for Egyptians. (my translation) Haddad explicitly reworks the incantatory slogan (‘the people want’), borrowed from al-Shabbi’s poem ‫‘( ﺍﺭﺍﺩﺓ ﺍﻟﺤﻴﺎﺓ‬The Will to Live’, discussed above), and the ubiquitous revolutionary demand associated with the Egyptian revolution, namely ‫ﺍﺳﻘﺎﻁ ﺍﻟﻨﻈﺎﻡ‬/isqaat an-nizaam (‘the fall of the regime’), into a short celebratory poem, an epistle to the people, at the end of the first 18 days of the revolution and upon Mubarak’s resignation. The reworking relies on the shared root in Arabic for ‘will’ and ‘want’, a feature that cannot be replicated in English. In my translation of this important poem in the collection, I have prioritized the content but had to sacrifice the rhyme and wordplay of il-basateen (‘gardens’), il-mayadeen (‘squares’), is-sineen (‘years’), il-muntasireen (‘victors’), l-il-malayeen (‘to millions’), and ilmasriyeen (‘Egyptians’). Nevertheless, having sacrificed the musicality and incantation of the poem, the translation still attempts to convey something of the effects of rhythm and repetition so central to the original and so important in achieving an affective impact on the reader/listener. A landmark poem in the collection, the eponymous poem ‫ﺍﻟﺤﺮﻳﺔ ﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﺸﻬﺪﺍء‬ (‘Freedom is from the Martyrs’), translates the second wave of the revolution after the Maspero massacre and the death of martyrs in October 2011.

‫‪Tahia Abdel Nasser‬‬ ‫ﺍﻟﺤﺮﻳﺔ ﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﺸﻬﺪﺍء‬ ‫ﻛﺎﻥ ﻳﺎﻣﺎ ﻛﺎﻥ ﺷﺒﺎﻙ ﻣﻔﺘﻮﺡ‬ ‫ﺣﻂ ﻋﻠﻴﻪ ﻋﺼﻔﻮﺭ ﻣﺠﺮﻭﺡ‬ ‫ﻗﺎﻝ ﺃﻏﻨﻴﺔ ﻭﺑﻌﺪﻳﻦ ﻁﺎﺭ‬ ‫ﻛﺎﻥ ﻳﺎﻣﺎ ﻛﺎﻥ ﻋﺼﻔﻮﺭ ﺗﺎﻧﻲ‬ ‫ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻤﺴﺘﺸﻔﻰ ﺍﻟﻤﻴﺪﺍﻧﻲ‬ ‫ﻋﺎﻳﺰ ﻳﺮﺟﻊ ﻟﻠﺜﻮﺍﺭ‬ ‫ﻳﺎﻟﻠﻲ ﺑﺘﺮﻣﻲ ﻋﻠﻴﻬﻢ ﻧﺎﺭ‬ ‫ﻣﻬﻤﺎ ﺿﺮﺑﺖ ﻭﻣﻬﻤﺎ ﻗﺘﻠﺖ‬ ‫ﺍﻟﻌﺼﺎﻓﻴﺮ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻬﻮﺍ ﺃﺣﺮﺍﺭ‬ ‫ﺩﻡ ﺍﻟﺸﻬﺪﺍ ﻋﻠﻰ ﺍﻷﺳﻔﻠﺖ‬ ‫ﻳﻄﺮﺡ ﻭﺭﺩ ﻭﻳﻄﺮﺡ ﻧﻮﺭ‬ ‫ﺷﻤﻊ ﻣﻨﻮﺭ ﺳﺖ ﺷﻬﻮﺭ‬ ‫ﺩﻡ ﺍﻟﺸﻬﺪﺍ ﺷﻤﺲ ﺍﻟﻤﻐﺮﺏ‬ ‫ﻳﺎ ﻧﺎﻳﻢ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻠﻴﻞ ﺗﺘﻘﻠﺐ‬ ‫ﻣﺎ ﺑﻴﻨﻔﻌﺶ ﻻ ﻧﻮﻡ ﻭﻻ ﺻﺒﺮ‬ ‫ﺻﻮﺕ ﺍﻟﺸﻬﺪﺍ ﺃﺩﺍﻥ ﺍﻟﻔﺠﺮ‬ ‫ﺻﻮﺕ ﺍﻟﺸﻬﺪﺍ ﻳﻘﻮﻝ ﻟﻚ ﺍﺻﺤﻰ‬ ‫ﺃﺳﺎﻣﻴﻨﺎ ﻓﻲ ﺣﺒﺎﺕ ﺍﻟﺴﺒﺤﺔ‬ ‫ﻋﺪ ﺻﻮﺍﺑﻌﻚ ﻋﻠﻰ ﺃﺳﺎﻣﻴﻨﺎ‬ ‫ﺧﺎﻟﺪ ﺃﺣﻤﺪ ﻣﺎﺟﺪ ﻣﻴﻨﺎ‬ ‫ﺷﻬﺪﺍ ﻳﻐﻨﻮﺍ ﻭﺷﻬﺪﺍ ﻳﻄﻴﺮﻭﺍ‬ ‫ﺷﻬﺪﺍ ﺍﻋﺘﺼﻤﻮﺍ ﻭﺷﻬﺪﺍ ﺷﻬﻮﺩ‬ ‫ﺷﻬﺪﺍ ﺑﻴﻴﺠﻮﺍ ﻣﻦ ﻣﺎﺳﺒﻴﺮﻭ‬ ‫ﻭﻳﺰﻭﺭﻭﺍ ﻣﺤﻤﺪ ﻣﺤﻤﻮﺩ‬ ‫ﺷﻬﺪﺍ ﺳﻮﺍﻳﺴﺔ ﺍﺳﻜﻨﺪﺭﺍﻧﻴﺔ‬ ‫ﺷﻬﺪﺍ ﺻﻌﺎﻳﺪﺓ ﺑﺤﺎﺭﻭﺓ ﺑﺪﻭ‬ ‫ﺛﻮﺭﺓ ﻣﺼﺮ ﺣﺘﻔﻀﻞ ﺣﻴﺔ‬ ‫ﺑﻜﺮﺓ ﻫﻼﻟﻨﺎ ﺣﻴﺼﺒﺢ ﺑﺪﺭ‬ ‫ﺷﻤﺲ ﺍﻟﺜﻮﺭﺓ ﻗﻮﻳﺔ ﻗﻮﻳﺔ‬ ‫ﻭﺣﺘﺒﻌﺪ ﻛﻞ ﺍﻷﻋﺪﺍء‬ ‫ﻣﺼﺮ ﺷﺒﺎﺏ ﻁﺎﻟﺒﻴﻦ ﺣﺮﻳﺔ‬ ‫ﻭﺍﻟﺤﺮﻳﺔ ﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﺸﻬﺪﺍء‬ ‫ﺩﻡ ﺍﻟﺸﻬﺪﺍ ﻣﺶ ﺣﻴﺮﻭﺡ‬ ‫ﻛﺎﻥ ﻳﺎﻣﺎ ﻛﺎﻥ ﺷﺒﺎﻙ ﻣﻔﺘﻮﺡ‬ ‫ﺣﻂ ﻋﻠﻴﻪ ﻋﺼﻔﻮﺭ ﻣﺠﺮﻭﺡ‬ ‫ﻗﺎﻝ ﺃﻏﻨﻴﺔ ﻭﺑﻌﺪﻳﻦ ﻁﺎﺭ‬ ‫ﻛﺎﻥ ﻳﺎﻣﺎ ﻛﺎﻥ ﻋﺼﻔﻮﺭ ﺗﺎﻧﻲ‬ ‫ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻤﺴﺘﺸﻔﻰ ﺍﻟﻤﻴﺪﺍﻧﻲ‬ ‫ﻋﺎﻳﺰ ﻳﺮﺟﻊ ﻟﻠﺜﻮﺍﺭ‬ ‫‪Freedom is from the Martyrs‬‬ ‫‪Once there was an open window‬‬ ‫‪A wounded bird landed on it‬‬ ‫‪sang a song and flew away‬‬

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Once there was another bird in the hospital in the square wanting to return to the revolutionaries You fire at them but no matter how much you beat and kill them the birds in the air are free The blood of martyrs on the asphalt blooms flowers and blooms light Six candle-lit months The blood of martyrs is the sunset O you who are asleep, turning at night No sleep or patience will do The voice of the martyrs is the dawn call to prayer The voice of the martyrs is telling you to wake up Our names are in the beads of the rosary Count your fingers on our names Khalid Ahmad Magid Mina Martyrs singing and martyrs flying Marchers and witnesses Martyrs coming from Maspero And visiting Mohamed Mahmoud Martyrs from Suez Alexandrians Upper Egyptian Bahari Bedouin martyrs Egypt’s revolution will live Tomorrow our crescent will become a moon The sun of revolution is too strong and will turn away the enemy Egypt is youth who want freedom and freedom is from the martyrs The blood of martyrs will not be forgotten Once there was an open window A wounded bird landed on it sang a song and flew away Once there was another bird in the hospital in the square wanting to return to the revolutionaries. (my translation) The publication (in 2013) and translation of the poem (in 2015, for the current volume) resituate the original in a new context beyond 2011 and offer

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an extended elegy of the martyrs of the revolution whose names – including Khalid (Khaled Said) and Mina (Mina Danial) – recall individual events as well as act as symbols that evoke the collective memory of all martyrs. Every (re)reading and every translation evokes the original context and connects with the current moment in ways that cannot be predicted by the poet or the translator. In summary, what I have tried to demonstrate in this essay is that the revolutionary poetry of the Egyptian uprising can be seen as a series of iterations of the revolution, with every iteration shaping and being shaped by its own context. The poems can also be seen as literary witness and archive, documenting events from the early stages of the revolution and connecting with a long tradition of revolutionary poetry written, recited and sung in colloquial Egyptian. Translations of this revolutionary poetry remain very limited in number, but what is available plays a central role in creating the growing archive of the Egyptian revolution and shaping global understandings of its accumulating evidence.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Mona Baker for her invaluable comments and suggestions. I thank Amin Haddad for helpful clarifications and for providing material for the essay. 2 Useful references include Alif (2012), Mehrez (2012), Radwan (2011a) and Colla (2011). For a discussion of the role of poetry in the Tunisian revolution, see SalahOmri (2012). 3 For a fuller discussion of Egyptian colloquial poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, see Radwan (2004). 4 For a discussion of al-Abnudi’s poetry, see Radwan (2011b). 5 For a profile of the poet, see Jadaliyya (2014). 6 Translated by Mona Anis (Nigm, undated).

References Abdel Nasser, Tahia (2014) ‘Between Exile and Elegy, Palestine and Egypt: Mourid Barghouti’s Poetry and Memoirs’, Journal of Arabic Literature 45: 244–64. al-Abnudi, Abd al-Rahman (2012) ‘Al-Meedan’, in Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 32: 322. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics (2012), special issue on The Imaginary and the Documentary: Cultural Studies in Literature, History, and the Arts, vol. 32. Antoon, Sinan (2011) ‘This Script is My Script by Ahmad Fou’ad Nigm’, Jadaliyya, 23 November. Available at www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3258/this-script-ismy-script-by-ahmad-fuad-nigm (last accessed 31 March 2015). Badawi, Muhammad Mustafa (1975) A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baker, Mona (2014) ‘The Changing Landscape of Translation and Interpreting Studies’, in Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter (eds) A Companion to Translation Studies, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 15–27.

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Colla, Elliott (2011) ‘The Poetry of Revolt’, Jadaliyya, 31 January. Available at www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/506/the-poetry-of-revolt (last accessed 25 March 2015). Colla, Elliott (2012) ‘The People Want’, Middle East Report 42(263). Available at www.merip.org/mer/mer263/people-want (last accessed 31 March 2015). Damrosch, David (2003) What Is World Literature?, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Forché, Carolyn (1993) Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company. Forché, Carolyn (2012) ‘Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art’, in Elizabeth Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore (eds) Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, New York & London: Routledge, 135–48. Galvin, Rachel J. (2014) ‘Poetic Innovation and Appropriative Translation in the Americas’, in Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter (eds) A Companion to Translation Studies, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 361–74. Haddad, Amin (2013) ‫ﺍﻟﺤﺮﻳﺔ ﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﺸﻬﺪﺍء‬/al-7urriyya min al-Shuhada2 (‘Freedom is from the Martyrs’), Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq. Jadaliyya (2014) ‘Ahmad Fouad Negm: A Profile from the Archives’, Jadaliyya, 29 June. Available at www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18294/ahmed-fouad-negm_ a-profile-from-the-archives (last accessed 31 March 2015). Mehrez, Samia (ed.) (2012) Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Nigm, Ahmed Fouad (undated) I Say My Words Out Loud, trans. by Mona Anis, Prince Claus Fund. Available at www.princeclausfund.org/files/docs/Poetry% 20Book%20by%20Ahmed%20Fouad%20Negm_%20I%20Say%20My%20 Words%20Out%20Loud.pdf (last accessed 31 March 2015). Radwan, Noha (2004) ‘Two Masters of Egyptian “Ammiyah Poetry”’, Journal of Arabic Literature 35(2): 222–3. Radwan, Noha (2011a) ‘The Verse of Tahrir Square’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 March. Available to subscribers at www.chronicle.com/article/The-Verse-ofTahrir-Square/126664/?key=Gm0lIVJpancXbX83ZDtEbThQbXZgY01zYXdO YngnblxXEA%3D%3D (last accessed 25 March 2015). Radwan, Noha (2011b) ‘Palestine in Egyptian Colloquial Poetry’, Journal of Palestine Studies 40(4): 61–77. Reed, Alastair (trans.) (1981) ‘Translator’s Note’, Isla Negra: A Notebook, by Pablo Neruda, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Salah-Omri, Mohamed (2012) ‘A Revolution of Dignity and Poetry’, Boundary 2 39(1): 137–65. Salim, Helmi (2011) ‫‘( ﺍﺭﻓﻊ ﺭﺃﺳﻚ ﻋﺎﻟﻴﺎ‬Hold Your Head Up High’), Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization. Selim, Samah (2010) ‘Pharoah’s Revenge: Translation, Literary History and Colonial Ambivalence’, in Mona Baker (ed.) Critical Readings in Translation Studies, London & New York: Routledge, 319–36. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2005) ‘Translating into English’, in Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (eds) Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 93–110. Tilib, Hasan (2011) ‫( ﺍﻧﺠﻴﻞ ﺍﻟﺜﻮﺭﺓ ﻭﻗﺮﺁﻧﻬﺎ‬The Bible of the Revolution and its Quran), Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization.

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Youssef, Saadi (2011) ‫( ﻣﺼﺮ ﺍﻟﺒﻬﻴﺔ ﺃﻣﻨﺎ ﺟﺎءﺕ ﺍﻟﻲ ﺍﻟﺴﺎﺣﺔ‬Egypt, Bahiyya, our Mother, has Come to the Square), Akhbar al-Adab, 20 February: 13. Yusuf, Shaaban (2012) ‘Poetry and the January 25 Revolution: Introduction and Selected Poems’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 32: 312–21.

Part III

Challenging patriarchy

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10 Translation and solidarity in Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution Leil-Zahra Mortada

Translation has been an integral part of Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution from its very first stages. Subtitling the speech of the women interviewed into a variety of languages is not just an issue of disseminating information and making their unique experiences accessible to as many people as possible, but is part of a broad expression of political commitment that assumes different forms. First and foremost, it is part of a wider postcolonial and feminist commitment to allowing the subjects themselves to shape their own voices and representations. Speaking in Arabic, the women translate their first-hand experiences into a discourse that counters the widespread appropriation of the voices of both women and people of colour, which have traditionally been constrained and distorted by patriarchal, xenophobic and racist interpretations and streamlined into simplistic generalizations that oscillated between imposition and exoticism. Making subtitles into a wide range of languages an integral part of the project is a further step towards empowering Egyptian women by connecting them to networks of rebellion across borders. Subtitles extend the messages of empowerment to other locales, make local political struggles visible to other protest movements, and further foster international networking and solidarity. This essay offers a critical account of both levels of translation as they evolved in Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution.

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Leil-Zahra Mortada Leil-Zahra Mortada, transfeminist queer anarchist, was born in Beirut. Leil has formed part of several groups of alternative media and political collectives in Lebanon, Egypt and the Spanish state, with a major focus on anarchism, gender activism, sexualities, the border regime and state terrorism in its multiple forms. For the past few years Leil mainly worked within the Egyptian revolution, primarily taking part in the collectives Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment (OpAntiSH), No to Military Trials for Civilians and Mosireen. Leil also founded Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution, an oral Herstory project, in 2012, with the aim of collecting stories of women of all communities in Egypt who participated in various stages of the Egyptian revolution.

Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution is an “audio-visual Herstory project”; it set out “to remind history” of the vital role women have played in shaping the events that unfolded in Egypt before and since January 2011. The project aims “to shed light on and document the participation of women in the Egyptian Revolution, and to document their experiences as part of the historical (herstorical) memory” of that momentous set of events.1 The production team consists of Sandy Chamoun (Sound Recordist), Ziyad Hawwas (Editor), Layla Sami (Director of Photography), Nazly Hussein (Producer), and myself as Director. The project created two sets of resources: an archive that is only accessible via direct contact with the team, and which includes full interviews with a wide range of Egyptian women who have participated in the revolution; and an online YouTube channel2 that provides public access via a Creative Commons Licence to shorter, edited versions of a subset of these interviews, 11 in total, as follows: • • • • • • • • • • •

Episode 1: Rasha Azab – 29 years old at the time of filming Episode 2: Sabah Ibrahim – 52 years old at the time of filming Episode 3: Evelyn Ashamallah – 64 years old at the time of filming Episode 4: Nada Zatouna – 23 years old at the time of filming Episode 5: Hanan Sadek (mother) – 52 years old at the time of filming, and Mona El-Sabbahy (daughter) – 18 years old at the time of filming Episode 6: Mariam Kirollos – 22 years old at the time of filming Episode 7: Madeeha Anwar – 20 years old at the time of filming Episode 8: Om Ahmad Gaber – 36 years old at the time of filming Episode 9: Bahrain Special. Maryam Alkhawaja – 24 years old at the time of filming Episode 10: Mahienour El-Masry3 – 26 years old at the time of filming Episode 11: Aya Tarek – 22 years old at the time of filming.

Apart from these 11 edited and published episodes, the archive includes a further 13 unedited interviews. Lack of funding has led to what I hope will

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prove only a temporary halt to the project, and plans to finalize and publish a selection of the remaining interviews are constantly being revisited. The 11 interviews listed above were not published in full, mainly because of considerations relating to the safety of the interviewees. Details shared by some interviewees and edited out of the published interviews could put them at risk in an unpredictable and rapidly changing political environment. Moreover, allowing free online access to raw interview material could provide opportunities for manipulative editing and might encourage the use of footage by counter-revolution forces against the interviewees and/or against the philosophy of the project and the political values of the women themselves. This is why the production team decided that, for the time being at least, access to the raw interviews must remain restricted. At this point, it is important to reiterate a statement incorporated by the production team in the initial description of Words of Women, before I proceed to discuss other issues in more detail:4 The participation of women in the Egyptian revolution didn’t come as a surprise to us, nor do we view it as an extraordinary phenomenon. Women are part of every society and form part of the social, political and economic spectrum. It is history that tends in most cases to ostracize the participation of women and keep them in the shadows while highlighting the participation of men and attributing leading roles exclusively to them. This is why we are documenting Herstory.

The ethos and position of subtitling within the project Despite its apparent focus on Egypt, the project was conceived as a tool for empowering women everywhere, and as a resource for researchers, students and anyone interested in the issues with which it engages. This objective was considered achievable only through the adoption of a systematic policy of subtitling episodes into as many languages as possible, and ensuring open distribution of the material on a widely accessible platform like YouTube, which allows viewers to choose a subtitle language easily from a drop-down menu (Figure 10.1). 5 Translation, then, was an integral part of Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution from its inception, with subtitling featuring in the first draft of the proposal sent to the Urgent Action Fund-Africa and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture. The Urgent Action Fund subsequently provided most of the funding for the project; we raised the remaining funds through crowdfunding. During the filming process, speakers were asked to slow down when possible, or to repeat or reword certain stretches with a view to accommodating the subtitles to be added at a later stage. Where relevant, the production team explained the pace and mechanisms of subtitling to ensure that the interviewee understood what is involved. Subtitles were also taken into consideration during the editing process to some

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Figure 10.1 Choice of subtitling language on YouTube.6

extent; sometimes, for example, they dictated the pace of a scene or the length of a shot. Nevertheless, looking back now, and having gone through the process a number of times, I am aware that although much was learned through practice, much also remains to be rethought, analysed and considered more carefully in future productions. As far as the choice of languages is concerned, we initially focused on English and Spanish, these being the languages the production team was most familiar with and for which we could readily recruit volunteer subtitlers. As the project became better known, however, it attracted more support, and new volunteers used their own initiative to add French and Italian to published episodes. Dania El-Khechen, who joined the translation team later in the project, took charge of coordinating the French subtitles. She also translated some of the episodes into French, with the help of Mélodie Karama. Taking advantage of the Creative Commons Licence adopted by the project, members of the collective FreePalestina (Rome, Italy) arranged for the subtitling of some episodes into Italian and posted the videos on their own YouTube channel. The collective, whose political vision we share, was later given the rights to distribute the videos in Italy on DVDs to raise money for their activities. Other collectives in different countries, including Spain and Mexico, were similarly offered the opportunity to burn Words of Women episodes on DVDs and sell them at an accessible price to raise funds for their political work. Apart from the production team’s own familiarity with the language, English was a default choice, as it is for many initiatives, because as the current lingua franca it allowed us to connect with other initiatives and to reach as wide an audience as possible. Our dependence on English to connect with others was not accepted uncritically: we were aware of the inherent problems of using an imperial language to communicate with the world.

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Indeed, not only did we prioritize subtitling into English, but we also used it as an intermediate language, on which to base other sets of subtitles. In other words, given our own linguistic limitations and the pressure we were working under, we decided, rightly or wrongly, to put our reservations aside and invite volunteers to subtitle from English into their own languages, thus compounding the problems associated with relying on an imperial language to communicate what is essentially an anti-imperial message. Choosing a platform on which to enable volunteers to generate, amend and share subtitles was another issue we had to resolve. The platform we opted for was Amara (www.amara.org), an open-source, non-profit portal7 where users can access a video and either produce subtitles from scratch or add to or amend existing subtitles. The final subtitles can then be embedded in the video via Amara, or added later to the YouTube video, as well as downloaded in various formats to suit different video players and platforms. Apart from the desirability of working on open-source, non-profit platforms, using Amara to generate and revise subtitles had another advantage: it supported transparent, collective work. Any member of the team could produce subtitles, edit them, modify them, and suggest different wording to others. In this sense, Amara partakes of the ‘Wiki ethos’ (Keim 2013), which appeals to contemporary activist initiatives, including Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution.

Language, discourse and history The choice of expressions and terms to be used was key from the early stages of the project. One example is the term Herstory (in English), in contrast to the commonly used History. The term was not chosen as a glossy brand for the project, but rather as a means of making a political statement against the historical marginalization of women. It is recognizable in English-speaking countries as part of the lexicon of feminist movements, dating back to the 1960s, but it remains unfamiliar in the Egyptian context, even to many who have a good command of English. Despite the difficulty (or impossibility) of translating the etymologically ‘false’ neologism into Arabic, we felt that it allowed us to signal an important message and could not find a concise alternative in Arabic or English that would help us raise the question about women’s representation in the writing of history. It was a badge of feminism held boldly and openly in the English tagline of the project, but one that we could not incorporate into the Arabic version, as can be seen in Figure 10.2. Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution played an important role in negotiating the political and social landscape locally, in terms of documenting history/herstory of the revolution; but it also contributed to an ongoing and quite potent debate regarding the representation of Arab and Muslim women on the international front. Representations of Arab and Muslim women have been central to the discourses used to justify war

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Figure 10.2 Opening screenshot of Words of Women videos: “Herstory – to remind History” appears in English only.

(on Iraq and Afghanistan, for example), to provide a rationale for racist immigration laws, to promote Islamophobia, xenophobia and colonialism, and to validate exploitative economic and socio-cultural policies at both the international and local levels, as evident in the language of development agencies and international relief organizations. These discourses rob Arab and Muslim women of agency and voice, impose a white-saviour logic on them and confine them to colonial and patriarchal representations that obscure and marginalize important struggles led by women in Arabicspeaking countries and countries with a dominant Muslim majority. History, then, tends to downplay the contributions of women. At the same time, mainstream discourses, and unfortunately some activist discourses, tend to impose a passive role on Arab and Muslim women, projecting them either as victims or submissive subjects. These discourses and representations have to be challenged, and the ignorance that allows them to gain currency even within activist circles must be addressed. The Words of Women project, and the availability of subtitles in different languages, allowed us to make an important contribution in this respect and to intervene in the debate about the place of women, and specifically Arab and Muslim women, in political life. Language and translation played a key role in this intervention, but the choice of women featured in the project, whether in its online public interface or in the restricted-access archive, was equally important. The interviewees were carefully selected to reflect the diversity and richness of the discourses, religious identities, social and educational backgrounds and experiences of women (old and young) who have been involved in the revolution. In her own individuality, each woman interviewed brought life and nuance to the bigger, wider collective image of the revolution. The project

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thus not only challenged generalizations made about Arab and Muslim women and ignorant attempts at homogenizing them internationally; it also subverted rigidly constructed categories and boxed identities generated within Egypt itself. Representations of and discourses about Arab and Muslim women intersect with a long history of racist and colonial politics adopted towards people of colour in general. The imposition of (gendered) roles, the projection of stereotypes and stigmas, the exoticism, the repressive generalizations, sexual and cultural fetishization, attempts at appropriation and tokenization are only a few forms of oppression from a long list of violations to the agency of people of colour and their cultures. In the past decades, there has been much debate around how these violations serve as the tools of oppressive systems, but more recently we have become aware of their unfortunate echoes within certain activist groups. While in principle opposition to patriarchal oppression and misogyny in some activist projects is valid and necessary, the prevalent discourses do not take into account the complexity of white privilege, and the will and resistance of those suffering such forms of oppression. Without attention to the voices and struggles of the oppressed, the discourse, no matter how valid it is in its critique of the status quo, will continue to be void of respect and will ultimately reproduce the same patterns of prejudice, colonialism and racism. Providing an intimate encounter with a cross-section of activist women and women who contributed to the revolution, the video interviews allow viewers, at home and abroad, to become familiar with their struggles during and before the revolution. They place the women themselves in centre stage and allow their voices to reach the world, or at least that part of the world that is prepared to make an effort to engage with the issues by listening to the subjects themselves. Thanks to the work of the subtitling team, the videos could be used – and were used – in a variety of forums around the world, especially in discussions of key issues such as feminisms, women’s rights, genders, anti-colonialism and Islamophobia, among others. For example, various episodes were shown and discussed at the following venues: • • • •

5º Ciclo de Cine Documental Espejos y Espejismos, Buenos Aires, Argentina, September 2012 Event organized by FreePalestina, hosting Rasha Azab,8 Rome, October 2012 The Art of Being Many, Hamburg, Germany, September 2014 La Llibertaria bookshop and social centre, Barcelona, Spain, May 2013

The issue of representation acquired broader significance at a time when media and public attention were predominantly centred on ‘analysts’, ‘experts’ and ‘commentators’, whether from Egypt or elsewhere. Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution was also a response to this wider context of a lack of direct representation of popular resistance, locally and

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internationally, at a time when direct democracy was being practised in the most inspirational of ways, out there on the streets and in the squares. Recalling long-standing practices of appropriating women’s voices, we were now witnessing the appropriation of a whole movement. The voices of the revolution were reduced in most cases to familiar academic and media figures, who were largely divorced from events on the street, where the revolution was unfolding. The project was therefore responding to this problematic by providing a platform for airing first-hand accounts of the makers of the revolution, creating a space for them to reclaim their own voices. The voices of popular resistance figures who were most unlikely to be invited to a conference or interviewed on TV were precisely the voices we sought out. Subtitling constituted a further step in the direction of reclaiming the space rightfully deserved by these women on an international level, and at the same time giving non-Arabic speakers direct access to the experiences and lives of these activists. Generally speaking, we tried to let the women shape their own stories, by using minimal intervention in the editing process, opting to focus on the speakers themselves and deliberately avoiding techniques such as adding background music, and by reducing the common practice of using cutaway images to the bare minimum. Cutaway images are usually used to hide editing cuts. For example, an editor might focus the camera on the speaker’s hands or similar to hide the modifications or edits introduced, primarily for artistic effect. In Words of Women, we opted to reveal the cuts, even if this meant they could be perceived as ‘mistakes’, in order to be transparent about where we intervened in editing a testimony. All this was part of a deliberate attempt to avoid intervening in the relationship between the speaker and the viewer, as much as possible, and to stay as close as possible to the story as told by its narrator. In this sense, we privileged transparency over artistic quality. The Words of Women team did not see themselves or the project as being located outside the unfolding events, as onlookers taking a peek at the revolution. The initiative was clearly conceived and presented from the beginning as a project from the revolution and for the revolution. We saw in it an opportunity to pursue a revolutionary political agenda, to empower an important segment of society, and to reaffirm the importance of our ongoing struggle. As political activists ourselves, engaged in political groups, networks and a wider revolutionary movement, we felt a commitment towards other regional and international struggles outside Egypt. Just as we were inspired and empowered by other struggles and had access to them through translated videos, articles and communiqués, we felt an obligation to communicate our struggle to similar movements abroad by subtitling the videos we were producing, often in the midst of a heated revolutionary moment. We needed to tell the world, and fellow revolutionary movements, what was happening in Egypt. Our subtitled videos were also a clear call for solidarity at a time when the Egyptian regime(s) and the mainstream media locally and internationally were undermining and misrepresenting

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our struggle. The videos provided an important source of information for solidarity groups and other social movements to draw on in planning actions and debating issues on forums. As already mentioned, they were publicly screened in various countries and allowed people to learn about, discuss and demonstrate solidarity with the Egyptian revolution. The Words of Women team’s recognition of the importance of international networking and cross-border solidarity extended beyond the provision of subtitles for non-Arabic speakers. It included reaching out to fellow activists at the regional level, as evident in the special episode dedicated to the Bahraini revolution: Episode 9, Interview with Maryam Alkhawaja.9 The intention was for Alkhawaja’s to be the first of several interviews with Arab women: we planned to interview women from Syria, Palestine, Tunisia, Yemen and Sudan. However, these plans proved difficult to pursue given the growing momentum of the Egyptian revolution, in which the team was actively involved, and various financial, political and personal limitations that constrained us.

Translation and gender Language, spoken and written, encodes attitudes to gender. English, Arabic and Spanish (the three main languages that feature prominently in the Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution project), encode such attitudes explicitly to varying degrees. Gender activists, especially queer and transfeminist activists, have worked for decades to introduce new ways of addressing the gender issue in these languages, and in some areas of translation certain professional guidelines have made it easier for gender-aware activists to resolve the tensions surrounding this issue. For example, simultaneous interpreters are trained to use first-person pronouns to refer to the speaker. First-person pronouns are not gendered, at least in English and indeed most languages, and hence the imposition of a certain gender on the speaker can be easily avoided. Instead of having to opt for a term from the gender binary he or she, using the non-gendered first person I respects the speaker’s right to self-identification and, indeed, the right to withhold gender identification. These issues were explicitly discussed among the subtitling group in Words of Women, and led to the adoption of relevant linguistic and subtitling strategies. The Spanish language, like Arabic and unlike English, marks gender in adjectives, verbs and in the plural form of nouns, as well as pronouns. The masculine plural form is used as a default, to refer to mixed groups of men and women, and the feminine plural is reserved for groups that consist exclusively of women. English all, for instance, translates as todos (masculine plural) or todas (feminine plural). A familiar strategy adopted by gender-aware activists in recent years is to replace the o (masculine) and a (feminine) with @; thus both todos and todas would be replaced with tod@s in an attempt to reveal and challenge the patriarchal world view

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that pervades the language. Rather than opt for this familiar strategy uncritically, however, the group paused to consider people who do not identify as men or as women, who adopt a queer politics. After all, @ can be interpreted as a visual combination of the masculine o and the feminine a. What about identities and genders that reach beyond the strictly imposed binary of Man vs. Woman? Discussions among the group led to the adoption of a different practice, which involved replacing the masculine o and feminine a with an x rather than @: todxs. This was felt to subvert the gender binary in the language and signal our position on the issue. All the Spanish subtitles of Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution reflect this commitment to queer and transfeminist politics and replace the masculine o and feminine a with x consistently, as in Figure 10.3.10 The decision to adopt this strategy was not taken lightly, however. We were particularly concerned about the ethical implications of imposing our queer politics on the speaking subject. We attempted to redress this in part by retaining the first-person pronouns and adjectives used to refer to the speaker, a woman who self-identifies as such, in the feminine form. This constitutes a departure from a common political stance that involves ‘queering’ the language by replacing the masculine o and feminine a with x in all adjectives, including those that refer to the speaker. Nevertheless, the imposition remained: using the queer form (x) in all other instances, whether the speaker identified with the gender binary or not, could be questioned on ethical grounds. But then Words of Women as a project never claimed it was neutral, and all decisions, including the decision not to intervene, ultimately have ethical implications. The subtitles that accompanied every video were always viewed as a space of intervention, an active and integral part of the political agenda, as important as other tools and techniques we used to convey our message. Our decision to adopt subtitling strategies that are more inclusive in relation to gender did not conform to the dominant

Figure 10.3 Replacing of masculine o and feminine a with x.

