Egypt - Writing - Revolution

written by my colleague Hosam Aboul-Ela in the blog wordswithoutborders 

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Imagining more Autumns for North Africa’s Patriarchs: The Dictator Novel in Egypt

By Hosam Aboul-Ela

In the mid 1970s, at a time when Latin American countries chafed under brutal dictatorships, an amazing literary phenomenon swept through the region. Three powerful novels were published within months of each other by three of the greatest authors of the region hailing from its varied corners. Inspired by Guatemalan Nobel Laureate Miguel Angél Asturias’s 1946 classic, El Señor Presidente, and working in open collusion with one another, Cuban Alejo Carpentier published El Recurso del método(1974, translated as Reasons of State), followed in rapid succession by Colombian Gabriel García Márquez’s El Otoño del patriarca (1975, The Autumn of the Patriarch), and Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo, el supremo (also 1975, I, the Supreme). These three novels not only solidified the dictator novel as a serious literary genre, but could fairly be said to have shaken the very social consensus that allowed the dictatorial system to persevere in Latin American society.


In the Arab world in general—and in Egypt in particular, the relationship between the novel and its dictators has evolved differently, developing over decades as the social/political system has grown ever increasingly intertwined with corrupt, centralized authority, and literary trends have waxed and waned. But a discussion of the relationship between Arab novel and Arab dictator must inevitably begin—as so many discussions of modern Arab fiction do—with Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. The current Egyptian regime traces its beginnings back to another uprising sixty years ago led by Egypt's Free Officers, one which caused a six- year stoppage in the output of the famously prolific Mahfouz, who seems to have been disillusioned by Gamal Abel Nasser's consolidation of his power shortly after the King's departure in 1952. Mahfouz's hiatus from writing was finally broken in the late 1950s, first with his Cairo Trilogy, widely regarded as his masterpiece, then with the novel that must be considered the foundation of dictator fiction in the region, Awlad Haratna, rendered as Children of Gebalawi by Philip Stewart in 1981, and then re-translated by the incomparable Peter Theroux as Children of Our Alley in 1999. With its network of gangs of thugs deployed by a central authority to terrorize the populace, no other work of fiction strikes a more haunting note today. In the novel's notorious ending, the decrepit god, who has allowed the system to run amok, dies. Generations of clerical scholars have misinterpreted this figure to be God, but if the real reference meant by this centralized authority was murky in the fifties, Mahfouz's regular return to the theme of dictatorial authority in his fiction in the 1980s, as Mubarak took over for Anwar El-Sadat, should have made it all too clear that the god in Children of Our Alley was really the Arab dictator...

Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/imagining-more-autumns-for-north-africas-patriarchs-the-dictator-novel-in-e/#ixzz1DsMFeNHd

Free Egypt? 2 11 2011

Al Jazeera 


 Mubarak's requiem: who will emerge?

There are many outstanding leaders ready to take the mantle, and lead Egypt into a new era of democratic rule.

Larbi Sadiki Last Modified: 09 Feb 2011 12:12 GMT

A regime is dying, the second in as many months in the Arab world. How the outside world looks at succession and how local people approach it will differ. The positive fact about change in Egypt and Tunisia this time round is that citizens of both countries are not beholden to the West.

These are home-grown popular uprisings that revitalized popular sovereignty and the will to choose. To aid this birthing, Western governments should do one thing: nothing at all, leaving dictators to face their moment of doom and leaving self-governing people to their own devices. Thus, democratic futures will ensue.

With the imminent end of Mubarak this year, whether in days or weeks, another Pharaoh is discarded to the dustbin of history. But who will lead Egypt to resume its status as a regional player?

The good news is that Egypt has a large pool of leaders, institutions, civic bodies and parties to facilitate a smooth and democratic transition.

Of the key contenders for power in the post-Mubarak era, one faction seems to be leading the pack.

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Egypt: February 3, 2011

Muslim Scholar Tariq Ramadan and Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Zizek comment on Egypt:

click here for link to video

Tariq Ramadan & Slavoj Zizek

Egypt - January 2011

 Egypt Erupts:

Robert Fisk: A people defies its dictator, and a nation's future is in the balance

A brutal regime is fighting, bloodily, for its life. Robert Fisk reports from the streets of Cairo

Saturday, 29 January 2011  - London Independent

...It began at the Istikama mosque on Giza Square: a grim thoroughfare of gaunt concrete apartment blocks and a line of riot police that stretched as far as the Nile. We all knew that Mohamed ElBaradei would be there for midday prayers and, at first, the crowd seemed small. The cops smoked cigarettes. If this was the end of the reign of Mubarak, it was a pretty unimpressive start.

But then, no sooner had the last prayers been uttered than the crowd of worshippers, perched above the highway, turned towards the police. "Mubarak, Mubarak," they shouted. "Saudi Arabia is waiting for you." That's when the water cannons were turned on the crowd – the police had every intention of fighting them even though not a stone had been thrown. The water smashed into the crowd and then the hoses were pointed directly at ElBaradei, who reeled back, drenched.

He had returned from Vienna a few hours earlier and few Egyptians think he will run Egypt – he claims to want to be a negotiator – but this was a disgrace. Egypt's most honoured politician, a Nobel prize winner who had held the post of the UN's top nuclear inspector, was drenched like a street urchin. That's what Mubarak thought of him, I suppose: just another trouble maker with a "hidden agenda" – that really is the language the Egyptian government is using right now.

And then the tear gas burst over the crowds. Perhaps there were a few thousand now, but as I walked beside them, something remarkable happened. From apartment blocks and dingy alleyways, from neighbouring streets, hundreds and then thousands of Egyptians swarmed on to the highway leading to Tahrir Square. This is the one tactic the police had decided to prevent. To have Mubarak's detractors in the very centre of Cairo would suggest that his rule was already over. The government had already cut the internet – slicing off Egypt from the rest of the world – and killed all of the mobile phone signals. It made no difference.

"We want the regime to fall," the crowds screamed. Not perhaps the most memorable cry of revolution but they shouted it again and again until they drowned out the pop of tear gas grenades. From all over Cairo they surged into the city, middle-class youngsters from Gazira, the poor from the slums of Beaulak al-Daqrour, marching steadily across the Nile bridges like an army – which, I guess, was what they were...more