Incongruities
No one tortured us in prison. We were beaten, we girls, one time: on the day we decided we would refuse to go back to our cells, after a rally protesting the placement of one of our mates with the criminal prisoners. They descended on us with truncheons; some of us suffered bruises or minor wounds. But the era of Abdel Latif Rushdie had passed, or so it seemed to me – this was one of my many naïve notions. (Here is where Foucault’s argument concerning the transition from securing power by means of extreme torture to control by means of the Panopticon represents a European reality, applicable only in part to our own situation, in that for us power is like a thrifty, scrimping housewife, who never gets rid of anything, even if it’s worn out – she keeps her old, used-up things along with whatever new things she has managed to procure, usually in the same drawer, or at best in two adjoining drawers, opening sometimes one, sometimes the other, according to circumstance and need.)
We were not tortured, because we were students, and the authorities knew how little threat we represented, or because the new president had risen to power only recently, holding the card of democracy: a democracy with teeth, as he once declared, or one whose teeth had been pulled – it hardly matters; what matters is that it was a democracy that permitted the arrest of thousands of students, and occasionally non-students, in the course of a single night, and either punished dissenters with modern batons, different from Abdel Latif Rushdie’s, or brought them baskets full of carrots, and patted them sweetly on the head, so that they took one look and turned into tame rabbits. (And as long as we’re back on the subject of Abdel Latif Rushdie, that ‘Abul Fawares’, the ultimate cavalier, we must mention – though it’s a digression – that he was transferred to Upper Egypt, where he pursued some of his usual methods, ordering his men to beat the soles of a suspect’s feet in front of a crowd of spectators. But the victim was a man of position and good family, and no sooner was the family informed than – before daybreak – they had bombarded the cavalier’s house. The government couldn’t lay hands on those who had perpetrated the killing of its personal cavalier, whom it had mounted upon its own horse. My paternal aunt recounted this incident to me, and then later I confirmed the accuracy of the details she had related, when a former detainee, one of my father’s colleagues, offered them up in a book he wrote.)
Abdel Latif Rushdie did not break us – he was off the set. Nor did the milder versions, those who took his place in the seventies, break us. What, then, broke us? And how?
The question that preoccupies Arwa – between two suicide attempts (the one that failed, when she threw herself into the Nile but was rescued, and the second, when she jumped from the twelfth floor) – is a similar one she takes up in the context of what she calls the attempt to identify both our ‘true image’ and the reasons for the ‘aborted dream’. She talks about the defiance of that group of boys and girls who set out on their noble mission one morning, answering ‘history’s summons’, wishing to ‘adjust the scales’, raising the banner of the ‘dream of collective liberation’, convinced they were a collective who were partaking together of the grand march that ‘traversed the ages’, ‘toward fraternity, equality, justice, and fulfilment’. What happened to them, then, that in the end they were merely a generation come ‘before their time’ (that’s the title of her book), living lives of isolation, despair, impotence and flaccidity, or else of nihilism, stripped of all morality? What happened between that exuberant moment of setting off to realise the noble dream, and the final moment of abandoning the dream to a life of ‘wholesale destruction’, where they became ‘like mummies that, suddenly exposed to the sun, crumbled into dust’?
Arwa talks about the moment that empowered the students to announce their defiance, seeing it as a tragic moment, in spite of everything, because the establishment – armed with ‘a long history of autocracy and the prerogative of word, deed, and thought’ – had been on the point of taking the populace altogether on a different path, reducing it to a state of murderous mayhem, with society following submissively, disempowered and helpless, for ‘it had no foot free, with which to keep its balance’. During the collapse, the situation and its rules changed, and ‘the struggle reached a new level too fierce to be led by students’.
I don’t know how comprehensive this answer is, as for the most part I am afraid of broad generalisations – that is, of absolute judgements or conclusive answers in matters relating to the history of an epoch or the exertions of a generation. All I have to go by is what I saw with my own eyes: a wave that swelled and receded. And because we were young, we saw in the wave only what the young see. We started out laughing, roused by the unexpected sport. Then we held our breath and plunged into the depths; one moment the waters closed over us and the next we raised our heads and took a deep breath, confident, declaring that we were the most capable of winning the contest. Then we would swim on, laughing, jumping, diving, surfacing, playing in the water. As the sun tanned our skin, we found ourselves and each other that much more robust and beautiful.