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hetero-normative binary, but this non-conformity was very much part of the landscape of the revolution and the vision of the world we wish to create. The risk of imposition was inevitably part of that dynamic. It is fair to point out that the Spanish subtitles were subject to more debate and discussion than the English ones (and of course any occasional subtitling in Italian and French). This was partly due to the energy and dedication of the two volunteer subtitlers who produced all the Spanish material, Elena Cal Atán and Ethel Odriozola, and partly because our timetable for producing the Spanish subtitles was always more relaxed. The subtitling from Arabic into English was done mostly under considerable time pressure, and the subtitled videos were uploaded to the YouTube channel immediately. The videos were revised in most cases only when the English-into-Spanish team started working and spotted issues that needed to be resolved. The English subtitles therefore did not receive the same level of attention, especially in terms of the political import of specific strategies, as the Spanish ones. Today, if we were to attempt to produce the English subtitles again, our debates and the linguistic choices we would make would be rather different.

Concluding remarks Producing the subtitled series of Words of Women videos was an interesting learning experience for the team of activists who initiated the project. It gave rise to various questions and concerns that were not anticipated at the start. Although we always viewed subtitles as an important part of the project, we did not integrate them in the overall process as well as we might have done. The addition of subtitles still followed the conventional order of the production line: subtitles were incorporated once the editing process was finalized, at which point major changes to the film could no longer be introduced. The experience alerted us to the importance of discussing subtitles at every stage of the process. With hindsight, it is now clear that it would have been more productive to involve the subtitlers in the creative process from an early stage. After all, for the majority of viewers, who do not speak the interviewee’s language and are not familiar with the cultural codes and references she deploys in telling her story, the subtitles are the only way into her world. They therefore cannot be divorced from the filmmaking process nor, indeed, from the political project as such.

Notes 1 See www.youtube.com/user/LeilZahra (last accessed 15 December 2015). 2 See www.youtube.com/user/LeilZahra (last accessed 15 December 2015). 3 An unemployed human rights lawyer and legal translator, Mahienour was subsequently sentenced to two years in prison for breaking a controversial protest law, but was released after 125 days, in September 2014. She was awarded the 2014 Ludovic Trarieux Award for her contributions to the defence of human

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rights and was subsequently re-arrested and sentenced in May 2015 to one year and three months in prison. See www.youtube.com/user/LeilZahra (last accessed 15 December 2014). This facility used to be much more viewer-friendly in the past, where only one button had to be clicked to reveal a drop-down menu of different languages. More recently, YouTube changed its interface and the viewer now has to activate the subtitles first by clicking on a button marked ‘CC’ (for captions), and then on another button (a settings wheel) to choose from a drop-down menu of languages. Episode 6: Mariam Kirollos. www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsydGLi71uc&list= UUoJMzdw8wTSR5NY3zENZCmg (last accessed 15 December 2014). Amara continues to operate partly as a non-profit, free service but now relies on fee-based services to generate roughly half its revenue (Keim 2013:77). It previously relied totally on grants from organizations such as Mozilla. Interviewee in Episode 1, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=NamUZHWJem0 (last accessed 27 January 2015). See www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxUD3TUC6zM (last accessed 16 December 2014). Maryam Alkhawaja is Co-Director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights. She was sentenced in absentia to one year in prison by a Bahraini court on 1 December 2014. From Episode 11: Aya Tarek. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI1sBiWaPhM (last accessed 16 December 2014).

Reference Keim, Brandon (2013) ‘What Works: Babel of Video’, Stanford Social Innovation Review (Spring): 75–7.

11 On translating a superhero Language and webcomics Deena Mohamed

Experiencing the Egyptian revolution as a teenager meant living through a period of history that witnessed my generation both shaping and being shaped by momentous events. This dynamic also impacted a webcomic I created in June 2013, at the age of 18, originally in English and later in both English and Arabic. The current essay reflects on the role played by language and translation in radically transforming the content of this webcomic, whose purpose varied as its audience grew and encompassed different constituencies. Though challenging, the experience of translating the comic into Arabic proved very positive. I suddenly found myself free to talk about the unsung heroism of Egyptian women, their activism, Egypt’s failings and strengths. What had started out as a joke intended to challenge sexism and liberal feminism suddenly became a much more complex venture, partly because translating the comic into Arabic made it go viral that much faster. My audience did not just diversify, it expanded rapidly.

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Deena Mohamed Deena Mohamed is an Egyptian illustrator, artist and blogger. She created a viral webcomic, Qahera, in 2013, about a female Muslim superhero who combats Islamophobia and misogyny, amongst other things, and addresses social issues against the backdrop of the ongoing Egyptian protests. Her work has been featured by major media outlets such as the Daily Beast, the BBC, Foreign Policy and The Times.

In June 2013, at the age of 18, I created and posted online a webcomic titled Qahera.1 Originally posted in English and later in both English and Arabic, the comic features a central character named Qahera: this is the Arabic for ‘Cairo’, but also for ‘conqueror’ or ‘vanquisher’. Qahera is an anti-misogyny, anti-Islamophobia, visibly Muslim superhero who engages with her environment critically and hopes to improve it (Figure 11.1). The comic deals with issues such as sexism, harassment and imperialist stereotypes of Muslim women, set against the backdrop of contemporary Egypt and the events unfolding in that space. Within a year, the comic had attracted over half a million hits and been featured in various international and local media outlets, 2 with visitors divided equally between Egypt and abroad. This essay focuses on some of the ways in which the shift in language and the process of translation radically transformed the content of the comic, adapting it to different constituencies and a rapidly diversifying set of audiences.

Figure 11.1 Qahera – a webcomic superhero.

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Qahera in English To discuss the translation of the comic, it is first necessary to explain why it was initially published in English, given that I – as its author – am Egyptian, with Arabic as my native language. There were several reasons for this unusual choice of language, the most important being that the comic was shared on an English-speaking blogging platform and that the language most commonly and comfortably used online by many people across the world is English. Qahera was created after an evening of reading extremely misogynistic articles written by Muslim men and published on various websites in English. The articles were shared by women – who were both in Egypt and abroad – on other social media websites, also in English. The point here is that despite my being Egyptian and despite the fact that Qahera essentially began as a joke to address problems in my own community, the comic was created on a global platform and meant to engage with audiences from around the world who use English as their shared language of interaction. Consequently, the choice of subject matter itself was conceived in relation to an English-speaking audience – Muslim and non-Muslim, Arab and non-Arab, and male and female alike. While the very first comic depicts Qahera getting the better of clearly Muslim (and less clearly Egyptian) misogynistic men, it also includes a panel depicting Western feminists using this scene to argue that Muslim women are oppressed, an argument that Qahera also challenges (Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2 Qahera rejecting feminist assumptions about Muslim women (Part 1: Brainstorm).

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Essentially, the webcomic served as both a space for self-expression and an opportunity to release my frustration with misogyny, both home and abroad. I was also careful to signal a warning to Western, liberal feminists who I knew would inevitably hijack Qahera to serve their own purposes. My wariness grew out of my own personal experiences as a Muslim girl ‘growing up online’; if there are no limitations on who is allowed to see your content, someone will inevitably hijack it to serve their own purposes. The effort involved in guarding against this dynamic is exhausting: I was constantly torn between being on the offensive and being on the defensive, frustrated at being unable to critique my community without having my own narrative used against me. Although I became used to it over time, this dynamic certainly influenced Qahera’s genesis and development from the start. The simple fact that it was being published in English meant that key aspects of Qahera/Qahera as a character and a comic were established from the very beginning – especially that she had no time for exclusionary Western feminism that dismissed her, and that she did not exist as a vehicle for viewers to project their own narrative of oppressed Middle Eastern Muslim women on her. The language choice also influenced the projection and reception of other important, visible aspects of her identity, the most obvious of which is the hijab, which is viewed far more negatively in the West where visibly Muslim women tend to bear the brunt of Islamophobia. Had the comic been created with a predominantly Egyptian or Arabicspeaking audience in mind, it is doubtful these qualities would have been developed as central to the character. Another reason I felt it was natural to create the comic in English was that the central concept of a ‘superhero’ is Western in origin. I came across it in English, and therefore it seemed only right to respond in kind. The image of the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’ is also a very Western motif that permeates pop culture3 so thoroughly it was bound to filter down to me, a Muslim woman living in Egypt and positioned on the receiving end of foreign stereotypes of herself. As such, there was a certain enjoyable irony in creating an Egyptian, Muslim female character as a superhero, a genre distinguished by its numerous white male characters. Superheroes are by definition powerful and outspoken characters, a concept at complete odds with the image of an oppressed, subjugated Muslim woman. Endowing them with superpowers is also a convenient way to surpass physical barriers and deliver powerful and amusing visual messages. Finally, I chose to publish Qahera in English because the comic wasn’t just about a superhero; it was about a superhero who raised and challenged issues such as sexism and misogyny. The concept of women’s rights is not foreign in the slightest, but the words used to talk about certain aspects of it frequently are: for example, patriarchy, misogyny, feminism. Which brings us to the next issue: translating Qahera into Arabic.

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The challenges of translation Given the various reasons I have discussed above for publishing Qahera in English in the first instance, I hesitated for a while to translate it into Arabic. For a start, I didn’t want to be guilty of providing an Egyptian audience with inferior content. As an Egyptian, I had never been a fan of hastily adapted Western formats, such as Egyptian multicam sitcoms with laughter tracks. These are almost always unenjoyable and uncomfortable viewing experiences. I was worried that translating Qahera would involve compromising on quality and treating Arabic-speaking audiences as an afterthought. I have been on the other side of that process as a viewer, and the experience has not always been pleasant. While some Egyptian adaptations have been of a very high quality, and some indeed have far surpassed the original,4 they have usually been undertaken out of necessity as it is easier to translate foreign media than produce certain types of genres locally. And since I was not a foreign artist nor an experienced translator, it felt odd for me to venture into this area. Then there was the fact that, as previously mentioned, I had no idea how to address many of the central issues in Qahera in Arabic. Two factors contributed to the difficulty I was facing. The first is the gap between Standard Modern Arabic and colloquial Egyptian Arabic, the former being reserved for formal contexts only and the latter being the language of the street, and especially of new media. The second factor was that topics like sexism, misogyny and patriarchy were largely unacknowledged and relatively little talked about in Egyptian society. At that point, I had no idea what words were even used for them. There were no words for these concepts in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, and Standard Arabic equivalents felt alien and melodramatic in the context of a webcomic. This situation was even worse before the revolution. Since then, things have been improving somewhat. Items such as activist and dismantling the regime became part of our everyday vocabulary, and so did words such as harasser. Although anti-harassment organizations had been working to rid Egyptian society of the latter phenomenon since before the revolution, it was only after January 2011 and in the wake of several well-documented and publicized attacks on female activists that the word ‫( ﺗﺤﺮﺵ‬ta7arrosh, ‘harassment’) gained momentum and replaced the more commonly used ‫( ﻣﻌﺎﻛﺴﺔ‬mo3aksa, ‘flirtation’). This apparently minor but significant change in designation made a vast difference to society’s perception of verbal harassment on Egyptian streets, and allowed for it to be taken more seriously. The content of the third comic I created dealt with harassment. Because of how common and relevant this phenomenon was as a prominent example of the type of misogyny Egyptian women have to contend with, it seemed only natural to address it in a comic. Nevertheless, Part 3: On Sexual Harassment (Figure 11.3) was initially produced in English, on the basis that harassment

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Figure 11.3 Part 3: On Sexual Harassment, in English and Arabic.

is not restricted to Egypt. Non-Egyptian women also suffer from misogyny and experience harassment on the street, and victim-blaming in this context is a worldwide phenomenon. The content worked well in English, and the comic was well received by English-speaking audiences. The English version attracted well over 10,000 notes5 (likes and shares), at which point I was urged by several people to translate it into Arabic. I had my reservations, for the reasons I explained earlier, but I thought the subject matter was particularly pertinent to Egyptians and a one-off venture into translation would not create too many problems. Indeed, I assumed at that point that no one would see the Arabic version anyway, as few Egyptians had seen the earlier parts/ episodes of the comic, which were all available only in English. I was only posting the comics on the Qahera site and not sharing them on other platforms, so I told myself the ‘damage’ would be minimal. It was a quick and graceless translation, and I did not even bother to switch the panels from left to right. But it changed everything.

The shift in content and the translation process When I conceived the comic in English, I was appealing to a Western audience on Western issues that affected me as an Egyptian woman exposed to these issues, namely Islamophobia and misogyny. The On FEMEN comic exemplifies this focus particularly well (Figure 11.4). However, once I began to translate some episodes into Arabic I found myself gaining a much wider audience, but also entering a much more complex area to navigate. I was

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Figure 11.4 Part 2: On FEMEN.

creating a ‘superhero’ comic for an audience to whom the concept is somewhat irrelevant, translating into colloquial Egyptian Arabic issues and concepts for which we seemed to lack words in our community, such as misogyny and patriarchy, finally taking the big leap from a superhero webcomic to an Egyptian superhero webcomic. As I translated into Arabic, I suddenly found myself free to talk about the unsung heroism of Egyptian women, their activism, Egypt’s failings and strengths. What had started out as a joke, intended to make fun of sexism and liberal feminism, suddenly became a much more complex but enriching exercise. Translating Qahera into Arabic also made it go viral that much faster. My audience did not just diversify, it expanded rapidly. Translating Qahera into Arabic also changed many of my previous perceptions about the ‘intended’ audience. As its creator, I felt I had no right to dictate who the audience should be. I didn’t feel Qahera was the best thing I could offer Egyptians. I still don’t. But Egyptians seem to like it nevertheless. I thought I would receive a lot of complaints from my new Arabicspeaking audience about how silly it all was, how ‘feminism’ is a foreign Western concept, how harassment is the woman’s fault. I received none of

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these reactions. To date, the majority of negative feedback I have received has come from American men, while Egyptian men have been unfailingly supportive of the comic. Translating Qahera into Arabic helped me realize I was mistaken in my assumptions, and it was generally a positive experience. And this despite the fact that the translation was awkward, that Qahera as a character was completely unfamiliar to people reading the harassment comic in Arabic for the first time, and that the concept of a superhero is not familiar in Egyptian culture. Creating the comics that followed On Sexual Harassment (Figure 11.3) became less about catering to my original audience and more about addressing issues I cared about through the lens of an Egyptian superhero character. The process was also influenced by a newfound awareness that more people were reading the comic, and that more people from Egypt specifically were reading it. It was with this in mind that I chose to address the issue of protests (Part 4: On Protests), or more specifically, the role of women in protests. My own perception of feminism and courage had been profoundly influenced by watching and hearing accounts of female Egyptian activists during the revolution, and I felt there would be something amiss in allowing Qahera to be lauded as an Egyptian superhero without paying tribute to the true heroism of Egyptian women. As it was, Qahera was in a sense modelled on these women. And yet, I had difficulty translating this particular episode into Arabic from the start, as the opening panel referred explicitly to superheroes, and the Standard Arabic equivalent, ‫ﺍﺑﻄﺎﻝ ﺧﺎﺭﻗﺔ‬ (abtaal khaareqa, ‘miraculous/super heroes’), was somewhat clumsy and uninspiring (Figure 11.5). The comic that followed On Protests, Part 5: On Music, Sort Of, broke the pattern. I wrote it in Arabic first, and then translated it into English. It engaged with music, specifically a popular, misogynistic Arabic pop song that glorifies Si Al Sayed, a character from a film based on one of Naguib Mahfouz’s best-known novels. The name, and character, have come to represent the epitome of Egyptian masculinity, and are usually used to refer to a man who exercises total control over those around him, especially his womenfolk and family. This comic is more light-hearted than the ones that preceded it. The punchline is a colloquial Egyptian insult. Si Al Sayed is usually pronounced as SiSayed in Egyptian dialect; it is shortened further in the comic to read Sees – a term usually used to refer to effeminate or feeble men. Sees replaces SiSayed in the dialogue just as the pop singer in question falls from the sky, and before he completes the sentence (Figure 11.6). Translating this stretch into English was probably more difficult than translating all the previous comics put together into Arabic. I eventually had to adapt part of the dialogue, so that the pop singer ends up screaming ‘sorry!’ as he falls from the sky. While this process is challenging, the fact that I am in control of both texts (English and Arabic) allows me a certain degree of freedom. The comic has therefore become something of a bilingual venture: limited by my own

Figure 11.5 Opening panel of Part 4: On Protests in English and Arabic.

Figure 11.6 Part 5: On Music, Sort Of (English and Arabic).

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skill in each language, but with the content shifting freely between languages. Rather than attempting to produce literal translations, I aim to create adaptations that can be read as they are meant to be read by audiences of both languages. That said, my own perceptions of the intended audience have changed over time, and the way the comic has been received has consistently surprised me. For this reason I feel I am still experimenting and testing the waters with regard to the translations I produce. For example, while the comic that followed On Music, Sort Of addressed the issue of Palestine from an Egyptian perspective, the dialogue was phrased in such a way as to accommodate a non-Egyptian audience. Although I was specifically referring in this episode to Egypt’s complicity in Palestinian suffering, I tried to make sure that Western readers who are unaware of the historical and local context can still understand that the comic is critiquing complicity in crimes against humanity. This may be how many translators approach the task of rendering a comic into another language: for instance, Japanese manga often works along the same lines of adapting rather than literally translating episodes for Western audiences, especially when they feature Japanese concepts that are difficult for a Western audience to relate to.6 However, since I am in control of the narrative here, I can choose to adapt and change elements as I wish, to make the comic more appropriate for each audience. I am still not entirely comfortable with the translations, largely due to my own haphazard thought processes. Sometimes I create a comic with English in mind, and sometimes I conceive it in Arabic. I’m not particularly experienced at translating, and often when a stretch of language feels natural in Arabic I have difficulty translating it into English, and vice versa. But I’m taking things one step at a time in this respect. I’ve grown more comfortable with the development of the character and the webcomic itself as an international but Egypt-based project, and to some extent with the subject matter addressed, too. It’s usually issues of expression – of translation – that are yet to be resolved satisfactorily.

Concluding remarks The issues I have raised so far may not seem directly relevant to the revolution, but in a sense my experience is still part and parcel of the events that have been unfolding in Egypt since January 2011. I was 16 when the revolution started; experiencing it as a teenager meant living through a period of history that witnessed my generation both shaping and being shaped by momentous events. Qahera would not have existed had my perception of Egypt and Egyptians not changed for the better during that period. At the same time, it is doubtful the comic and the character would have been as well received had revolutionaries and activists not already mobilized a desire for positive change. Nor would people outside Egypt have cared so much about initiatives like Qahera before the revolution captured their imagination.

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Qahera began, in English, as a venture against Islamophobia and the often taken-for-granted, imperialist assumption that Muslim women are oppressed and subjugated. For Arabic-speaking readers, Qahera was introduced through her opposition to misogyny in a comic that criticized sexual harassment in Egypt. Somewhere along the line, she was redefined in the traffic between the two languages. Just as the revolution itself has been translated, repackaged and re-interpreted in the process of engaging with different audiences within and outside Egypt, so has Qahera. Whatever the future holds for the comic, the character, and the revolution, their survival and development will inevitably continue to be impacted by the politics of language and translation.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

www.qaherathesuperhero.com (last accessed 19 December 2014). Including The Times, Foreign Policy, New Internationalist Magazine, the Hindu, the Daily Beast, Al-Arabiyya, and El Mundo. For a full list, with links, see www. qaherathesuperhero.com/elsewhere (last accessed 22 December 2014). Even within superhero films and comics such as the Iron Man trilogy. I have personally always found the Arabic edition of Monsters Inc. infinitely superior to the original. For reference, by the time of writing, in August 2014, the English version had attracted over 100,000 shares and comments. My personal experience of reading English translations of Arabic text suggests that this is not typical of the way Egyptian or Arabic content is translated. Translators from Arabic often seem to privilege literal translations in an attempt to closely convey the original meaning. This can result in a strange cognitive dissonance even for those familiar with the original Arabic content. Such literal translations into English render the subject matter exotic and those associated with it unmistakably ‘other’.

12 An archive of hope Translating memories of revolution Hoda Elsadda

This essay offers an analysis of issues related to the translation of memories of resistance of women who participated in protests since 2011 in Egypt, for inclusion in a web archive created and managed by the Women and Memory Forum. It argues that stories and testimonies are powerful modes of activism in the struggle over the collective memory of a particular group or country. They complement and/or contest official narratives and potentially construct counter-narratives of dominant histories. However, the archiving of these stories, which may be conceptualized as a process of translating memories to a wider audience in a structured manner for ease of access, is not straightforward or innocent. Archives have been described as “tools of the powerful” that seek to normalize, standardize and impose order; they are “the manufacturers of memory and not just merely guardians of it” (Harvey Brown and Davis-Brown 1998:21–2). Archives are necessarily entangled in the construction of hegemonic narratives as well as counterhegemonic narratives that potentially shape the future of a given group, country or nation.

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Hoda Elsadda is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University and a prominent activist for women’s rights. She previously held a Chair in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Manchester and was Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World in the UK. In 1992, she co-founded and co-edited Hagar, an interdisciplinary journal in women’s studies published in Arabic. In 1997, she co-founded and is currently Chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the Women and Memory Forum, a research organization based in Egypt that promotes the production of gender-sensitive knowledge. Her research interests are in the areas of gender studies, women’s rights, cultural studies, comparative literature, oral narratives and women’s writings. Her most recent book is Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt, 1892–2008 (2012). She is currently working on creating an oral history archive of women who have participated in activist movements and political initiatives post-25 January 2011. Hoda served on the 50-member committee that drafted the Egyptian constitution endorsed in 2014.

The Women and Memory Forum (WMF) oral history archive aims to document and preserve memories of Egyptian women’s experiences of and engagement with the social and political upheavals that shook Egypt and the Arab world since 2011. The archive tells a story of hope as it highlights the agency of women as political actors effecting change within their immediate circles as well as in the larger body politic. It is a continuation of an older archive of voices that documented the life stories of pioneer Egyptian women who played a role in public life in the twentieth century. Both archives are made available and can be accessed on the Women and Memory website.1 The documentation of women’s narratives of the revolution started in April 2011 as members of the WMF team recorded interviews with their close circle of friends and family. This early effort was driven by a realization of the importance of capturing and understanding the impact of radical transformations on the lives and views of the women involved. It was also guided by the overall research and activist framework of the Women and Memory Forum, which aims to preserve and document women’s stories as an act of resistance to the marginalization of women in mainstream historical narratives. This pilot project was primarily focused on recording women’s experiences during and immediately after the mythical 18 days of the Egyptian revolution, i.e. between 25 January and 11 February 2011. In September 2013, WMF launched a new phase of the project that aimed to document narratives of women’s participation in public life in times of change. The 2013 project had a wider focus and targeted a larger range of ideologies and positions. Both archives responded to a pressing need for documenting and preserving narratives of what happened since 2011, told by engaged participants in the events, as the whole so-called ‘Arab Spring’ narrative became a site of contestation and bitter power struggles.

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The archival turn Narratives of the revolutionary wave that swept the Arab World in 2011 are typically diverse, contradictory and polemical. The new generation of digital media technology has enabled ordinary citizens to interact and publish news items as well as their own memories about what happened. Blogs and Facebook posts became popular venues for sharing eyewitness accounts and first-hand experiences of specific events. Websites documenting oral narratives of activists became very popular. Conversely, cyberspace also became crowded with blogs, posts and websites that shared accounts and spread news of conspiracies, accusing activists and revolutionary youths of colluding with foreign agents to destroy the state. The Web has thus proven to be a double-edged sword: it has certainly facilitated citizen participation and enabled marginalized groups, societies and individuals to reach wider audiences, to forge partnerships across the globe and to construct counter-narratives; at the same time, it lends itself to manipulation and foul play in the hands of dominant elites and counterrevolution forces striving to control the official narrative of history. Whether they circulate in physical space or on the Web, stories and testimonies constitute powerful modes of activism in the struggle over the collective memory of a particular group or country. They complement and/or contest official narratives and have the potential to construct counter-narratives of dominant mainstream histories. Archives of such testimonies are necessarily entangled in the construction of hegemonic narratives as well as counter-hegemonic narratives that potentially shape the future of a given group or country. They are inevitably sites of contestation and revisioning. The Women and Memory Archive of women’s narratives in times of change is no exception – it is inevitably also embroiled in the history of struggles over memory. It is deliberately conceived as an intervention in the narrative of and about the revolution. It positions itself within a ‘politics of hope’ in lieu of a ‘politics of despair’.2 It celebrates women’s agency within a larger narrative of citizen engagement and empowerment and tells a story of possibilities and potential for change. It counters narratives of apathetic and disenfranchised populations. It captures the complex interactions and shifting positions between surrender and perseverance, love and hate, belief and disillusionment. Nevertheless, the project team engages in constant revisions and rethinking as it attempts to respond to questions such as: Why is the archive important? What are the limits of representation? Who does the archive speak for? Who should it include and who exclude? Why a women’s archive? Is it a partial archive, with a one-sided view? How can partial vision tell a collective story? Postmodern approaches to archives and archival knowledge have moved away from the view of archives as neutral repositories of documents and manuscripts that enable ‘objective’ research in search of historical truth, to a view of archives as powerhouses where struggles over memory and history

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are integral to the raison d’être of archival work. The ‘archive’ has become “a central metaphorical construct” in the work of cultural theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, pivotal to their perspectives on knowledge, memory and power (Schwartz and Cook 2002:4). Derrida drew attention to the role of archives as an instrument of power and control by highlighting the root of the word archive, which comes from the Greek arkheion, meaning “a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons” (1995:2). Foucault equated the archive with “the law of what can be said” (1972:129). Both located the archive at the centre of power and authority, rendering the control of the archive as a condition of rule and political power. Highlighting the workings of power in archives has resulted in a radical shift in perceptions of archives and archivists. It is no longer possible for archivists to hide behind claims of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ because “power recognized becomes power that can be questioned, made accountable, and opened to transparent dialogue and enriched understanding” (Schwartz and Cook 2002:2). Archives have therefore become key sites of political and social contestation as marginalized groups in diverse contexts challenge the authority of the archon and construct their own archives that tell stories previously excluded, undermined or distorted in official archival narratives. By acknowledging archives as sites of contestation, it becomes possible to approach documents and archival holdings ‘as technologies of rule’ that do not just describe but that also create social realities (Stoler 2002). Archives, then, construct the collective memory of a particular group or community. Control of the archive equals power over memory. Memory is not only about reconstructing versions of the past but is essentially about the visions of the present and the future. As Luisa Passerini argues, memory is “an active production of meanings and interpretations, strategic in character, capable of influencing the present” (1983:195). Archives constitute an important battleground where conflicts over memory are enacted. The past two decades have witnessed what has been described as a “memory boom” (Boesen 2012:7) as more and more marginalized groups who have been excluded from mainstream or national archives have focused on the creation of their memories to tell their stories and to counter official narratives. These non-official, non-state-centred, counter-official memories have been described as “peripheral” because they are “neither the focus of national or transnational . . . memory culture” (Boesen 2012:8). They are the stuff of the “fragments of history”, to use Gyanendra Pandey’s words, i.e. those stories, personal accounts, oral testimonies, songs etc. that express the voice of minorities or marginalized groups in any society and are invariably excluded from official mainstream histories (Pandey 1992:28). They respond to the challenge of finding ways by which this 99 per cent of the world can retrieve their voices and their stories to counter hegemonic narratives by the dominant 1 per cent who control resources and sophisticated tools of control and oppression.

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Archiving the peripheral, the fragment and the marginal raises new epistemological questions about what counts as knowledge, what knowledges are worthy of preserving and archiving, who is the knower, and who has the authority to define knowledge. Such archives challenge dominant narratives, give credence and historical value to the voices and points of view of marginalized groups or communities, and consequently subvert pretensions of objectivity and impartiality posited by custodians of archives that claim to safeguard the history of ‘the nation’ or ‘the state’. Women’s archives, which house women’s oral narratives and women’s cultural production, have played a key role in empowering women’s rights movements and activism in many countries in the world. They tell a story of strength, of agency and of achievement. They also expose the dynamics of power, the processes of exclusion and marginalization to which women are and have been subjected, and the misogynistic authoritarianism behind the thinking and epistemological paradigms that deem women’s experiences and life narratives unworthy of inclusion in mainstream histories. Writing women’s stories, recording women’s memories and unearthing women’s hidden knowledge production (such as literary manuscripts forgotten in cellars and old deserted houses) have all contributed to a revisionist movement in recording various histories and cultural traditions. Attempts to undermine women’s archives, or any archive with a focus on a specific group or community that does not claim to represent everyone, have charged them with telling a one-sided story that encourages a form of gender ghettoization. Unlike ‘national’ archives, or archives that are not gender-sensitive but still claim to speak for everyone – and are therefore presumed impartial, objective and disengaged – women’s archives are seen to represent a partial vision. Is partial vision suspect? Is there such a thing as an impartial and objective perspective? Donna Haraway critiques such claims of a disengaged rational knowledge on the basis that “to be from everywhere . . . [is to be] from nowhere” (1988:590). She argues convincingly that objectivity can only be realized through the production of ‘situated knowledges’ that are transparent about positionality and context and that can therefore enable better vision and an informed engagement. Partial vision not only enables an engaged and embodied perspective, but it also provides a commentary and a critique of claims of transcendence and impartiality. Verne Harris uses the metaphor of a “sliver of a window” to describe archival work in order to challenge the idea that archives reflect reality or some essential truth about a community. The “sliver of a window” emphasizes the partial vision and position but also brings in an awareness that “the window is not only a medium through which light travels; it also reflects light, transposing images from ‘this side’ and disturbing images from the ‘other side’” (Harris 2002:136). Hence, not only is partial vision more ‘objective’ by virtue of being transparent about its positionality, it also impacts and sheds new light on other knowledges, other positions and other representations of reality.

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The Women and Memory Archive: an embodied experience The creation of an archive is “an embodied experience” (Burton 2005:9), meaning that decisions on what to include and what to exclude, what is worthwhile and what is not, what to make available and what to censor or keep under limited access, are shaped and guided by considerations of location within social and political structures, at specific moments in history; location of the individual, the team and the organization. Considerations of location, be they real or imagined, are not static but are subject to revision and modification as positions shift and rules of combat with power structures vary. This dynamic is evident in the decision-making processes involved in the creation of the Women and Memory Archive of women’s voices in times of change, specifically the way they reflect and respond to as well as shape power relations in the cultural field. The WMF oral history team consists of six researchers, supported by three administrative assistants: Hoda Elsadda, Maissan Hassan, Diana Abdel Fattah, Omnia Khalil, Dalia Ebeid and Aya Sami, supported by Nahla Salama, Ramy Riad and Dalia El-Hamamsy. The team meets once a week to coordinate work, touch base and discuss emerging issues. The first meetings agreed the overall goal and aims, the criteria for selecting interviewees and the questions to be asked. The aim of the project is to document the experiences and life stories of women who have played a role in public life, focusing on their contributions since 2011. The goal is to create an archive of women’s voices that can be made available to researchers and historians who are engaged in the writing of the history of the revolutionary wave that swept Egypt and the Arab world. The project also aims to preserve and safeguard memories of agency, of activism, of citizen engagement, memories of people’s power in confronting powerful authoritarianisms. The ultimate goal is to create an archive of hope for the future. The pilot project that started in April 2011 focused on documenting and understanding young women’s experiences of, reactions to and perceptions of the 18 days that led to the ousting of Mubarak on 11 February 2011. The context then was largely celebratory: activists and participants in the events, while talking about constraints, gender discrimination or violent encounters, were nevertheless speaking from a position of achievement and power, the position of victory, or near-victory. Still, the fast pace of dramatic events that followed the 18 days had its toll on the mood and perspective of narrators, and the stories of what happened during the 18 days were therefore often coloured by reflections or comments that stemmed from events that were happening on the day of the interview. The interviews were narrated in medias res: as events unfolded, and as gains and losses against the old regime were becoming the stuff of everyday conversations, narratives of the 18 days were structured and framed by, and against, these upheavals.

