Losing Myself in Writing & Finding It Again Through Reading [Part One]
Or, having a meltdown and being soothed by re-reading Pascale Ghazaleh's 'An Archive of Forgetting: Egypt, 2011-2021'.
On days like today, when my sternum is more velvet cushion whereupon a tight coil of rage rests and there’s little I can hear over the clamorous sound of crackling cartilage, an ever-present reminder of the dirty combat boot making a footrest of my fucking throat at an excruciatingly slow pace, I long for the margin, the echo-chamber, the anthropology department balcony, our once-corner at the Greek, that one table at Granita.
(The Omar Mohsen entrance)
On days like today, when my body is trembling with the force of my despair and grief, the acute sense of loss of self, the hyper-awareness of the things I’ve done to myself to survive – the self-censorship that has done little for me but prove itself the most effective tool for state-approved erasure, because I’m sitting here gnawing my own fingers off with every word lent to that corrupt apparatus (because we were all born slaves in a labyrinth-prison of violent institutions hell-bent on jerking off to our suffering) – I feel like rendering ribbons out of my own flesh, a fitting form of flagellation for such a felony...or a forlorn cry for help.
And so, maybe it was God’s will or maybe pure chance, that today of all days, I decided to pull my morning read from my bookmarks and accidentally clicked on the link to Pascale Ghazaleh’s 2021 Jadaliyya article, ‘An Archive of Forgetting: Egypt, 2011-2021’.
“It is so difficult to measure the passing of time we know is gone. Events that took months and occurred years ago are encapsulated in an image, a song, or the vivid recollection of euphoria; they seem to have happened yesterday, to be happening now, never to have happened at all,” Ghazaleh writes. “In some ways, the 2011 uprising in Egypt—shall we call it revolution? Perhaps, perhaps not—is ongoing. In others, it never was. The bitter sense of a stillborn revolution was born in the earliest days of the uprising…” she continues.
Beyond this piece’s social sagaciousness and its visceral knowledge of our state’s political anatomy – this is, after all, Pascale fucking Ghazaleh – it breathes a trickle of something close to intimacy, but not quite, into the reader. For all that it is filthy (or perhaps, because of it?), politics are intimate, and it’s writings like the above that serve as a reminder that thinking and re-memorying, translated into spoken or written word, aren’t acts of resistance that are only necessary, but often relieving, liberating, and ultimately, pleasurable.
And perhaps, despite Pascale’s piece sinking deeply into the hows and the whys of the digital archiving efforts spearheaded by journalists and cyberactivists and then-“historians of the present moment” and the subsequent – and ongoing, of course – systemic forms of erasure we experience on the “quotidian”; from the regular YouTube and Twitter sweeps of digital documentation of their violence and the near-daily disappearances of people we know (and mostly do not) to the employment of the capitalist and patriarchal arms to serve as distractions turning thinking individuals into mere cogs in a fucking grinder and going so far as to rewrite the entire story while the blood of the wounded and the murdered was still wet on the scorching concrete of our streets, it is deeply resonant.
Generations will come that will know nothing of Jan 25.
In fact, I would like to take this moment to remind you of the viral screenshot from a Whatsapp group belonging to a high school class where someone genuinely asked why Jan 25 was a national holiday, only for a classmate to reply with, “3ashan kan fe haga zay el war keda” and another to add, “azon masr kesbet.”
So, technically, generations exist that have no fucking idea about, well, what is arguably the most important upheaval in contemporary (living) Egyptian history.
Now, I’m writing this on the fly and my thoughts are scattered across a raging sea of pure emotion, and this piece isn’t about the revolution nor is it about Pascale’s article, or rather, it is but it is not the crux of what I’m trying to get at.
While on any given day, reading this article would’ve reduced me to little more than a blubbering mess, instead of inflaming the pre-existing guilt-grief-outrage-loss, and despite having inspired tears, it soothed me. More than anything, mouthing those words felt like sucking on an ice cube after being torturously parched for seeming weeks, and they melted on my tongue just as fast, thin rivulets running along my scraped tongue and down my bruised throat. Because what it did is remind me, (non-so) gently, that a revolution had taken place. A moment where people, our people, my people, toppled a fucking government. Whether, as Lina Attalah wondered in 2013, the revolution became the counterrevolution or, as Pascale pondered, the revolution was – possibly – stillborn, matters fucking not.
It happened. It was there. It still is there, for those who know where to look and those whose heart beats along to its rhythm, faint as it may be (but never silent).
None of the usual feelings of resentment or bitterness that I’ve felt towards those who let themselves (or pretended to) forget, or who arbitrarily sawed through whole pieces of their hearts to survive the status quo, are present. Instead, for the first time, I feel a deep sense of understanding and companionship. I might feel like a cog in a larger machine, I may long for the pockets of loud resistance that were (not-so-long-ago) home, and I may feel miserable that this wretched system has driven me to a point where I’ve felt the need to fashion bars out of my own fucking teeth and embed them into my own gums lest a stray word land me a fate much worse than death, but at least I’m alive, not living, but here.
Present. Breathing. Dreaming.
And one day, inevitably, the noose will loosen, and I will do more than breathe.
But until then, I will remain where I am; swallowing around the faint taste of leather and dirt, letting my fingertips rot with their misuse, and holding my tongue captive behind my bloodied lips, because the only thing we can all hope to do when the state’s necropolitics have seeped silently into our lifeblood, evincing a necropolis that stretches along the Nile like a damn groyne, is survive.
Reading this article today reminded me that I remember, and for now, that will have to be enough.