Resurgent Nationalism

[16 April 2012, the Arabic reads:\"your gas is illuminating Israel, take the streets\". In this instance, \"your gas\" is in reference to the natural gas Egypt is exporting to Israel on a \"special\" price deal according to reports. The graffiti is displayed in Al-Zamalik, Cairo, Egypt. Image originally posted to Flickr by Hossam El-Hamlawy] [16 April 2012, the Arabic reads:\"your gas is illuminating Israel, take the streets\". In this instance, \"your gas\" is in reference to the natural gas Egypt is exporting to Israel on a \"special\" price deal according to reports. The graffiti is displayed in Al-Zamalik, Cairo, Egypt. Image originally posted to Flickr by Hossam El-Hamlawy]

Resurgent Nationalism

By : Ola Galal

“God is Great! Long live Egypt!” Amr Adib, an anchor on Al-Qahera Al-Youm talk show, shouted as he waved the country’s tricolor flag minutes after the commander of the Armed Forces announced the removal of President Mohamed Morsi from power on 3 July.

“The Egyptian people are great ... Egypt is the greatest state in the world, the whole world is watching you, and watching the Egyptian flag!” Spreading the flag across his shoulders, Adib proudly declared that this was the Egyptian flag and “not the flag of the group,” referring to the Muslim Brotherhood, which the ousted president hails from.

In the run-up to the 30 June protests and after Morsi’s ouster, talk shows run by presenters like Adib that air on privately owned satellite channels have been fraught with nationalistic rhetoric. This rhetoric has been mostly used to criticize the deposed president and his group.

Sometimes subtly and other times blatantly, most privately owned satellite channels have been highlighting the superiority of the Egyptian nation and its people, the valorization of the state and its institutions — specifically the army and the police — and the demonization of an enemy, namely Muslim Brotherhood members, threatening the nation state.

Shadia’s "Egypt, My Love" (ya habibti ya masr) has been played on air repeatedly and the Egyptian flag has been omnipresent on screens, either as banners or in the backgrounds of studios. Nationalistic expression by the Egyptian media is not particularly new, especially as during the protests against former President Hosni Mubarak, television stations both supporting and opposing the revolt adopted a nationalistic rhetoric that emphasized “love” for Egypt. Echoing the streets, TV shows still maintain, as they did when Mubarak was ousted, that the Egyptian people did what they did — overthrow Morsi ​— because they are a great nation. Such media discourses are in fact a reflection of sentiments already prevalent on the ground, best captured in the chant “Keep your head up high! You are Egyptian!” which has echoed in Tahrir Square and across Egypt since 11 February 2011, the day Mubarak left.

But the way these talk shows are using nationalist discourse at this historical and political juncture is different. The enemy this time is not Mubarak’s men or feloul ​— a derogatory term referring to a diverse group of people whose interests are linked to the Mubarak regime — but the Ikhwan (the Arabic name for the Brotherhood), and this time, the state institutions that are most resistant to revolution — the army and the police — are on the side of the protesters.

Although long-time critics of the Interior Ministry’s repressive practices, in the days leading to 30 June, talk shows airing on ONtv, for example, commended the “national role” of police officers in planning to secure the upcoming protests, and implied that loving the homeland, Egypt, entails having respect for the police. This is not to say that all police officers have been involved in abusive practices against citizens, but the point is that the station has clearly played up praise for the police and armed forces, whose members are also suspected of involvement in attacks on protesters during their eighteen months in power after Mubarak’s removal.

In a similar vein, Ahmed Moussa, a presenter on Tahrir TV, dedicated a significant amount of airtime to beseeching Egyptians to pay allegiance to the institutions of the Egyptian state. “Leave your homes and become martyrs for the sake of this nation,” he pleaded in a shrieking voice on 5 July, “... to support your army and the police ... We have to stand against the Muslim Brotherhood ... the killers ... and America.”

Speaking on ONtv, Hamada al-Masry, identified as a political activist, called on Egyptians to take to the street to “liberate your country from the Brotherhood/American occupation.” It seems that this attempt at linking the Brotherhood to America was meant to vilify them before the Egyptian audience, who intensely resent any hint of interference by the American administration or any foreign government or group in their national affairs. This image of the American-backed Islamists was contrasted with that of the Egyptian army, a savior whose sole interest lies in safeguarding the nation, thus deserving Egyptian citizens’ support and respect.

Alongside the military, whose intervention to pass on interim leadership to the head of the supreme Constitutional Court Adly Mansour was key in ending Morsi’s term, the opposition are portrayed as being patriotic (wataneyyeen), while the Muslim Brotherhood are treacherous (khawana), betraying the nation in the interests of their group, whose primary loyalty is to other group members throughout the world. In an attempt to disparage the Brotherhood and Morsi, Adib of Al-Qahera Al-Youm sought to portray them as a group apart from the Egyptian people. Commenting on a video showing a purported Brotherhood supporter throwing a supposedly anti-Morsi protester off a rooftop tower, he presented his view as such: “there is the people, us, and there is an Umma (Islamic nation), the Brotherhood.” Commentators often cited former Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood Mohamed Mahdi Akef as saying “Tozz fi Masr," which roughly translates as “To hell with Egypt.”

Even though this nationalist rhetoric in the Egyptian media is nothing novel, especially at times of political crisis, its resurgence in media coverage of Morsi’s ouster is particularly alarming since it entails calls — made by TV hosts themselves either directly or subtly — for unquestioned allegiance to repressive state institutions, the very ones that have been at the core of protester rage since 25 January 2011. It has also indirectly led to a form of xenophobia that targets non-Egyptian communities, such as the Syrians and Palestinians living in Egypt, because of their purported association with the Brotherhood. Talk show hosts and prominent public figures interviewed on their programs have made repeated, unsubstantiated allegations that Hamas fighters either trained the so-called Muslim Brotherhood militias or were directly reinforcing their ranks. Syrians in Egypt, they claimed, were among Morsi’s supporters at the Rabea al-Adaweya sit-in.

Even though talk shows speak to millions of Egyptians who may truly have genuine love for their country, such a discourse, especially when adopted by state institutions, may have grave implications. This rhetoric could be used to discredit anyone criticizing the state as unpatriotic or as being an agent of a foreign entity, as was the case during the 25 January uprising. Non-Egyptian communities in Egypt or even Egyptians, who are perceived as different, such as the Nubians or Sinai Bedouins, may have to bear the brunt of growing xenophobia or discrimination. Others may feel alienated and cut off from Egypt`s political community and thus reject participation in the political process altogether. And as the country starts on a transitional phase all these developments are troubling because they are incompatible with the mode of governance based on freedom, openness, and multiplicity that was envisioned by many who took part in the ouster of Morsi and of Mubarak before him.

 [This article originally appeared on Mada Masr.]

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]