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The project was expanded in September 2013, and the questions revised. The focus was extended to include the documentation of women’s life stories, with special attention directed at their specific contribution and response to events post-2011 rather than only during the first 18 days. The interviews were conducted throughout 2014. Much had happened since January 2011: perspectives and opinions about specific events had since either changed or been revised; radical shifts in positions regarding the status quo and perceptions of ‘revolution’ were widespread; old comrades found themselves on opposing sides of the political fence; counter-revolution voices came to dominate the public sphere and have been attempting to control the narrative of what happened since 2011. The interview questions sought to document the background of the narrator (family background, political affiliation, engagement with public life before and after 2011) and specific memories of specific events, in addition to capturing perceptions of change: how the political events of the past few years changed the narrator’s relation to her family, to the street, to the country in general. Some of the questions are particularly focused on the gender dimension of the narrator’s experience or her perception of the impact of her gender on her life. For example, narrators were asked about their views on violence against women on the street, and whether they noticed an increase in violence in the aftermath of 2011, as well as about whether they believe their gender determined their position and interactions in their engagement with the public sphere. In general, the interviews were openended and allowed the narrators’ stories to develop unhindered, with the questions used as reminders and prods. The starting point for the selection of interviewees was personal connections and networks of the research team. However, a concerted effort was made to reach out to a diverse group of women who participated in public life and who did not necessarily belong to the familiar networks of the research team. The team identified the interviewees from their circles of friends, new and old, acquaintances, and based on their knowledge of prominent actors in society and of significant initiatives and groups that appeared on the scene post-2011. A long list was drawn up and comprised approximately 200 women: newcomers as well as women with a history of activism and public engagement; activist women from different generations; women who joined new parties as well as women who belonged to old parties; women who joined new initiatives or youth movements; political and cultural activists; women who responded to calls for milyoniyyaat (million-strong demonstrations); women who showed their support to one party or another by going out on the street to demonstrate – in general, women who were energized by the wave of revolutions that swept the Arab world in 2011 and made a decision to be active participants rather than spectators of the dramatic changes that engulfed the region. The selection process was carefully planned, not random: it targeted different generations of women, different public interests and diverse viewpoints and

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political ideologies. Indeed, the sample even includes women who did not necessarily support the street protests against Mubarak in 2011 and were more active after 30 June 2013. The next phase of the project will reach out to women who decide to run for elections in 2015, 3 regardless of their ideological affiliations. The decision to include a diverse array of women’s voices, women who represent different positions along the political spectrum, is guided by the commitment to highlight women’s agency and understand drivers for change by identifying difference and encouraging comparative perspectives. Having said that, it is fair to acknowledge that the balance is tipped in favour of women who supported the revolutionary wave that erupted in 2011 and became actively involved in the ensuing events. This coincides with the position of members of the WMF team, who perceive themselves as part of the movements for change and hope in the Arab world. The aim of the research team is to produce situated knowledge, embodied in their social, political and individual locality. Their partial vision consciously challenges mainstream narratives that undermine people’s agency and detract from their achievement in 2011. Finally, the entire project is conceived within a framework of feminist knowledge production. It is feminist in its sensitivity to gendered, unequal power relations and in its attempt to produce subversive discourses that challenge dominant mainstream accounts about women’s role in politics. The feminist identity of WMF is clearly signalled by the research team in all its interactions with interviewees and other parties. Foregrounding the feminist character of the project and the identity of WMF ensures that the aims of the project are transparent to all participants. In some cases, an interviewee will have reservations in relation to feminism as a social movement and may decline participating in the project. This is a challenge to the research team, especially if we bear in mind the widespread negative associations of ‘feminism’ in the Arab context. The team makes an effort to respond to questions about feminism and to dispel concerns around some negative connotations as and when such concerns arise. More importantly, the decision to be upfront about the feminist character of the project demonstrates a commitment to establishing a relationship built on respect and honesty between the researcher and the interviewee as an essential component of feminist praxis. Ethics of representation and language policy Questions of representation can be approached from divergent angles and with reference to an array of stakes. Archival stories are mediated stories, where the desires and aims of the two parties involved, the narrator and archivist, are negotiated. Negotiations take place to ameliorate and address the often unequal power relation between the two sides: in some situations, the archivist assumes control over the narrated text and makes unilateral

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decisions regarding the final product, in effect manipulating the representation of the narrated self. Archives of oral histories, like museums, curate people. As Elisabeth Carnegie points out, “memories of ordinary people may be appropriated or actively sought out, in order to serve the wider aims of local state funded museums” (2012:146); the same may be said of archival stories. This unequal power relation is mitigated by rules that govern the ethics of research where both parties agree on principles and guidelines for representation and ownership. Consent forms are usually designed to guarantee that the narrator is well informed about the aims of the overall project they are contributing to, and the use to which the interviews will be put, in order to determine copyright issues and to agree on details of representation of the mediated self. An ethical archive ensures transparent sharing of information, clear boundaries of ownership and a negotiated compromise regarding representational decisions. Archivists are not the sole mediators of narratives of the self. Stories told by narrators are structured and shaped by the context of narration: the specific historical moment at which the narrative is recorded; the wider metanarrative to which the narrator subscribes or which she supports; the position the narrator chooses to occupy, be it consciously or unconsciously, within the metanarrative. In other words, narratives of the self, or recollections of events, are mediated by the narrator herself depending on multiple factors that impact the moment of narration. These factors may include the mood of the narrator at the time of narration, the impact of the physical surroundings on the narrator, an event or a piece of news that triggers a flow of memories, the presence of other people at the interview and their interventions or interruptions. As Maissan Hassan explains (2014) and as already noted in this essay, narrators’ evaluation and point of view regarding specific events may also change over a period of time, as was evident during the pilot project conducted in 2011, where the pace of events and political transformations was extremely fast and impacted narrators’ perceptions and views. Moreover, as noted by Diana Abdel Fattah in a discussion with the research team in 2011, some narrators change their minds about what they wish to share, or how they wish to present their narrative, after being presented with the transcript of their interviews. The reasons for such changes of mind vary and can be very complex: the very act of narrating may force one to confront issues or events that were forgotten or repressed, for example. Another important reason certainly has to do with the narrator’s self-image and her desire to control the representation of her narrative and her self. To date, the team has conducted more than 100 interviews; almost half have been transcribed and edited. Narrators are required to sign two consent forms: the first ensures that they agree to contributing to the project and to the sharing of their stories; the second ensures that they agree to the final edited version of the transcript that will be made available via the archive. The editing of the transcript conforms to a set of editorial policy

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rules devised and agreed upon by the research team. The policy will be published on the website of the archive for the sake of transparency and is informed by research ethics. The underlying principles attempt to achieve a sensitive balance between potentially conflicting issues, such as accessibility of the narrative; making it user-friendly; sensitive and responsible representation of the identity of the narrator, as well as WMF as an organization with a particular profile and self-image; safety of individual narrators and of WMF and its research team; negotiating state censorship; and transparency. Editorial interventions in the narrated text attempt to facilitate the text’s readability. In some cases, there is a need to provide information about events, dates, organizations or individuals mentioned in narratives that are well known to certain audiences but not necessarily known to a wider readership. In most cases, this information is added in the text between square brackets, or through the use of hyperlinks to existing websites or pages. Footnotes may be used to correct mistakes in dates mentioned by the narrator. Other interventions made with a view to facilitating readability attempt to bridge the gap between Standard Arabic and colloquial Arabic, in an act of translation among varieties of language that is the subject of much controversy among researchers. The vast majority of interviews are conducted in colloquial Egyptian Arabic.4 This is the language of speech and communication in Egypt, unlike Modern Standard Arabic, which is used in writing and formal addresses. The problem arises when colloquial Arabic is transcribed in a written text, and includes expressions and words that are only used orally. For many, writing down colloquial expressions reduces the readability of the text, making it look strange and ungrammatical. In fact, some narrators are not happy with their narratives when they are presented with the written version precisely because of their unfamiliarity with reading colloquialisms. One narrator, for example, felt that the written text passed a judgement on her ability to express herself in ‘proper’ Arabic. On the other hand, many feel strongly about the use of colloquial Arabic in written form, and argue that a shift from colloquial to Standard Arabic detracts from the authenticity of the written text and distorts the style and character of the narrative. The use or avoidance of colloquial Egyptian Arabic in writing has been the subject of debate since the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth. The debate touches on matters of identity, the Arabic language as the language of the Quran that must be protected from colloquial incursions, the Arabic language as an integral identifier of Arabness and Arab identity, and other issues that cannot be addressed here, all constituting major points of controversy in the Arab cultural scene. The WMF team has favoured keeping the narratives in their original form, i.e. in colloquial Arabic, while making very minor changes in syntax and diction to facilitate the flow of the text. The original transcript will be preserved and made available to those whose research may address stylistic aspects of the narrative.

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Another linguistic intervention relates to the use of English words and expressions in some interviews. According to the agreed editorial policy, all foreign words and phrases are translated into Arabic. The reason here is again to enhance readability and minimize distractions. Language decisions are not made unilaterally by the research team: they are negotiated with the narrator as the final edited text is shared with her for her final consent. All comments are taken into consideration and the rule of thumb is to respect the wishes of the narrator. Narrators too have a vested interest in controlling the representation of their selves, based on their perceptions of their identities and their efforts to consolidate their current identity through their narratives. Having said that, sometimes it is the identity of the organization and/or research team that is at stake. In these situations, the editorial policy of the organization is made transparent and shared with both narrators and reading publics. This is particularly important in relation to words or content in the interview that might have legal implications for the organization. Editorial policies inevitably involve some level of censorship. I have tried to shed some light on the implications of editing practices for the final text that is made available to readers. Another form of control is exercised in deciding when access to the material can be allowed and who can access it. Addressing the issue of transparency and control of access, Verne Harris reflects on his own shifting position, from a researcher working in a Freedom of Information NGO in South Africa, struggling with the apartheid regime to gain access to records, to his new position as programme manager of the Nelson Mandela archive, and notes how he developed “an acute awareness of the need to protect ‘sensitive’ information” (Harris 2009:138). Different contexts determine the actual ramifications of what ‘sensitive’ means. In the case of post-2011 Egypt, sensitive information that requires protection, a euphemism for concealment and denial of access, may include anti-regime political positions, the narrator’s involvement in actions that may be regarded as illegal, pronouncements that lend themselves to media manipulation and can support character assassination campaigns, and off-the-record accounts that the narrator herself identifies as confidential. Rules of access to sensitive information vary: an archive can provide limited access to materials based on a case-by-case review of requests; material can be quarantined for a specified number of years. In the case of web archives, rules of access can be more complicated: for each narrator some sections of the material can be made readily accessible via the designated website, while other materials may be accessible only onsite, i.e. at the Library and Documentation Centre of the Women and Memory Forum in Cairo. Rules of access are guided by political as well as practical considerations. They protect both the interests of the narrator and the organization responsible for maintaining the archive. They are also about the positioning of both the narrator and the organization at a particular moment in history.

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Conclusion Verne Harris draws attention to the challenges facing post-apartheid South African archival projects, which identified their goals as “archives for justice and were motivated by an ethical imperative towards the realization of justice in the country” (2011:120). These archives quickly became locked in the ‘endgame’ and have consequently borne the brunt of the narratives of disillusionment that began to proliferate as injustices continued and justice remained an aspiration and a goal. Harris argues for a new vision that goes beyond the function of the archive as a tool for achieving justice, one that acknowledges that the archive itself “is justice and resistance to injustice” (2011:120; emphasis in the original). The Women and Memory Archive of women’s voices is an archive of hope. It is not called an archive of the Egyptian revolution precisely because we do not wish to be caught up in the endgame Harris has identified as the challenge to South African archivists. Commentators will continue to debate for a long time whether the waves of change that swept the Arab world in 2011 were revolutions, ‘refo-lutions’, 5 military coups, conspiratorial foreign interventions or uprisings. The archive documents diverse points of view and narratives of events that constitute some of the pieces of the puzzle that will become history. Its aim is to foreground what cannot be lost regardless of the outcome: Egyptian women’s agency and ability to effect change in society and the larger body politic, and, by extension, the agency of ordinary women and men to become active participants in shaping the future.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

www.wmf.org.eg/project/archive-of-womens-voices/?lang=en (last accessed 3 April 2015). I am grateful to Sherene Seikaly for discussions about the need for a politics of hope. Assuming elections do take place in 2015. At the time of writing, no dates have been set for elections. One interview was conducted in English. An Arabic translation of the profile and summary of the interview will be provided on the website. The term refo-lution was coined by Asef Bayat (2011), who explains that Arab revolutions “may be characterized neither as ‘revolutions’ per se nor simply ‘reform’ measures. Instead we may speak of ‘refo-lutions’ – revolutions that want to push for reforms in, and through the institutions of the incumbent states”.

References Bayat, Asef (2011) ‘Paradoxes of Arab Refo-lutions’, Jadaliyya, 3 March. Available at www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/786/paradoxes-of-arab-refo-lutions (last accessed 19 March 2015). Boesen, Elisabeth (2012) ‘Peripheral Memories – Introduction’, in Elisabeth Boesen, Fabienne Lentz, Michel Margue, Denis Scuto and Renee Wagener (eds) Peripheral

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Memories: Public and Private Forms of Experiencing and Narrating the Past, Bielfeld: transcript, 7–20. Burton, Antoinette (2005) ‘Introduction’, in Antoinette Burton (ed.) Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History, Durham, NC, & London: Duke University Press, 1–24. Carnegie, Elizabeth (2012) ‘Curating People? Museum Mediated Memories and the Politics of Representation’, in Elisabeth Boesen, Fabienne Lentz, Michel Margue, Denis Scuto and Renee Wagener (eds) Peripheral Memories, Bielfeld: transcript, 144–60. Derrida, Jacques (1995) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. by Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel (1972) Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon. Haraway, Donna (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–99. Harris, Verne (2002) ‘The Archival Sliver: A Perspective on the Construction of Social Memory in the Archives and the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy’, in Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (eds) Refiguring the Archive, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 135–51. Harris, Verne (2009) ‘Against the Grain: Psychologies and Politics of Secrecy’, Archival Science 9: 133–42. Harris, Verne (2011) ‘Jacques Derrida Meets Nelson Mandela: Archival Ethics at the Endgame’, Archival Science 11: 113–24. Harvey Brown, Richard and Beth Davis-Brown (1998) ‘The Making of Memory: The Politics of Archives, Libraries and Museums in the Construction of National Consciousness’, History of the Human Sciences 11(17): 17–32. Hassan, Maissan (2014) ‘Insights into Women’s Experiences in Public Space in Egypt’. Paper read at an international conference held at the Lebanese American University (23–25 June) entitled Arab Countries in Transition: Gender Rights and Constitutional Reforms. Pandey, Gyanendra (1992) ‘In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about HinduMuslim Riots in India Today’, Representations 37 (Winter): 27–55. Passerini, Luisa (1983) ‘Memory’, History Workshop Journal 15 (Spring): 195–6. Schwartz, Joan and Terry Cook (2002) ‘Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of the Modern Memory’, Archival Science 2: 1–19. Stoler, Ann (2002) ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form’, in Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (eds) Refiguring the Archive, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 83–102.

Part IV

Translation and the visual economy of protest

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13 Translating emotions Graffiti as a tool for change Bahia Shehab

During the Egyptian revolution, art sublimated violence and translated emotions. Music, theatre, video art, graffiti and cartoons were just a few examples of media of protest that overtook the streets and cyberspace. Strong emotions brought about intense creativity, and in the process artists and laymen alike provided us with exceptional examples of how to express dissidence and solidarity aesthetically. Focusing on graffiti, I engage with examples of collaborative creative protest and my own contribution to them, and treat the palimpsests that emerged out of the interaction among graffiti artists and between them and the public as a form of visual conversation. The main focus is the ‘Tank vs Biker’ wall, which started with Ganzeer’s iconic painting of a military tank and a man on a bike carrying a bread board on his head. Moving on to my own ‘Thousand Times No’ and ‘Some People’ campaigns, I tell the story of how I paid tribute to the ‘Tank Wall’ by spraying stencils from both campaigns on it. With more artists painting on the wall, and some of their contributions whitewashed or defaced, I returned to the wall with another campaign, ‘Rebel Cat’, my attempt to feminize the act of rebellion.

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Bahia Shehab Bahia Shehab is Associate Professor of Professional Practice and director of the Visual Cultures and Graphic Design programmes at the American University in Cairo. She has developed and launched the new graphic design major for the Department of the Arts, with courses focused mainly on the visual culture of the Arab world. Her artwork has been on display in exhibitions and galleries in China, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, UAE and the USA. Her book, A Thousand Times No: The Visual History of Lam-Alif, was published in 2010. She is a 2012 TED Global Fellow1 and was selected as one of BBC’s 100 Women who are changing the world in 2013, and again in 2014. In 2015 she was honoured as distinguished alumna by the American University in Beirut. Nefertiti’s Daughters, 2 a documentary that features her artwork during the Egyptian uprising, was released in 2015.

On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the 2011 Egyptian uprising, Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, a 31-year-old activist from Alexandria, went to Talaat Harb Square in downtown Cairo with a small group of people, carrying signs and flowers to commemorate the revolution. She was shot in the back at close range and died choking on her blood (Mackey 2015). Before the day ended, the number of casualties had risen to 30 injured and 11 dead (Magdy 2015). Indeed, the number of people being killed on the streets in Egypt has continued to rise since 2011, with every anniversary of the revolution in particular witnessing a high rate of casualties within a few hours. How does one translate the fact that these victims are not numbers, and the agony, pain and anger felt by every mother and father, every son or daughter, who has lost a dear one to the brutality of a criminal system? How can we communicate this to people who have been brainwashed by the regime’s media to believe that revolutionaries and demonstrators are hired thugs paid to destroy the country? How can we defeat ignorance, greed and corruption? There are no simple answers to these questions, but at least some of us have tried to translate some of the pain and anger, and honour the victims, through visual language. Between November 2011 and June 2013, I painted on the streets of Cairo, alongside other graffiti artists. As we painted the walls, we constantly chatted with each other, and with people on the street. Even when our work was erased, which happened regularly, we still considered this a form of conversation, because the person who erases your work is telling you “I don’t want to read it”. Like many of the street artists in Cairo, I chose to tell stories on the city’s walls. This was my way of translating all the injustice, pain and bitterness that I witnessed and felt since the beginning of the uprising. The messages I sprayed were always a reaction to something that had just happened, very much like a cartoonist commenting on events, but instead of a newspaper, I chose to comment publicly on the street. Every wall we sprayed became a conversation, like an open invitation for people to comment on or just look at what we drew, and contemplate or

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ignore it altogether. Everything we painted became an idea with a life of its own, one that passers-by had the right to add to, delete from and eventually remove altogether. On the streets our work was alive, people passed by it every day on their way to work, or when they went to buy groceries. By posting our work online we gave it a further, new form of life and a new meaning. We shared our messages not just with the inhabitants of Cairo or the inhabitants of Egypt, but also sent them to the whole world. We kept telling the story of the revolution on the streets in the hope that we might change our future and the future of a whole nation. The fact that the work got covered with new graffiti or whitewashed was largely irrelevant; what was important was keeping the conversation going and continuing to engage others.

A conversation about tanks and martyrs The longest and most exciting of these public visual conversations took place on the ‘Tank vs Biker’ wall, whose chronology of visual interventions appears as an appendix at the end of this essay. This mural, painted by the Egyptian artist Ganzeer under the 6th of October Bridge in Zamalek in May 2011, showed a military tank stencilled to size, in profile, pointing towards a man on a bike carrying a bread board on his head. The part showing the man with the bread board was painted over an older painted street advert written in a classical Arabic script for a bodybuilding centre called ‫‘( ﻣﻤﻠﻜﺔ ﺍﻷﺑﻄﺎﻝ‬The Kingdom of Heroes’). Next, the artist Sad Panda added a sad panda figure, also in profile, behind the biker facing the tank (see Suzee in the City 2011). The addition of the panda in that position visualized the way demonstrations unfolded at the time, with more people joining in as the demonstrators walked through the streets. For passers-by, the tank came to symbolize authority, and more artists started slowly adding their contributions to the conversation. In January 2012, the space around the tank, the biker and the panda was whitewashed, and 15 protestors with their arms reaching towards the sky and facing the street and the passers-by were added to the original image by Ganzeer. The fact that none of the existing elements of artwork was damaged suggests that the wall was whitewashed by the artists who painted the protestors. A slogan was also added: ..‫ ﺍﻧﺎ ﻣﻮﺟﻮﺩ‬.‫ ﺍﻧﺎ ﺑﻮﺵ ﺟﺪﻳﺪ ﻭﺵ ﻛﻞ ﺷﻬﻴﺪ‬..‫ﻣﻦ ﺑﻜﺮﻩ‬ (‘Starting tomorrow I wear a new face, the face of every martyr. I exist’). It was written in a modern angular script style using the colour blue for the first sentence and red for the words ‫( ﺷﻬﻴﺪ‬shaheed/‘martyr’) and ‫ﺍﻧﺎ ﻣﻮﺟﻮﺩ‬ (‘I exist’). But the clearest and most striking addition was a river of blood that was painted under the tank. In front of the tank stood four protestors; two being run over by the tank and the other two facing the tank and trying to stop it with their arms. Mohamed Khaled is cited as the artist who created these additions to the wall. It didn’t take long for army loyalists to whitewash the Tank vs Biker wall, interestingly leaving the painting of the tank itself intact; the blood,

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martyrs, protestors, biker and panda were all gone. The words ۱ ‫‘( ﺑﺪﺭ‬Badr 1’) and ‫‘( ﻣﺼﺮ ﻟﻠﻤﺼﺮﻳﻴﻦ‬Egypt is for Egyptians’) were amateurishly sprayed in black on the tank. The same words were sprayed again in black on the wall facing the tank, together with the sentence ‫‘( ﺍﻟﺠﻴﺶ ﻭﺍﻟﺸﻌﺐ ﺍﻳﺪ ﻭﺍﺣﺪﻩ‬Army and people are one hand’ [i.e. united]) in red. It was later revealed that the whitewash and the messages supportive of SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) were added by a team who called themselves ‘Badr 1’ and who vandalized, or from their perspective, cleaned, the mural 10 days after the blood and protestors paintings were added (Suzee in the City 2012). The artist Mohamed Khaled was quick to respond. On 23 January 2012, he painted – on top of the messages sprayed by ‘Badr 1’ – a crouching figure depicting Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, then commander-in-chief of the Egyptian armed forces and chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and hence the head of state during the power void left by the ouster of former president Hosni Mubarak. The Marshal was portrayed as a monster posing on all fours, like an animal, and holding a blood-drenched, lifeless human figure between its teeth. The blood stained the monster’s face and formed a red pool underneath the figure hanging from its mouth. The Tantawi monster was painted wearing a military suit and donning a beret with the Egyptian flag’s eagle painted on it. More paintings were soon added on the same wall by a group calling themselves ‫‘( ﻛﺘﺎﺋﺐ ﻣﻮﻧﺎﻟﻴﺰﺍ‬Mona Lisa Brigades’). According to their Facebook page, 3 the group was formed on 28 February 2012 as a contemporary street art practice. The artwork they added consisted of a large yellow playing card, with the figure of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa stencilled as queen in black. Mary Mounib, a famous Egyptian film star and comedian from the 1960s, was painted twice, carrying a Kalashnikov and addressing a stencilled head of Marshal Tantawi with her famous line ‫ﺍﻁﻤﻦ ﻳﺎﺭﻭﺡ ﺍﻣﻚ‬ (roughly: ‘Don’t worry, mama’s boy’), in a clear reference to Egyptian cinema icons and idioms – an interesting deployment of Egyptian pop culture at the height of military rule in Egypt. The portrait of a young martyr was also stencilled twice, with one of the two images flanked by two stencils of the Russian Communist revolutionary and political figure Vladimir Lenin raising his fist. The Mona Lisa Brigades were not only building on local cinema references but also on international revolutionary idiom in an attempt to translate the Egyptian revolution in the context of a wider human revolutionary course. They were clearly aware of and striving to communicate the monumentality of what they were experiencing – and created artwork to reflect and translate this awareness. Another visually interesting addition by the Mona Lisa Brigades was a flower, with its five petals consisting of Tantawi’s head: three petals depicted Tantawi’s head in black and two showed the Marshal’s head stencilled in red. This interesting addition conceptually translated the idea that military rule, symbolized by the Tantawi blooming flower, was expanding and gaining strength, taking over the country. The Brigades signed their name

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in Arabic ‘‫ ’ﻛﺘﺎﺋﺐ ﻣﻮﻧﺎﻟﻴﺰﺍ‬above the stencil of a Mona Lisa sprayed in black in front of the tank. A few days later, in early February 2012, a bucket of black paint was splashed over the face of the Tantawi man-eating monster, leaving the military suit intact. The rest of the artwork was whitewashed, and again the military tank was left intact. Now the wall had a life-sized military tank and the body of a military suit with a head covered in black paint; everything else was gone. Clearly, whoever covered the face of the monster is a military loyalist. The practice of covering the face of a painted figure is also very common among fundamentalist Islamic groups, who believe that painting live subjects is against Islamic beliefs. But I doubt Islamic groups were involved in this instance: whoever defaced the painting wanted to remove the idea of an army marshal as monster from the picture.

A Thousand Times No I started spraying on the streets of Cairo in November 2011. The first stencil I sprayed was on a wall in Tahrir Square; it read ‫‘( ﻻ ﻟﺤﻜﻢ ﺍﻟﻌﺴﻜﺮ‬No to military rule’). One of my earlier projects, ‘A Thousand Times No’, had also engaged with the ‘No’ theme. It was an installation commissioned for an exhibition entitled The Future of Tradition – The Tradition of Future, which was housed at the Haus der Kunst in Munich between September 2010 and January 2011. For the Munich exhibition I decided to look for a thousand different versions of ‫‘( ﻻ‬No’) because there were a thousand things I wanted to say ‘No’ to. To confirm and stress the ‘No’, Arabic speakers say ‘No, and a thousand times No’, hence the title of the project. I traced down different forms of the ‫‘( ﻻ‬No’) character from Spain, Afghanistan, Iran, China and all the countries where the Arabic script is or was used, on everything ever produced – buildings, mosques, architecture, plates, textiles, pottery, books. As I examined all these artefacts, it was easy to find the ‫ ﻻ‬character because the Islamic Shahadah (testimony) starts with ‘There’s no God but Allah’. So the word ‫‘( ﻻ‬No’) was everywhere. The research documented the chronological evolution of the word ‫ ﻻ‬and was published in 2010 by Khatt Books under the title A Thousand Times No: The Visual History of Lam-Alif. When the revolution started in January 2011, I forgot completely about the artwork and the book and became totally immersed in the unfolding events of the uprising. Nine months into the revolution, I realized that every ‘No’ has a reason. There are no thousand general ‘Nos’. I could assign a purpose, a message, to each one of the thousand Nos. I then started using the Nos like ammunition. I designed stencils with them, and sprayed them on the walls and streets of Cairo. At the same time, I was aware that I was translating these characters out of their historic context and assigning them a new context – a modern context – and thus giving them new life through translation. So many of the Nos I sprayed are resurrected historic graphic

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forms that I brought back to life. They are forms that translated history to modernity and that translated emotions into graphics. Each ‫‘( ﻻ‬No’) was sprayed for a specific incident, a specific violation or a specific crime committed by the regime. ‫ ﻻ ﻟﺘﻌﺮﻳﺔ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻔﺮﻋﻮﻥ ﺟﺪﻳﺪ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻠﻤﺤﺎﻛﻤﺎﺕ ﺍﻟﻌﺴﻜﺮﻳﺔ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﺘﺄﺟﻴﻞ ﺍﻟﻤﺤﺎﻛﻤﺎﺕ‬،‫ﻻ ﻟﺤﻜﻢ ﺍﻟﻌﺴﻜﺮ‬ ،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻸﺟﻨﺪﺍﺕ ﺍﻟﺨﺎﺭﺟﻴﺔ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻠﻔﺘﻨﺔ ﺍﻟﻄﺎﺋﻔﻴﺔ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻠﻘﻨﺎﺻﺔ ﺍﻟﺒﺸﻮﺍﺕ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻔﻘﺄ ﻋﻴﻮﻥ ﺍﻷﺑﻄﺎﻝ‬،‫ﺍﻟﺸﻌﺐ‬ ‫ ﻻ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻠﻄﺮﻑ ﺍﻟﺜﺎﻟﺚ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻠﺠﺪﺭﺍﻥ ﺍﻟﻌﺎﺯﻟﺔ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻠﻌﻨﻒ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻘﺘﻞ ﺭﺟﺎﻝ ﺍﻟﺪﻳﻦ‬،‫ﻻ ﻷﺳﺘﻐﺒﺎء ﺍﻟﺸﻌﺐ‬ ‫ ﻻ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻠﻘﻠﻪ ﺍﻟﻤﻨﺪﺳﺔ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻠﻜﺎﺋﻨﺎﺕ ﺍﻟﻔﻀﺎﺋﻴﻪ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻠﻐﺎﺯ ﺍﻟﻤﺴﻴﻞ ﻟﻠﺪﻣﻮﻉ‬،‫ ﻻ ﻟﻠﺨﺮﻁﻮﺵ‬،‫ﻟﻠﻬﻮ ﺍﻟﺨﻔﻲ‬ ‫ﻟﺴﺮﻗﺔ ﺍﻟﺜﻮﺭﺓ‬ No to Military Rule, No to Emergency Law, No to Postponing Trials, No to Military Trials, No to a New Pharaoh, No to Stripping the People, No to Blinding Heroes, No to Sniper Pashas, No to Sectarian Divisions, No to External Agendas, No to Killing Men of Religion, No to Stupefying the People, No to Burning Books, No to Violence, No to Barrier Walls, No to Third Parties, No to Conspiracy Theories, No to Bullets, No to Tear Gas, No to Aliens, No to the Infiltrating Minority, No to Stealing the Revolution. All of these ‘No’ slogans were sprayed with a large ‫ ﻻ‬shape and with a message added in Arabic underneath. Only one ‫ ﻻ‬had a different graphic character, with visual rather than just textual elements added to it. ‘No to stripping the people’ was a reference to the veiled woman with the blue bra whose video was circulated on social network forums and went on to travel the world on the front pages and in the news reports of major news networks around the globe (see Souief 2011). She was captured on video as three soldiers dragged her to the ground and stripped her, revealing her now famous blue bra. Stripping this young woman on the streets of Cairo on 17 December 2011 was a highly significant moment for Egyptians: it stripped the army of any respect the people had for them. Thus the police and the army were both widely perceived at that point as corrupt and criminal. My contribution to the conversation consisted of spraying a blue bra, ‘No to stripping the people’ and a footprint, the footprint of the soldier who stomped on the young woman’s stomach with his boots. The footprint on my stencil was overlaid with ‫‘( ﺗﺤﻴﺎ ﺍﻟﺜﻮﺭﺓ‬Long live the revolution’; Figure 13.1). I started another spraying campaign related to the ‘No’ theme before the presidential elections, in May and June of 2012. The mass sentiment at that point was very low and there were a lot of anti-revolutionary feelings in the air, even among people who had been strong supporters of the revolution. My new campaign was intended to remind people of the aims of the revolution and the sacrifices that people made for us to get to where we were. The campaign was called ‘Some People’ and consisted of five stencils which read:

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Figure 13.1 ‘No to stripping the people’. Photograph by Bahia Shehab (2011).