Hazem is irritated by what I say, finds my words provoking; he remarks acidly, ‘Fill in the picture, Sitt Nada: the young people on the beach at night, alone, naked, and frightened, the whirlpools that can drag you down to the bottom of the ocean, the sinking ships! I can’t take your overwrought fantasies. It’s not about a bunch of children, the ocean, people feeling sad. The reality is more complex and more cruel – besides, we were never that innocent. The difficulty and guile of the surrounding circumstances were more than we could handle, it’s true, but we, despite all the good intentions and the splendour of our collective efforts, were corrupted by a thousand things: from the little shops that treated the street like a puppet show whose strings they could pull, to the deep-rooted ignorance and stupidity, the miscalculations, and the high-handedness of mini-generals.’
‘You didn’t like Arwa. It was your right not to like her. But try to read her book objectively!’
‘The fact that I object to shameless reductivism doesn’t mean I’ve lost my objectivity. I recognise that she hadn’t entirely recovered from her health problems, but her posing as a theorist upsets me. There are some intelligent insights in the book, but taken as a whole it’s poor from a theoretical standpoint, marred by its own facile approach: “The bourgeoisie is the problem, and the behaviour of the bourgeoisie is responsible for every false step, every perversion, every failure” – what could be more convenient than a rack to hang our mistakes on, so we can wash our hands of them, and be relieved?’
‘God, that’s unfair!’
‘It’s not unfair. Any reading of this reality – which is freighted with history going way back, and with endless contradictions – requires of us a greater effort. It’s a responsibility, Sitt Nada, and if we’re not equal to it then we’d better admit it!’
‘Her book is rather like passing reflections, her personal papers.’
‘And judgements, lots of judgements, false generalisations, provocative oversimplifications. I think the split she points to between the ideal in her mind and the reality she lived is nothing but an internal split between what she believed about herself and the reality she disowned, even though she herself was part of that reality. Wasn’t Arwa one of the leaders of the movement? Wasn’t she at the head of one of those little shops? Didn’t you tell me that, in prison, they wanted to break Siham because she wasn’t one of their number? Wasn’t their jealousy of her and her astonishing popularity a part of their motive?’
‘You’re harsh, Hazem, you never forget a grievance.’
‘Maybe so. But I hate nihilism, and I hate seeing the people brought to despair by the fall of one person who, in his own personal state of despair, proclaims with casual ease that any undertaking people may turn to in order to create meaning in their lives is just tilting at windmills. In her book, Arwa writes that family, children, the struggle, are all imaginary solutions. By what right . . .’
I interrupted him. ‘You’re like some fool of a teacher with a metal ruler in his hand that he’s using to beat the palms of a little girl, unable to see her terror and confusion, or even to notice that she’s bleeding. Actually, your behaviour is even worse than that, because the girl you’re beating died! How did you get to be so cruel?’
He got angry, and we parted.
Not all was well in my relationship with Arwa. Was it the chemistry that attracts and repels, or a difference in temperament and ways of looking at things? Or was it that the coolness that arose between us when I refused to join her group became like a snowball that just keeps getting bigger with or without cause? But at this point I wasn’t nitpicking, so why was Hazem? He wasn’t cruel by nature. He had been closer to Arwa, coming more into direct contact with her, for the collective embraced them both. Then Hazem left, declaring that the way things were being managed was ineffective, and would lead no one to safe ground. They didn’t accept this statement coming from him; when Arwa herself, fifteen years later, said some of the same things he had said, and called her book Before Their Time, she found an audience that would celebrate her wisdom and cheer her on. Against Hazem, on the other hand, they had levelled the popular indictment: ‘Bourgeois’, they called him, saying, ‘He sold out for the sake of his own personal aspirations.’ In spite of this he didn’t cut himself off from them – he would still be there to lend his support to any of them in their hour of need, ready to provide medical treatment if someone was ill, and quick to assist with funeral arrangements in the event of a death. He took part in Arwa’s funeral, although he had announced, when the news was first brought to him, that he wouldn’t march in the procession. ‘Arwa,’ he said, ‘spat in all our faces. I can forgive her for everything,’ he said, ‘except killing herself. That I can never forgive.’ And yet he did march in the funeral procession. He helped carry the coffin. He accompanied the mourners to the gravesite. He evinced a strange grief I had never seen in him before – for grief is a powerful downward force, lowering the head and shoulders, as if the body, in sorrow, grew feeble and insubstantial, lending gravity the virulence to overpower it. But Hazem’s grief was expressed as a peculiar kind of anger, rather like the force of a violent storm. It was as if Arwa, before his eyes, had split in two: a dead person whose loss he grieved, and a killer against whom he blazed with wrath, confronting her with a violence he could scarcely contain.
