Book review: Cairo - My City, Our Revolution

By Gavin Bowd
Published on Sunday 22 January 2012 03:49

‘A REVOLUTION,” writes Ahdaf Soueif, “is a process, not an event.” In this account of the “18 golden days” that shook Egypt in February 2011, the acclaimed author of The Map Of Love conveys the fervour, but also the dangers and delusions, of political upheaval.

Originally commissioned to write a personal book about her native Cairo, the novelist and political commentator found herself remapping the city as she and other opponents of the Mubarak regime fought to reclaim their streets.

Tahrir Square, which the regime had been planning to privatise, suddenly lives up to its “Liberation” name; charming pedestrian passageways become useful for ambush and escape; on Maspero Square, there is a restaurant to bring back romantic memories, but also tanks; from the roof of the Ramses Hilton, snipers turn rebel students into martyrs.

Certainly, Tahrir Square sees moments of levity, from irreverent stand-up comedians to the unintentional farce of an attack by Mubarak loyalists riding camels, but the brute reality of shootings, torture and disappearances is never far away.

Soueif’s book is a lyrical tribute to the “shabab”, the young Egyptians who stood up to the regime in a way that she and her forebears had only dreamed of in the preceding 40 years. Her city, “degraded and bruised and robbed and exploited and slapped about”, has, it seems, rediscovered its soul. The spirit of revolt that brought Gamal Nasser to power in 1952 has been rekindled. This “open-source” revolt, using social media as well as sticks and stones, is celebrated as “inclusive, unkillable and incorruptible”. Liberal and cosmopolitan, the shabab are contrasted with the thuggish and robotic “baltagi” of the secret police.

However, this intoxicating melodrama is troubled by the far from smooth transition since Mubarak was finally toppled and put on trial.

Soueif’s breathless account of the 18 days is interrupted by a flash-forward to the complex situation eight months later. The headquarters of the National Democratic Party may now be a burnt-out shell, but the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is redeploying the hated baltagis against protesters, albeit under a different name.

The tear-gas has cleared, but “the people know that Tahrir was simply spectacle”, an inspiring point of departure. “Nobody is going to step back into the nightmare,” Soueif says, and yet the “Remnants” are re-organising and gaining strength. The arrival of Salafi Islamists from the provinces shows another side of the anti-Mubarak uprising which sits uncomfortably with the westernised Cairenes who greet them.

Indeed, Soueif’s account skirts around Egyptian realities which do not fit an intellectual revolt. She and her freedom-loving rebels may demand that their country cease to be the “scabby mongrel” of Israel and America, but US aid constitutes a third of Egypt’s GDP. Earnest academics put on improvised literacy classes for urchins attracted by the protest, but the impoverished masses are voiceless in this book, only appearing in the dehumanised and irredeemably negative form of the baltagi.

Such a degraded majority could never share the daily existence of Soueif, split as it is between demonstrating, being interviewed by Jon Snow for Channel 4, and preparing for a long summer holiday in her family’s country home. There is surprisingly little concern about the tensions between Muslims and the minority Coptic Christians which have recently, and predictably, exploded.

The overwhelming presence of the pronoun “I”, coupled with sometimes bombastic praise for kith and kin – her sister is “a radical Romantic who has spread her sheltering wings over friends and family and brought up three children who’ve shone like comets in the skies of our revolution” – offers an intensely personal take on events, but also makes “our revolution” as much enclosed as “inclusive”.

“We lived the dream,” concludes Soueif, indicating that, as with so many revolutions before, the “process” may soon make its participants long for those now distant “golden days”.

• Cairo: My City, Our Revolution by Ahdaf Soueif, Bloomsbury, £14.99