‫ﻓﻲ ﻧﺎﺱ ﺍﺗﺴﺤﻠﺖ ﻋﺸﺎﻥ ﺍﻧﺖ ﺗﺮﻓﻊ ﺭﺍﺳﻚ ﻓﻮﻕ‬ ‫ﻓﻲ ﻧﺎﺱ ﺍﺗﻌﺮﺕ ﻋﺸﺎﻥ ﺍﻧﺖ ﺗﻌﻴﺶ ﻣﺴﺘﻮﺭ‬ ‫ﻓﻲ ﻧﺎﺱ ﺍﺗﻌﻤﺖ ﻋﺸﺎﻥ ﺍﻧﺖ ﺗﺸﻮﻑ‬ ‫ﻓﻲ ﻧﺎﺱ ﺍﺗﺴﺠﻨﺖ ﻋﺸﺎﻥ ﺍﻧﺖ ﺗﻌﻴﺶ ﺣﺮ‬ ‫ﻓﻲ ﻧﺎﺱ ﻣﺎﺗﺖ ﻋﺸﺎﻥ ﺍﻧﺖ ﺗﻌﻴﺶ‬ Some people have had their head put to the ground so that you can raise your head up high. Some people have been stripped naked so you can live decently. Some people have lost their eyes so you can see. Some people have been imprisoned so you can live freely. Some people have died so you can live. This campaign was erased three days after I sprayed it, the fastest of my work to get erased since I started spraying. For me, this proved one thing: the faster they erase, the stronger the message. So I sprayed the five stencils again a month later, this time with larger images and clearer text. Two weeks later, someone took a photo of the stencils and the campaign went

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viral. Three weeks later, it was featured on the third page of one of the leading local newspapers, below the image of Mubarak. The message had been translated across different media, and I was pleased that despite the fact that my work was erased on the street it found new life online and elsewhere. The experience was a game changer for me.

Returning to the tank I had been using various elements of my ‘A Thousand Times No’ project in different parts of the city, mainly around the Tahrir area, since November 2011. After the defacing of the Tantawi monster in February 2012, I felt that it was my turn to pay tribute to the Tank Wall. Until then, I had been working alone on the streets, either going down to spray at four in the morning to avoid harassment or spraying during demonstrations, where I knew or hoped that the crowd would protect me. A friend of mine knew two young men who wanted to help; one of them had lost his right eye when, like many, he was shot by the police in Tahrir during the first 18 days of the revolution. We met at the bursa (‘stock exchange’) café in downtown Cairo on 4 March 2012 and headed to the Tank Wall. The three of us were very reluctant to reveal our identities: we only knew each other by our first names and did not ask further questions. I had a box of spray cans and my folder containing notes on the ‘No’ campaign, the ‘blue bra’ stencils, and the ‘Some People’ campaign. We sprayed the different stencils 62 times all over the wall, which took us 15 minutes, and then drove off (Figure 13.2 and Figure 13.3). Many artists painted and wrote on the wall in the following year, but on 1 June 2013 a group of ‘concerned citizens’ who live in Zamalek decided to whitewash the whole wall, in the process erasing one of the longestrunning street art interventions in Cairo since the start of the revolution. Unlike fans of the military, the Zamalek residents ‘cleaned’ the whole wall: they did not just whitewash or paint over certain parts of it to ‘retranslate’ elements of the original image but rather removed every trace of the entire set of images, as if preparing the ground for a new start. And a new start

Figure 13.2 Stencilling on the Tank Wall. Photograph by Bahia Shehab (2012).

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was what they got. Artists reacted immediately. On 2 June 2013 six inverted stucco mould Egyptian flag eagles were added by the artist Alaa Abd El Hamid. The eagles were stuck in the place formerly occupied by the tank and were coloured in bright phosphoric colours, two in pink, two in yellow and two in green (Figure 13.4). Desecrating the flag by hanging it upside down can be interpreted as an expression of protest at a government’s policies (see, for example, Johnson 2012). On 3 June 2013, a large mural was painted on the wall, depicting the figure of Khairat el-Shater, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood

Figure 13.3 Close-up of stencilling on the Tank Wall. Photograph by Bahia Shehab (2012).

Figure 13.4 Alaa Abd El Hamid’s inverted flag eagles. Photograph by Bahia Shehab (2013).

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and Deputy Supreme Guide at the time, holding the devil’s fork in his left hand and sticking his right hand middle finger out, in a gesture signifying arrogance and indifference to his critics (Figure 13.5). The figure is over two metres in height and is painted in strong black lines over a lightly whitewashed background. El-Shater has black lines coming out of his left ear, connecting him to the ear of Mohammed Badie, then Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood. The right side of Badie’s ear also has black lines coming out of it, connecting his head to that of another figure drawn in the same size as el-Shater and facing him on the right side of the wall. The figure in question is of Mohamed Morsi, then President of Egypt. All three figures are painted in a very cartoonish manner. In between the two figures and under Badie’s head is a large square Kufic inscription which reads ‫‘( ﺑﻌﺪ ﺍﻟﺪﻡ ﻣﻔﻴﺶ ﺷﺮﻋﻴﺔ‬After blood there is no legitimacy’). The word ‫ﺩﻡ‬ (‘blood’) is painted in red while the rest of the calligraphic composition is painted in black. Three kneeling figures in a prayer position appear on either side of el-Shater and Morsi, as if worshipping them. The artwork is by Mohamed Khaled, Mahmoud Magdy, Mohamed Ismail Shawki and Ali Khaled, and the calligraphy is by the artist El Zeft.4 These bold paintings were undertaken in the context of a campaign that was gaining considerable momentum at the time in Egypt. A group of young activists calling themselves Tamarod were collecting signatures and asking people to take to the streets on 30 June 2013 to overthrow the Muslim Brotherhood. Egyptians, including artists, were openly expressing anti-Muslim Brotherhood sentiments. It was later revealed that Egyptian businessmen who opposed the Brotherhood and were supported by the military heavily financed the Tamarod campaign, which resulted in millions of people demonstrating on 30 June, the anniversary of Mohamed Morsi’s election and the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power. As is well documented, these demonstrations ended with a military takeover and a new, ongoing cycle of repression.

Figure 13.5 ‘After Blood’ mural. Photograph by Bahia Shehab (2013).

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Back to our wall: on 4 June 2013 an artist by the name of Mozza pasted three female figures next to the ‘After Blood’ mural: two seated and veiled women flanking a belly dancer. The faces of the veiled women are covered; the belly dancer reveals a long, bare thigh but her face has no features, and hence she is also faceless (Figure 13.6). This constituted another graffiti translation on the walls of Cairo of an important aspect of social and political life – namely, the position and status of women in different walks of life. I was out of town when the wall was whitewashed. Had I been in Cairo I would have also gone to paint on 2 June. I did however follow the progress of the wall online and planned a retaliation. When I arrived at the wall at 5 a.m. on 7 June 2013, the belly dancer was already slightly ripped. Without having seen the specific work by Mozza I had also wanted to talk to women this time around, given the aggressive, organized and targeted sexual harassment campaigns that were used to intimidate Egyptian females and dissuade them from joining the protests on the streets.5 Intended to feminize the act of rebellion, my ‫‘( ﺗﻤﺮﺩﻱ ﻳﺎﻗﻄﺔ‬Rebel Cat’) campaign was a call to women to join the revolution. I used the feminine form of the verb ‘rebel’ to ensure women understood that the campaign was addressing them, and ‫ﻗﻄﺔ‬ (‘cat’) because it was a recognizable ‘howl’ that men sometimes used as a term of flirtation in addressing women on the street. I was accompanied by two young women who wanted to help me spray. The minute we took our stencils out we were attacked by three men. I am not sure what bothered them – whether it was the message we were spraying or the German ZDF TV crew who were covering the spraying event – but they quickly became very aggressive. That was the fastest I have had my work covered over: five minutes into the campaign one of the men sprayed over my message using one of my own red spray cans. They also started to aggressively peel off the

Figure 13.6 Three female figures on the Tank Wall, by Mozza. Photograph by Bahia Shehab (2013).

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work by Mozza. We got into the car and drove off. We returned 30 minutes later, the men were gone and we continued working on the wall. We sprayed seven cats, each in a different colour and with a golden halo on their heads. We also sprayed the slogan ‫‘( ﺗﻤﺮﺩﻱ ﻳﺎﻗﻄﺔ‬Rebel Cat’) ten times over the damaged work by Mozza, where the vandal had sprayed red on the belly dancer’s face (Figure 13.7, Figure 13.8 and Figure 13.9).

A return to the past: our translations must live on A deep process of ‘cleansing’ most of the walls in Cairo took place after General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi was elected President of Egypt in June 2014. The city became graffiti-free and sterile again. Our beloved Tank Wall was not spared (Figure 13.10). A 19-year-old street artist, Hisham Rizk, was found dead in mysterious circumstances on 2 July 2014 (Ahram Online 2014).

Figure 13.7 ‘Rebel Cat’ campaign. Photograph by Bahia Shehab (2013).

Figure 13.8 Close-up of ‘Rebel Cat’ campaign, by Bahia Shehab (2013).

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Figure 13.9 Full view of ‘After Blood’ mural with ‘Rebel Cat’ images added. Photograph by Bahia Shehab (2013).

Figure 13.10 The Tank Wall whitewashed after June 2014. Photograph by Bahia Shehab (2014).

The regime’s message rang loud and clear: artists are no longer welcome on the street. The city does not belong to us any more; we are strangers here again. I chose to share the story of one wall in Cairo and the stories and work of the different artists who have contributed to the wall and whose works no longer exist, except in virtual form on the Internet. The city is no longer ours, but at least we have documents and archives that can help us remember that we had the honour of trying to effect change, that we shared the same feelings and for once our hearts were beating to the same tunes. I did not personally know any of the artists who were intervening on the streets between 2011 and 2013, but I know that to the best of our abilities we all tried to translate the momentous events and stories of the revolution into visual, engaging media. We translated our emotions into paintings on the street, and must now ensure that our translations live on, even as they disappear from the streets of Cairo.

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Appendix: The Tank Wall chronological development 1 Tank vs Biker by Ganzeer (May 2011) 2 Tank vs Biker + Protestors by Mohamed Khaled (January 2012) 3 Whitewash and Tank + pro-Egyptian and pro-army messages by the Badr 1 group (January 2012) 4 Tank + Marshal Tantawi, Head of Supreme Council of Armed Forces, as a maiden-eating monster by Mohamed Khaled (23 January 2012) 5 Face of Tantawi maiden-eating monster covered by anonymous (February 2012) 6 ‘A Thousand Times No’ + Blue Bra + ‘Some People’ by Bahia Shehab (4 March 2012) 7 Zamalek citizens whitewash wall (1 June 2013) 8 Inverted Egyptian eagles by Alaa Abd El Hamid (2 June 2013) 9 ‘After Blood there is No Legitimacy’ by Mohamed Khaled, Mahmoud Magdy, Mohamed Ismail Shawki and Ali Khaled. Calligraphy by El Zeft (3 June 2013) 10 Belly Dancer by Mozza (4 June 2013) 11 Belly Dancer damaged by anonymous (4 June 2013) 12 ‘Rebel Cat’ by Bahia Shehab (5 a.m., 7 June 2013) 13 Wall whitewashed (October 2013).

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

www.ted.com/talks/bahia_shehab_a_thousand_times_no (last accessed 17 July 2015). https://vimeo.com/104411723 (last accessed 17 July 2015). www.facebook.com/kta2eb.monalisa/info?tab=page_info (last accessed 17 March 2015). A video depicting the process of painting the wall and titled After Blood was uploaded to YouTube on 19 June 2013. Available www.youtube.com/watch? x-yt-ts=1422327029&x-yt-cl=84838260&v=OOJ_PsoJY7I#t=12 (last accessed 17 March 2015). For background, see the Human Rights report ‘Egypt: Epidemic of Sexual Violence’. Available at www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/03/egypt-epidemic-sexualviolence (last accessed 17 March 2015).

References Ahram Online (2014) ‘Activists Mourn Graffiti Artist Hisham Rizk’, 3 July. Available at http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/105374/Index.aspx (last accessed 17 March 2015). Johnson, Dirk (2012) ‘Symbol of Pride, Inverted, is Now Symbol of Political Dismay’, New York Times, 17 December. Available at www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/us/ politics/upside-down-flags-mark-conservative-anger-on-obama.html?_r=0 (last accessed 17 March 2015). Mackey, Robert (2015) ‘Protester is Killed as Egyptian Police Attack Marchers Carrying Flowers to Tahrir Square’, New York Times, 24 January. Available at www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/middleeast/egypt-woman-is-killed-inpeaceful-cairo-protest.html?_r=3 (last accessed 25 February 2015). Magdy, Walid (2015) ‘‫ ﻣﺼﺎﺑﺎ‬۳۰‫ ﻗﺘﻴﻼ ﻭ‬۱۱ ‫‘( ’ﺍﺭﺗﻔﺎﻉ ﺿﺤﺎﻳﺎ ﺍﻟﺘﻈﺎﻫﺮ ﺍﻟﻲ‬Source in Ministry of Health: Rise in the Number of Demonstration Casualties to 11 Dead and 30 Injured’), Al-Masry Al-Youm, 25 January 2015. Available at www.almasryalyoum.com/news/details/640853 (last accessed 17 March 2015).

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Souief, Ahdaf (2011) ‘Image of Unknown Woman Beaten by Egypt’s Military Echoes around the World’, Guardian, 18 December. Available at www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2011/dec/18/egypt-military-beating-female-protester-tahrir-square (last accessed 17 March 2015). Suzee in the City (2011) ‘An Afternoon with Sad Panda’, 11 July. Available at www.suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/an-afternoon-with-sad-panda/ (last accessed 25 February 2015). Suzee in the City (2012) ‘War on Graffiti – SCAF Vandalists versus Graffiti Artists’, 6 February. Available at www.suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/waron-graffiti-scaf-vandalists-versus-graffiti-artists/ (last accessed 25 February 2015).

14 Democratic walls? Street art as public pedagogy John Johnston

This chapter explores the potential of street art as a means of gaining voice and political capital, and examines the connections between Egyptian and other traditions of street art. Constructing an argument for artists to see their role as that of public educator, it highlights a major concern for street art in contested spaces, namely, the danger of falling into what Freire (1970) describes as a ‘banking pedagogy’, where the values are drawn from a limited source and deposited onto a community without consultation or inclusion. The discussion draws on an open dialogue with some of the Egyptian artists who create street art in Cairo, political muralists from Northern Ireland, and those from each context who live with the visual residue of revolution. I argue that despite several similarities, particularly between Republican mural art and the paintings of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, unlike the paintings of Northern Ireland Egyptian street art constitutes a series of palimpsests that exemplify a democratic process of visual enquiry; that there is a life and possibility to this work that is missing from the murals of Northern Ireland, which have become prisoners of history.

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John Johnston is an artist and educator from Belfast and incumbent Head of the MA Artist Teacher & Contemporary Practices at Goldsmiths University, London. He has worked in a variety of conflict and postconflict contexts, including Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the Balkans, sub-Saharan Africa and Aboriginal Australia. He has engaged with young people, informal educators and ex-combatants to create collaborative artworks that question notions of identity and difference. His art strives to strike a balance between process and product, relying on public engagement to reach what he sees as its full pedagogical intention. John’s art is often seen as confrontational; however, he makes no apologies for the forthright visual language that he employs, as he believes such approaches to art-making enable people to engage in the difficult conversations needed to build empathy between self and other. Most of his art is made in public spaces, and while he tends to focus on process as a main instrument of dialogue, he also sees the final ‘art product’ as a deeply rooted pedagogical tool. In this sense, he sees art as a combination of the functional with the intrinsic – a language that can either act as a dominant interpreter or, as he would prefer, a platform for critical enquiry. John is pictured with his artwork Peace/Separation Wall, West Belfast (2010), made in collaboration with Belfast political mural painter David (Dee) Craig. His own title for this piece, which is not adopted by the community that hosts it, is Palestine Mural – Shankill. The difference in titles relates to Loyalism’s indifference to Palestine and Palestinians. Despite this indifference, John was able to carve the word Palestine into the surface of the wall, thus producing a permanent visual representation and reference to Palestine in the heartland of Ulster Loyalism.

As an artist educator who originates from Belfast, I have observed at first hand how the political mural has developed to become a form of public education, and indeed a weapon in the conflict between the Unionist and Nationalist identities in Northern Ireland. Thus when the murals and graffiti of the Egyptian revolution began to emerge in January 2011, I not only connected with the visual language but also recognized the activities of the artists as of equal political importance to those of the street protestors. In this context, as Elansary (2014) points out, it is important to explore “how artists and activists think about their work as makers and shapers of aesthetic and political meaning”, and “how this same art has been viewed by the broader Egyptian public”. By drawing attention to the reception of Egyptian art, Elansary raises an interesting issue in regard to how street art functions as a form of public pedagogy. I explore the issue by placing street art within the paradigm of public pedagogy and establishing a critical dialogue between a selection of murals from Mohamed Mahmoud Street in downtown Cairo since 2011 and political murals from Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland, produced

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by Republicans (Nationalists) as well as by Loyalists (Unionists). While it could be argued that this line of enquiry places an unnecessary burden on artists and their work, it is important to acknowledge that artists can act as agents of change in the promotion of social democracy but can equally act as instruments of propaganda and become agents of division and mistrust. Political street art walks a fine line between these positions, and must therefore be read within a critical pedagogical paradigm.

Street art as public pedagogy: Egypt and Northern Ireland At a local level, street art draws attention to issues of political importance – such as social marginalization, political corruption and broader agendas related to social justice. Lewisohn (2008:18) describes graffiti and street art as two distinct art forms which draw on lines of communication that are “different in terms of form, function and most importantly, intention”. Although this may be true of what I would call ‘popular street art and graffiti’, a form of visual resistance that grew out of the post-1960s urban decay of Europe and the USA, the definition becomes problematic if applied to the street art and graffiti of political conflict zones. In these contexts the graffiti writer and the mural painter share the same intention: to reclaim public space in order to further explicit political goals. The paintings of Cairo and Belfast share this intention, but unlike the paintings of New York in the 1970s, for example, they are not just stating a presence – they are calling the public to attention, inviting them to act. They do so through a complex pedagogical relationship where the teacher/artist projects ideas and meanings onto the public in order to influence their behaviour and thoughts. This form of public pedagogy works by deploying a combination of recognizable historical narratives that are appropriated and entangled with the issues of the present. In both Cairo and Northern Ireland, audiences are engaged through a common visual aesthetic based on figuration and formal artistic elements. Artists are aware of the value of using recognizable techniques and images, which allow them to connect to both local and global audiences. The murals of Northern Ireland and Cairo draw on these principles to construct visual messages in a manner that is clear and unambiguous. However, the works are significantly different in regard to purpose and pedagogical positioning in each context. On the whole, both Loyalist and Republican murals seem closed to the possibility of change, while the murals of Cairo present an openness that is unique and democratic. That said, a major difference between Republican and Loyalist murals can be seen in how Republicans actively seek to connect with international causes such as Palestine. Loyalism tends to stay focused on the local, with any connection with the cause of Israel remaining tacit. Thus, while Israeli flags fly alongside the symbols of Britain in Loyalist areas, there is little or no reference to Israel in any existing murals. Loyalist murals are largely

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emblematic and defensive in nature, to the point that many paramilitary paintings feature masked gunmen facing onto the public in a posture of defiance (Figure 14.1). Palestinian flags and murals in support of Palestine, on the other hand, are readily seen in Nationalist areas across Northern Ireland. Paramilitary paintings are often composed within a historical context. Narrative and place are important elements of these works as they seek to project a story of resistance. Hence, gunmen are painted in military uniforms and as such are visually described as soldiers – freedom fighters – not terrorists. The Cairo paintings, on the other hand, tend to connect local and regional issues to global values such as freedom and democracy. While these values formed a shared purpose for the Egyptian artists, the artists from Northern Ireland used their work to claim and define territory as belonging to one side or another (Jarman 1998). Each context then shared the need to communicate and influence, but Egyptian street artists moved the practice into a new sphere of political engagement. Artists and activists used Facebook, Twitter and other Internet platforms to develop new publics – reaching out beyond the immediate context to spread their message and engage with the audience to create what I call a ‘participant viewer’. A participant viewer remains engaged in the issues after the initial contact and becomes a further avenue of dissemination. Egyptian street art was also used as a ‘raw’ source of information for global news networks; like Northern Ireland, paintings became a backdrop for news reports, a visual aid and a ‘translation’ of events that created an immediate context for the viewer.

Figure 14.1 Loyalist memorial painting in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photograph by John Johnston (February 2014).

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While such exposure presents boundless political potentiality, it also raises questions about the pedagogical intention and implications of the engagement. As a promoter of ideas and informal interpreter of events, the artist’s role is transformed from reporter to a critical pedagogue whose objective is to expose corrupt power structures and enable a nuanced understanding that may ultimately lead to social change. First discussed by Paulo Freire (1970), critical pedagogy has since been developed by Henry Giroux and others as a praxis-oriented “educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action” (Giroux 2010). Although the majority of discourse around critical pedagogy is situated within formal educational settings, street art extends this discourse into the public domain. The suggestion here is that street artists working in political conflict zones can be seen as critical public pedagogues: they apply their knowledge and expertise to redress larger economic, racial and sociopolitical problems. In this sense, public pedagogy bridges the space between private and public learning to include the media, cultural sites and public spaces. The visual activists in Egypt used the medium of street art to inform and elicit responses from the immediate public and the international community. They maintained a watchful eye on the political landscape, and as that changed so too did the content and meaning of the artworks. Artists who originally aimed their attention at the Mubarak regime moved to question the policies of the Muslim Brotherhood and then the actions of the Sisi government. As such they have been involved in an ongoing process of critical enquiry within the public domain and have taken on the role of public intellectuals. As Giroux (2005) argues, public intellectuals link pedagogy to notions of public good, democracy and social justice, an argument that can be easily extended to the street art of Cairo.

Critical pedagogy, socially engaged arts practice and gender inequality The role of public intellectual comes with considerable responsibilities that are often overlooked by many artists, who may be unaware of the political potential of their work to transcend its immediate purpose and acquire pedagogical value. This lack of realization undermines the developmental potential of the artist to form new understandings of his or her role in transforming public space into a place of critical learning. Freire (1970) discusses two opposed modes of pedagogy that best describe the ethical tightrope artists walk when engaging in such public works. The first is a ‘banking pedagogy’, which places the teacher or communicator as a dominant party who sees the learner (public) as a mere depository for the installation of their ideas and beliefs. The second is a ‘critical pedagogy’, where the artist functions as a communicator who places dialogue at the centre

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of their practice. To pursue a critical pedagogy the artist must first and foremost be ‘critically conscious’ of his or her role as a public intellectual. This makes it possible for the artist to “play a central role in producing narratives, metaphors, and images that exercise powerful pedagogical force over how people think of themselves in relation to others” (Giroux 2004:62). For example, many murals from Cairo and Northern Ireland expose the corrupt power structures of government, but only a few expose ephemeral power structures of domination such as gender inequality, which prevails even within the ranks of political activism in Egypt (see Mortada, this volume), and for that matter Northern Ireland. The public pedagogue has a responsibility to expose such inequalities and hold society to account as they would political leaderships. A conscious public pedagogy pursued in Egypt would mean that murals would address agendas of democracy and social justice by questioning not only the authority of the state but also a prevailing culture of gender inequality. The story of women artists and the cause of gender equality in Egypt are rarely addressed in discussions of street art, as noted by Elansary (2014). Recognizing the chasm between the common cause of revolutionary street art and the moral cause of gender equality, Mia Gröndahl and Angie Balata formed the Women on Walls collective (‫ )ﺳﺖ ﺍﻟﺤﻴﻄﺔ‬in 2012 to act as a platform for the dissemination of the work of women artists in Egypt, as the collective explains on its website:1 Women on Walls (WOW), or Sit El 7eta (in Arabic), began as an idea to see how we can use graffiti and street art in a project that combines the creativity and uniqueness of Egypt’s top graffiti, street, and visual artists to work on a national campaign focusing on women’s empowerment. The chasm between how women artists, as opposed to men artists, are valued was highlighted further when Gröndahl explored the proliferation of publications, exhibitions and documentary films revolving around street art at the time. Most focused their attention on the work of male artists and in doing so marginalized women artists and their role in the street art revolution. Indeed, while Gröndahl’s own book, Revolution Graffiti (2013), includes a section titled ‘Women Power on the Wall’, she was “only able to find 253 graffiti images featuring women out of around 17,000 pieces of art from her archive” (Bajec 2014). This gender imbalance not only undermines the idea that the street art of revolutionary Egypt was democratic, but also raises questions about the role of the street artists as public intellectuals and critical pedagogues. The female voice is often marginalized and lost in the masculinization of street art in general, and this applies equally to Northern Ireland and Egypt. While WOW endeavoured to counter this position by establishing a women’s art movement, it may be possible to explore alternative propositions through the lens of contemporary art practice, and in particular socially

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engaged arts practice (SEAP) or relational art (Bourriaud 1998/2002), which involves the “application of artistic methods within a community, in collaboration with community members, to address an issue of importance in a way that creates a significant space for the possibility of individual and collective agency” (Keller 2013:2). Although street art differs from prototypical conceptions of socially engaged art, there are many examples of works in Cairo that moved across from ‘art object’ to ‘interactive art’. The same is not true of the murals of Northern Ireland. Bill Rolston, who has written extensively on the latter, points out that “murals do not exist in isolation from the culture and politics of the society that spawns them” (1995: viii). This would suggest that the images and messages of the murals in many parts of Belfast and Derry are reflections of the values and beliefs of those communities that live in their shadow. Extending the argument to the paintings of Cairo, we can begin to see a lack of critical consciousness that is in keeping with my assertion that many street artists do not recognize their position as pedagogues. A critical engagement with communities and publics would expose new understandings that have the potential to transcend imbalances of power, including the gender imbalance. Unlike Northern Ireland, many trained artists and cultural workers in Egypt made their skills available to other participants in the revolution and offer us examples of how critical engagement with communities and publics can be achieved and the model extended to street art and graffiti. The skills of these artists were harnessed to develop avenues of communication that clearly signpost a move toward the principles of socially engaged arts practice. For example, the film-makers’ collective Mosireen organized numerous workshops to train young people to make documentary films, and its website describes the group’s role in terms of an interactive, socially engaged pedagogy:2 We see a large part of our role as helping to network between a wide variety of initiatives and projects, especially those born out of a spirit of civic engagement. As well as connecting those with skills, we are also working to share our skills with others and have run free training courses for more than 250 people so far. Admittedly, this form of socially engaged art as public pedagogy is relatively safe and is less vulnerable to manipulation and damage than street art, which can be easily abused, changed or completely eradicated. Republicans have attacked many Loyalist works in Belfast and Derry, while murals in Nationalist areas have come under attack from the police and security forces (Rolston 1995). On a research trip to Cairo in September 2014, I saw the residue of similar actions carried out mostly, it seems, by the regime. A major area of Mohamed Mahmoud Street was painted over. However, the artists returned to paint a large area of the street in pink camouflage that eventually formed a background for a series

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of new paintings. I spent many hours in and around Tahrir Square exploring the side streets and talking with a variety of people. All had a view on the paintings, indeed many wanted to share and relive their experiences of the revolution through the narratives imprinted on the walls.

Public space, remembrance and the ethics of narration All of the artworks I viewed during my trip to Cairo in September 2014 were in and around Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which may be described as the epicentre of the ‘visual dissent’ of revolutionary Cairo. These mural paintings and stencilled images uncovered a wealth of material that shares many commonalities with Northern Ireland. I entered the area from the direction of Tahrir Square – passing by a large painting of a young man whose left eyelid was peeled back to reveal a ‘dead eye’. I was later told that the painting represented a young artist who had been shot in the eye by a regime sniper while painting a mural on that same street. The head and shoulders were approximately three metres in height and width and dominated the street corner between Tahrir Square and Mohamed Mahmoud Street. This was the first of many monument paintings that I encountered along the one-mile strip that leads to downtown Cairo. Like Belfast, Cairo had a surplus of subjects for such paintings. The works capture a historical narrative that is common in many conflict zones – the notion of sacrifice looms heavy over these walls. There are constant reminders of the people killed, the pain and torment of those left behind. In an attempt to erase history, some have been painted over while others remain defiant – these are extremely powerful paintings that embody a struggle for remembrance. The need to claim and interpret history is deeply connected to notions of sacrifice and remembrance; it produces a ‘bottom-up history’ and a form of public pedagogy that challenges the narrative of powerful forces, including the state and media. While there are similarities, particularly between Republican mural art and the paintings of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, unlike the paintings of Northern Ireland, Mohamed Mahmoud Street demonstrates an evolutionary dimension that is unique and in my view deeply democratic. Multiple layers of images combine and overlap to form semi-abstract compositions that draw on previous works to inform the current painting. In many ways these paintings are the visual embodiment of the revolution. The walls capture the various phases of dissent, from the struggle to remove Mubarak to the debacle of the Morsi presidency and the latest coup and presidency of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. The Cairo paintings, then, capture an ongoing narrative in the form of ‘visual palimpsest’, with images continually overdrawn and reused to support the narrative and aesthetic of the next painting. They exemplify a democratic process of visual enquiry. There is no artistic hierarchy at play, as naive paintings sit alongside and at times on

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top of highly skilled works. While many paintings are accompanied by Arabic text, others use a combination of Arabic and English, in a clear attempt to speak to an international audience. There is a life and possibility to these works that is missing from the murals of Northern Ireland, which have become prisoners of history. Indeed, any attempt to paint over or redefine the political murals of Belfast could be met with severe punishment. While the symbolism and materiality of the artworks are similar, the urban ecology of each context is extremely different. The murals of Northern Ireland have evolved to become a symptom and symbol of the sectarian divide, claiming public space by excluding the Other, whereas the paintings of Cairo acted to reclaim public space for all the people, announcing a new era of non-conformity to the norms of the political elite. At the same time, there is a marked similarity between Republican (rather than Loyalist) street art and the works displayed on the walls of Cairo. Republicans challenged the authority of the British state, unlike Loyalists, who saw themselves as part of that state, a position that is underlined in the numerous murals that incorporate the flag and emblems of British identity alongside those of Loyalist paramilitaries. In many ways, Loyalists saw the street as belonging to them, the so-called ‘Queen’s highway’. Republicans, on the other hand, viewed public space as a battle zone between Irish and British identities, a contested space that needed to be liberated from the forces of the British Empire. This challenge to authority and the state is shared with the activists of Cairo, and there are some examples of Republican murals influencing the work of Egyptian artists, resulting in an interesting form of visual translation. The young artists I met in Cairo showed me images they saved on mobile phones of the dead Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands, who has become an international symbol of resistance. The importance of street art and public space to the Republican movement is nowhere more evident than in the words scrawled on a wall in Derry in 1969 (Figure 14.2): “You are Now Entering Free Derry” drew a clear demarcation line between what the state controlled and what the people now claimed as their space. In essence, the ‘Free Derry’ mural declared a space beyond state control and has become an iconic image of resistance that has inspired other such paintings in the West Bank. The inspiration flows in both directions, with numerous examples of connectivity between the resistance movements in the Middle East and Republican Ireland. The most obvious visual form is to be found on the International Wall in the Lower Falls area of West Belfast. Images of Palestinian origin and influence interweave with Irish Republican narratives and act as form of translation and bonding agent between the two contexts. The iconic ‘Free Derry’ Wall mural is appropriated and used by Palestinians on the wall of Dheisheh refugee camp in the West Bank (Figure 14.3). This is another form of visual translation forming a bond of solidarity between peoples and context. Look a little further and we will see how the narrative of Bobby Sands has been translated into popular culture, from the renaming of streets in Tehran

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Figure 14.2 Free Derry Wall, Northern Ireland. Photograph by John Johnston (July 2012).

Figure 14.3 ‘One’: Graffiti in Derry and Dheisheh. Artwork by John Johnston (2015).

to cafés in Palestine – all bearing the name of the IRA hunger striker as a symbol of defiance against authority. The remembrance murals that dominate the walls of Mohamed Mahmoud Street are a further example of the connectivity between the resistance murals of Derry and those of Cairo. Many murals recount the killings of 14 unarmed civilians by the British army in Derry in January 1972. That day became known as Bloody Sunday, and has strong resonance in the context of the murder of over 40 protesters in Mohamed Mahmoud Street on 19 November 2011 (Figure 14.4). In this sense, the paintings of Derry and Cairo draw on a shared repertoire and act as historical artefacts that demand our attention and remembrance. The portraits of those killed in Derry are echoed in the images on the walls of Mohamed Mahmoud Street (Figure 14.5). Each set of paintings acts as a pedagogical tool that aims to translate meanings and values for its respective publics. The paintings create

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new spaces for civic engagement and act not merely as backdrops but as visual translations that can inform and encourage action through a poetics of art that combines doing with critical thought in a bid to “redefine mundane public space as politicised place and . . . thereby help to reclaim it for the community” (Jarman 1998:86). Such events, however, are relatively rare in Northern Ireland. One action that took place in Cairo in May 2011 highlights the democratic and political potentiality of street art particularly well. According to organizer Aida al-Kashef, the ‘Mad Graffiti Weekend’ was a response to the censorship of a portrait of the 18-year-old martyr Islam Rafaat in

Figure 14.4 Graffiti depicting Gika and other martyrs; Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo. Photograph by John Johnston (2014).