‘There’s more to it,’ I thought, ‘than just abusing someone he doesn’t want to forget.’ I rang him the following day, and we made up.
It’s strange that I should cling to the same perception of someone for thirty years; that time should pass, years go by, the scene keep changing, and my image of that person remain just as it was when it fixed itself in my mind at the time of our first encounters. It is as if, by intuition or perspicacity, I had acquired, once and for all, the ability of that tall, slender boy to remain upright in a frightening scene, buffeted by bilious and pestilential winds. (Was it actually on a brilliant, sunny morning that we had that picture taken, or was it cloudy and ominous?)
Hazem grew up and so did I. We went our different ways, meeting on occasion by chance, or by arrangements we made through telephone calls from one country to another. For years we wouldn’t meet, and then we would resume seeing each other once more, each of us finding the other just as when we last parted company, apart from a little weight gained or lost, hair greying or black threaded with white, a bout with depression just surmounted or about to begin – each of us found the other still alone, still a comrade.
I never fully acknowledged to him the place he occupied in my soul. I was in the habit of dissimulating, and of putting on the affability of a colleague, of joking and bickering. We would get together and laugh raucously. We would playfully trade off the costumes of a masquerade, and for moments in which confusion reigned be unable to distinguish between what was real and what was the disguise. We would banter and joke, and laugh still more loudly, like a pair of lunatics, mocking the world, playing with words. Or he might be absent-minded, impervious to humour, and then I might put up with him or not: we might have a row, quarrelling in loud voices, then abruptly going our separate ways, one of us walking away from the other in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of the road, giving both ourselves and the other a break.
Months would go by, and then we would start meeting again.
At some conference where I was working as a simultaneous interpreter, someone said to me – someone of whom I remember nothing except how blue his eyes were and how sleek his blond hair was, gathered in what looked like a short ponytail – ‘To confront the system on your own is simply impossible!’ I don’t remember whether this was the sequel to something he’d already said and he went on at great length, or whether his commentary was confined to this single utterance. Nor do I remember the context. But this comment often surfaces in my mind, and with it a clip from an old black-and-white Italian film – by Vittorio De Sica, I think: a group of people, poor and homeless, who spend their nights wherever they find themselves. We see them on a very cold, cloudy morning, when they have just got up from their haphazard beds, clothed in rags that scarcely keep off the cold. There in the open they approach a small triangular patch of light formed by a ray of sun that breaks through the clouds. They stand together there, seeking warmth, pressing close and then still closer against one another, until none of them is outside the spot upon which the sunbeam falls.
Why did this clip, from a film I saw such a long time ago, stick in my mind? I recall the scene, then wonder all over again about the individual and the group. I think about the two-way street where the individual morphs into the group, or the group dissolves into individuals.
It dissolved, and yet my friendship with Hazem remained, warm and firmly rooted. Strange!
We met initially at the first big sit-in. He was sitting in the seat next to mine – tall, slim, and so young you were amazed he was a university student. I said, ‘Nada Abdel Qadir, pre-qualifying in engineering, Cairo.’
‘Hazem Kamel,’ he said, ‘medicine, Cairo.’
We shook hands.
‘Are you pre-med?’
‘I’m in the bachelor’s programme!’
‘Are you joking?’
‘Of course I’m joking. I’m in my first year of high school, but I skipped school and came to the sit-in. I look a bit older than I am, don’t I?’
‘Which school?
