We take turns reciting the lines of the poem. One of the women on our cellblock objects, ‘We don’t understand!’ Siham translates: ‘A little white horse.’ ‘A colt,’ I put in. She says, ‘A brave white colt, they’re behind him and he’s in front.’ I say, ‘All of them are behind, and he’s in the vanguard.’ Together we finish translating the poem, or interpreting the lines when they’re too hard to translate.
Chapter eleven
Incongruities
No one tortured us in prison. We were beaten, we girls, one time: on the day we decided we would refuse to go back to our cells, after a rally protesting the placement of one of our mates with the criminal prisoners. They descended on us with truncheons; some of us suffered bruises or minor wounds. But the era of Abdel Latif Rushdie had passed, or so it seemed to me — this was one of my many naïve notions. (Here is where Foucault’s argument concerning the transition from securing power by means of extreme torture to control by means of the Panopticon represents a European reality, applicable only in part to our own situation, in that for us power is like a thrifty, scrimping housewife, who never gets rid of anything, even if it’s worn out — she keeps her old, used-up things along with whatever new things she has managed to procure, usually in the same drawer, or at best in two adjoining drawers, opening sometimes one, sometimes the other, according to circumstance and need.)
We were not tortured, because we were students, and the authorities knew how little threat we represented, or because the new president had risen to power only recently, holding the card of democracy: a democracy with teeth, as he once declared, or one whose teeth had been pulled — it hardly matters; what matters is that it was a democracy that permitted the arrest of thousands of students, and occasionally non-students, in the course of a single night, and either punished dissenters with modern batons, different from Abdel Latif Rushdie’s, or brought them baskets full of carrots, and patted them sweetly on the head, so that they took one look and turned into tame rabbits. (And as long as we’re back on the subject of Abdel Latif Rushdie, that ‘Abul Fawares’, the ultimate cavalier, we must mention — though it’s a digression — that he was transferred to Upper Egypt, where he pursued some of his usual methods, ordering his men to beat the soles of a suspect’s feet in front of a crowd of spectators. But the victim was a man of position and good family, and no sooner was the family informed than — before daybreak — they had bombarded the cavalier’s house. The government couldn’t lay hands on those who had perpetrated the killing of its personal cavalier, whom it had mounted upon its own horse. My paternal aunt recounted this incident to me, and then later I confirmed the accuracy of the details she had related, when a former detainee, one of my father’s colleagues, offered them up in a book he wrote.)
Abdel Latif Rushdie did not break us — he was off the set. Nor did the milder versions, those who took his place in the seventies, break us. What, then, broke us? And how?
The question that preoccupies Arwa — between two suicide attempts (the one that failed, when she threw herself into the Nile but was rescued, and the second, when she jumped from the twelfth floor) — is a similar one she takes up in the context of what she calls the attempt to identify both our ‘true image’ and the reasons for the ‘aborted dream’. She talks about the defiance of that group of boys and girls who set out on their noble mission one morning, answering ‘history’s summons’, wishing to ‘adjust the scales’, raising the banner of the ‘dream of collective liberation’, convinced they were a collective who were partaking together of the grand march that ‘traversed the ages’, ‘toward fraternity, equality, justice, and fulfilment’. What happened to them, then, that in the end they were merely a generation come ‘before their time’ (that’s the title of her book), living lives of isolation, despair, impotence and flaccidity, or else of nihilism, stripped of all morality? What happened between that exuberant moment of setting off to realise the noble dream, and the final moment of abandoning the dream to a life of ‘wholesale destruction’, where they became ‘like mummies that, suddenly exposed to the sun, crumbled into dust’?
Arwa talks about the moment that empowered the students to announce their defiance, seeing it as a tragic moment, in spite of everything, because the establishment — armed with ‘a long history of autocracy and the prerogative of word, deed, and thought’ — had been on the point of taking the populace altogether on a different path, reducing it to a state of murderous mayhem, with society following submissively, disempowered and helpless, for ‘it had no foot free, with which to keep its balance’. During the collapse, the situation and its rules changed, and ‘the struggle reached a new level too fierce to be led by students’.
I don’t know how comprehensive this answer is, as for the most part I am afraid of broad generalisations — that is, of absolute judgements or conclusive answers in matters relating to the history of an epoch or the exertions of a generation. All I have to go by is what I saw with my own eyes: a wave that swelled and receded. And because we were young, we saw in the wave only what the young see. We started out laughing, roused by the unexpected sport. Then we held our breath and plunged into the depths; one moment the waters closed over us and the next we raised our heads and took a deep breath, confident, declaring that we were the most capable of winning the contest. Then we would swim on, laughing, jumping, diving, surfacing, playing in the water. As the sun tanned our skin, we found ourselves and each other that much more robust and beautiful.
Hazem is irritated by what I say, finds my words provoking; he remarks acidly, ‘Fill in the picture, Sitt Nada: the young people on the beach at night, alone, naked, and frightened, the whirlpools that can drag you down to the bottom of the ocean, the sinking ships! I can’t take your overwrought fantasies. It’s not about a bunch of children, the ocean, people feeling sad. The reality is more complex and more cruel — besides, we were never that innocent. The difficulty and guile of the surrounding circumstances were more than we could handle, it’s true, but we, despite all the good intentions and the splendour of our collective efforts, were corrupted by a thousand things: from the little shops that treated the street like a puppet show whose strings they could pull, to the deep-rooted ignorance and stupidity, the miscalculations, and the high-handedness of mini-generals.’
‘You didn’t like Arwa. It was your right not to like her. But try to read her book objectively!’
‘The fact that I object to shameless reductivism doesn’t mean I’ve lost my objectivity. I recognise that she hadn’t entirely recovered from her health problems, but her posing as a theorist upsets me. There are some intelligent insights in the book, but taken as a whole it’s poor from a theoretical standpoint, marred by its own facile approach: “The bourgeoisie is the problem, and the behaviour of the bourgeoisie is responsible for every false step, every perversion, every failure” — what could be more convenient than a rack to hang our mistakes on, so we can wash our hands of them, and be relieved?’
‘God, that’s unfair!’