Figure 14.5 Memorial paintings, Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Photograph by John Johnston (2014).

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Bab al-Louq, in downtown Cairo. This massive, commemorative portrait was painted on the wall of a public restroom in late March. It was painted over in late April, to the dismay of many, who decided to respond in kind (Charbel 2011). While the artists painted they also engaged in a dialogue with the public, who photographed and curated the work before disseminating the process via social media. The engagement between artists and the public created a social bond that surpassed the materiality of the painting. Such practices constitute a concrete form of intervention into the social and political arena that creates a new set of conditions based on democratic principles and amplifies the political potentiality of street art. They directly contrast with the anti-dialogue spirit evident in Northern Ireland, where many muralists – particularly those from the Loyalist community – prefer to remain anonymous. Although they may produce their works to communicate specific messages to the public, they rarely engage in dialogue with the public. Republican muralists may seem more open to dialogue, but they rarely, if ever, change their artwork as a result of any criticism or intervention from the public. It was during the ‘Mad Graffiti Weekend’ that Ganzeer produced one of the iconic images of the revolution: the ‘Tank vs Biker’ mural (see Shehab, this volume). The painting attracted the attention of both sides of the divide in Cairo, and what happened over the following weeks to the painting and around it embodies some of the values that so many gave their lives and freedom for during and after the revolution. Ganzeer’s painting juxtaposed a life-size tank with a boy on a bicycle carrying a tray of 3eish baladi (‫ﻋﻴﺶ ﺑﻠﺪﻱ‬/‘local bread’) on his head, intended to reflect the daily struggle of ordinary Egyptians to make ends meet. The artist known as ‘Sad Panda’ added a further visual layer of complexity to the scene. His logo, a sulking panda bear, was visualized standing perplexed in the direct line of the tank, observing the scene but also an active part of it, conjuring up possible connections with the Chinese activist who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Over the following weeks, the mural was transformed to reflect the ongoing events as they unfolded across Egypt and became a visual battleground between supporters of the military and activists, as described in detail by Shehab (this volume). The sheer dynamic of this exchange, the aggressive nature of the attacks on this painting, and the visual languages at play all highlight the global importance of the street art of Cairo. It doesn’t matter whether the painting remains or disappears. The unfolding of events and the dialogue are preserved in digital platforms and in contributions such as Shehab’s in this volume. It is the process, rather than the painting per se, that provides evidence of a critical public pedagogy, one which extends our understanding not only of the social political context but also of the deeply democratic nature of this form of street art. This ‘palimpsest’ pattern or reimaging of narrative, particularly well documented in the case of the ‘Tank vs Biker’ wall, was apparent on almost

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all the walls I observed in and around Mohamed Mahmoud Street. During my second visit to the area, as part of my September 2014 trip, I met with four street artists and activists attached to the Ultras Ahlawy, a fan group of El Ahly football club, all young men aged between 22 and 26. The group showed me their work, which is mainly concentrated in or around Mohamed Mahmoud Street. We explored a number of common agendas related to the style, methods and meaning of the murals, and they talked about how they had learnt the skills and techniques via the Internet – mostly from YouTube.3 They had a significant back catalogue available to view on their mobile phones. They also showed me a number of recognizable images from Northern Ireland, which were exclusively Republican. We talked about the images of political leaders and the text that accompanied them. All these works were stencilled and included text in both Arabic and English. The Ultras had made a number of stencil and painted images in memory of a member of their group who had been killed by the military – ‘Gika’.4 They spoke with great pride about this young man and the painting: “We feel like we are keeping him alive”, they said – a sentiment shared with the artists who painted the victims of Bloody Sunday in Derry. The group also took me to a side street to show me work made by women artists. This was a distinctly different space from the rest of the street. The paintings were very informal; they looked like they had been done in a hurry, but they stimulated a revealing discussion with the group when I interviewed them later that evening. I asked why these works were separated from the main street and was told that this space was set aside to give women a voice. I found this surprising as I had thought that all spaces were accessible to all genders and beliefs. The group explained that at a given point the streets became dangerous for women, and many female activists suffered abuse at the hands of both the police and a minority of activists. Our discussion moved on to cover the appropriation of personal traumas that had become the subject of public paintings. I wanted to focus on the ‘Blue Bra Girl’ painting that was stencilled on walls across Egypt and became an internationally recognized symbol of the brutality of the regime. The piece reflected the events of Saturday 17 December 2011, when the military beat and stripped a veiled young protestor (Soueif 2011; see also Shehab, this volume). I asked the group whether they thought artists had the right to appropriate the narrative for their own cause. One, let’s call him ‘Ahmed’, believed that the painting would “remind the public of what happened and make sure that she will never be forgotten”. Another, call him ‘Sherif’, questioned the use of the image and thought “it was immoral”, posing an interesting dilemma for the rest of the group: If the woman did not want her pain to be seen was it still okay? How would they feel if it was their sister, girlfriend or wife? Would they think it was right to use the pain of an individual in this way? (Cairo, 25 September 2014)

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I have asked similar questions of mural painters in Northern Ireland and received a similar reply to that I received from the other three members of the group I interviewed in Cairo. ‘Ahmed’ argued “She is a hero of the revolution, her story belongs to Egypt”; ‘Edfu’ insisted “It was important to make sure what happened was not covered up by the regime”; and ‘Adel’ explained: “We have used her story to teach the world about the brutality of the regime.” I asked what he meant by teaching. He replied: “We needed to let people from Europe know that Egypt was not the nice place of the pyramids and pharaohs. We also needed to let our own people know what was happening.” And did the paintings achieve this? I asked. “Yes”, they all agreed (Cairo, 25 September 2014).

Conclusion I set out to explore the pedagogical and political potentiality of street art within the context of the Egyptian revolution and Northern Ireland. While there is little doubt that the works from Cairo and Northern Ireland both enact a form of public pedagogy, questions remain with regard to the validity of each as a form of critical public pedagogy. Each context has used the strategies and mechanisms of consumerism to project ideas and values onto the public, and while there are some examples of social engagement, particularly in Egypt, the overall drive of the paintings is to inform rather than to transform. Critical pedagogy attempts to transform the power relations between the oppressed and the oppressor (Freire 1970). The limited exposure and lack of attention to women’s art and issues of gender inequality in Egypt undermine the transformative potential of the phenomenon in this context. It should also be noted that the voice of women is completely absent from the street art of Northern Ireland. And while the content, process and production of the work in Egypt exposed the corrupt power structures of the political elite, it did not pay as much attention as it could have done to this major issue of inequality. Human rights and democracy are universal principles that need to be embedded in the politics of revolution and the strategies of political street art. Republican and Loyalist murals in Northern Ireland pay attention to this agenda but only to serve their own cause. It is this lack of solidarity – in the sense of engaging with broader values and issues that unite activists everywhere – that weakens the potential of the works to be read as examples of a critical public pedagogy. However, public interest in and critical attention to Egyptian street art has placed it in a unique position, and has undoubtedly raised the profile of street art in general to a new level of international importance. Publications such as Walls of Freedom (Karl and Hamdy 2014) and Image Politics in the Middle East (Khatib 2012) not only present a comprehensive visual anthology and theorization of the art of revolution but also indicate the depth of interest and the capacity of street art to translate revolutionary realities across cultural and linguistic boundaries. The works and artists

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selected for such publications will have been curated and chosen for their potential to do so. Documentary films such as Jehane Noujaim’s The Square (2013) and Marco Wilms’s Art War (2014) have further enhanced the visibility of street art and secured its place within the revolutionary narrative. The same does not apply to Northern Ireland, where mural painters are deliberately cut adrift from mainstream arts discourse. This has inevitably led to isolation and exclusion and reinforced the existing cultural hegemony in the region. The lack of inclusiveness and the clear separation between Republican and Loyalist narratives have reified the perceived differences between the two communities. Yet having worked with Republican and Loyalist mural painters on what I would term ‘common ground’ projects, I have witnessed at first hand how dialogue through art transforms understandings of self and other and undermines perceptions of difference. The Cairo ‘Mad Graffiti Weekend’ is an example of how street art can act as a social bond in the midst of extremely challenging circumstances and enable new understandings of art as activism. The lesson to be learned is that we must recognize the value of critical dialogue that is inherent in art-making processes. Street art may need leaders, but these leaders must act dialogically if they are to be true agents of change.

Notes 1 2 3

4

www.womenonwalls.com (last accessed 21 March 2015). See www.mosireen.org/?page_id=6 (last accessed 21 March 2015). My conversation with the group was conducted for the most part in English. However, there were moments when some translation from Arabic into English and vice versa had to be provided, mainly when I was talking about technical issues. I remember spending a little time discussing ‘appropriation’ – I wanted the group to ‘get’ that word. When I needed translation, however, I questioned the rendering a number of times to make sure that what I said was being interpreted in the correct manner and context. A few minor adjustments were occasionally needed, but on the whole the conversation proceeded smoothly. Gaber Salah, known as ‘Gika’ or ‘Jika’, was a member of the April 6 youth movement. He was 16 when he was shot during protests on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, in November 2012. No one has yet been charged with his murder.

References Bajec, Alessandra (2014) ‘Can Graffiti Remake Egypt?’, 19 February. Available at www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2014/02/19/can-graffiti-remake-egypt. html (last accessed 21 March 2015). Bourriaud, Nicholas (1998/2002) Relational Aesthetics, trans. by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, Dijon: Les Presses du réel. Charbel, Jano (2011) ‘Mad Graffiti Weekend Challenges Military Tribunals’, Egypt Independent, 22 May. Available at www.egyptindependent.com/news/mad-graffitiweekend-challenges-military-tribunals (last accessed 21 May 2015).

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Elansary, Hannah (2014) ‘Revolutionary Street Art: Complicating the Discourse’, Jadaliyya, 1 September. Available at www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/19033/ revolutionary-street-art_complicating-the-discours (last accessed 22 March 2015). Freire, Paulo (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum Publishing. Giroux, Henry (2004) ‘Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1(1): 59–79. Giroux, Henry (2005) ‘Cultural Studies in Dark Times: Public Pedagogy and the Challenge of Neoliberalism’, Fast Capitalism 1(2). Available at www.fastcapitalism. com (last accessed 31 March 2015). Giroux, Henry (2010) ‘Lessons From Paulo Freire’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 October. Available at www.chronicle.com/article/Lessons-From-Paulo-Freire/ 124910/ (last accessed 22 March 2015). Gröndahl, Mia (2013) Revolution Graffiti: Street Art of the New Egypt, Cairo: American University Press. Jarman, Neil (1998) ‘Painting Landscapes: The Place of Murals in the Symbolic Construction of Urban Space’, in Anthony Buckley (ed.) Symbols in Northern Ireland, Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, 81–97. Karl, Don and Basma Hamdy (2014) Walls of Freedom, Berlin: From Here to Fame Publishing. Keller, Dana (2013) ‘Socially Engaged Practice as Public Pedagogy’. Available at www.academia.edu/5654246/Socially_Engaged_Practice_as_Public_Pedagogy (last accessed 22 March 2015). Khatib, Lina (2012) Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle, London: I.B.Tauris. Lewisohn, Cedar (2008) Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution, London: Tate Publishing. Rolston, Bill (1995) Drawing Support 2: Murals of War and Peace, Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications. Soueif, Ahdaf (2011) ‘Image of Unknown Woman Beaten by Egypt’s Military Echoes around World’, Guardian, 18 December. Available at www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2011/dec/18/egypt-military-beating-female-protester-tahrirsquare (last accessed 22 March 2015).

15 Pharaonic street art The challenge of translation Soraya Morayef

This essay engages with the work of Alaa Awad, a prolific Egyptian street artist who drew graffiti on the walls around Tahrir Square between 2011 and 2013 using ancient Egyptian styles and themes. In replicating pharaonic murals in a space that was literally the epicentre of the political uprising in Egypt, Awad provided a quintessentially Egyptian narrative of street protests, yet one that was also exotic and indecipherable to Egyptian spectators and passers-by, given his use of hieroglyphic codes and references to ancient Egyptian symbolism. Having reproduced temple murals on the street, Awad arguably decontextualized an art form used to support the status quo and glorify the ruling pharaoh. His murals spoke from the perspective of the Egyptian people living through their uprisings, triumphs and bereavement. He had, as one scholar put it, shaken up everything Egyptologists have been studying for centuries. Yet, by using hieroglyphics and indecipherable symbols, was Awad really speaking to the Egyptian street, or had he created a barrier between his audience and his work? Was his street art revolutionizing the concept of pharaonic art or was he merely feeding into what one scholar described as an orientalized, tourist-centric vision of Egypt? Had his message been lost or did it evoke new meanings in translation?

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Based in Cairo, Soraya Morayef is an Egyptian writer and journalist who has documented the evolution of post-revolutionary street art in Cairo via her blog suzeeinthecity, one of the Daily Beast’s Six Best Egypt bloggers to follow.1 She has produced four documentary shorts on street art in the Middle East for MOCATV and her photos have been published in the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post and the Smithsonian Magazine. Soraya has given lectures on Egyptian street art in Dubai, London, Hamburg, Rabat, Casablanca, Cairo and Port Said, and counts antisexual harassment campaigning, human rights, street children and social development among the causes for which she advocates heavily. In 2013, I gave a talk at the Petrie Museum in London to a room full of Egyptology students and academics. I wanted to show them the work of Alaa Awad, a 33-year-old Egyptian street artist who had painted murals of pharaonic and ancient Egyptian art around the area of Tahrir Square, Cairo, during the political protests of 2011 and 2012. As I showed them a series of murals depicting women in fierce, coloured robes walking to a battle (Figure 15.1), or a row of bearded men kneeling before the throne of a mouse being fanned by a cat (Figure 15.4), I could sense the room temperature changing. I am sure their first thoughts were ‘How is any of this relevant to us?’ But then they began to recognize that these paintings were in fact almost exact replicas of murals found in the ancient Egyptian temples and tombs they had studied. Except that these artworks had been produced just one year earlier, in Cairo, amidst the tumultuous events of the Egyptian revolution. Why had these murals reappeared? What was Awad trying to tell us? How were these images – the faces of kings, cats and gods – connected to the unfolding events in Egypt today? These are all open questions that I can

Figure 15.1 Mural of women heading to battle by Alaa Awad, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo. Photograph by Soraya Morayef (February 2012).

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only offer my own interpretations to try to address. They are also ultimately questions of translation, and retranslation.

The artist and his project I chose to write about Awad because it seems to me that he put a lot more thought into the symbolism, relevance and context of his murals than many of his street art contemporaries, making them somewhat more resistant to translation. He chose to paint shapes that were immediately recognizable as part of our historical identity as Egyptians, yet simultaneously completely alien – at least to those of us who had not studied ancient Egypt and were not familiar with temple names such as Ramose, Ramesseum and Khonsu, or the symbolism of black lotuses and green goddesses, or the Book of the Dead’s weighing of the heart. A classically trained artist born in Mansoura, Awad lived on the West Bank of Luxor in Upper Egypt, where he taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts alongside fellow street artist Ammar Abo Bakr. Both artists had training and skills that gave them a significant advantage over the many street artists I had seen emerge, and yet they were polar opposites. In February 2012, Awad and Abo Bakr took an eight-hour train from Luxor to join the protests on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in Cairo. Seventy-five young men had died in a football stampede in Port Said that night,2 and both artists had come to fight and paint. They spent 50 days painting on the walls of the American University in Cairo and the neighbouring Lycée School; these walls provided a popular canvas for many graffiti artists at the time, especially because of their proximity to Tahrir Square. The outcome was a 100-metre-long mural: Abo Bakr painted martyrs with wings, while Awad flirted with tombs, scales, feathers and suckling women. His work was bizarre, ethereal and somehow strangely discomforting. While Abo Bakr created a community of artists, friends and fans throughout the 50 days he spent working on his street murals, Awad chose to break away from the group and work on his pharaonic murals alone. While Abo Bakr created direct, confrontational and easily dissected murals, Awad painted decontextualized forms and faces that neither resembled nor related to contemporary Egyptians aesthetically or culturally. Ebony Coletu, Assistant Professor at the Department of English in Pennsylvania State University, befriended Awad during her stint as a professor at the American University in Cairo. She often painted alongside him on the university walls in 2012 and analysed his work with her class. She spoke to me in 2013 about the value of his murals: He was very open about his influences and references; he was always challenging himself to do something different. And I think he was a little bit more reflective about what he was doing: he was thinking intellectually about what this work could be and where it came from. And he was genuinely interested in other people’s thoughts.

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Dabashi and Chelkowski (2000) argue that a revolution sees itself in the mirror of the images it creates. This concept can be applied to the palimpsest of poignant and powerful street art that appeared on the walls around Tahrir Square over three years: images of suffering, perseverance and injustice, revolutionary slogans, hashtags, poetry and Koranic verses. Many of these images conveyed the narrative of the Egyptian uprising in almost chronological order. Abo Bakr and his peers reflected the revolution in their work along these lines, but Awad’s work was different. His art revealed a quieter and more intellectual battle. His themes were tackled subtly through visual codes and an ancient language. In The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East, Charles Tripp defines street art as a form of resistance in its unique power to move and persuade the masses: “When art is used against the established order, in symbolic reversals that form part of a project of resistance, it shows all the intimate familiarity with power that has been apparent in other spheres” (2013:306). Watching him paint his figures on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in early 2012, I was struck by the fluidity of Awad’s paintings – everything seemed perfectly measured and controlled, yet the unblinking eyes and vaguely smiling cats seemed eerie and almost lifelike to me. Tripp believes that there is significant power in reversing the very images used by the state as “evidence and instrument of [its] dominion” into a channel of subversion against the regime. At the same time, the everyday can be transformed into something strange and disconcerting, jolting people’s acceptance of the world “the way it is” (2013:308). Awad took familiar images that surrounded Egyptians – on advertising billboards, one-pound notes, restaurant menus and schoolbook covers – and placed them in a different, contemporary context, surrounded by broken glass and shrapnel-filled walls that made the murals look so out of place, they demanded that we stop, stare and think about their relevance. It was – to me at least – the equivalent of placing a gold-framed fresco by Michelangelo in the middle of a nuclear war zone, bringing two disconnected worlds together into a surreal co-existence. Awad wanted people to talk; he made work that he hoped people would think and argue about; and those clever enough to recognize his shapes as forms of dissent and resistance felt pleasure in being let in on his secret. You could see the subtlety of his themes in the naked, dark-haired women holding shields as they climbed a ladder, in the crying faces of mothers begging the star-filled skies (Figure 15.2), and in the black panthers roaming a battlefield filled with crushed and bloodied bodies writhing like snakes. This is evident especially if you compare his drawings with others that depicted ‘realistic’ scenes of battles that were being directly experienced on the streets of Cairo at the time. Awad’s representations were not completely accurate. He changed tiny details, such as giving the row of women in Figure 15.1 batons to protect themselves, transforming the pharaonic mural from one originally depicting mourners to one of armed and grieving women, heading away from

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Figure 15.2 Mural of women in mourning accompanied by a black panther, by Alaa Awad, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo. Photograph by Soraya Morayef (February 2012).

Tahrir and towards the Ministry of Interior on Bab El Louk Street. This was a strategic decision: Awad had painted this after the police-aided massacre of the Ahli Ultras at the Port Said match on 1 February 2012, and at a point when protestors filled the streets and attempted to fight their way towards the Ministry of Interior building, the aorta of the Egyptian Police. Rather than superimposing the same pharaonic images as is on a contemporary wall, he added a layer of meaning to them, as Egyptologist and American University in Cairo professor Marwa Ayad put it, managing “a full integration and internalization of the content . . . [with an] added depth of suffering and anguish” (cited in Durham 2013). In another mural, he painted the goddess Hathor, a goddess of love and motherhood, suckling a young and sickly boy next to scales that carried a feather on one scale and a heart being placed on the other (Figure 15.3). This is the weighing of the heart from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, where the jackal-headed god Anubis weighs the heart of the deceased against a feather of ‘Ma’at’, the goddess of truth, justice and morality. If the heart weighed heavier, the deceased is condemned to non-existence. But Awad explained to Mona Abaza (2012b) that the goddess Hathor represented Suzanne Mubarak, wife of the former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, whose sickly sweet name ‘Mama Suzanne’ had been spoon-fed to generations of Egyptian children via the nationalistic media. This changed the whole mural; yet no one would have known this if Awad had not actually explained it himself. Awad told Abaza of his frustration about the lack of justice in Egypt, its hypocrisy and corruption. At the time of the interview, families of the dead football fans had yet to see their demands for retribution being met (nor were they to see justice served in the years that followed). Not a single person had been brought to trial in the case. The Mubarak family’s appearance next

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Figure 15.3 Mural depicting Ma’at from the Book of the Dead and the goddess Hathor, by Alaa Awad, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo. Photograph by Soraya Morayef (March 2012).

to the scales of the afterlife could be interpreted as Awad’s commentary on the double standards of the justice system in Egypt. Indeed, even at the time of writing, Hosni Mubarak has been sentenced to no more than three years for plundering millions, while peaceful protestors and journalists have been sentenced to up to ten years, merely for opposing the state. Awad spoke of identity often. You could see it in his work. His pride and patriotism were reflected in his relentless need to paint larger-than-life replicas of his ancestors. He wanted to remind the street of what the real, original Egyptians were like: flowing hair, naked heads, fierce and tall; not religious zealots crouching before a tyrant. The mural from the tomb of Sobekhotep (eighteenth dynasty) got Awad into particular trouble. In painting a row of bald and bearded men praying to and making offerings to a mouse on the throne (Figures 15.4 and 15.5), Awad seemed to be mocking religious zealots and members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi parties. His timing was perfect; he painted the mural in late 2012, at a time when religious parties were gaining political power, a situation that generated distrust and frustration among secular protestors. As he painted, I remember a crowd of men – mostly bald and bearded, wearing the traditional galabeyas, often associated with fundamentalist Muslims – surrounding him, alternating between protesting, pleading and assaulting him. Awad kept his cool and pointed out that he was merely depicting a mural from an ancient tomb as a tribute to our ancient Egyptian history. Baffled, his critics eventually left. He may have won that battle, but he didn’t necessarily communicate his meaning to the viewer. This mural needed a title or a description on a card. Without Awad to explain it, or to explain the weighing of the heart or the suckling Mama Suzanne murals, none of this would have made sense. Awad created barriers between his murals and his audience through his use of ancient symbols. The only people who could possibly decipher his work were Egyptologists, academics familiar with

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Figure 15.4 First part of a mural replica from the tomb of Sobekhotep, by Alaa Awad, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo. Photograph by Soraya Morayef (March 2012).

Figure 15.5 Second part of a mural replica depicting the tomb of Sobekhotep, by Alaa Awad, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo. Photograph by Soraya Morayef (2012).

ancient Egyptian art and hieroglyphics. Not me, not the bearded men, not the average Egyptian walking to work past the murals every morning. Awad spoke with a composed dignity. Whenever we met by his ladder on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, he was usually surrounded by Western reporters and film-makers, documenting him in action and cooing audibly at his

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work. He never lost his cool, never swore in front of me, and often would turn his head to exhale his cigarette smoke away from me. A former army conscript, Awad wouldn’t speak a word against the conscripts that he once stood next to. He found fault in the leaders of the country: religious, political and military, they were all corrupt. His great enemy was not the state or the religious fanatics, not even the police that he threw rocks at between painting through tear gas, but ‘foreign interference’. I heard this term repeatedly throughout our conversations on the street, in coffee shops, on the plane, in foreign countries where he travelled to speak of his work and paint more murals. Awad once showed me his mural of Tutmoses III (Figure 15.6), a king towering over his captives and holding them by their hair, as he raises his other arm to smite them. He wrote on the painting in Arabic: ‘I am the Guardian of the Eastern Gates, the herders shall not pass again’. The threat is from the East, he tells me, our borders are weak, and our very existence is being threatened from the East. He talks in riddles, like a faded history book. Over coffee and cigarettes, he peppers his chit chat with anecdotes about ancient Egypt, black lotuses and oxen, mourners’ hands covered in mud and candles being raised to the skies, and the Salafists he would stand up to whenever they tried to stop him from painting. Then he asks me to pass the sugar. Yet always we return to the fear and paranoia, the neurosis in his agile mind about foreign forces, be they Israel or the American University in Cairo, the colonialists or the orientalists. In mid 2012, the Scientific Institute in Tahrir caught fire during a protest and burned down, destroying hundreds of precious manuscripts, including an original copy of Description de l’Égypte, a seminal book that provided the basis for much of our current knowledge about ancient Egypt, but also perpetuated French colonialist thinking as well as the idea that Western

Figure 15.6 Mural of Tutmoses III, by Alaa Awad, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo. Photograph by Soraya Morayef (December 2012).

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Figure 15.7 Mural of Luxor landscape, by Alaa Awad, Kasr El Eini Street, Cairo. Photograph by Soraya Morayef (March 2012).

countries had superior knowledge about Egypt’s heritage than Egyptians themselves (Lau 2012–2013). Before the Institute burned down, few had heard of its existence. The building was shut to the Egyptian public, and thus its books, supposedly the property of the people, were completely inaccessible. On the corner of the charred building, a military blockade had been erected. Awad painted a landscape mural of the West Bank of Luxor on the new wall, with two-dimensional silhouettes hidden in the shade (Figure 15.7). On the side closest to the building he wrote: ‫ ﺩﻋﻨﺎ ﻧﺮﻱ ﺿﻴﺎء ﺍﻟﻨﻬﺎﺭ‬/ ‫ ﻣﻔﻴﺶ ﺣﺎﺟﺔ ﺍﺳﻤﻬﺎ ﻭﺻﻒ ﻣﺼﺮ‬/ ‘There is no such thing as Description de l’Égypte. Let us see the light’. Whether the last sentence was a plea for the walls to be pulled down or for the books to see the light of day, I don’t know. What I am certain of is that Awad rejected the book’s orientalism and the very concept of ‘superior knowledge’ being the preserve of the West. He certainly didn’t mourn the loss of the book, and believed that the murals he painted would restore a sense of agency in people and reconnect them to their history (Lau 2012–2013). I don’t know how he did it or whether he consciously planned it, but at dusk, when the street lamps were switched on, golden light spilled through the cracks in the wall and Luxor’s landscapes and its silhouettes came to life.

Resisting and problematizing translation I read everything written about Awad, showed his paintings to my Egyptologist friends, asked him to explain a new mural whenever he finished it, and only

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then did the paintings make sense to me. It’s almost as if he was teasing the viewer throughout, making visuals that pleased aesthetically and superficially but resisted translation, except on his own terms, when he was prepared to provide one. He created codes that no one could read without a book, a proficiency in hieroglyphics or a master’s in ancient Egyptian history. Was he elitist, orientalist, or just smarter than us all? Abaza (2012a) described the murals of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, including Awad’s work, as a “fascinating fusion between a variety of cultural artistic traditions that portray Egypt’s rich history . . . [and] reinvent, adapt to and adopt universal schools of painting”. As one of the most prolific street artists during 2011 and 2012, Awad’s clever, ambiguous art was truly unique: as the only artist to focus entirely on ancient Egyptian art, he reinvented old, forgotten texts and murals and inserted them in a contemporary context, adapting them with subtle nuances into a new historical narrative, one that reconnects people meaningfully with their past and gives them “a sense of their own agency as living history” (Lau 2012–2013:64). He excited my audience at the Petrie Museum because he had followed the same format of painting as the ancient Egyptians once did; painting stiff figures in almost perfect symmetry on straight lines to create a perfectly controlled painting that seemed to be held by a frame – as opposed to the freehand graffiti and almost volatile spurts of colour on the walls around him in Mohamed Mahmoud Street and elsewhere in Cairo. In his battle scenes on the corners of Kasr El Eini and Yousef El Guindy Street in downtown Cairo, he also painted without registers, i.e. without straight lines, another painting method used by ancient Egyptians to specifically evoke chaos, battles and hunting scenes (Calvert, n.d.). He painted kings and gods on the same scale to represent their power and holiness, but he changed a subtle detail: by painting the mourning women (Figure 15.2) the same size as the gods and kings in other murals on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, he gave these women the same power and hierarchy as deities and rulers, in an attempt to pay tribute to their spirit and bravery. It was not just what Awad painted that I found inspiring; it was the whole context of his performance: the fact that he and Abo Bakr would only step away from their walls to eat, sleep or throw rocks at the front line of street protests gave his paintings much more significance, a meaning that resisted translation because it exceeded the boundaries of the text, the image. Tear gas choked chests, and eyes stung, yet Awad painted; it was his way of paying his debt to the revolution, he once told me. Neil Jarman argues that murals redefine public space “as politicised place and can thereby help to reclaim it for the community” (1998, cited in Elansary 2014); Awad and Abo Bakr reappropriated the walls of Mohamed Mahmoud and continued to reclaim them over two years whenever their work was defaced by municipal workers. The quality of their work and their constant presence on the streets won them a venerability and popularity reflected in the fact that other artists would paint around their murals – not over them.

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Awad’s simple yet terrific strategy of transferring art from a means of supporting the status quo and a form of propaganda intended to glorify the ruling pharaoh to a street performance that subverts the established art form and empowers anti-regime protests in modern-day Egypt was practically a rewriting, a retranslation of our past. By decontextualizing the murals and changing subtle but important details, he took something away from the state – something that had upheld the sanctity of the state – and gave it back to the people. But did they get it? Did it translate, even within the same cultural environment?

Concluding reflections on art and translation There I was, talking to a room full of expert Egyptologists, surrounded by books and artefacts in glass casings that had been removed from my country’s temples and studied around the world. I spoke to them about pharaonic temples and icons, explaining things that they already knew but I had needed several hours of research to decipher. I could not shake the uneasy feeling that I was not an authority on the subject on which I was lecturing – on what I was attempting to translate for them. I could talk about the street; I could explain how Awad thought because I had spoken to him; but I had never studied flying centaurs or registers, panthers or Ma’at. The irony that I, as an Egyptian, was showing codes I did not understand to a group of foreign experts inside a space full of acquired antiquities, was not lost on me, and brought a new complexity to the concept of translation and the translator that I had not considered before. I started writing about street art in Cairo in 2011 because it simply fascinated me. What started as a simple blog3 of photos and texts explaining the emergence of graffiti in post-25 January Egypt turned into a full-time preoccupation, one that took me driving through the backstreets of Cairo at 3 a.m. in search of new walls, and trawling social media for news of artists being arrested. I befriended many of them. I tagged along as they worked, watched as they were interviewed, and listened when they complained that their work had been stolen or defaced and their words taken out of context. In some way, I thought of myself as a translator – one who turned images into text, gave background to walls, and explained to an English-speaking world why a massive mural of a Koranic verse, the face of an angel-winged man, or a gas mask covering the face of Nefertiti mattered. In contextualizing and translating these walls, in sharing what I had heard on the street and how people had reacted to the art, I felt I was doing some, albeit minor, service to someone, somewhere. It often worried me how words and images can be taken out of context, misunderstood and misconstrued. Because I wrote consistently about street art on my blog, I would often find my analysis appearing elsewhere as a fact, despite my insistence that it was my personal opinion. And that terrified me. The word ‘expert’ had been flung around so overzealously in Egypt by that

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time, it seemed that anyone with a degree or an accent or a hat was an authority on Egypt, a primary source of information, a translator of momentous events. The word ‘expert’ was handed out so carelessly that one day I found myself giving a talk at the Petrie Museum, trying to explain an ancient art piece I did not fully understand to an audience that didn’t know what had happened the night Awad had started painting: the crying, the tear gas and the gunshots as police stormed the field hospital held in a mosque across from Mohamed Mahmoud Street during the Port Said protests, stepping on dying bodies with their boots. The difference between an expert and me was that I was too close to the subject to talk without bias. I could not remove the murals from their contexts, whereas these anthropologists and historians were comparing them to the ancient contexts they were familiar with. The study of ancient Egypt and pharaonic history is a very structured discipline, one where context is everything. It is difficult to appreciate and analyse the art without taking into consideration the walls on which it was made, the pharaoh commissioning the work, the location, size and structure of the building and the events of the time. “It’s nothing we’ve seen before,” one attendee at the Petrie Museum talk told me: “Egyptologists have studied these symbols and paintings for hundreds of years, but always within the context of the temples. He’s completely decontextualized them, and that really worries me. I don’t know what to think now.” Another attendee emailed to ask for Awad’s sources of information: “It would be interesting to know the sources [he] uses and whether it matters to him which sources he uses: the topic of authenticity is a key issue in archaeology and museums,” he wrote: “It would be great to have photos of his work on the walls of the Petrie one day.” That evening at the Petrie Museum, one particular comment struck me. As we discussed Awad’s work and gathered around the projector to scrutinize my photographs, some suggested his work was profoundly political, subtle in its subversiveness and impenetrable to those unable to translate his symbols. One man – an Egyptian living in London who was more cynical than the Egyptology students – asked: “What if Alaa Awad is simply feeding the touristic stereotype of Egypt? Perhaps he made these paintings because this is how the world has typecast us [as ancient pharaohs] and he wanted to cater to that.” This suggestion troubled me. What if my friendship with Awad had given too much weight to his art in my own mind? What if the scores of academic papers I had read and the fascinated journalists surrounding him had fed into this notion that there was more to the murals than a very well-made replica of the art we see on postcards and aprons in duty-free shops? Had the simplicity of Awad’s work been lost in my own attempt at translation? For all the pages I could write about Awad and all the sources I could dig up analysing and praising his work, one glaring issue remains: far too much of the discourse on Egypt’s street art has been based on the artists’ thoughts and academic analysis, with little attention paid to actually proving the

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claims made about the impact of this art form on the Egyptian audience. Elansary (2014) noted this discrepancy after conducting a sample survey of Egyptians to verify the claims made about Egyptian street art, in which she found no consensus and no evidence that these claims – including the ones made in this paper – could be substantiated. The reason I find the word ‘expert’ distasteful is that it gives me a responsibility I do not want to assume. In the days I spent photographing graffiti and speaking to artists such as Awad, it never crossed my mind to record the different reactions to his art, count them and then divide them by square metre population of the area. As an observer, I was able to appreciate and share the street’s reaction; I felt part of it and I lived it. To quantify that would mean to take a step back from Awad and his peers and observe from an anthropologist’s perspective. I had no interest in being distanced from the context; it would have rendered the art much less evocative. Though some of the questions posed in this paper remain unanswered, I identified the cause of my discomfort at having spoken at Petrie in Lau’s paper on Description de l’Égypte and the Scientific Institute (2012– 2013), in which she argued that such establishments excluded the Egyptian people from their own heritage and gave currency to a concept of colonialist superiority that – to this day – I still experience whenever I visit a foreign museum exhibiting Egyptian antiquities. Perhaps one of the factors that made Awad so exciting to the Egyptologists, academics and myself is the threat he posed to the notion of expertise, including the expertise of the translator. He was a native who studied and identified with ancient Egyptian art and history, he knew how to manipulate and translate ancient texts and symbols into awe-inspiring art, and he studied historical interpretations such as Description de l’Égypte, rejecting them as colonialist and flawed. So he wrote his own version, and hoped that others would read, understand, and if necessary translate it – as best they can – for those who can’t interpret it for themselves.