‘Al-Saïdiyya. Just a stone’s throw away. I climb over the school fence, then it’s a hop, skip, and a jump and I’m inside the university.’
When I met him for the second time I asked him, ‘Did you skip school again?’
‘They expelled me for skipping too many times.’
‘What will you do now?’
‘Look for a job – anything at all, because I’m looking after three children and their mother!’
For years these two encounters would fuel Hazem’s mockery – he would ridicule my credulity, with a standard closing remark: ‘Silly girl!’
After I got out of prison, I went back to my on-campus activism as a matter of course, although I was more careful about reconciling it with my academic requirements. More to the point, I was capable of reconciling the two, because I made up my mind to refuse to join any of the existing groups, those that demanded a great deal of effort from their young members (‘the vigorous capacity for endless discussion that belonged to people with too much time on their hands . . . endless discussion instead of productive work’ – in this Arwa was exactly right, although she herself had been among those with this kind of capability, and had been one of the pillars of these organisations). The issue of wasted energy wasn’t the greatest deterrent for me – rather it was the contemptible situation I had experienced firsthand in prison, which all too often produced petty tyrants and a lot of iron boxes.
By this abstention I escaped the most confining of the Masonic circles – my relationship with, and estrangement from, Shazli was of a piece with this circumstance – and the movement seemed less forceful than it had been for the previous two years. Moreover, a number of its most prominent leaders were graduating and leaving to continue their studies abroad, going off to London or Paris or Moscow. (Sometimes it seemed as though things were turned around: the movement didn’t collapse because they went away; rather they went away because the movement was fading, so there was nothing for it except for them to pursue their individual plans.) Siham and Tawfik separated. The breakup was cataclysmic, an act of treachery, out of nowhere. Stricken with a nervous collapse, Siham was beset and overcome by her fears. Afterward she told me, ‘I lived in a weird state of terror such as I’d never known before. When a knock came on the door I was completely engulfed by fear and hid under the bed – as if hiding there would protect me from Them.’
I hated myself for opening the door to a conversation that induced her to say what she said. I closed it again hastily, and opened a different one. I reminded her of ‘Spearhead’, the plan we had agreed on the day we refused to go into our cells, after roll-call. (We stood in spearhead formation.) They attacked and we attacked, and after that we ran and spread ourselves out around the prison, so as to scatter the guards and wear them down. As usual, Siham was in the vanguard.
I said to her, laughing, ‘You didn’t have the opportunity I had, to follow the chain of events: You had a guard on your right and another on your left, and guards all over the place backing them up, all of them upon you. You pulled one guard’s hair and grabbed the other one, giving them all a good drubbing with your feet. You were too much for them!’
She smiled. ‘I was fixated on repaying them blow for blow. I wasn’t thinking of anything except that I had to get the better of them.’
‘For my part, I was rapt before the spectacle, and forgot to strike out, forgot to kick, forgot to be afraid – I stood transfixed by what I saw, rooted to the spot and musing on your ability to face down three guards all at once.’
We recalled the details of that episode and laughed over our failed battle plan, which ended with some of us beaten up, with those in front of the cells (which they had refused to enter at the staging of the protest) now wanting to take cover in them, while one solitary comrade actually accomplished the second part of our strategy – the plan to spread out into different parts of the prison: she ‘scattered’ all by herself, and so they ganged up on her and beat her to within an inch of her life.
I deliberately invoke the funny incidents, and we both laugh. But when I leave her and go home and get into bed, what she said about her fear, and how she hid under the bed, comes back to me, and I weep until my pillow is wet. I get up and spread a towel over it, but then the towel gets soaked as well, and I replace it with another.
I never told this story about the bed. Once, when I was on the point of confiding it to Hazem some years later, the words froze on my tongue, and I found myself saying to him, ‘Don’t you think we should establish a political association for orphans like us?’
He raised his eyebrows quizzically. I didn’t explain. ‘Just a thought,’ I said. And we took leave of each other.
