This is the transcript of a talk given in the last week by the
Booker-nominated novelist, journalist and Palestine Festival of Literature
founder, Ahdaf Soueif, at a non-UK university. Questions were posed by the chair, a prominent academic
at the university’s Asian and Middle Eastern Studies institute, and by an audience
of academics and specialists affiliated with the institute. And they were all
fantastic amazing genius women hurrah!
Chair:
Congratulations on the success of Palfest, a festival that’s produced in the
teeth of a lot of difficulties and struggles and so is an act of protest
itself, not just an excuse for a get-together.
AS: Thank you, I’m
delighted to be here.
Soueif is invited
to read from her latest book, the non-fiction Cairo: My City, Our Revolution
which is an account of the 18 day anti-Mubarek demonstrations and protests in
Tahrir Square and also a remembrance of the city she has known all her life.
Let’s go back to
the start of the protests. How did they arise?
AS: Well, it was
interesting to see the protestors rushing in as the central security vehicles
were racing to get out. But I think, funnily enough, that when they tried
cutting off people’s communications – there was no telephone network, no
Internet service – it had the effect of motivating and propelling people. All
the people came out to talk to each other because there was no other way of
knowing what was going on. So every person was in one place, fully
concentrated. We came together as individuals in a great co-operative project
and the goal was to reclaim our country.
Did you see
something like this coming?
AS: Yes. We felt it
simmering. We were always talking about what was going to happen, although we
felt that the era of big revolution had passed. So what form would it take?
Would there be mobs? Would the army be staging a coupe to purge and self-renew?
So we knew something would happen, but we did know what it was going to look
like. Since about the year 2000 we felt the country was being run down,
deliberately – but we couldn’t quite believe it. What the regime did was rob
people of a sense of agency. There was a feeling hat you couldn’t do anything,
achieve things, you couldn’t influence anything. And then in 200 after the 2nd
Palestinian Intifida, there were demonstrations that didn’t really die down.
There was a proliferation of small civil-society associations, an informal
network of activist organisations, human rights organisations. Then in 2003
there were the big marches against the Iraq war, which happened all over the
world. And then in 2004 there were protests against the upcoming Egyptian
elections, and through into 2005 we saw the Kifaya [Enough] movement, a street
movement which started with people standing on the steps of the High Court with
stickers over their mouths. By 2010 there wasn’t a single sector of society
that wasn’t in protest. Even the tax collectors. And I said all of this,
actually, in an interview in Jaipur. I said the country’s boiling.
With events
happening so swiftly, do you feel tempted to update the book?
AS: Well, the book
goes up to October 2011 and my American publishers wanted me to update it up to
October 2012. It’s interesting to do because the tonality of the experience is
changing so much; I write a weekly column in which I try and least to represent
the revolution to itself, to encourage, to show certain things up. But it’s
been hard to write [the book update] simply because on the ground there’s so
much to be done and a huge part of me wants to be out on the street and part of
the action. You tell yourself that producing something like a book is part of
the revolutionary effort, but in the moment that you’re doing it, it feel
unsatisfactory. You could be marching, organising, buying dressings for field
hospitals, being with the young people at their meetings and demonstration.
What has been the
response from those in power – the ones the protestors are demonstrating
against?
AS [Smiles]:
Well...nobody in the business of bureaucracy or repression has time for this
[literary] kind of thing. They’re busy killing people, or passing terrible
laws. They’re operating at the macro level. I’m currently rendering the book
into Arabic; those who’ve read it so far are those who read it in English. But
I heard something wonderful from one young revolutionary: she said that when
she felt despair, she went back to this book, remembered and regained are hope.
People are emotional when they read it – they remember experiences they went
through, they read it and think, “Oh, I was in the next street along, just the
next street.” I also wrote about the experiencing of living the revolution in my
home town. It was amazing and it felt like, for all of us who were from Cairo,
the city was working with us. You could see thing happening, see the young
people fighting, visors, gas – and yet behind them would be the Egyptian Museum
which contains all the Pharaonic artefacts...and the army used it to drag
people in and beat and torture them. So, everything that happened added a layer
of symbolism as it was the city of my childhood and the places meant something
for me, like there was a big building by the side of Tahrir Square and my aunt
used to work there. I watched the graffiti going up in Tahrir, knowing there
were snipers at the windows, and yet this was the city of my childhood.
What about the
young revolutionaries?
AS: Their parents
used to go on about the [politically active] Cairo of the 60s and 70s but they
[themselves] had never felt any revolutionary energy. Now the city has come
alive for them. The newspaper I write in is staid but extremely
correct-thinking and is with the revolution. I wrote a piece about the young
cadets of the military academy because a protest had gone on there. It was at
the end of the weekend and all the young cadets were coming back and had to go
past the protest. It was so strange because there were young people on one
side, young people on the other side, all Egyptians, both sides probably loving
their country equally, bandanas and scarves versus army caps. What I do is very
very little compared to what they do.
What is happening
in terms of the response to protests
now?
We’ve seen an
escalation in the amount of personal violence that the army is using against
the protestors. They had been reluctant at first. I got a phone call from SCAF,
which was the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces, after a meeting which had
been basically us on one side, SCAF on the other. It was on my landline, which
almost never rings. “The second so-and-so general of the such-and-such
department of so-and-so, such-and-such division is on the line and wishes to
speak with you.” And he kept me on the phone for an hour and a half, going on
and on, quite rambling, about how the army had Egypt’s nest interests at heart.
