The Callous Father Who Refuses to Die

Re: The Callous Father Who Refuses to Die, and the Madman Screaming at the Wind

The place: Tahrir Street in Doqqi.

The time: Four o`clock in the afternoon less than two weeks after Mubarak’s ouster.

Traffic is jammed, cars lining up behind one another waiting for the light to change. The atmosphere is stifling, and there is a palpable feeling in the air that everyone is about to lose it. You can feel it in the way the lethargic bodies jerk about. You can feel it in the frenzy of pressure coming down on the traffic signal.

I notice the concern of the passing street traders as they jostle each other, looking up. I raise my head in turn and catch a glimpse of him standing in the window of one of the buildings. A man with wild grey hair and a glittering patch of baldness on the front of his head, his pinched face strained and his raised voice breaking. He is screaming out words I cannot decipher. The distance and surrounding din turn them into a disturbing hiss. I wish I could figure out what he is saying, so that I would know the target of all his scorn and indignation. But his voice vanishes into the ether, into the exhaust fumes, and gets lost among all the car-horns announcing their impatience toward this never-ending traffic jam.

It is as though the man were insulting a particular something or someone. But the way he curses, and the anger streaming from his face, suggest that his curse is meant for all existence.

My eyes leave the old man`s angry face to fall on the visible portion of his body and I see that despite the winter cold, he’s wearing a short-sleeved cotton undershirt. It occurs to me that all he is missing is a colorful cardboard crown and a soccer referee`s whistle, and he would look exactly like madmen do in old Egyptian movies. This man really does seem insane, and his screams disappearing on the wind in turn transform the world into an equivalent madness, equally as vicious and grim.

As a kind of guessing game, I begin to imagine why he is so hysterical. Did he lose one of his children during the revolution? Was this his way of telling the world that he had suffered some terrible injustice at the hands of the toppled regime? Did the revolution cause him harm? Or is he just one of those people who cannot stand to live in a situation where nothing is clear?

In a moment of writerly speculation, I imagine him as a father who has lost all control over his children, and that his children have taken over as the main protagonists of the story. They have left him to do little more than make annoying threats of dire consequences before finally giving himself over in this way, screaming into the sky in protest against the disappearance of the world as he knows it, even with the knowledge that the new world to be built upon the rubble of the old will be better and more liberated.

In the figure of this screaming old man, I see another face of the deposed president and the generals who now want to take on the role of the father-figure, as though the revolution—which was mounted to bring down only one dictator—had instead installed numerous dictators in his place.

The military, just like the madman of Tahrir Street (at least as I imagined him), is exactly like Mubarak before he was overthrown. They all think they can turn back time, as though 25 January did not change anything. But the truth is that the revolution created a new spirit in the soul of every person who participated in it—a spirit that has made it impossible for anyone to accept the norms that prevailed before the revolution.

There is a vast difference between the way the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces behaved in the days following Mubarak`s fall and the way they talk and act now. “The Benevolent Father” who goes to great lengths to appear as the revolution’s guardian, striving his utmost to achieve its goals. Yet, even as he continues to cling to his role as father and guardian, time and again the veil comes off to reveal another face—that of a callous father who would “kill” his children to punish them for overstepping their expected roles. This is the kind of father who tries civilians in military courts, subjects female prisoners to virginity tests, and restricts the freedoms of opinion and expression as well as the right to hold public demonstrations.

In Egypt, conversation in many circles now runs thick with talk of the militarization of society and its speedy progression since 11 February. But these conversations fail to address the fact that our society—and herein lies the danger—has never been able to rid itself of the impact and effects of six decades of military rule. Even if the military`s actual presence has lessened in the two decades directly following the July Revolution, its roots run deep in a society where the majority of individuals still sanctify hierarchy as though it were the divine law of existence. A society that behaves as though youth were a disgrace and being advanced age a super virtue, even if those of such an age lack supporting qualifications. This shameful societal hierarchy is a blend of military chain-of-command and rural values that require absolute obeisance to the Eldest, even if his words have no meaning or logic and his actions subjugate and suppress those younger than he.

The most beautiful thing initiated by the January revolution and all those who participated in it—whichever generation, class, intellectual or social background they may belong to—was an endeavor to break this hierarchy and rebel against those who appoint themselves as guardians over others. But now we are being pushed back to the starting point. There are people fighting to return Egypt to its former state: a family run by an all-powerful “father” who attempts to set his children to a particular rhythm. He spoils one child, is stern with another, and allies himself with a third for reasons that are never made clear. And in each instance all he wants is to pull strings, to control the game so that the regime he has set up does not collapse. A tyrannical father, like the one to whom we grew accustomed over the course of many long decades, who stifled us, and who surveyed our every move—always in the name of benevolence, and care for our well-being. If we happen to step out of the scenario he’s sketched for us, he loses his nerve and indeed the whole meaning of his existence. Unless we behave, he will drown in angry, unintelligible cries.

The present political powers seem like a group of people gathered in a dim room, each of whom sits in one corner with his eyes closed, listening apprehensively to the low voices of the others as they speak to him. They sharpen their hearing with the strength of their fear, not out of a genuine interest in listening, and they prepare vehement reactions for the first gestures they interpret as an attack against them.

And the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces—alone and at a distance—monitors these hesitant, conflicting parties, intervening at times to set the rhythm of the game and orient it in the direction that best serves its interests, though it is no less hesitant and apprehensive than the rest.

Exploiting the confusion between the army and itself as a governing body, the Council tries to place itself above responsibility or criticism, pretending to have forgotten that it has happily accepted a political role many times in the past, and that it is thus illogical for it to be above responsibility.

Taking advantage of the general tendency to confuse its identity with the army’s, which enjoys great popularity among Egyptians, the Council clings to slogans like “The People and the Army are One Hand,” even though the sequence of events since 25 February has transformed such slogans into utter nonsense. Still, they are now being used in accordance with a different strategy. Starting on the second Friday of Anger (27 May), the protesters who participated in the demonstrations (hundreds of thousands of them) were removed from this equation with the army and turned into “riot-fomenters working against the popular will and attempting to sow discord between the people and the army.”

Those “riot-fomenters” who crowded into Tahrir and many other squares in governorates across Egypt--they are the ones who exposed—yet again—the Muslim Brotherhood`s opportunism and preference for their own narrow interests as an organization over those of the public. They also sent a message to the “New Fathers” in the SCAF: they will not allow the Council to evacuate the revolution of its meaning. They will not stand by and watch their uprising be transformed from a popular revolution into a coup engineered by a military that hides behind a mask of benevolence at times while exercising violence and stricture at others.
 
But the most important question now is: what next? How can we transform the vitality and momentum of the Square into an effective political praxis—one in touch with reality that can succeed in attracting more popularity? How can we arrive at a shared language between us and that man screaming from the window of his apartment in a building on Tahrir Street, perhaps because he thinks the rug is being pulled out from under him—between us and all the grumbling indifferents who call the protests “sectarian demonstrations” without realizing that these demonstrations and others like them are the only way to help the revolution take root and reach deeper?

[Transleted from the Arabic by Emily Drumsta]