At the beginning of the following academic year, I took to reading whatever books appealed to me – textbooks or otherwise – without feeling guilty, or worrying that I was doing this at the expense of the cause. I began to express feelings of scorn and contempt for X and Y if I thought that they were stupid or corrupt; now that I wasn’t affiliated with the organisation and its hierarchical structure, I felt no obligation to respect them and follow their brilliant instructions. The reaction of my comrades, who still abided by what I now rejected, availed nothing except to increase my alienation and my determination to accept what I liked and refuse what I didn’t, following only my own head, even if some regarded this individualism as a residue of the ‘corrupt petty bourgeoisie’ to which I belonged. None of my comrades said this to me directly, except for Shazli, who flung it in my face one day – so we quarrelled bitterly. The rift between us lasted several weeks, and then when we made up he took me by surprise:
‘Nada, what do you say we get married?’
‘How can we get married and set up house when we’re students? My father is paying my expenses, and your family’s paying yours.’
‘We can work while going to school.’
I laughed. ‘How? We can’t find enough time for studying to begin with – we don’t go to most of the lectures as it is! Besides, we’re not even twenty! Siham and Tawfik split up, Arwa and Khaled as well. It seems to me marriage is a strategic decision, to be taken by a person who’s mature and self-assured. I laughed again. It’s like those well-made commodities you expect to last a lifetime. I’m going to graduate from the university first and work for a few years before I think about marriage!’
He turned pale, then burst out shrilly, strident in his accusation: ‘You don’t love me. You don’t know the meaning of love. You’re just one of the bourgeois, and you think only of marriage bourgeois-style. Your revolutionary ideas are nothing but a superficial shell. You went to Paris for the pleasure and the spectacle, you threw me on the mat and left. Your father took part in the dissolution of the Party!’
He turned his back on me and befriended another girl.
Then began a new phase in my life, my responsibility for which I could not neglect, nor could I deny the joy it brought me.
Hamdiya took me aside, looking conspicuously pale and wan. ‘There’s something I want to talk to you about,’ she said. I looked at her. She said she was pregnant. I didn’t know what I was expected to say, nor did I know how to deal with the news. I said nothing, as if I hadn’t heard, or had heard her but not grasped the words.
‘I’m afraid to tell your father,’ she said.
‘Why? He’ll be overjoyed.’
‘No, he won’t. He made an agreement with me before we got married that we wouldn’t have children. I didn’t intentionally break my promise – I got pregnant by accident.’
‘Do you want to terminate the pregnancy?’
When she didn’t reply, I said, ‘Tell him in my presence, and then leave it to me.’
I surprised myself in saying this, not knowing why I said it or why I had decided so quickly and resolutely that I would protect her from my father.
After dinner, Hamdiya made tea and brought it to us in the sitting room. Then she sat down beside me and said in a faint voice, looking at my father, ‘Doctor (for this is what she called him), yesterday the physician confirmed that I’m pregnant.’
There was a moment’s silence, which was broken by my father’s voice. ‘It’s not a problem. You can have an abortion.’
I joined the conversation. ‘Why an abortion? Does she have some health problem that prohibits her from carrying and bearing a child?’
Neither of them said anything. Then my father looked at me. ‘I’m about to turn fifty, Nada!’
‘And your point is?’
I was gathering my forces, and it showed in my voice, which seemed louder than I wanted it to be.
‘My point is that I may not live long enough to raise this child!’
I said, ‘God give you strength and good health – may you live a hundred years. Congratulations, Hamdiya!’
Hamdiya was watching my father, waiting for a decision or a pronouncement, which struck me as provocative and offensive. Looking at my father, I said, ‘Congratulations, Abu Nada!’
He raised his voice. ‘I have a daughter, and that’s enough.’
I shouted, ‘But Hamdiya has a right to bear a child. And you have no right to deprive her of that, or to deprive me of a sister or brother. Hamdiya may accept your insistence on an abortion, and she may forgive you, but I won’t accept or forgive!’
I went into my room and slammed the door.
The battle over the baby lasted seven days, culminating in my father’s capitulation. Nor was this favourable outcome a matter only of the battle to save the child; it was also an occasion for collaboration between Hamdiya and me, as if my defence of her right to this baby conferred on me also some right where it was concerned – not merely that of the sister who would delight in the baby after it was born, but the right to participate in actual maternity, by following its progress from the early stages of pregnancy to preparing to receive the newborn, whose name my father and Hamdiya had given me the honour of choosing.