The New York Review of Books - USA (2022-04-21)

April 21, 2022 47

Refusing Silence in Egypt

Ursula Lindsey

Here Is a Body

by Basma Abdel Aziz,

translated from the Arabic

by Jonathan Wright.

Hoopoe/American University

in Cairo Press, 333 pp., $18.95 (paper)

The Queue

by Basma Abdel Aziz,

translated from the Arabic

by Elisabeth Jaquette.

Melville House, 217 pp., $15.95 (paper)

You Have Not Yet Been Defeated:

Selected Works, 2011–2021

by Alaa Abd el- Fattah,

translated from the Arabic

by a collective, with a

foreword by Naomi Klein.

Seven Stories, 398 pp., $18.95 (paper)

The Book of Sleep

by Haytham El Wardany,

translated from the Arabic

by Robin Moger.

Seagull, 161 pp., $21.50; $17.00 (paper)

I visited Cairo in late November 2021,

after a two- year absence. I knew to ex-

pect changes, and I found them. The

area around Tahrir Square, emptied of

most of its cultural life, has become a

decorative and heavily policed show-

case. The dense lower- class neighbor-

hood of Bulaq has been cleared to make

way for hotels and high- rises. The riv-

erside promenade along my old neigh-

borhood is under construction too, and

I fear for the trees there, since so many

elsewhere have been uprooted. Huge

new elevated freeways cut through cen-

tral neighborhoods. They are designed

to make it easier to drive and to reach

the grandiose new administrative capi-

tal that the regime of President Abdel

Fattah el- Sisi is building in the desert

east of Cairo at a cost of $58 billion.^1

The city seemed unfamiliar, but it

wasn’t just because of this physical

transformation. My sense of Cairo

was strongly marked by the last year

I lived there, 2014—by which time the

euphoria, chaos, and anxiety of the

Arab Spring, three years earlier, had

been brought to an end by the installa-

tion of a counterrevolutionary military

regime. I’ve been back several times

since. Many of the people I knew have

left, and those who have remained are

either tired of talking about what went

wrong or busy dealing with the never-

ending trouble they’re in.

What was different this time was the

way the memory of the 2011 uprising

seemed not just buried but obliterated,

as if it had never happened at all. Ever

since it took power, the Sisi regime’s

goal has been not just to undo the ef-

fects of the uprising (which Sisi has

said he viewed from the beginning as

“the death certificate of the Egyptian

state”) but to wipe away the very story

of what happened with a flood of lies

and threats.

These days it feels hopeless, even

pathetic, to go on looking back at the

Arab Spring. Yet a minority of Egyp-

tians remain committed to its memory

and ideals. One of them is the writer

Basma Abdel Aziz, whom I met one

morning to discuss her latest book,

Here Is a Body. Her original publisher

has been instructed not to promote it,

bookstores not to sell it, newspapers

not to write about it. Copies of the En-

glish translation by Jonathan Wright,

published by an imprint of the Amer-

ican University in Cairo Press, aren’t

available in Egypt. What makes this

novel so unwelcome?

Here Is a Body opens in disorienta-

tion and terror. Rabie, a homeless boy,

is kidnapped in the middle of the night

from the garbage dump where he and

other street kids live:

My hand was crushed under some-

one’s boot, along with Emad’s arm.

I gasped silently. Then someone

started lifting my leg, which was

stuck under Youssef’s stomach,

and then my body too. I clung on

to Youssef’s clothes, but the hand

lifting me was much too strong

for me. I suddenly found my head

swinging through the air. I stiff-

ened my neck to try to control it,

but it was no use. I couldn’t make

out where the voice giving orders

was coming from but it was defi-

nitely from above.

“Get up, you filthy bastard. Get

up, you piece of shit. Get up, get

up,” it said.

The children are gagged, blind-

folded, and transported to an unknown

location, where they are dumped in a

crowded room and left to cry and moan

and shit themselves for days. One of

their captors explains that they have

been rounded up to end the nuisance

and disgrace of their vagrancy. Various

solutions have been proposed. An emi-

nent scholar has

suggested we consider you to be

non- existent, that we eliminate you

completely, that we remove your

names from the official records,

if your names are even there, and

that we treat you in the same way

we treat stray dogs.... The coun-

try cannot afford to spend money

feeding, educating, and housing

you without you doing anything in

return.

In the end, though, the authorities de-

cide to spare the boys. They will not be

slaughtered but rather rehabilitated in

this camp, where they lose their names

and are simply addressed as “bodies”

(the word in Arabic is badan, which

specifically refers to the torso, the body

without the head); their masters are

addressed as “Heads.” The children

undergo physical training and attend

lectures. They are told that they must

help defend their country, be ready to

sacrifice whatever they possess; that

they are like scalpels, excising infected

wounds from the body of the nation;

that they are soldiers supported by God

Almighty, who will reward them in the

afterlife and send their enemies to hell.

At first the boys are skeptical. But

eventually they begin to be sent out on

missions, attacking protesters or creat-

ing pretexts for the police to open fire

on them. Some of the boys are intox-

icated with their newfound power. As

one of them explains:

Now we’re the masters, the mas-

ters of the country. No one will

dare to harass us. No son- of- a-

whore driver will look down on us,

no lousy waiter will shoo us away

from outside a restaurant or a café.

No one will dare call for help or

report us. We’ll report on people

and wipe them off the face of the

earth like straw. If some bastard

shouts, we’ll shut him up and in fu-

ture he’ll open his mouth only to

obey us.

The book’s other storyline involves

a couple, Aida and Murad, who have

decided to join a tent city of protesters

that has formed in “the Space.” The

sit- in is organized by the Raised Ban-

ner movement to demand the return to

power of their abducted ruler. For any-

one who knows Egypt’s recent history,

the references will be obvious: this is

Cairo’s Rabaa el- Adawiya Square in

the summer of 2013, where the Muslim

Brotherhood was holding a massive

sit- in that was about to be dispersed by

security services in the worst massacre

in Egypt’s modern history.

President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in

2011 was followed by a deliberately

muddled transitional period in which

the Muslim Brotherhood, the interim

military government, and other state

institutions maneuvered for power,

while protesters continued to clash

with security forces and to demand

real reforms. In 2012 Mohamed Morsi,

of the Brotherhood, narrowly won

the presidential election. In their first

year in power, the Brotherhood proved

themselves to be intransigent, intoler-

ant, and shortsighted. They lashed out

at critics, refused to rein in violence by

the police and their supporters, and

pushed through a constitution that en-

shrined sharia law and alienated liberal

and progressive forces in the country.

Morsi clashed with the courts and is-

sued a highly contested constitutional

declaration that granted the presi-

dency exceptional powers. A group

that called itself Tamarod (Rebel)

began gathering signatures for a peti-

tion demanding that he step down. On

June 30, 2013, huge protests against

Protesters against the military government under a banner calling for the release of Alaa Abd

el-Fattah, center, and other political prisoners, Tahrir Square, Cairo, November 2011

Mohamed Abd el-Ghany/Reuters/Alamy

(^1) See Yasmine El Rashidi, “Sisi’s New
Cairo: Pharaonic Ambition in Ferro-
Concrete,” nybooks.com, October 16,
2021.
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