He kept quoting my articles back at me. I was taking notes, desperate to record
it, but I didn’t have the equipment to do that. Eventually he got off the phone
and I realised that he had made three threats. First, my nephew was in jail
because they’d accusing him of sabotaging an army vehicle and stealing weapons
out of it and all sort of stuff. And the general said, “I’m sure you’re very
much affected by it.” And I said, “Well, the case is going to trial.” And he
said, “Because of course it could still go either way.” Then the second thing
he said was, “You wrote an article? Anybody can write an article. Somebody
could write an article saying this woman basically lives in London, every year
she goes to Israel – when I don’t go to Israel, I go to Palestine – why is she
taking an interest in Egypt?” And the third and weirdest thing he said was,
“You know Dostoevsky? He said that in the absence of God anything is permitted,
even murder.” It was from The Brothers
Karamazov. I said, “Yes? So what? Which character said it? A good character
or an evil character?” And he got really, really angry: “I tell you Dostoevsky
said it!” I realised later it was some kind of threat.
Where do you stand
now on the non-violent intentions of the revolution?
AS: We were very
proud of the non-violent nature of the revolution. Those eighteen days showed
us the best we could be. They were so positive and an antidote to how we’d been
made to feel bad about ourselves. We were altruistic, organised, creative,
co-operative. We were like a nation on its best behaviour. But Mubarek and then
the army were not as well-behaved. So it has not remained bloodless. People
were killed from day one and quite soon within the eighteen days young men set
fire to the police station. But even when we had to fight with the security
services, the young people would take his [the security service guy’s] weapons
and turn him loose. But ultimately we have to have a revolution and we have to
have change. The last two years have show the revolution’s attempt to remain
nonviolent and retain faith in the institutions of state. But the government’s
pushing things away from nonviolence.
There’s now emerged
a new ‘Black Bloc’ of young people. They put on black clothes, cover their
faces and say they’re the warriors of the revolution, who’re going to be on the
frontline, that this is the fighting battalion. They’re sick of being beaten by
Mubarek, the army, the Muslim Brotherhood. They say that this is not a
turn-the-other-cheek revolution. So now, we want a revolution – but it may be
bloody.
What do you think
about the current crop of books about the Middle East revolutions?
AS: Many of the current
books about the Arab Spring are by people from the outside, so perhaps you
could say they’re more analytical. But they’re not from within. If you want a
really current flavour then look at the blogs, the tweets, the essays by artists
– they carry the real blood of the story now. I do feel that fiction can be
important in this, in drawing in hearts
and minds. Fiction lasts. You create characters who people fall in love
with and they carry you along with them. I did a signing at a bookshop in Cairo
and a young woman showed me her copy of my novel The Map of Love, it was a
pirated edition, full of notes, writing, drawings. She told me that at one of
the sit-ins, they were passing it amongst themselves, reading out little bits
and talking about it. It was humbling and moving. When it comes to my own
fiction, if everything could just freeze for eight months, I could write my
novel! And then everything could start up again. I do see myself wanting to engage
fictionally with what is happening but for any process to begin to happen I’d
need to be locked away again, and I couldn’t bear to be locked away now.
Are you ever in
doubt?
AS: In May 2012,
for the first time, the revolutionaries carried weapons. That was a new trend,
although the overarching wish was for things to remain non violent. My nephew
spoke out in protest and he was attacked
for it, he was defensive and a debate was had. And sometimes you have
sit-ins which last and last and get frayed: people leave, authorities try to infiltrate
street vendors come in – the ethos is that protestors and revolutionaries are
as friends and as one with the poorer people. But vendors are easy to
infiltrate by the authorities. So there have been fights, things have been
stolen. I found out that one tent was actually being run as a prison by
revolutionaries, in which they were keeping two people who’d stolen from them.
We speak about it amongst ourselves, instead of giving ammunition to the enemy.
That’s the decision of the people on the ground and I stand by them because
they’re the ones at risk of being shot, beaten, taken to jail. So you can talk,
you can be critical, and you must decision to what degree and what moral view
you take of the situation.
What is happening
right now?
AS: Now there’s a great
deal of turbulence. We are in a continuing revolution. It would have been
amazing if the 18 days had worked and at the end of the military rule we got a
government of the revolution. There’s political Islam and there are the secular
state advocates, and a lot of us were not unwilling to go with political Islam
on the basis that they are a part of Egyptian society and if the people elected
them democratically we would work together. So it was a choice between the
military and Morsi. His promise was that he’s be a president of all Egyptians,
not just the Brotherhood. But the Brotherhood don’t want to work with us. We’ve
seen the killings and the beatings. They don’t believe in the goals of the
revolution – bread, freedom, social justice. They don’t share the principles of
the revolution. Their economic policy is even more to the right of Mubarek: the
IMF, the Ford Bank, privileging the rich. They’re even talking about
reconciliation with the heads of the old regime in return for the return of
stolen money – at the same rates as when it was stolen! – and they’re saying it’s
“because we need stability.” We thought our problems would be with the social agenda,
not economics and development.
We want pretty obvious and simple things: an
education system, transport to be out of the hands of private companies. Universal
healthcare, insurance, sustainable development. Meanwhile, they’re distracting everyone
by pushing through a divisive social agenda. There is no recognition that they
rose on the back of a policy or a manifesto, or that they came to power on the
back of a revolution. Since Sadat first started using the Islamist ticket to
beat down the Left, we’re seeing the Islamist groups come to power democratically
through the ballot box. So let’s see. The country has specific and very clear
aims. Let’s see if they deliver. If they don’t, the country will protest,
through the ballot box or through uprising. It’ll be the country saying, We won’t
take it any more. Not just artists and intellectuals talking about whether or
not to wear a headscarf or freedom of speech, the whole country will reject
them. So we will have gone through this phase. How bloody will it be? What will
happen in the next four to six months? A lot will be tested.