Notes 1 2

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www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/30/six-best-egypt-bloggers-to-follow. html (last accessed 17 July 2015). See Jonathan Rashad’s account of these events and the background to what is generally referred to as ‘the Port Said massacre’ on Stories of Change. Available at http://storiesofchange.worldpressphoto.org/stories/the-port-said-massacre (last accessed 18 December 2014). The account reflects a widely held view that the police deliberately allowed the Ahli Club Ultras to be slaughtered, possibly by paid thugs. See www.suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com (last accessed 18 December 2014).

References Abaza, Mona (2012a) ‘The Buraqs of Tahrir’, Jadaliyya, 27 May. Available at www. jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5725/the-buraqs-of-tahrir (last accessed 10 November 2014).

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Abaza, Mona (2012b) ‘The Art of Narrating the Egyptian Revolution: An Interview with Alaa Awad’, Jadaliyya. Available at www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5134/ the-art-of-narrating-the-egyptian-revolution_an-in (last accessed 17 July 2015). Calvert, Amy (n.d.) ‘Egyptian Art’, Khan Academy. Available at www.khanacademy. org/test-prep/ap-art-history/ancient-mediterranean-AP/ancient-egypt-AP/a/egyptianart (last accessed 17 July 2015). Coletu, Ebony (2013) Audio recording of interview conducted by the author. Transcript available. Dabashi, Hamid (with Peter Chelkowski) (2000) Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran, New York: New York University. Durham, Kate (2013) ‘Tomb of Tahrir’, Egypt Today, 26 September. Available at www.egypttoday.com/blog/2013/09/26/tomb-of-tahrir/ (last accessed 17 December 2014). Elansary, Hannah (2014) ‘Revolutionary Street Art: Complicating the Discourse’, Jadaliyya, 1 September. Available at www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/19033/ revolutionary-street-art_complicating-the-discours (last accessed 1 November 2014). Lau, Lisa (2012–2013) ‘The Murals of Mohammad Mahmoud Street: Reclaiming Narratives of Living History for the Egyptian People’, WR: Journal of the CAS Writing Program 5. Available at www.bu.edu/writingprogram/journal/pastissues/issue-5/lau/ (last accessed 29 October 2014). Tripp, Charles (2013) The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

16 Translating Egypt’s political cartoons Jonathan Guyer

Political cartoons present a daily snapshot of the gut reactions to current political and social issues. With each Egyptian newspaper publishing about five cartoons daily – and some papers up to a dozen – a range of perspectives are conveyed through punchy imagery and text penned in Egyptian colloquial Arabic. Since the 2011 uprising, a new cartoon renaissance has swept Egypt, with a variety of new comic zines and exhibitions, among other media. This chapter reflects critically on the translation of Arabic political cartoons, both in broad and narrow terms. The questions I address include the following: How does one translate humour and satire? How does one convey symbols that are rooted in local contexts (and thus illegible to outside audiences)? How does one communicate the immediacy of a political cartoon’s punchline without diminishing from its semantic meaning? The word karikatir, which can be defined as either ‘political cartoon’ or ‘caricature’, is used to frame my interrogation of the multiple meanings of each illustration. Interpreting ‘translation’ broadly, I examine the utility of cartoons as a mechanism for communicating Egyptian politics to an international readership. In terms of interlingual translation issues, I explore political cartoons as selfcontained mini-texts packed with homegrown symbols as well as cultural creations that engage with music, film and other pop culture genres.

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Jonathan Guyer is an Institute of Current World Affairs Fellow focusing on the intersection of art, mass media and satire in the Middle East and North Africa. He has been living and working in Egypt since 2012, where he is Senior Editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, a policy journal published by the American University in Cairo. From 2012 to 2013, he served as a Fulbright Fellow researching political cartoons in Egypt. A frequent analyst on Public Radio International and France 24, he has contributed to Guernica, the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, New York Magazine, Nieman Reports, the Guardian, Jadaliyya and others. His research on Egyptian satire has been cited by the Associated Press, CNN, The Economist, New Statesman, Reuters and TIME, as well as a variety of international news outlets. A cartoonist himself, he blogs about Arabic comics and caricature at Oum Cartoon. In Egyptian Arabic, ‫ﻛﺎﺭﻳﻜﺎﺗﻴﺮ‬/karikatir can signify a caricature, political cartoon or comic, trespassing a variety of illustrated forms. Borrowed from the Italian caricatura, the word suggests exaggeration,1 a picture that is literally ‘overloaded’. That karikatir is a loan word also indicates the dynamic role that cartoons play, seizing on the international and applying it to the local. The word’s meanings and etymology point to a larger question: can a political cartoon be translated? The answer, of course, is yes. In what follows, I sketch out some lessons learned and challenges encountered while interpreting Arabic cartoons for a global audience. Cartoons are burdened with multiple meanings, backhanded jokes, wordplays and slang. Translating political cartoons on my blog and in essays, I strive to communicate a cartoon’s punch without diminishing from its semantic meaning. On the surface, the major impediment to the translation of Arabic political cartoons into English is that puns and local references are pesky. How does one convey the cartoonist’s intended meaning? Whatever approach the translator takes, the key is to serve as mediator as well as linguistic acrobat. The cartoon itself becomes a springboard for discussing the cartoonist’s engagement with the news and with society. Translation, in the narrow sense, is difficult for another reason. Cartoonists themselves are in a sense performing a particular type of translation: they are turning the day’s news into a series of words and symbols. “I think cartoons are ideas translated into drawings”, says Hany Shams, the political cartoonist for the widely circulated, semi-official Egyptian newspaper Akhbar Al-Youm.2 The translator of political cartoons is not just decoding a local witticism but also communicating an artist’s interpretation of the world. Political cartoons are compelling to translate because they are small texts that provide big insights into the issues of the moment. The immediacy of a cartoon lends itself to timely translation, which is why I write a first draft of a translation on Twitter, tweak it for a blog post, and ultimately reflect more generally on the cartoon in an essay. The medium of cartoons is well

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suited for dissemination via social media. Because cartoons are ephemeral commentaries on the mood of the day – intended for consumption today, not tomorrow – they offer a lens for translating Egypt’s political machinations to an international audience.

Translating Egypt For the past decade or more, Western media has offered a monochrome view of the Middle East and North Africa, sensationalizing terrorism and conflict while overlooking more complex narratives. Whether reporting on the Muslim Brotherhood or ISIS, news outlets latch on to strife, projecting fault lines without asking critical questions. The region’s significant cultural and social currents are scarcely discussed. The study of Arabic political cartoons holds the potential to change this equation. 3 Cartoons encapsulate the good-humoured or dark-humoured reactions of Egyptians to the cacophony of political events, conflict and violence.4 Cartoons offer analysis and criticism of actors and institutions often absent from Western media, a deep dive into local concerns that go beyond news reportage. They capture the persistence and resilience of satirists in the face of repression. The cartoonists themselves offer an imprecise allegory of the movements and tensions at play in Egypt: revolutionaries and conservatives, secularists and Islamists, women and men. Reading the day’s cartoons and translating them over the past few years allowed me to investigate the acquiescence of state newspaper satirists to the regime and the disappearance of Muslim Brotherhood cartoons from news-stands. They also allowed me to identify the emergence of a new golden age of political caricature and comics, with the proliferation of alt-comix zines. My entry point has been the changing red lines – what can or cannot be published on a given day. These limitations are fluid, evolving and responsive to new political events. How far a cartoonist can go in critiquing the regime or other power player is intimately tied to the cartoonist’s nerve – which is to say, in the era of online publishing, cartoonists, rather than editors, are the gatekeepers. When faced with censorship, cartoonists can turn to social media to disseminate their controversial works. The red lines have less to do with laws and more to do with how far a cartoonist is willing to go to critique the powerful. Rather than focus on which cartoons an editor cuts or rejects, the red lines pertain to self-censorship, the artist’s deliberations and reservations while at the drawing board.5 There are stresses and risks involved. Consider the difficulty of attacking the regime through visual symbols while myriad opponents and journalists are incarcerated. Sometimes the masked messages of cartoons are subtle, but just as often the cartoon constitutes a direct attack on the state. Nevertheless, Egyptian cartoonists persevere. The burst of creativity at the current, tense period of my writing raises a range of questions. Why are art and humour such effective methods for political agitation? Why are regimes

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afraid of satire? Can political cartoonists go further than others in holding leaders accountable?6 These are some of the provocations that translators must keep in mind as they sort through the day’s papers. Cartoonists are also in conversation with artists of the past. In addition to the day’s papers, I translate cartoons from 50 or more years ago that address relevant topics in the news. By reviving and republishing vintage cartoons, from great Egyptian cartoonists such as Ahmed Hegazi (1936–2011) and Salah Jaheen (1930–1986) to virtually unknown illustrators, I have been able to study the development of the art form. And in the current context of repression, subversive old drawings shine a torch on the limitations of today. For instance, in the 1950s drawings by Jaheen showing naked men and women – cartoons that might be published in Playboy – were serialized in state newspapers. Likewise, I have come across old comic advertisements for Stella beer and illustrations of drunk sheikhs – none of which would be published in the current environment. By following political cartoons in the daily press, I have been able to track discontent as well as other societal trends. Cartoons are not the only way to translate Egypt broadly to an international audience. All cultural producers operate in a space that connects creative expression and current events, technology and press freedoms, as they negotiate blurry red lines. Other media and cultural outlets – theatre and film, novels and fine art, photography and viral memes – also portray the angst (or obedience) of citizens. But given that cartoons are daily features in the press, they record a timeline of unfolding events. Long before the variety of feature stories on energy shortages in Egypt appeared in Western media, local cartoonists were making fun of government incompetence with regard to frequent power cuts. The quickest route to understanding the day’s punchline, then, is to translate Egypt through cartoons and cartoonists. Therein lies a trap. Deciphering political cartoons purely for instrumental purposes will certainly lead to misunderstanding. Cartoons are an art form above all; to simply extract the political commentary from a cartoon, with the utilitarian eye of a political analyst, is to miss the point entirely. I endeavour to read cartoons in dialogue with a country’s artistic and political fluxes, to see cartoons as crossing artificial boundaries erected between the realms of art and politics.

Who translates Why are artists as well as Western organizations engaging in the translation of Arabic cartoons? Surely the answer lies in translation in the broad sense, the use of cartoons as a vehicle for grasping the thicket of news coming out of the Middle East. Most interesting is that a number of artists have begun to translate their own works to a wide audience, beyond Arabic speakers. Notable among this contingent is the Sudanese cartoonist Khalid Albaih, who draws in

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both English and Arabic. The primary source for his latest ‘Khartoons’, as he calls them (a play on Khartoum, capital of Sudan), is Instagram and Facebook. Sometimes the translation is awkward, but his thousands of active followers and fans do not seem to mind. In Egypt, artists recognize the importance of translating their own works, too. On the independent news site Mada Masr, the prolific cartoonist Andeel translates his own works, which are then copy-edited by the editorial team. More and more cartoonists across the Middle East are using social media as a platform for translating their illustrations. On the other side of the spectrum are Western organizations that offer translations of Arabic cartoons in an attempt to advance particular political agendas. Rather than exploring the dialectical nature of political cartoons, they privilege certain perspectives and downplay others. Such translations tell us more about the institutions’ biases than the cartoons at hand. Consider, for instance, the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED), a Washington-based advocacy outfit. In their daily email newsletter on Egypt, a ‘Political Cartoon of the Day’ is occasionally included. POMED follows a purely instrumental approach to translation, denying the comic art form its due respect and instead using it exclusively as a way to explain Egypt to a broad audience. There are several issues with this. First, the cartoon seems like an afterthought, the dessert after reading the vegetables of the day’s news – even though a political cartoon is as meaty as any other report. Second, the artists and the publication are often unattributed, ignoring the cartoon’s context and denying recognition to the artist. Third, the translations are rushed, sometimes so literal or sloppy that the joke is lost altogether. More egregious, however, is the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Cherry-picking, MEMRI only broadcasts anti-American or anti-Semitic views expressed in the Middle East’s mass media.7 As it paints an incredibly skewed portrait of a diverse media ecosystem, MEMRI produces publications and videos that say more about the organization’s dogmatic world view than what is actually happening in Arab states. MEMRI has published several reports on Arabic political cartoons, which are data dumps rather than studies. Dozens of cartoons are translated from Arabic media without any description of the artists or publications in question; their analysts do not conduct close readings of the cartoons. The report titled ‘Bin Laden’s Death Depicted in Cartoons’ (Shamni 2011), for example, is just that, leaving the reader wondering whether caricatures of Osama Bin Laden or US President Barack Obama in the Arabic press are common. The same goes for the 2011 report, ‘The Middle East Crisis Part VII – Cartoons on Wave of Protest in Arab World’, which features over 20 translated cartoons without any critical perspective or content analysis.8 In these online publications, the translator fails to fulfil her broad purview: the need to explain and explore. The aesthetics and linguistics of cartoons are totally ignored. Furthermore, MEMRI and POMED only translate cartoons from

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sources available online, monitoring what they can from their armchairs. In both cases, the translation of cartoons obfuscates the complexities of the Middle East and North Africa. Translation in itself is insufficient; cartoons demand examination and explanation. If cartoons hold the potential to deepen policymakers’ understanding of the Middle East, then groups like POMED and MEMRI are failing to facilitate that. So long as Washington sees cartoons narrowly as a vehicle for understanding Egypt, and nothing more, then it will in fact know very little about the Middle East.

Translating the verbal content of cartoons There is no such thing as a correct or perfect translation. The translator of cartoons is an artist, requiring a diverse toolkit and a clever wit. The translation of a funny cartoon must be funny. Even the tersest political cartoon is an intertextual headache, containing homegrown symbols as well as local, pan-Arab and global cultural threads. Most cartoons engage with music, film and pop culture. To read a cartoon one must be fluent in the hit songs of today and yesteryear, the movies and serials that are screening on TVs across the nation, as well as the Western characters that have been reappropriated (for the previous generations it was Tom and Jerry; for contemporary illustrators, SpongeBob). Given the multitude of considerations embedded in the translation process, one should always engage experts and friends, and if possible the cartoonist himself or herself. The more people involved in a translation – the more back and forth – the better the outcome will be, which is why posting a translation on Twitter and receiving crowd-sourced feedback can be productive. A literal translation will never suffice. It is crucial to delve into dialects when translating comics. Most Egyptian political cartoons are written in street vernacular, set in local scenes from downtown corners to uptown bedrooms. The formal language of politics does seep into word bubbles and captions, especially as cartoonists criticize high politics and elites. Still, the most common scene in the Egyptian political cartoon is the ahwa, or street café. Variation in handwriting poses another challenge for translators of cartoons, as each illustrator cultivates his or her own font, which to the untrained eye looks either like chicken scratch or elegant (but illegible) calligraphy. There’s no shortcut to learning each cartoonist’s unique script except for practice. When parsing a cartoon’s semantic meaning, I turn to reliable resources such as the Badawi Egyptian–English Dictionary, which is filled with much of the slang that echoes in the cartoon world. For thorny translations, I reference the Hans Wehr Dictionary as well as digital lexicons and corpora, notably the online resources Aratools and ariCorpus. Still, there are words that cannot be found in any reference volume. A plethora of new

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slang has emerged from the 2011 uprising, words drenched with political connotations, with shifting definitions.9 In a satirical article, ‘Lexicon of a Revolution’s Insults’, the cartoonist Andeel notes (Andeel 2014): After the January 25 revolution, Egypt’s political sphere was suddenly cracked wide open for stormy debates about concepts that swung between the super shallow and predictable to the extremely deep and philosophical. . . . One of the most widely impactful phenomena born during this period is labeling. Due to this labeling, many have complained that opinions are not being discussed as much as the individuals behind them are. Indeed cartoonists often label, and the translator must elucidate and interrogate those labels. Andeel goes on to translate words that frequently appear in the Egyptian media, from feloul (‘remnants of the old regime’) to ‘revolutionaries’. His mini-dictionary is a useful snapshot for those interested in translating material that features the Egyptian dialect, but there are scores more words that appear just as regularly and must be investigated. When translating a cartoon, one has to consider offering options of how to understand a specific cartoonist’s use of a given word, rather than attempting a universal meaning. For Andeel, an independent illustrator who has fought censorship, the word ‘revolutionary’ will have a different meaning from that used by his counterparts at semi-official newspapers. Another effective way to translate a cartoon is to cross-reference it with the artist’s portfolio as well as the newspaper’s archive. I maintain an extensive digital collection, along with binders of newspaper clippings, to check and double-check the reappearance of slang words and symbols. This is useful for tracking trends in the scenario and dialogue. Close readers will notice when a cartoonist repurposes a cartoon from last year or last month, adding a new character or punchline. Along with the translation, it is essential to provide background information on the cartoonist. To understand a political illustration in a vacuum – that is, without getting to know the creator and his or her context – is to misinterpret the art form. The typical political cartoonist produces hundreds of cartoons a year; some of their daily copy are exhibitions of sheer brilliance while others are simply daily grind. The translator is not only interpreting the text in the narrow sense but also interpreting how each cartoon fits into an artist’s broader corpus and project.

Challenging translations To illustrate the challenges of translating political cartoons, let’s look at several cases where a literal translation would not be effective. The philological considerations made during the translation process should not be papered over; we need to discuss them as part of the translation.

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Figure 16.1 ‘Militant on psychiatric couch’, by Anwar.

Take the ‘Militant on psychiatric couch’ cartoon (Figure 16.1). Anwar, a 27-year-old cartoonist for the privately owned Al-Masry Al-Youm, drew the masked goon sitting with his therapist in August 2014. The militant says: “Then, every time I threaten a guy and tell him that I’m from the Helwan Armed Brigades he just starts laughing and walks away, doc.” The shrink chuckles, “Which brigade, again?” When I translated this for my blog, I offered a close rendering of Anwar’s gag below the cartoon itself. Then I went on to provide an analogy for American readers: The Helwan Armed Brigades would intimidate a Cairene as much as the Staten Island Liberation Organization or the Coney Island Defense Front would startle a New Yorker. If you said you were from the Yonkers Militia, everyone would just laugh – right? Cartoonists love to put their characters on the psychiatric couch. In booking a session for a terrorist – a goon, a masked thug, the other and enemy – the cartoonist engages in a kind of symbolic violence against the character. Isn’t that why Tony Soprano was such a breakthrough character? We could finally see the don at a vulnerable moment.10

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I acknowledge the potential for obscuring the message of a cartoon by drawing too heavily on analogies. However, how else can you make the reader realize how funny it is? Analogies offer some utility in terms of (broadly) translating a cartoon’s punchline. Puns in the Arabic language are difficult to translate; in fact, most are untranslatable. In explaining a pun, many a translator has offered extraneous explanations that overtake the laugh line. Similarly, a verbatim translation is prone to wordiness, which diminishes from the cartoon’s efficacy. In such cases, it can be most effective to provide a literal translation and then explain in a short essay why one has done so, what’s missing, and what the original Arabic holds that the English cannot. When a draconian protest law was passed in October 2013, Al-Masry Al-Youm illustrator Makhlouf used a pun that was strictly untranslatable to make fun of the law in a cartoon published on his blog11 (Figure 16.2). A youth in a striped shirt intones, ‘So can I pretend to protest?’ The words for ‘pretend’ and ‘protest’ are derived from the same trilateral root in Arabic. Makhlouf’s most famous, recurring character is a demonstrator holding a protest sign, so there is also an element of intertexuality involved. However one translates this tricky pun, Makhlouf’s message is stark: the ban on public demonstrations limits one’s agency in the world of the real and the pretend. When the Egyptian state announced a constitutional referendum in winter 2013/2014, following the military takeover, support for the plebiscite was widespread. Very few cartoonists criticized the state’s blitz in advance of the first presidential elections following President Mohamed Morsi’s ouster in July 2013. Walid Taher used a pun to mock this pro-government fervour in a cartoon published in the privately owned Al-Shorouk newspaper. A childishly penned character says ‫‘( ﻧﻌﻢ ﻟﻠﻜﺴﺘﻮﺭ‬Yes to flannel’), which would mean very little to the Western reader if no context were given. The word for ‘flannel’ (‫ﻛﺴﺘﻮﺭ‬/kostur) in Arabic rhymes with the word for ‘constitution’ (‫ﺩﺳﺘﻮﺭ‬/dostur). The cartoonist’s snide comment mocking the regime is so silly, he got away with it. Taher moonlights as an author of children’s books, which seems to inform his tactics.

Figure 16.2 ‘Can I pretend to protest?!’ by Makhlouf.

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I found Taher’s cartoon reminiscent of a 2005 cartoon by Amro Selim, published in the privately owned newspaper Al-Dostur, whose lines are similarly sloppy. In Selim’s cartoon, a policeman rushes into a bedroom as a man and a woman throw up their hands, alarmed. ‫ ﻣﻴﻦ ﻓﻴﻜﻢ ﺍﻟﻠﻲ ﻛﺎﻥ ﺑﻴﻘﻮﻝ ﻣﻦ ﺷﻮﻳﺔ ﻛﻔﺎﻳﺔ‬.. ‫ﻛﺒﺴﺔ‬ (‘Busted. Which one of you just said enough?’), says the officer. The pun here is significant; the word for ‘enough’ – ‫ ﻛﻔﺎﻳﺔ‬/Kefaya in Arabic – is also the unofficial name for the Egyptian Movement for Change, a protoanti-Mubarak group. Selim’s pun criticizes the state’s intrusiveness; perhaps the vulgar sex joke provided some cover for the even more insurrectionary political message. Cartoonists are always in conversation with each other (as well as with their previous works). Rather than posting the translation of a single cartoon as a standalone, it is worth incorporating a range of cartoons on the same subject as part of a translation project. Packaging related cartoons together can provide a deeper understanding of the moment. When celebrity comedian Bassem Youssef was censored from Egyptian television, I rounded up the most provocative cartoons for and against the satirist; this method forces the reader to consider which cartoons are rebellious and which are establishment, which are outliers and which are the norm.12 Similarly, after Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was inaugurated as President of Egypt in November 2014, I compiled caricatures of him. I discovered that once he had retired from the armed forces and was elected to public office, the red lines surrounding the prohibition of his caricature had loosened slightly. Looking at the highly supportive caricatures of al-Sisi from the state-run newspapers Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar made it clear how rebellious a cartoon of the president was for the privately run Al-Masry Al-Youm daily. Cartoonist Makhlouf depicted a stubby President Abdel Fattah alSisi saying ‫‘( ﺣﺎﻥ ﻭﻗﺖ ﺍﻟﻌﻤﻞ‬It’s time for work’). Below the text was a snarky disclaimer in the cartoonist’s hand: ‫ ﻫﻮ ﻟﻠﺘﻮﺛﻴﻖ ﻓﻘﻂ‬،‫*ﻫﺬﺍ ﺍﻟﻜﺎﺭﻳﻜﺘﻴﺮ ﻟﻴﺲ ﻫﺪﻓﻪ ﺍﻟﺘﺄﻳﻴﺪ ﺍﻭ ﺍﻟﻨﻘﺪ‬ *‫ﺣﺘﻲ ﻻ ﻳﺘﺨﺎﺫﻝ ﺃﻱ ﻁﺮﻑ ﻣﻨّﺎ ﻋﻦ ﺩﻭﺭﻩ‬ This cartoon is neither to criticize nor support [al-Sisi]. It is just to document, so that none of us underachieve in our roles. At that moment, Makhlouf was going as far as any cartoonist could in criticizing the new president. Had this cartoon been translated by itself, the punchline might have seemed tame, if not earnest.13

Translating tropes It is not just translation of dialect that demands meticulousness; translating tropes and metaphors can be even more demanding. A whole dictionary of Egyptian tropes could be written. To personify Egypt as a woman as the

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majority of cartoonists do, for instance, is to be in conversation with a century of representations of Egypt as a woman. Let me take this opportunity to describe how tropes evolve, how they pop up, and whether there is some universality across the political spectrum. To understand how quickly symbols change, one need only look at representations of the Muslim Brotherhood in political cartoons. From 2011 to mid 2013, many cartoonists antagonized the Islamist movement by drawing them as sheep. This reflected a widespread perception of the Brothers as a community of undeviating conformity and capitalized on the fact that the Arabic word for ‘Brotherhood’ (‫ﺍﺧﻮﺍﻥ‬/ikhwaan) rhymes with the word for ‘sheep’ (‫ ﺧﺮﻓﺎﻥ‬/khirfaan). After the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhoodaffiliated President Mohamed Morsi, in July 2013, cartoonists largely scrapped the sheep metaphor for something much more incendiary. The Brothers were depicted as terrorists, armed to the teeth, with the long beards characteristic of religious fundamentalists. While both metaphors de-humanized the Brotherhood, the terrorist trope was more dangerous, justifying the lethal crackdown on the movement.14 Cartoonists thus set the tone before the Brotherhood was officially declared a terrorist organization by the state. The translator must study the common symbols of a society while acknowledging that many symbols are ephemeral – workarounds that only last as long as the cartoonist needs them. As presidential candidate Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was campaigning, caricatures of the general were exceptionally rare in the press. So when al-Sisi appeared in viral social media photos wearing a tracksuit, riding a Peugeot bike, this was a golden opportunity for cartoonists. In a cartoon entitled ‫‘( ﺳﺒﺎﻕ ﺍﻟﺮﺋﺎﺳﺔ‬The Presidential Race’), published in the privately owned Al-Shorouk newspaper, Walid Taher drew a bike and a tank racing to signify the military’s control over the presidency (Figure 16.3).15 The bicycle was a savvy workaround to criticize al-Sisi; though its reproach of the regime was veiled, this was one of the few critical

Figure 16.3 ‘The Presidential Race’, by Walid Taher.

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cartoons that appeared in the press in advance of the election. If published a year later, however, that metaphor would have been lost on most readers. Competing political actors will use the same symbols to convey very different messages. In December 2012, the Gaza-based illustrator Umayya Joha published a cartoon in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice newspaper in advance of the constitutional referendum. In it, a broom, labelled ‘Constitution’, sweeps up the ‘remnants’ of the Mubarak regime. For Joha, the Morsi-backed constitution was a clean-up crew, purging the country of the old regime. A year later, in the state’s flagship newspaper, Al-Ahram, pro-regime cartoonist Farag Hassan drew in support of the new constitution put forward by al-Sisi. He showed the ‘2014 Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt’ sweeping away ‘chaos’. The jumble of chaotic folks being swept up is almost certainly a reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, which illustrators for Al-Ahram have commonly depicted as terrorists. The cartoonist even labels the dustbin ‘garbage’ – just in case the message is not clear. There are other metaphors to depict sweeping change; that two opposing cartoonists would both use brooms cannot be chalked up to plagiarism. Does the job of cartooning for a large audience demand that an artist sink to the lowest common denominator of legible symbols?16

Translation as criticism Once a translator has toyed around with and perfected a cartoon’s translation, he or she then has to decide where the outcome, the English text in this case, can or should be published. Considerations as simple as whether the English translation goes above or below the illustration, or in place of the original Arabic, affect how a reader consumes a cartoon. Ideally, from my perspective, the translation would be published in a secondary position – below the cartoon, to its side, or in the text that follows. Even without the translation, many cartoons are legible due to the exaggerations at play. The reader should see the cartoon, question it and engage with it, prior to hearing the translator’s voice. Nevertheless, the translator has a crucial role to play in the dissemination of Arabic political cartoons. In part, this is because the political cartoon is saturated with layers of meaning and local tropes. Furthermore, the translator is the ultimate decision maker, choosing which cartoons will be shared with a new audience. With thousands upon thousands of political cartoons appearing in the Egyptian press annually, how does one curate such an expansive body of satirical work? There is no single answer except for the translator to be transparent about the choices he or she makes. I have argued in this essay that the medium of comics, in a variety of illustrated iterations, provides a panorama of views on any given issue, an alternative to Western news outlets that are heavily focused on security issues. Yet, cartoons in and of themselves are not a panacea to ignorance or xenophobia. This is why the aggregation of Arabic cartoons by some

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American organizations misses the point, presenting a caricature of the Middle East. The essence of translation is not just rendering foreign words into English. Political cartoons are at once an art form and a political commentary, intimately related to broader media and pop culture ecosystems, and of course to the individuals who create and share them. Any narrow act of translation is deeply linked to the broader translation – how Egypt, or any other place, is presented to a global audience. As cartoonists begin to translate their own works online – and collaborate with international comic networks – it is tempting to think of the translator’s role as waning. This is especially the case when a cartoon engages the reader with familiar imagery, transcending the language in which it is written. The essence of a cartoon is its engagement with the reader, pushing him or her to rethink biases. Such a cartoon forces the reader to complete the loop. When seven cartoonists for an independent Egyptian paper each used their daily frame to publish military boots crushing pencils, in the fall of 2011, their message was all too clear. Some cartoons are so effective that they do not need a translation in the narrow sense. Such cartoons still need critics to study them, to read them closely and comparatively. Like other forms of fine art – paintings, photographs, and more – deciphering tropes is insufficient. Translation (in the broad sense) is, in a word, criticism. To use cartoons as a prism for understanding Egypt, one must first interview the artists and investigate the art scene; one must dive deeply into the colloquial dialect; one must purchase newspapers daily and study which articles and advertisements the cartoons appear alongside. The translator of political cartoons should go far beyond the limited purview of a bilingual interpreter. The task at hand, like the cartoon itself, trespasses the intersection of art, media and satire – not to mention politics. The translator must engage in dialogue with the cartoon as well as the cartoonist.

