Cairo: My City, My Revolution

Abstract

Like Ahdaf Soueif, I am from Cairo, but I watched and lived the beginnings of the Egyptian revolution through my presence in a different ‘global’ city, proud, inspired, deeply moved, and extremely engaged. My thoughts and feelings extended to the brave people who have put their lives on the line in a persistent pursuit of freedom, justice, and dignity. How I wished to be physically there. On the eve of 25 January 2011, in London, I started to receive news through Facebook, one of the portals connecting me to home, about people pouring into the streets of Suez, Alexandria, and Cairo in marches and demonstrations, at first by tens and hundreds, then quickly filling the streets in streams of thousands. Watching pixilated fragments of scenes on the Internet — live-streaming transmissions from Cairo or short footage filmed on mobile phone cameras — I struggled to comprehend the extent of the situation and to absorb its reality. My city, Cairo, appearing through the jerky scenes, seemed transformed. Its dusty streets, its exhausted buildings, its trees that fill spaces between concrete blocks, all came to life. They stood as witnesses: watching over, sympathizing with, and being defended. The people captured in those early images looked determined, powerful, fearless, confident, together, but most of all knowing. Somehow they ‘knew’, somehow they collectively agreed on the moment of rising when the barrier of fear was to be shattered.

For twenty years I have shied away from writing about Cairo. It hurt too much. But the city was there, close to me, looking over my shoulder, holding up the prism through which I understood the world, inserting herself into everything I wrote. It hurt. And now, miraculously, it doesn’t. Because my city is mine again.

(Soueif: 9)