Mohamed Mahmoud: The Revolutionary Romance Continues

[2 December 2011, graffiti in Mohamed Mahmoud St. Image originally posted to Flickr by Gigi Ibrahim] [2 December 2011, graffiti in Mohamed Mahmoud St. Image originally posted to Flickr by Gigi Ibrahim]

Mohamed Mahmoud: The Revolutionary Romance Continues

By : Mohamad Salama Adam

On Friday 25 November 2011, one week after the Mohamed Mahmoud events, I was standing near one of the entrances to the Sadat metro station, its tunnels spreading beneath Tahrir Square like a spider’s web. I saw a man wearing a heavy brown galabeya turn to a man walking beside him, and ask: “Where is that street...Mohamed Mahmoud?”

During a moment of the “revolutionary romance” I was experiencing, I imagined this man’s day. I imagined that he woke up in his bed in a small village far away from Cairo, and that he put on his galabeya and decided to come to Cairo to see the site of the battle for himself.

It was this romance that made me think that perhaps the revolution had won a major victory that week. But in the moments when I sober up from the intoxication of this romance I conclude that both the revolution and revolutionary and democratic forces in Egypt have lost one of the most important battles in the history of the revolution.

The Mohamed Mahmoud protests were the first of their kind during the revolution. The people came out against the two most important camps in the history of the Egyptian state: the military and the Muslim Brotherhood. At the same time, the protesters were challenging the state’s security arm, the Interior Ministry.

While there is uncertainty about how the events started, the incident that really provoked people’s anger was the attack by the army and security bodies on a small number of protesters, no more than one hundred, who had set up camp in Tahrir Square about a week before the clashes.

The protesters were individuals who had been injured during the revolution. A week after their sit-in began, and the day before the events of Mohamed Mahmoud, a large protest took place in Tahrir Square. The protest was organized by Islamist forces opposed to the document put forward by then-deputy Prime Minister Ali Al-Selmi, which laid out a number of “supraconstitutional” principles rejected by the Islamists.

The Islamists came to Tahrir Square and protested where the revolution’s injured were assembled. The next day (Saturday 19 November 2011), without any warning or justification, security forces used brutal force to disperse the small sit-in. The action provoked many Egyptians, who assembled in Mohamed Mahmoud Street–the street that connects Tahrir Square–the symbol of the revolution, and the Interior Ministry building–the symbol of the security state.

We were approaching parliamentary elections, scheduled to take place at the end of November. This was despite the many failed attempts by democratic and revolutionary forces to change the road map shaped by the success of the Islamists and a “yes” vote by the majority of Egyptians who took part in the 19 March referendum, which resulted in elections being held before a constitution had been drafted.

Democratic and revolutionary forces wanted at that time to exploit this movement to delay the elections. They had failed to convince public opinion that having elections first was not the correct means of making democracy take root. At the same time, Islamists had succeeded in convincing many people that democracy is nothing more than elections.

The street protests were not, in essence, against the holding of elections. Many protesters I spoke to during the events said that they were not against taking part in elections but, at that time, they rejected the Interior Ministry’s continued use of violence. The people were motivated by something more profound than these details fought over by politicians and activists, and which boil down to an argument over when elections should be held. People took to the streets to maintain the autonomy of the street, and of public space, and to ensure that the Interior Ministry did not return once more to its repressive practices. People chanted “Down with military rule” in order to state their rejection of the continuing military state. People took to the streets despite calls by Islamists for calm, and despite their appeals that people should wait until the elections.

After the fall of Hosni Mubarak, people began the quest for a political current that would represent them. The only options they found were the two biggest political forces, both of which had designs on power and possibly fascist intentions. Both camps relied on messages that were easy for the man in the street to understand.

The first model was that of the Islamists. Despite the fact that they were not correct, the two messages that the Islamists focused on—Egyptian society is Islamist, and Egyptians are pious by nature—occasionally drew the street to them and made the street believe that it was Islamist in nature. This was largely due to the Islamists’ mobilization and cohesion with the street. The second model was that of the army, which relied on nationalist rhetoric and the message that the military was the only national institution working for the country’s interests. While it is not true that the only thing that gets results from Egyptians is whipping them, or having a military figure keep them in line, the army’s use of a nationalist message drew the street toward it and reinforced the idea that the whip is the only thing works.

In Mohamed Mahmoud it was clear that a large segment of the street refused both projects. Despite this, democratic forces failed to connect to the street at that moment and select messages that expressed themselves and answered the street’s need for a new project far removed from the dull binary of the military and the Brotherhood.

On the ground, protesters scored a victory against the Interior Ministry by preventing it from committing the violence it hungers for. Politically, democratic and revolutionary forces failed to exploit the movement in Mohamed Mahmoud as the first building block of a genuine third current to fight the power-hungry Islamists and military, as well as the Interior Ministry. And then it lost the shallow battle over the elections, which went ahead on schedule and which Islamists won in a landslide victory. In addition to this, the revolutionary forces that boycotted the elections found a new reason for not taking part in the elections, and this was that they were being held against a backdrop of the blood of the Mohamed Mahmoud martyrs.

The protest movement waned after Egyptians took part in the elections that started 28 November 2011. Some political actors considered this a mistake on the part of the people, with the same superior attitude from the elite and some secular forces–the same forces that constantly justify their failures by saying that the people do not listen to their marvelous advice, transmitted to them on television or via social media sites, while in reality they are completely disconnected from the street and unqualified to talk about it.

The street is neither Islamist in character nor infatuated with the army. Rather, democratic and revolutionary forces are failing to respond to their aspirations.

The only kind of movement the street sees from secular forces is for their own interests and personal freedoms. The street sees secular groups as an invitation to dissoluteness and its proponents as defending the right of their wives to wear short skirts. It views the left as a group of peoples who have no religion and who are hired to spread chaos. The street will stay like this as long as activists and the elite who represent these forces remain removed from it and continue, from a lofty pulpit, their calls to people to mobilize for demands they do not believe offer them anything.

On its second anniversary, Mohamed Mahmoud is still defeating the military and Brotherhood. The street’s history stood alone against attempts made on social media by Brotherhood youth to claim that the Brotherhood were in the square. It stood against their calls for people to go there on the anniversary of its fierce battle, with the result that the Legitimacy Coalition that represents supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi have announced that their marches will not go to Mohamed Mahmoud Street.

The street’s history also stood against attempts by the army and the Interior Ministry to hold their celebrations today. The Interior Ministry published a statement in which it said “glory to the martyrs” (the writer of this statement perhaps forgot to add, “who we killed”), and today army and Interior Ministry vehicles surround Tahrir Square, completely closing off Mohamed Mahmoud Street. A media campaign against protesting on 19 November has also begun: on Friday, the front page of the state-owned Al-Ahram led with the headline “The fifth column forms alliance with Muslim Brotherhood to spread chaos.”

Perhaps we also failed in moving the revolution away from its over-centralization in Tahrir and Mohamed Mahmoud, that street whose splendidness the man in the galabeya came to witness. We failed in creating a non-centralized movement that would take the revolution to that man, wherever he might be. If that had happened, matters might be more difficult for the army and the police than merely closing the square and the street.

The history of this day will remain terrifying for the military and the Interior Ministry. It will also remain a mark of shame that pursues the Brotherhood. Its memory will remain the seed of a movement that refuses the fascism of both camps, as well as state oppression. The question remains: when will democratic powers translate their activism into a message that reaches the street and initiates a movement of a different kind? Perhaps the answer will come on the second anniversary of Mohamed Mahmoud. 

[This article originally appeared in 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.]