Notes 1 Oxford Dictionaries, available at www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/ caricature (last accessed 8 January 2015). 2 Hany Shams, interview with the author, November 2013. 3 For an example of Western media’s obsession with Al-Qaeda and ignorance of Arabic pop culture, see ‘Countering the Terror-Punditry Complex’, Oum Cartoon, 23 October 2014. Available at www.oumcartoon.tumblr.com/post/ 100742501976/al-qaeda-and-isis-versus-arabic-pop-culture (last accessed 8 January 2015). 4 For example, an Egyptian cartoonist has drawn gags about ISIS’s beheadings, exemplifying black humour (Guyer 2015). 5 I expand this argument in Guyer (2013a). 6 The daily considerations of two Egyptian cartoonists are examined in Guyer (2014). 7 As one veteran journalist wrote, “the stories selected by Memri for translation follow a familiar pattern: either they reflect badly on the character of Arabs or they in some way further the political agenda of Israel” (Whitaker 2002).

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8 MEMRI Special Dispatch No.3550, 1 February 2011. Available at www.memri. org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/4963.htm (last accessed 8 January 2015). 9 There are even curse words that have gained new cachet since 2011. See for instance, ‘Egypt’s ‘A7a’ Moment’, Oum Cartoon, 9 September 2013. Available at www.oumcartoon.tumblr.com/post/60741836704/egypts-a7a-moment-arabiccartoons-have (last accessed 8 January 2015). 10 ‘Helwan Armed Brigades’, Oum Cartoon, 18 August 2014. Available at www. oumcartoon.tumblr.com/post/95086700546/egypt-terrorist-shrink-couch-cartoon (last accessed 8 January 2015). 11 www.makhlouf.tumblr.com/ (last accessed 6 February 2015). 12 ‘Round-Up of Reactions from Egyptian Cartoonists to CBC’s Cancellation of The Program’, Oum Cartoon, 3 November 2013. Available at www.oumcartoon. tumblr.com/post/65896910113/heres-a-round-up-of-reactions-from-egyptian (last accessed 8 January 2015). 13 For a selection of post-election caricatures of al-Sisi, see: ‘Winner Takes All’, Oum Cartoon, 5 June 2014. Available at www.oumcartoon.tumblr.com/post/87888172571/ winner-takes-all-here-is-a-selection-of-cartoons (last accessed 8 January 2015). 14 See my slideshow depicting this rapid change of trope (Guyer 2013b). 15 ‘The Presidential Race’, Oum Cartoon, 1 April 2014. Available at www.oumcartoon. tumblr.com/post/81386427728/egypt-peugeot-presidential-track-suit-race (last accessed 9 January 2015). 16 I first discussed these cartoons in the post ‘The Universality of Symbols’, Oum Cartoon, 8 January 2014. Available at www.oumcartoon.tumblr.com/post/ 72656007423/on-the-universality-of-symbols-morsi-supporters (last accessed 9 January 2015).

References Andeel (2014) ‘Lexicon of a Revolution’s Insults’, Mada Masr, 3 February. Available at www.madamasr.com/sections/culture/lexicon-revolutions-insults (last accessed 8 January 2015). Guyer, Jonathan (2013a) ‘Under Morsi, Red Lines Gone Gray’, Jadaliyya, 24 September. Available at www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/14293/under-morsi-redlines-gone-gray (last accessed 8 January 2015). Guyer, Jonathan (2013b) ‘Egypt’s Fault Lines, and its Cartoons’, New Yorker, 9 July. Available at www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/egypts-fault-lines-and-itscartoons (last accessed 9 January 2015). Guyer, Jonathan (2014) ‘Gallows Humor: Political Satire in Sisi’s Egypt’, Guernica, 15 May. Available at www.guernicamag.com/features/gallows-humor-politicalsatire-in-sisis-egypt/ (last accessed 8 January 2015). Guyer, Jonathan (2015) ‘Drawing While the Hand Trembles’, Foreign Policy, 14 January. Available at: www.foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/14/drawing-while-thehand-trembles-charlie-hebdo-cartoonist-paris/ (last accessed 25 January 2015). Shamni, N. (2011) ‘Bin Laden’s Death Depicted in Cartoons’, MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis Series Report No. 686, 4 May. Available at www.memri.org/report/ en/0/0/0/0/0/0/5252.htm (last accessed 8 January 2015). Whitaker, Brian (2002) ‘Selective Memri’, Guardian, 12 August. Available at www. theguardian.com/world/2002/aug/12/worlddispatch.brianwhitaker (last accessed 8 January 2015).

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Part V

Solidarity, translation and the politics of the margin

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17 Interview with Philip Rizk

Editor’s introduction I chose to interview Philip Rizk for this collection because I consider him one of the most critical and articulate voices to emerge out of the vigour and ensuing trauma of post-2011 Egypt. He is as uninstitutionalized as almost anyone can be in a modern society, and perhaps it is his positioning outside most mainstream institutions, including academia, that gives him a unique vantage point, one that allows him to do more justice to the complexity and passion of the revolutionary landscape in Egypt than most. Importantly, he is able to do so in English, the language in which the global public is continually subjected to an avalanche of ‘expert’ analyses and streamlined narratives, and in which ‘native’ commentators who support such narratives are prioritized and the many powerful and critical voices available in Arabic filtered out. This interview was conducted by email, over a period of several turbulent months, starting at the end of September 2014 and concluding at the beginning of April 2015, less than a month before submitting the manuscript to the publisher. Like the events and issues it engages with, it started – and continued – from a position of uncertainty and instability. As in Khalid Abdalla’s contribution to this volume, the uncertainty is not glossed over, nor is it a source of despair; its acknowledgement is what allows voices like Philip’s to remain critical and open to other views and possibilities. As every day brought in new developments, competing narratives, unexpected perspectives on ‘old’ stories in Egypt, Philip revised and tweaked his answers, and may want to revise them again in the future. For now, this is a record of one activist’s reflections, at a specific point in time, on a broad range of issues, including the relationship and tension between the local and the global, the centre and the margin, the politics of language and articulation, and what forms of ‘deep translation’ and solidarity we need to continue the battle against our oppressors.

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Philip Rizk and Mona Baker

Philip Rizk is a film-maker and writer based in Cairo, Egypt. He studied philosophy and anthropology and has been working with video since 2009. His first film is the short documentary This Palestinian Life (2009). In 2010, Rizk completed the short film series Sturm, a twochannel articulation that explores rural and industrial ruin in Egypt. Together with Jasmina Metwaly, he formed the video collective Intifadat Intifadat in 2011, producing the series of videos Remarking January 25. Since 2011 Rizk has been a member of the Mosireen video collective. Metwaly and Rizk’s film Land Without is in long-term post-production. In 2015, Rizk and Metwaly released their first feature film, Out on the Street, in which they engage with performativity and theatre in a work with non-professional actors exploring the social and political landscape in Egypt leading up to the 25 January revolt. Out on the Street premiered at the Berlinale, and a work around the film will be presented at the Venice Biennale 2015. Rizk’s texts have appeared in various collected volumes, the Journal of Human Geography and on jadaliyya.com and roarmag.org.

Mona: Unlike most members of Mosireen, you have taken particular interest in the subtitling aspect of the collective very early on – you initiated the mailing list for subtitlers, drafted guidelines of subtitling, and engaged with subtitlers regularly on the discussion list. You had also arranged for videos produced by Intifadat Intifadat to be subtitled before you joined Mosireen. From your experience, what do you think subtitling contributes to collectives such as Mosireen and Intifadat Intifadat? How does it fit into the political project? Philip: It is difficult to answer questions such as these when a collective is for the most part in stasis. I joined Mosireen after being part of Intifadat Intifadat; both were conceived to be deeply intertwined with the revolution, which itself is going through a hiatus, and accordingly we are not what we

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once were. I would like to broaden your question for a moment by thinking through the act of translation in relation to the work of these two collectives before addressing subtitling directly. One way I would sum up what Mosireen and Intifadat Intifadat are about is translation. We came together to try to translate the spirit of the revolt; in a sense, we sought to translate the street through images, in the hope of breeding anger, in the hope of forcing the audience to face the reality of the brutality of the regime, in the hope of instigating revolt. This goes for most of the collectives’ work, but if I speak particularly of my own involvement, one of the important intentions was to dislodge the middle-class milieu of activists, of whom the collectives were a part, from the position of the main protagonists of revolt. As you well know, the narrative of 25 January that has gained the most traction amongst elites both in and outside Egypt is that the revolt was flamed by an Internet-savvy middle-class milieu; this narrative would later clearly reveal itself to be part of the strategy of the counterrevolution’s undermining of the revolution. Intifadat Intifadat, which was already active during the first 18 days of the revolution, was exactly about this: the interlocutors of the revolt had to be those who carried it through, not those who were already made to represent it. After all, as Max Weber wrote years ago, representation is a structure of domination. Here, the act of translating the positions and opinions of an underclass was of the essence, in order to counter a much more dominant telling of who the protagonists of this revolt were. I remember around March or April of 2011 filming a march protesting a draft law that sought to ban protest, a law that of course was implemented at the end of 2013 and is the reason why so many are behind bars today. After the march, we gathered in Tahrir Square and I was filming a working-class man who was enraged about the scope of the law. As he referenced the revolution’s key motivation, ‫ ﻋﺪﺍﻟﺔ ﺍﺟﺘﻤﺎﻋﻴﺔ‬،‫ ﺣﺮﻳﺔ‬،‫ﻋﻴﺶ‬/ 3eish, 7ureyya, 3adala igtema3eyya (‘bread, freedom, social justice’), a very shrill voice of a woman off-frame cut him off, yelling, “No, no, this is a revolution for ‫[ ﻛﺮﺍﻣﺔ ﺍﻧﺴﺎﻧﻴﺔ‬/karama insaneyya (human dignity)]”. The man stopped speaking immediately out of respect. I turned to find a clearly middle-class woman in her late 30s trying to convince me to stop filming because this man didn’t know what he was talking about. This was a very direct experience of what was happening on a much wider scale in competition over the narrative of the revolution. I often think of the main protagonists of protest though a trope of ‘the street’, which of course is a very subjective, abstract category that remains constantly in flux. Without a consistent, clear position, the majority of protagonists of revolt are difficult to represent, to categorize, to generalize in the manner that is the very essence of metanarratives like those of the mainstream press or authorities. The protagonists of ‘the street’ are the unseen actors with enough wrath, and often with not enough to lose, to risk their lives in an attempt to oppose a regime of coloniality with full force. Most of us who make up Mosireen, on the other hand, are the privileged few; speaking

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multiple languages, with more rights in a society with few to speak of. Most of us were politicized before 2011, thus we were amongst this crowd of wrath but always set apart in a vital sense. Of course the chroniclers of metanarratives are unlikely to put it in just such terms, and here clearly one of the difficulties, one of the dangers of the position we have chosen for ourselves, emerges. We place ourselves in a position of the translator, a position we cannot fully escape. Through a structure that is collective and for the most part nameless, we attempt to subvert some of the potential violence that this act of image-making and dissemination entails, but we cannot escape it completely. I want to mention one video that had a powerful impact at a particular moment, a very brief interview with a protestor called Aboudi, a member of the Ultras. On one night of the Parliament sit-in, in December 2011, soldiers nearly clobbered Aboudi to death. One Mosireen member managed to get past hospital security and filmed him soaked in blood on his hospital bed within an hour of the occurrence (Figure 17.1). The telling of this act helped to bring about a turning point in the sequence of events in the days that followed, by revealing to many that the military men were lying when they claimed to be on the side of the protestors. Our aim was not to present breaking news; our aim was to oppose the lies of those in power. Similar to the Kazeboon campaign that built on the idea of Mosireen’s street screenings very successfully, the intention of such videos and screenings was to translate the reality of the counter-revolution, a reality that was completely at odds with the narratives promoted by the establishment at the time. This is why for me it is so important to clearly distinguish between Mosireen and other forms of media: Mosireen is a ‘media collective’, not in the sense of ‘press’ or ‘journalism’ but in the sense of using multiple audiovisual media to try and communicate the protest of the street. I have to point out that while these were always our aspirations, on many occasions we failed to reach the size of audience we hoped to engage, or we failed to reach the kind of audience we desired. At other times our videos

Figure 17.1 Testimony of Aboudi, video by Mosireen, 16 December 2011.1

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may have actually prevented people from going to the street, as it was just as easy to go on with your daily routine and at the end of it watch Mosireen’s summary of that day’s protests. It is hard to assess how much we really succeeded in reaching our aims. One example of this is that we tried very hard to circumvent our dependence on the Internet as the primary method of distribution of our material. Thus during street screenings for example we tried very hard to find a way to streamline the distribution of our videos through Bluetooth from phone to phone. At some point I was in contact with developers of such Bluetooth software that would have allowed us to achieve a much broader, faster Bluetooth distribution. The researchers were still in too early a development phase to provide us with what we needed. Another software we purchased failed us miserably. At some street screenings almost the entire audience would line up afterwards to receive a free CD with a collection of our videos. We encouraged online viewers to download videos onto their phones or for public or private screenings and distribute them to friends. We were never content with the focus on an Internet audience; the Internet after all is not accessible to the majority of Egyptians, and certainly not to those we most sought to engage with, but these obstacles often remained insurmountable. In certain periods our videos often screened on TV; this gave us access to a larger audience but involved all the pitfalls of following television guidelines and placed us at the whims of the editorial line of commercial TV stations. As far as I know, after 30 June 2013 not a single TV station screened any of our new videos. TV was never an outlet we could rely on. If we were going to translate the street to the street then we needed to find ways to access different constituencies. We failed in big ways to do that. A secondary aim of translation, which is just as important as the first, was to connect with a global community of revolt. At key moments Mosireen played an important role in broadening the reach of solidarity protests around the world, which helped increase the pressure on the regime in particular instances. Of course there were many ways of informing outsiders of the events that were occurring across Egypt; our videos were only one of these. Here the role of subtitling, building on our effort to translate the street to a local audience, came into play. As a rule we always translated into English. Later on, especially as the translation team started growing and became one of the most effective aspects of our video-making process, we managed often to translate quickly into multiple languages. Especially in times of ebb of protests in Egypt, we sought out connections with revolts around the world. I recall connecting with protestors in Greece and Spain, often leading to an exchange of solidarity letters. On one occasion we were put in contact with members of the self-governed tile factory Zanon in Argentina, after they had watched a Mosireen video, with Spanish subtitles, on the strike of tile workers in the Ceramica Cleopatra Company in Suez. On one occasion a series of Intifadat Intifadat videos was screened in a public square in Mexico City to passers-by, and the artist who organized

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the screening handed out CDs of the films, encouraging people to organize home screenings. Through images, we were translating some of the realities on the ground in the Egyptian revolt; these images could move across continents, and on some rare occasions inspire action. A third reason for translation, again in the form of subtitling, involved subtitling in the other direction – not from Arabic into other languages, but from other languages into Arabic. We sought to identify this moment of revolt as part of a larger protest that connected us with people and movements around the world. This meant that on occasion we translated videos into Arabic: at times short activist videos like ours and later longer feature films, which we screened in the Mosireen space in an attempt to inspire and connect our struggles to protest elsewhere. A special example of the impact of this form of translation involved a group of workers who occupied their factory – the IFFCO plant, again in Suez. We were hosted by the occupying workers to screen Ernesto Ardito and Virna Molina’s film Corazón de Fábrica, which was subtitled by the Mosireen translation group. Before screening the film, a translated message of solidarity from the Zanon workers I mentioned above was read to the group. The IFFCO workers at the time were contemplating strategies to intensify their protest and were deeply moved by the Argentinian workers’ struggle. Looking back at the years since 2011, I have come to the conclusion that revolt in the twenty-first century cannot happen in a vacuum or be disconnected from the global political status quo. This means that translating our own revolts and those of others and seeking inspiration from and connecting with those struggles are vital to our struggles’ very longevity. If the world’s superpowers politically support one dictator after another and supply the Egyptian police and military with training and weapons, if software developers from Silicon Valley make part of their profits by supplying the regimes that lock us up and torture us with the tools they need to spy on us, then how can we speak of a strictly Egyptian revolt? Unless we frustrate these political alliances, stop the weapons shipments and shut down the corporations that supply our overlords with the tools that crush us, the counter-revolution will continue to be armed to the teeth, while we take care of our dead. In Egypt there was a short-lived campaign by dock workers in Suez to block a tear gas shipment as the supplies of the Egyptian police seemed to be running out, but the repression against them was too strong, the risk-taking by colleagues too limited. There was also a campaign to try to link these efforts in Egypt to similar campaigns against weapons shipments to the Israeli and Bahraini regimes, but again the traction was too limited, the fronts of our battle were too many. The lesson to be learned is that we have to recognize the dimensions of our battle, which certainly cross national boundaries and de facto make them obsolete. In light of this, translation becomes a vital tool to link people together and wipe out the boundaries of coloniality created to contain our common struggles.

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Mona: Your response to my first question confirms an impression that I developed in an earlier conversation and from following your work in general, namely that the kind of activism you have been involved in privileges the margin as a space from which a radical challenge to the status quo can be initiated and sustained, a site of resistance full of possibility, one in which you can imagine and create radical alternatives, a new world. You have a long-standing interest in workers, particularly precarious workers, who often feature in your work and have already featured prominently in our conversation so far. You comment on your blog (Tabulagaza) that “these people change our world” – referring to workers; not intellectuals, artists or the professional class, those with relative power and capital in society. You have also so far privileged filming outside the centre: outside Cairo (in Mehalla, Idku, Suez) and even outside Tahrir Square (in side streets, Imbaba, Tura) during the period when Tahrir was the centre of the revolution. How does this location in the social and geographical margin impact filmic language? Can you speak to and about dominance in the same language (whether verbal or filmic), in the same voice you use to speak to and about the underclass, the oppressed? Can you reflect on the implications of this location for subtitling/translation? Philip: I am uncomfortable speaking about the margin as a whole, in a generalized manner. When I reference the margin it is usually as a space, one which hosts a community out of which a certain revolutionary tendency has arisen, but not one that summarizes a community. I cannot speak about the margin in toto. The space of the margin in my view comprises a majority of the population, so it is in a way actually speaking more to whom it excludes, rather than to whom it includes. It excludes people like myself, in a milieu of privilege. I am not saying that the revolution was only comprised of this margin; there were many from the non-margins revolting. What I am saying is that without the margins we would have continued to be a small group protesting on the steps of the Journalists’ Syndicate, where protests used to take place on a regular basis under the Mubarak regime. Only once that space of protest opened up to include the wider population was there potential for intifada, uprising. This dynamic is quite consistent if you look at Egypt’s recent past: 1977, 1989, 2008 – these are moments when people from the margins revolted. First I need to say that in part this emphasis is brought about by my own presence in that space, though I am a privileged member of society to be speaking on behalf of others. With my height, my slightly accented Arabic and my obvious dual national origin, I am always a stranger in the midst of that ‘outside’, that ‘margin’, which has made it very often difficult to be there. I had to learn not only the language spoken in the margin, but the body language, the non-spoken language, though by no means would I claim to have excelled at it. It took time to learn the rules of those different margins – of course the margin is not all the same, not an undifferentiated

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space. This also meant that I was an easy target at times for those who did not want me there. And it means that, except on rare occasions, I do not enter such a community without a guide known to the community who can make my presence there, and especially the camera, welcome. It is precisely also being the stranger, the mutt, the neither–nor that places me outside. This weakness of position allows me in, in a different way. The margin allows for a rich filmic language; it is a visual landscape often unfamiliar to the familiar viewer. Whether it is the inner makings of an industrial workspace or the 3ashwa2yya (underclass neighbourhood), 2 you are taking the viewer on a journey. But this journey itself is a luxury, for who is watching these sorts of images online but the privileged few with time to spare? The majority of work of both collectives I have been involved with used a largely uniform filmic language. This is a problem, a shortcoming that we tried to move beyond but struggled to do so. For various reasons I have grown discontented with the particular documentary format that we used. For one, unless you have the means to reach new audiences as the Kazeboon campaign did very effectively, by setting up screenings in the street, the format itself brackets the particular type of audience you can access. Further, with the classic documentary mode there is a tendency to delimit yourself to the realm of the given, rather than moving into a realm of the possible, the realm of the imaginary. This is one of the main reasons I am no longer working on such videos, and along with Jasmina Metwaly after many years of work have recently completed a very different kind of project, a feature-length film called Out on the Street. When I first met with one of the participants in Out on the Street, a project that embodies this approach of working with people from the margins, one of Ahmed’s first observations was that he would have to use the language of his neighbourhood, the language of the street. I couldn’t have been happier to hear this. Though at times I would need translations and explanations of expressions Ahmed and the other protagonists used, this was exactly the type of element that Jasmina and I were looking for in the project: to hear about the margins not only through my filmic expression of the margin, but through the language of its inhabitants, their perception not only of the margins but of the centre. That is of the essence in Out on the Street, a film that seeks to engage the imaginary, that includes documentary footage but moves beyond it by using performance in an attempt to engage another sphere of reality. How some of these verbal and non-verbal dimensions of the film will be translated is a big task that requires a lot of space for negotiation. Translation involved a very long negotiation process with two professional translators, Jasmina, our producer and conversations with the protagonists themselves. We also had as an aid a researcher who spent years living and doing her PhD work in one of the neighbourhoods where many of the participants live. At the end of the day, translation of the verbal content of the film will

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not suffice. I believe the image does not need translation, the audience will read it; often a non-Arabic-speaking viewer will read what an Arabic speaker cannot understand. In some ways, the image is the language of the margins. Like so many of the stories told in the videos of Mosireen and Intifadat Intifadat, I feel the film tells a global story that crosses boundaries of (verbal and filmic) language. To the best of our abilities we will emphasize the utility of verbal language to help traverse these boundaries, but at some point the language of the body, of the eyes and of collective movement and the cinematic will do the work that verbal language cannot. Mona: Is it possible in your view to imagine alternative modes of filmmaking that acknowledge subtitling as an integral part of the semiotics of film, and as deeply embroiled in the politics of language and place? Philip: I don’t think one needs to speak of alternative modes of film-making but instead think of the integration of a radical politics into all levels of the process itself. In my view this is really a matter of priorities. Film-makers often prioritize narrative over much else; often we prioritize image over sound while filming; and rarely do we think about the dimension of subtitling, which ought to be a key element of the editing process. I think it is due to the nature of the rush of Mosireen and Intifadat Intifadat videos, the speed with which they had to be produced and released, that we didn’t prioritize this element enough. Too often I think we were already thinking about the next video that needed to be worked on while we were finalizing the current one. Without the involvement of the amazing subtitling team that eventually took that entire responsibility on themselves I think we would still have put out a lot of videos without subtitles or with very poor translations. I think some of the articles in this volume, such as the essay by Salma El Tarzi, explore the lost potential in ignoring this element quite effectively. When we ignore the element of subtitling, we lose the radical potential for a global audience. Mona: As you have already pointed out, the margin is not an undifferentiated or uniform space. How do you address the challenge of incorporating and doing justice to the multiple voices and experiences of people who inhabit this complex space? And how important is it in your view for subtitles to enact a political principle such as respect for diversity – perhaps by capturing nuances of register, dialect and idiolect? Do you ever reflect on how such linguistic features contribute to your project, or do you assume that the visual element (how someone looks, what they wear, etc.) and the content of what they say (rather than how they say it) will more or less deliver the political message and communicate the commitment to diversity? Philip: I just go with the flow, honestly. I try to speak to men and women, young and old, those with clear articulation of events as well as those who

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Figure 17.2 Non-stop Security Attacks in Simon Bolivar Square, video by Mosireen, 28 November 2012.

are more disarrayed in their discourse. I feel sometimes the discourse of diversity can be overbearing. I always try to film with the margins within the margins; in most cases these are women and children or those perceived by their peers to be less articulate. They are not always easy to access. I usually work alongside another person, often a woman, who might have access to people I am not allowed to talk to. On many occasions a crowd will automatically provide us with someone who is well spoken, someone older, someone with better education, a natural leader in their midst. Often we would spend quite some time engaging that person and then start seeking out others. At the end of the day, a lot of the selection happens in the editing process, and the person we filmed with most might not even appear in the film. Often the less articulate portrayal of events is to the point and more powerful. I remember a Mosireen video (Figure 17.2)3 where we asked people at the front lines why they were there; we did not film their faces, we just took the audio. Few of the people we spoke to at the front lines were well spoken in the traditional sense; they did not go on long diatribes about their political vision like many people who are usually asked to stand in front of a camera. They would say things like “I am here because I have no future, I am here because I am dead either way, I am here because they killed Jika”. In subtitling it is important to me to translate the meaning of things; there is no such thing as literal translation. I think the reading of class needs to be done by the viewer, the visuals of the space tell a lot about the luxuries that a character has access to. If we film in someone’s house that consists of two rooms where clearly the TV room is transformed into someone’s bedroom at night and the kitchen is at the doorway, I see no need to add emphasis on this in the subtitles. I also don’t want the subtitles to become a crutch

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for the visual language. Subtitles help make the film translatable but ought not to be used to make the filmic language itself more accessible. We usually rely too much on words, and so we need to draw limitations on what we expect them to do. Mona: When I interviewed you in January 2014, you made it clear that on the one hand your priority as a film-maker is to engage an Egyptian audience. At the same time, you mentioned several times that it is important to connect with other protest movements globally, and that there are certain connections on the global level that you have been nurturing for years. Can you reflect on the challenges of attending to the specificities of the local struggle and setting out to address a local audience on the one hand, and on the other, the desire to reach out to and seek solidarity from similar movements in other parts of the world? What impact does this tension have on subtitling and translation in general? Philip: It differs significantly, depending on the kinds of videos. Testimonies for example stand for themselves to a great extent, but as the political situation got more convoluted here it became important for us to take a very clear stance on issues. There was a period where the local press was extremely antagonistic towards violence used against the police. We made a video called Why Riot?, which was really taking a stance with the street and against a lot of elites, many of them supporters of the revolution who would say these are not legitimate ways to revolt. We were saying they are (Figure 17.3).4 This was a clear message to the local population, but I would expect that similar conversations are happening elsewhere around the world – you just need to look at what happened in Syntagma Square, Turkey or all over Brazil, for example. Taking a stance for the necessity of violent protest

Figure 17.3 Why Riot?, video by Mosireen, 18 March 2013.

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against the brutality of the state here as elsewhere unites us with protestors around the globe. One of the things that may have been hard to follow for an audience, whether local or global, is that many of our videos provided little context to the background of events depicted in the video. We usually used as a point of departure the assumption that the viewer ought to be familiar with events leading up to the political starting point of a video; after all, we are not media reporters, not reporting. I think much of this tension otherwise has already appeared in the answers to previous questions. Overall, it was a matter of time, it took a lot of effort in looking up people, making the connections and when screenings happened elsewhere it required getting them screening lists, video files, making sure subtitles were up to date and in the right language, and in some cases that someone was available to talk to the audience on Skype afterwards. This took a lot of time and kept one away from what was happening here, so there was not always time for attending to a global audience really. Mona: In the same interview, you referred to the ability to connect with other movements as ‘one of the easy consequences’ of what Mosireen was doing, even though it was not why Mosireen was established. Given recent events in Egypt and the reduced space of protest and of interaction with the domestic audience, does the ability to connect with movements outside Egypt assume more importance now? One example I can think of is the Egypt Solidarity campaign, whose priority is clearly to engage a global audience, including the Egyptian diaspora. The Egypt Solidarity site currently features no language other than English. Do you envisage a more or less central role for translation within Egypt-related political initiatives in the next phase, and why? Philip: The response to this question is much more bleak than you might expect. We spent two-and-a-half years giving the movement our all and now many of us are tired, recovering from some form of depression or simple disappointment, or tending to friends in jail. As you well know the regime fought back, and with a vengeance: the prisons are full, the risk of just going to the street with a sign or a chant is such that it could mean too many years in prison. The infectious disease of fear is back. In this environment our activities have been reduced, there is a lack of energy, a lack of hope and a lack of audience, and what our societies need now is much more than some videos. But all this said, I have not lost hope. I believe that with the new excessive measures of repression, the austerity measures, inflation and its impact, especially on the margins, this regime will not last for long. Though the next battle will be a much bloodier one. There was a man I filmed on the morning of 8 April 2011, after the military had entered the Square in the early hours, killed an unknown number of protestors, injured and arrested others. After an account of what he saw that morning, the speaker describes the Egyptian regime’s

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Figure 17.4 The Remnants of Colonialism: Eye Witness of the Square Massacre, 8 April, video by Intifadat Intifadat, 9 April 2011.

logic of coloniality (Figure 17.4; starting at 5:15 on the video), 5 colonial structures inherited from our past occupiers that today are under the auspices of local elites but function according to the same logic as they did in the past. Neo-colonialism is a global condition; that is what we are up against. At the end of the interview the man says that in order to fight back, we need to get rid of the entire system, not just the remnants. This attack that the man on the margins is speaking of can only happen when we do it together. This is a global battle and this is what gives me what hope I have left. In order to fight back we must connect, we must communicate, we need to learn solidarity, we must translate in more ways than just verbal translation, we must attempt a translation of the streets, a deep translation. Collectively we must move on to somewhere new. Where that is, we will find out in the process, here and elsewhere.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Available at http://youtu.be/MChw2kqlRG8 (accessed 31 March 2015). See Gaber, pp. 100 –1, for a discussion of 3ashwa2yyaat. Available at http://youtu.be/Gwb0PJryFm8 (last accessed 31 March 2015). Available at http://youtu.be/b_ywo_XZh1s (last accessed 31 March 2015). Available at http://youtu.be/agxaNWW8ccM (last accessed 31 March 2015).

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Part VI

Epilogue

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18 Moments of clarity Omar Robert Hamilton

Omar Robert Hamilton is a film-maker, writer and cultural organizer working in documentary and fiction. He helped found Cairo’s Mosireen collective and works on the documentation, archiving and the visual record of the Egyptian revolution in various ways: after making dozens of short documentaries he’s currently editing a feature documentary from the archive. He helped found the annual Palestine Festival of Literature, which seeks to challenge Israel’s various apartheid policies and the international discourse surrounding them. His latest fiction short, Though I Know the River is Dry, premiered at Rotterdam and went on to win some good prizes. He writes semi-regularly for Egyptian journalism collective Mada Masr and occasionally for the London Review of Books blog and is now working on a novel about the parts of the revolution you can’t capture in the archive. And once that’s done he plans on concentrating on another part of the world for a little while. www.orhamilton.com

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It’s hard to be honest when talking about heartbreak. Hard to be fair. If you asked me in 2012 if I thought translation was important I’d have replied enthusiastically that it was, of course it was, that forming connections between struggles is essential to the global movement that was taking shape. I’d have added that we are lucky, also, in Egypt, that our struggle, our immediate struggle, feels like it will be won and lost in the domestic arena. That we are not Palestine and that world opinion – in the broadest sense – is useful but not essential to the winning of our battles. I understand that position still. I think of it fondly. But I’m not sure if I trust it any more. And I’m sure I wouldn’t follow it into battle. The Egyptian revolution of 2011 to 2013 was glorious in its momentary difference, its unexpectedness and its clarity. Those first 18 days, those clear demands, the spectacle was unquestionable and there was no need for translation. He had to go. The great coming together of Egyptian society, of young and old, of secular and (some) Islamists, united under a simple slogan of leave. It was appealing. Of course it was. There is nothing simpler than saying No, than throwing a rock at your oppressor. But the complexities, the potential fractures, were there to be seen. Did we choose not to see them? Or did we see them and believe they could be overcome? It is so hard to remember now, through the fog of bitterness and pride. The spectacle, as it was, needed no reinterpretation, needed no middleman; it was undeniable. We live in a time without imagination. In a global moment without possibility. We live in the end times, at the peak, the pinnacle, preparing for the fall. We live on the brink of annihilation. We live beyond our means. We live without direction. And so those months of 2011 somehow felt inevitable, as young people amassed around the world, fighting for their public spaces, for their rights, for their futures, from Wisconsin to San’a. There is no question that change was needed, and so change had arrived. And those aspiring changemakers could communicate with each other like never before. Skype calls, YouTube videos, Twitter streams, Indymedias, email threads, bilingual pamphlets, solidarity posters – a new traffic of words and information appeared, flowing for the first time in centuries from both South to North and North to South. A new equality had arrived between the disenfranchised youth of the world. But as we lurched forward into the months ahead, into the divisions of power and corruptions of promise, into the new constructions of the old realities of militants and Islamists, so language re-entered into the world. The undeniable moment of clarity never lasts. Explanations were asked for, contexts were needed. Our comrades in Spain, in Greece, were confused. What was the role of the army? Why did people cheer it? Are the Brotherhood with the revolution or against it? The forces of the establishment were reorganizing themselves. Obama, his hypocrisy never to be outdone, declares “we must educate our children to become like

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young Egyptian people”. Vodafone proudly displays his words in Cairo airport. The revolution now is a commodity. It sells us Pepsi and bank accounts and future presidents. The language and image of the revolutionary youth are colonized, commodified, sanitized, and the Fall of Mubarak is ingested, translated and transmitted as something easily comprehensible, something ‘good’, something in the past, something over. And slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us. There has never been a completely successful revolution and there never will be. **** Several of my colleagues in Mosireen whom I trust and admire have contributed to this volume. They talk, among other things, about the practicalities of the work that was done, that we did, in transmitting what we could of the revolution both inside Egypt and abroad. But I can’t stop thinking about what the revolution didn’t do, what needs to happen next time. We trusted to the unknown; it was exhilarating, but it was easy. Easy not to know what should come next, to just know that it needs to not be this. In that moment of the unknown the images from Occupy and 15M and the London riots felt like they needed no translation. We were all in this together. But, had we known more, had we read more, had we had a chance to talk and plan and plot, might things have been different? We learned tricks from each other, swapped jokes with each other, gave a moral strength to each other. We dissented together. But we still don’t know how to take power. Or even if we want to. In Athens I learned the meaning of the word martyr. μα′ρτυς. Witness. It was September 2011 and the faces on the posters of the fallen that walled Tahrir in those first 18 days were still fresh in our minds. Martyr. Witness. As in the Arabic. The shaheed’s roots are in her witnessing. Her seeing and standing and speaking. She dies for her testimony, for her word, for her language of truth. I felt, then, looking at Alexandros’ face, his little memorial in Exarcheia, how much closer these two places must have been before. Athens and Cairo. Egypt and Greece. What centuries of exchange, what countless and unfathomable connections and catalysts passed between these places for millennia. The sea was not a barrier but a rolling mesh that tied the Mediterranean together, a tumultuous, breathing bloodline. And if you crossed it, you stayed; for a while at least. How long would you stay today before the next easyJet out? How will this Athens be translated for you? Its histories and its traumas? How can we understand each other through these Skype calls and YouTube videos? The Mediterranean has been replaced by the English language as our common interface, our first, loose, binding. Arabic and Greek rarely meet any more. We say our struggles are

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connected, say that we are connected, but do these phones and planes not make us more divided than ever? Justice. Revenge. Punishment. Retribution. Vengeance. Vendetta. Blood debt. Which one of these words can fill the throat of the martyr’s mother as fully as her crying call for ‫( ﻗﺼﺎﺹ‬qasas) when all else is lost? Which will make you weep with her as the funeral procession leaves the cemetery? I did not cry for Alexandros. Is dissenting enough? To be in opposition is the fate of the dissenter. To be in compassion. We would not, or at least I would not, hold on to power were it taken. Yet we say we cannot ask for liberties from those enthroned, that they must be taken. It is the central paradox. But if we must speak, must dissent, then, yes, we must translate ourselves to better hear each other. We must counter the thoughtless nature of our times. We will never fully win. It will never be over. And we cannot simply go on saying No. If there is to be speech, it should be of something new, something that still has no language for the reality that it might create.

Index

#ANTICOUPLDN 50 #OccupyCabinet 12 15-M movement 1, 63 Abaza, Mona 198, 203, 206–7 Abdalla, Khalid 4, 6, 33–44, 225 Abdel Fattah, Alaa 56 Abdel Fattah, Diana 153, 156 Abdel Moneim Riad Square (Cairo) 22–3 Abdel Nasser, Tahia 9, 107–22 Abend-David, Dror 9, 16 academia: commentary on protest 3, 6, 13, 52, 132, 205; distrust of 15n; in Egypt 103; false division with activism 3 ADEF (Arab Digital Expression Foundation) 96n After Blood graffiti, 172–3, 175–6 Al-Abnudi, Abd Al-Rahman (poet) 111, 120 Albaih, Khalid (cartoonist) 211 Al-Kashef, Aida 188 Alkhawaja, Maryam 126, 133, 136n Al-Muqattam, battle of (Cairo, 2013) 82 Al-Sabbagh, Shaimaa (protestor, martyr) 164 Al-Sayed, Si (film character) 144–5 Al-Shabbi, Abu Al-Qasim (poet) 114, 117 alt-comix zines see comics Amara.org (website) 129, 136n Andeel (cartoonist) 212, 214, 221 Andén-Papadopoulos, Kari 52, 59 Anderson, Benedict 50, 59 Anis, Mona (translator) 120n, 121 anti-coup protests 50, 52–7; see also narrative

anti-protest laws 5, 56, 101, 135n, 168, 216, 227 Antoon, Sinan (translator) 112–13, 120 Anwar (cartoonist) 215 Anwar, Madeeha 126 April 6 (youth movement) 192n Arabic: and borrowed terminology 8, 14, 99, 100, 103, 143–4, 158; use of Egyptian Colloquial vs Modern Standard 7–8, 103, 112, 116, 141, 144, 157, 213; see also language choice; transcription Arab Spring 13, 60, 62, 67, 70–1, 149 archive 7, 82, 86, 87n, 108, 111, 120, 126, 130, 148–9, 156, 159, 175, 183, 241; archival turn 150; as evidence for counter-narratives 14, 108–9, 148, 150, 152, 159; and partiality 152–3, 155–6; as technology of rule, 148, 151; as translation 148; see also poetry Ashamallah, Evelyn 126 A Thousand Times No see ‘No’ slogans audience 7, 14–15, 33, 41, 49, 51, 54, 77, 81, 93, 95, 144, 199, 219, 229; expectations of 110, 140; participant viewers 181; targeting a global audience 4, 9, 14, 34, 54, 85, 91–2, 94–5, 125, 128, 139, 146–7, 157, 180, 186, 209–11, 220, 233, 235–6; targeting a local audience 4, 9, 91, 107, 141–3, 147, 180, 206, 228–9, 232, 235 austerity 2, 60–3, 67, 70–1, 236 authoritarianism 49, 55, 99, 152–3, 182 authorship 80, 95 Awad, Alaa (artist) 4, 194–206; see also Pharaonic Art Ayad, Marwa 198

246

Index

Azab, Rasha 126 Azeez, Govand Khald 13, 16 Badawi, Muhammad Mustafa 114, 120 Badie, Mohammed (Muslim Brotherhood) 172 Badr 1 (graffiti group) 166, 176a Bajec, Alessandra 183, 192 Baker, Mona 4, 6, 10, 11, 13, 16, 47, 59, 72n, 86, 87, 96n, 110, 120n, 225–37 Bakr, Abo (artist) 196–7, 203 Balata, Angie 183 Bayat, Asef: refo-lution 159n becoming-revolutionary see Deleuze, Gilles being-in-place see Said, Edward Belfast (Northern Ireland) 179–80, 184–6; see also Northern Ireland Bell, Daniel 72n Belly Dancer graffiti 173–4, 176a Bermann, Sandra 49, 59 Boéri, Julie 6, 11, 16, 17 blogs 13, 46, 139, 150, 195, 204, 209, 216, 231; see also citizen media; social media; technology; vlogs Bloody Sunday (Derry, 1972) 187, 190 Blue Bra Girl 168, 190; graffiti 170, 176a, 190 Bluetooth technology 229; see also technology Bond, Patrick 72n, 73 Boesen, Elisabeth 151, 159 Bouazizi, Tarek Al Tayeb Mohamed (Tunisian protestor) 42–3 Bourriaud, Nicholas (art critic): relational art 184, 192; see also socially engaged arts practice Brandar de la Iglesia, María 6, 17 building mode of translation see translation Bukowski, Charles 31 Burton, Antoinette 153, 160 Cal Atán, Elena 135 Calvert, Amy 203, 207 capitalism 13, 60, 62–7, 72n Carnegie, Elisabeth 156, 160 cartoons 163, 172; as translation 8, 164, 208, 210–11, 218–20; translation of 8, 209, 211–17, 219–20 Castells, Manuel 62, 72 censorship 157–8, 188, 210, 214, 217; self-censorship 153, 210

Chamoun, Sandy 126 Charbel, Jano 189, 192 Chelkowski, Peter 197, 207 citizen media 52, 68, 100, 150, 153, 211, 242; see also blogs; comics; Indymedia; Intifadat Intifadat; LabourNet; Mosireen; social media; street art; vlogs; Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution class 23, 63–4, 66–7, 72, 100, 227, 231, 234 clicktivism 84 Coletu, Ebony 196, 207 Colla, Elliott (translator) 114, 120n, 121 colonialism 87n, 102–3, 130–1, 201, 206, 227, 230, 237; see also neocolonialism comics 6, 8, 14, 85, 208, 210; Qahera 8, 137–47; translation of 141–7; see also cartoons conscientization 58 context: connecting contexts 9, 14, 33, 36, 92, 110, 166–7, 181, 186, 197, 203, 208; embeddedness 80; importance of providing 47, 58, 71, 81–2, 85, 92, 102, 108–9, 116, 146, 152, 158, 189, 206, 214, 216, 236, 242; over-simplification of 54–5, 86; see also decontextualization contrapuntal reading see Said, Edward Cook, Terry 151, 160 co-optation 3, 65, 104, 140 corruption 164, 168, 180, 198, 201 Creative Commons 94, 126, 128 Cresswell, Tim 79, 86n, 87 crisis 12, 14, 40, 82–3 crisis translation see translation crowdfunding 127 cutaway images 132 Dabashi, Hamid 197, 207 Damrosch, David 109, 121 Danial, Mina (protestor, martyr) 119, 120 Davis-Brown, Beth 148, 160 decontextualization 167, 194, 196–7, 204–5, 212, 214 Deboulet, Agnes 100, 106 deep translation see translation Deleuze, Gilles 41–3, 44; becomingrevolutionary 40–2 della Porta, Donatella 1, 16 Doer, Nicole 6, 16

Index democracy 10, 24, 39, 53–7, 61–5, 69–71, 72n, 83, 132, 178, 180–3, 188–91; democratization 55, 85; see also radical participatory politics Derrida, Jacques 108, 151 Derry (Northern Ireland) 179, 184, 186–90; see also Free Derry Wall mural; Northern Ireland Dheisheh refugee camp (West Bank) 9, 186; see also Free Dheisheh mural; Palestine dialogue 151, 182, 189, 192 diaspora activism 3, 9, 45–52, 57–8, 236 diversity: engaging with 10, 47–8, 62, 64, 67–71, 130, 154–5, 159, 233–4 Downey, Anthony 6, 16 Ebeid, Dalia 153 economic factors: influence of 62–6, 72, 182; see also poverty Egyptian Movement For Change 217 Egypt Solidarity campaign 236 El-Amine, Rami 72n, 73 Elansary, Hannah 179, 183, 193, 203, 206, 207 ElBaradei, Mohamed 47 El-Hamamsy, Dalia 153 El Hamid, Alaa Abd (artist) 171, 176a El-Khechen, Dania 128 El-Mahdi, Rabab 2, 17 El-Masry, Mahienour 56, 126, 135n Elsadda, Hoda 4, 7, 148–60 El-Sabbahy, Mona 126 El-Sisi, Abdel Fattah (President of Egypt) 53, 92, 174, 182, 185, 217–19, 221n El-Shater, Khairat (Muslim Brotherhood) 171–2 El-Tamami, Wiam 3, 8, 13, 15, 21–32; pockets of normalcy 26, 29 El Tarzi, Salma 9–12, 88–96, 233 El-Zeft (artist) 172, 176a embeddedness see context empowerment 4, 14, 84, 125, 127, 132, 150, 152, 183, 204 ethics 14, 88, 134, 155–9, 182, 185; and translation 14, 82, 92, 107–11 exile 79–80 EZLN see Zapatistas Facebook 13, 25, 28, 46, 52, 61, 70, 150, 166, 181, 212; see also citizen media; social media; technology

247

Fawzy, Sameh 49, 59 feminism 15n, 125, 129, 137, 139–40, 144, 155, 163, 173; and translation 129, 131, 133–4, 140–1, 143; see also gender; Herstory Fields, Amanda 16 film-making, 3, 6, 9–14, 83, 88–96, 125–7, 135, 184, 227–8, 231–4; as translation, 9, 95; see also subtitling Flesher-Fominaya, Cristina 5, 10, 16 Forché, Carolyn: poetry of witness 108–9 Foucault, Michel 151 freedom 24, 40, 56, 116, 119, 181–2, 227; of expression 56, 140, 216; in translation 12, 92, 95, 144, 146 Free Derry Wall mural, 9, 186–7; see also Derry; Northern Ireland. Free Dheisheh mural 186–7 Freire, Paulo 58, 59, 178, 182, 191 fundamentalism 3, 47, 85, 98, 115–16, 167, 199, 210, 218, 242 Funke, Peter 3, 10, 12, 15n, 60–73; Global Justice Wave 62, 64, 67–71; Spring Wave 62, 64, 68–71 Gaber, Sherief 5, 15n, 97–106, 237n Galvin, Rachel 110, 121 Ganzeer (artist) 163, 165, 176a García Lorca, Frederico 115 gender 63, 66, 126, 131, 149, 154; fixed understandings of 66–7, 134; inequality and discrimination 131, 133, 152–5, 182–4, 190–1; neutrality 96, 133; and translation 96, 133–4 Ghannam, Farha 105n, 106 Ghonim, Wael 61–2, 73; Revolution 1.0 62; Revolution 2.0 62. Gika (a.k.a. Gaber Salah – protester, martyr)188f, 190, 192n, 234 Giordani, Angela 59 Giroux, Henry 182–3, 193 globalization 48, 61–2, 68, 79 Global Justice Movement 15n, 60–2, 65, 68–9, 71 Global Justice Wave protests see Funke, Peter; Wolfson, Todd Golson, Emily 2, 16 Gourgouris, Stathis 86n, 87 graffiti see street art Greece 2, 63, 71–2, 91, 229, 242–3; see also Syriza Gregory, Derek 2, 17 Gröndahl, Mia 183, 193

248

Index

Guthrie, Alice 13, 16 Guyer, Jonathon 8–9, 208–21 Haddad, Amin (poet) 107, 116–17, 120n, 121 Haddad, Fouad (poet) 111 Halls, Katherine 87n, 96n Hamdy, Basma 191, 193 Hamilton, Omar Robert 2–3, 15, 241–4 Hanieh, Adam 72n, 73 harassment 14, 138, 141–4, 147, 173; see also sexual assault Haraway, Donna 152, 160 Harding, Sue-Ann 6, 17 Harris, Verne 152, 158–9, 160 Harvey, David 63, 73, 86n Harvey Brown, Richard 148, 160 Hassan, Farag (cartoonist) 219 Hassan, Maissan 153, 156, 160 Hawwas, Ziyad 126 Hegazy, Ahmed (cartoonist) 211 Henaway, Mostafa 72n, 73 heritage 40, 202, 206 Herstory 126–7, 129, 130f Hess, Maya 6, 17 hijacking of struggle see co-optation Hilali, Sandi 102, 106 Hodkinson, Stuart 6, 16, 17 hologram protests 5 horizontality 1, 11, 70 housing 70, 98, 100, 105n; see also slum housing humour 24, 29; as means of protest 5, 137, 139, 143, 210, 217; translation of 144–6, 208–9, 212 Hussein, Nazly 126 Ibrahim, Sabah 126 identity 2, 66, 157, 179; collective 48–50, 155, 157; personal 140, 157–8, 199; symbols of 140, 186, 196, 199; and translation 49, 51–2; see also imagined communities IFFCO plant occupation (Suez, 2013) 85, 230 imagined communities 48, 50; see also nationhood Indignados 70 Indymedia 15n, 62–4, 69, 242; see also citizen media Inghilleri, Moira 6, 16 Instagram 212; see also citizen media; social media; technology

Intifadat Intifadat 226–7, 229, 233, 237f Inverted Flag Eagles graffiti 171, 176a Iraq 15n, 69, 87n, 130 Islamophobia 85, 129–31, 138, 140, 142, 147 Israel 13, 93, 180, 201, 220n, 230, 241 Ittihadiyya clashes (Cairo, 2012) 13, 49–50, 82 Jadaliyya (online magazine) 22, 113, 209, 226 Jaheen, Salah (poet and cartoonist) 111, 211 Jameson, Fredric 66, 72n, 73 Jarman, Neil 181, 188, 193, 203 Joha, Umayya (cartoonist) 219 Joya, Angela 72n, 73 Johnson, Dirk 171, 176 Johnston, John 9, 10, 178–93 Juris, Jeffrey 15n, 66, 73 justice: struggle for 1, 5, 14, 55, 65, 97–8, 103–5, 116, 159, 180–3, 227, 244; lack of 36, 159, 164, 197–9; see also Global Justice Movement; Global Justice Wave protests Karl, Don 191, 193 Karmi, Ghada 47, 59 Kazeboon campaign 228, 232 Kefaya see Egyptian Movement For Change Keim, Brandon 129, 136n Keller, Dana 184, 193 Khaled, Ali (artist) 172, 176a Khaled, Mohamed (artist) 165, 172, 176a Khalil, Ashraf 2, 17 Khalil, Omnia 153 Khatib, Lina 191, 193 Kirollos, Mariam 126, 136n knowledge: production of 80–2, 103, 149–52, 155, 182, 201–2 Korany, Bahgat 2, 17 LabourNet 85, 87n language choice: politics of 5–8, 49–51, 94–5, 97, 99–104, 128–9, 133–4, 139–40, 155, 157–8, 225, 231, 233, 236; see also Arabic; transcription; translation Lau, Lisa 202, 207 Lenin, Vladimir 166 Lewisohn, Cedar 180, 193 Lievrouw, Leah 6, 17

Index lingual memory see Spivak, Gayatri López Cortés, Juan 6, 17 Luchies, Timothy 15n, 17 Lyons, Terrence 48, 59 Mackey, Robert 164, 176 Mada Masr (online newspaper) 59n, 98, 212, 241 Mad Graffiti Weekend (Cairo, 2011) 188–9, 192 Maeckelbergh, Marianne 10, 15n, 17 Magdy, Mahmoud (artist) 172, 176a Magdy, Walid 164, 175 Mahfouz, Asmaa (vlogger) 61 Maier, Carol 6, 16 Makhlouf (cartoonist) 216–17 Mama Suzanne see Mubarak, Suzanne Mandaville, Peter 48, 59 Manji, Firoze 72n, 73 Manuel Jerez, Jesús de 6, 17 margin 100–1, 129–30, 149–52, 180, 183, 225, 231–5, 237 martyrdom 116–20, 165–6, 188, 196, 243; as witnessing 243; see also sacrifice Marxism 72n Maspero massacre (Cairo, 2011) 8, 24, 82, 117, 119 Massey, Doreen 86n Mattoni, Alice 1, 16 media: influence of Egyptian mainstream 24–5, 29, 92, 100, 164, 185, 198; influence of Western mainstream 3, 13, 15, 50–1, 54, 83, 92, 131–2, 210–12, 220n; see also citizen media; Indymedia; social media Mehrez, Samia 2, 15n, 17, 120n, 121 Melucci, Alberto 4–6 memory 34–5, 79, 108, 120, 126, 148–51, 185, 187 Metwaly, Jasmina (film-maker) 226, 232 Mexico 63–4, 68, 91, 128, 229 Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) 212–13, 220n military rule 58, 99, 102, 115–16, 172, 190, 216, 218, 220, 228; opposing 24–5, 53, 56, 92, 166–8 Mina see Daniel, Mina Moger, Robin (translator) 88 Mohamed, Deena 8, 137–47 Mohamed Mahmoud Street (Cairo) 119, 179, 184–5, 188, 190, 192, 195–206; clashes on (Cairo, 2011) 24–5, 82, 187

249

Mona Lisa Brigades (graffiti group) 166 Morayef, Soraya 4, 194–207; Suzee in the City blog 165–6, 195, 206n Morsi, Mohamed (former President of Egypt) 50–1, 53, 55, 57, 98, 172, 185, 216, 218–19 Mortada, Leil-Zahra 11, 15n, 125–36, 183 Mosireen 3, 7, 9, 10, 11, 34, 77, 78, 82, 83, 84, 88–9, 98, 126, 183, 226–37, 241, 243; and subtitling 9, 11–12, 78, 83–5, 89–96, 226–7, 234–6; street screenings 228, 230 Mounib, Mary (actress) 166 Mozza (artist) 173–4, 176a Mubarak, Hosni (former President of Egypt) 24, 83, 98, 111, 117, 153, 155, 166, 182, 185, 198–9, 219, 243 Mubarak, Suzanne (former President of Egypt’s wife) 198 murals see street art Muslim Brotherhood 37, 39, 55, 85, 92–3, 171–2, 182, 199, 210, 218–19, 242; see also Badie, Mohammed; El-Shater, Khairat Nada, Danya 96n nano demonstrations 4–5 narrative 34–7, 40, 86, 180–1; countering hegemonic 3–4, 14, 21, 36, 39, 41, 47, 58, 109, 111, 148–52, 155, 183, 185, 210, 228; of the coup 52–8; of the revolution 12–13, 34–5, 37, 39, 42–3, 48, 52, 107, 149–50, 153–4, 192, 197, 225, 227; role of personal 21, 24, 30, 140, 149–57; and translation 2, 6–8, 14–15, 48, 52; versus ideology 35–6 National Organization for Urban Harmony (NOUH) 99 nationhood 13, 48–52, 79, 101, 152; see also imagined communities neo-colonialism 237; see also colonialism Neruda, Pablo 109, 115 New Left 63–4, 66–7, 72n; see also Old Left Nigm, Ahmad Fouad (poet) 112–13, 120n, 121 Nim, Eugenia 5, 17 Niranjana, Tejaswini 6, 17 normalcy, pockets of see El-Tamami, Wiam

250

Index

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 63, 68 ‘No’ Slogans 163, 167–70, 176a Northern Ireland 178–92; see also Belfast; Bloody Sunday; Derry; Free Derry Wall mural; Sands, Bobby No to Military Trials 7, 126, 168 Noujaim, Jehane 192 Nunes, Rodrigo 6, 17 Obama, Barak 13, 212, 242 Occupy movement 1, 12, 60, 62–5, 67, 69–71, 83–5, 243 Odriozola, Ethel 135 Old Left 63, 66–7; see also New Left Om Ahmad Gaber 126 One Hand (slogan) 38, 166 Ong, Aihwa 66, 73 OpAntiSH (Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment) 89, 126 Oum Cartoon (blog) 209, 221n Palestine 9, 41, 84, 112–13, 133, 146, 179–81, 186–7, 242; see also Dheisheh refugee camp Pandey, Gyanendra 151, 160 Pantti, Mervi 52, 59 participant viewers see audience Passerini, Luisa 151, 160 pedagogy 58, 178–92; banking 178–82; critical 182–91 Pérez-González, Luis 6, 18, 96n performance 4, 203–4, 226, 232 periphery see margin Petti, Alexandro 102, 106 Pharaonic art 4, 194–207; see also Awad, Alaa; mural place 2, 15n, 48, 78–86, 98–105, 181, 188, 203, 233; and translation 79–82, 84–6, 99–105; see also exile; Said, Edward; space Podemos (Spanish political party) 71–2 poetry 6, 9, 14, 107–20, 197; as archive 108–11, 115, 120; new revolutionary 107, 116–20; as translation 107–12, 117; translation of 107, 112, 114, 116–17, 119–20 poetry of witness see Forché, Carolyn Port Saïd Stadium massacre (Port Saïd, 2012) 82, 196, 198, 206n positionality 30, 43, 47–8, 50, 58, 95, 152–8, 184, 225, 227, 232; of translator 1, 11, 13, 81–2, 86, 93, 95, 134

poverty 40, 72n, 100 prefiguration 6, 62, 64–5, 67, 69–70, 233; and translation 10–12, 133–4 professionalism 80–2, 86, 133 Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) 212–13 Qahera (webcomic) see comics queer activism 15n, 133–4 queering 134 Rabaa Al Adawiyya (sit-in, massacre: 14 August 2013) 13, 51–6 racism 64, 125, 130–1 radical participatory politics 1, 12, 60, 65, 70–1, 78, 83, 85, 97, 231, 233; see also democracy Radwan, Noha 112, 120n, 121 Rafaat, Islam (protestor, martyr) 188 Rafael, Vicente 6, 18 Rashad, Jonathan Rebel Cat graffiti 163, 173–5, 176a Reed, Alastair 109, 121 refo-lution see Bayat, Asef Relational Art see Bourriaud, Nicholas remembrance see memory representation 3, 10, 45, 47, 51, 109–11, 150–2, 155–7, 218, 227; of Arab and Muslim women 129–31, 138–40, 147; and translation 50–2, 110–11 revolution: as commodity 24, 243; as lived experience 1, 3, 8, 15, 21, 23–7, 29, 39, 125, 149–50, 153, 185, 227; role of translation in 1–3, 6, 10–12, 15, 45, 47–52, 77–8, 83–6, 94–5, 120, 125, 127, 132, 219, 230, 233, 237; role of women in 7, 90, 125–7, 130–1, 137, 143–4, 148–9, 154–5, 159, 173; as rupture 38, 42, 53; as sign of failure 38 Revolution 1.0 see Ghonim, Wael Revolution 2.0 see Ghonim, Wael Riad, Ramy 153 Rizk, Hisham (artist) 174 Rizk, Philip 1, 7, 9, 12, 14, 16n, 18, 70, 87n, 225–37 Rolston, Bill 184, 193 sacrifice 39, 168, 185; see also martyrdom Sad Panda (artist) 165, 189 Sadek, Hanan 126 Said, Edward 78–81, 86, 87; being-inplace 79–80, 82; contrapuntal reading 80, 87n

Index Said, Khaled (blogger, martyr) 61, 119, 120 Salah, Gaber see Gika Salah-Omri, Mohamed 120n, 121 Salama, Nahla 153 Salem, Sara 2, 18 Salim, Helmi (poet) 114–17, 121 Sami, Aya 153 Sami, Layla 126 Sands, Bobby (Irish hunger striker) 186 satire see humour SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) 116, 166, 176a Schwartz, Joan 151, 160 Seattle, battle of (Seattle, 1999) 63, 68–9 Seikaly, Sherene 159n Selaiha, Nehad 9, 18 Selim, Amro (cartoonist) 217 Selim, Samah 1, 12, 15n, 77–87, 110 sexual assault 24, 26, 28, 176n; see also harassment Shamni, N. 212, 221 Shams, Hani 220n Shawki, Mohamed Ismail (artist) 172, 176a Sheffer, Gabriel 49, 59 Shehab, Bahia 4, 9, 163–77, 189–90 slum housing 100–1; see also housing socially engaged arts practice (SEAP) 182, 184; see also Bourriaud, Nicholas social media 12–13, 52–3, 62–3, 67, 70–1, 79, 82–5, 139, 189, 210, 212, 218; see also blogs; Facebook; Instagram; technology; Twitter; vlogs; YouTube solidarity: building networks of 1–4, 33–4, 49–51, 55–6, 67–8, 87n, 88, 133, 186; and translation 9–11, 52, 77–9, 84–5, 125, 132–3, 225, 229–30, 235–7; see also clicktivism Soltan, Mohamed 47 Some People campaign 163, 168–70, 176a Soueif, Ahdaf 2, 13, 18, 47, 168, 190 Sowers, Jeannie 2, 18 space: as politicized place 188, 203; private 101, 234; public 5, 11, 14, 97–105, 180–2, 185–8, 242; state land 97–9 Spain 5, 63, 70–2, 93, 128, 229, 242; see also Indignados; Podemos

251

spectacle 15, 77, 83–5, 242 Spivak, Gayatri 82, 87, 109; lingual memory 82 Spring Wave protests see Wolfson, Todd; Funke, Peter Square, The (film) 34, 192 Stahuljak, Zrinka 6, 18 state prestige 98–9, 101 Steinberg, Saul 31, 32 Stephansen, Hilda 15n, 18 Stoler, Ann 151, 160 street art 4, 14, 92, 163, 194, 204; cleansing of 165–6, 170, 173–5, 184, 185; as conversation 163–5, 182, 185, 189, 192; digital preservation of 165, 175, 181, 189, 204; as palimpsest 185, 189; as public pedagogy 178–80, 182–4, 187–8, 191; as translation 6, 9, 164, 173, 175, 181, 191, 204, 206; as visual dissent 163, 180, 186, 197, 206; see also After Blood graffiti; Belly Dancer graffiti; Blue Bra Girl graffiti; Free Derry Wall mural; Free Dheisheh mural; Inverted Flag Eagles graffiti; Mad Graffiti Weekend; ‘No’ slogans; Pharaonic Art; Rebel Cat graffiti; Some People campaign; Tank vs. Biker mural; Three Female Figures mural subjectivity see positionality subtitling: as activist praxis 1, 6–7, 9, 12, 14, 24, 52, 77–8, 83, 85, 94, 125, 130–5, 229–30, 233; creative strategies of 12, 92–4, 133–4, 233; relationship with film-making 11, 88, 90–6, 127–8, 226, 233; see also Amara.org; translation Suzee in the City (blog) see Morayef, Soraya Syriza (Greek political party) 71–2 Taher, Walid (cartoonist) 216–18 Tahrir Square (Cairo, 2011; 2013): occupation of 4, 22–6, 28, 37, 50, 51, 61, 82–4, 111–12, 115–16, 170, 231, 243 Talens, Manuel 6, 18 Tamarod (campaign group) 172 Tank vs. Biker mural 9, 163–76, 189 Tantawi, Marshal Mohamed Hussein 166–7, 170, 176a Tarek, Aya 126, 136n

252

Index

technology: role of 12–13, 16n, 62–5, 67, 71, 150, 227; see also Amara.org; Bluetooth technology; citizen media; Facebook; Instagram; social media; Twitter; YouTube Teleb, Ahmed 1, 18 testimony 24, 132, 167, 243; as fragments of history 151; see also martyrdom; memory; narrative Teti, Andrea 5, 16 Three Female Figures mural 173–4 Tilib, Hasan 115, 121 Toensing, Chris 2, 18 Touraine, Alain 66, 73 training workshops 15n, 49, 89–91, 184 transcription 13–14, 157 translation: building mode of 79, 86; crisis translation 1, 79, 83–5; deep translation 1, 79, 82, 84–6, 225, 237; as integral to revolutionary project 1–3, 6, 10–12, 15, 45, 47–52, 77–8, 83–6, 94–5, 120, 125, 127, 132, 219, 230, 233, 237; as diaspora praxis 51–2; intralingual 6–8, 157; narrow and broad senses of 1, 7–10, 45–7, 125, 148, 208, 211, 227–30; resisting translation 100, 196, 202–3, 205; see also subtitling Tripp, Charles 197, 207 Tunisia 42, 43n, 71, 85, 114, 120n, 133 Twitter 12–13, 28, 46, 52, 70, 181, 209, 213, 242; see also citizen media; social media; technology Tymoczko, Maria 6, 18 Ultras (graffiti group) 190 Ultras Ahlawy (fan group of El Ahly football club) 190, 198, 206n, 228; see also Port Saïd Stadium Massacre Underhill, Helen 3, 9, 45–59 urban planning 14, 97–105; translation of Northern discourses of 99–105; see also housing Venuti, Lawrence 10, 18 video art see film-making

violence 3, 83, 153–4, 210; necessity of 36, 235; resisting against 36, 168, 235; state-sponsored 25, 69, 77, 83, 85, 108; symbolic 4, 215, 228; against women 154, 176n; see also harassment; sexual assault vlogs 61; see also citizen media; social media War Resisters League 84 webcomics see comics Weber, Max 227 Weizman, Eyal 102, 106 Whitaker, Brian 220n, 221 Wiki ethos 129 Williams, Terry Tempest 27, 32 witnessing see testimony Wolfson, Todd 3, 10, 12, 15n, 60–73; Global Justice Wave 62, 64, 67–71; Spring Wave 62, 64, 68–71 Women and Memory Forum (WMF) 7, 148–59 Women on Walls (WOW) 183 Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution 7, 11, 125–36 World Social Forum (WSF) 6, 11, 62–3, 69 World Trade Organization (WTO) 63, 68–9 writing: as translation of lived experience 8–9, 21, 24, 26–7, 30, 95, 108, 204 Youssef, Bassem (political comedian) 217 Youssef, Loubna 16 Youssef, Saadi (poet) 112, 122 YouTube 46, 83, 126–9, 135, 136n, 176, 190, 242–3; see also citizen media; social media; technology Yusuf, Shaaban 114, 121 Zamalek (Cairo) 28, 165, 170, 176a Zanon Factory Resistance 85, 229–30 Zapatistas 4, 60, 62, 68–9; history of 68 Zatouna, Nada 126