Crossed Arab Views, Ten Years Later (1)

Things I Learned on How not to Remember the Revolution

At the beginning of 2011, popular uprisings shake Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli, and bring down dictators. The shock wave will be immense throughout the region, from Morocco to Oman, from Syria to Iraq. Then came the time of the status quo, fierce repression, war and misfortune. People wanted change, they often inherited the worst.

Cairo, Tahrir Square, 29 January 2011

There is something exhausting in how the Arab Spring is being remembered. There is something exhausting about the very act of remembrance. I am asked identical questions by different journalists on assignment to produce content on the occasion of the 10-year anniversary. I don’t feel my answers matter. The story is somewhat pre-written; the revolution is over and I should somehow confirm it in my answers.

But my answers about the end and the defeat do not arrive, not out of blind hope or political naivety, but out of a certain conceptual blindness cast upon the entire conversation. One time, in an attempt to express candidly how I feel, I try to take my interviewer to a metaphysical area, whereby I speak to her about a spell that accompanies us without us really knowing it, and the redemption we experience when we become conscious of it. I told her this is how a relic of the revolution feels to me. I do not feel she gets me and I even sense she thinks I am troubled.

At the beginning of last year, our friend Salma Shamel generously initiated a reading group on the works of Walter Benjamin1, not just to study them, but to also approach them as epistemological method. The invitation spoke right to my constant need for spaces of praxis in order to keep doing what I am doing with a gist of meaning. Shortly after we started reading together, our weekly evening encounters became an embodiment of what Benjamin is perhaps calling us for: How to redeem a fragment of history in order to respond to the needs of the present?

Understanding differently

Calling on what Benjamin writes becomes an attempt to respond to a certain current and urgent need, a need to understand anew, or to understand differently, or to smuggle understanding from predominant processes and forms of knowledge, with what they include in terms of the act of remembering. There are points where I take on my habit to contemplate the very condition in which a process is unfolding; we are a group of scholars, writers, artists and journalists, mentally wrestling to understand some cryptic writings that arrived to us from the 1940s translated from their original language while most of us are reading them in their second language. At times, we’d feel the victory of arrival and settlement of a certain meaning and at others we’d keep lingering in our speculations, while reading the same line over and over, hoping for another arrival. I find the energy of this condition quite fitting for the moment, and the crisis it bears: How can we be today? And how can our politics emanate from the intricate act of unearthing and understanding the complex and multilayered reality and away from what we take for granted, theoretically and practically? And where does history fit in this cartography?

Benjamin wrote his text On the Concept of History in 1940, made of 20 fragments. We stop at each of them throughout several sessions. He wrote the text before fleeing France as Jewish citizens were being handed over to the Nazi Gestapo and committing suicide shortly after, and sent it to his friend Hannah Arendt, albeit not for the purpose of publishing. Arendt will cross the French border and will reach the Spanish side of the Mediterranean where her friend disappeared2; she would visit him and give a copy of the text to his fellow friends, and of them, Theodor Adorno3 will take on the task of publishing.

On the Concept of History might be a text that responds to the need to raise two questions among others: How can we adapt the concepts of time and temporality, to our present realities and our political commitments? And how can we deal with the past from a political, rather than historical, standpoint?

The fundamentals in Benjamin’s concept of history consist of liberating ourselves from committing to the linearity of history, and the view of time as empty and homogenous. Instead, the call is for capturing fragments that intersect with our present. These fragments appear to us in moments of need, moments of crisis, and this is when the intersection between past and present becomes an intensified moment in time, a political moment.

The Maadi People’s Committee

I am re-reading On the Concept of History when a friend recalls being part of the Maadi Popular Committee to Safeguard the Gains of the Revolution in 20114. I stop at this act of memory and wonder: How did the hegemony of a centralized linear narrative of the revolution affect these margins, these fragments that we didn’t stop at for too long? There is something both poetic and triumphant in the very name of this committee, let alone something deeply political. I wonder if the Maadi Popular Committee to Safeguard the Gains of the Revolution was perhaps the invisible micropolitics through which we could have re-ordered our understanding of the bigger revolutionary spectacle. Name aside, what was this committee doing back then? Who were its members? How were they organizing and working? What were their goals? And what was their relation to the Maadi neighborhood in a revolution where Tahrir Square dominated its geographic (and political) imaginary? What does this committee tell us of the relation of the local to the political? What could have happened if we allocated more space for it in the historical narrative of the revolution?

The Maadi Popular Committee to Safeguard the Gains of the Revolution seems to be a deviation from the 2011 epic as we know it. Benjamin speaks to us about deviations and roads we didn’t take, and makes us wonder what possibilities are inhumed in there. There is another type of popular committees that resurface to memory from the beginning of the 18 days of protests when police retreated from the streets. They are self-tasked with keeping order and security in different neighborhoods.

Geographic, demographic, gendered and class differences among others animate the bodies of these committees that together form an index of political reality. Power surfaces as these committees take over internalized state power as they defend their neighborhoods from looters and the general state of chaos; those of the affluent Zamalek neighborhood5 use rafts and pistols and those of the low-income Imbaba hood6 stand with their expansive masculine bodies and batons. These committees become a margin that we don’t look at often on our way in and to Tahrir, perhaps because it is a confusing detail, one that ousts us from the seeming harmony of the square. The seeming harmony of the square extends to encompass clear fault lines of comradery and enmity. Something in this condition makes me think of Benjamin’s long-time comrades, Adorno and Gershom Scholem, who reportedly absented from his correspondences some letters he wrote to the conservative figure Carl Schmitt7.

Opening closed rooms of history

Benjamin has had a curiosity toward Schmitt and the correspondence between them shows a mutual interest in an exchange of readings. Some attribute this intellectual interest to Benjamin’s theological penchants, which is commonly but not accurately pitted against his views on historical materialism. Away from Scholem and Adorno’s mediation for a progressive Benjamin to arrive to us in writing, what does his rapprochement with Schmitt tell us? Is this a sensibility elastic enough to extend to the revolution-counterrevolution binary that seeks to invent comfort in some imaginary frontiers? What if there are no frontiers?

There is an act of opening closed rooms of history in recalling the popular committees in their different configurations. Benjamin tells us of these rooms that they might be the containers of a future we should redeem. It takes ceasing to look at the past as an eternal image but as an ongoing set of experiences.

I am sitting on the other side of the call waiting for the inevitable question for this interview to end: Has the revolution ended? I could just say yes and be done. And I fear of uttering a no and sounding naive. But there is a certain intellectual exactitude, but also an intellectual liberation in withdrawing from a version of history that’s complete and closed. I try to find words to describe the continuation of the past through this act of capturing its fragments in the present, in the apogee of crisis, in the utmost sentiment of blockage. I try to say that the political sits somewhere here in that act. I don’t know if she will use my words in the end. After all, it’s the one-decade anniversary and a decade feels like a monument and a monument indexes something dead.

Maybe we need to surpass this anniversary and all other anniversaries.

Also read, in this series

➞ “Absurd History, Absolute Future”
➞ “An Arab Revolutionary Legacy?”

1German philosopher, art historian, literary critic, art critic and translator, born on 15 July 1892 in Berlin and died on 26 September 1940 in Portbou (Catalonia, Spain).

2This is the town of Portbou in Spain, where a monument has been erected in his memory.

3Theodor W. Adorno is a German philosopher, sociologist, composer and musicologist. He is one of the leading exponents of the Frankfurt School and critical theory.

4El Ma’adi is a high-class neighbourhood in Cairo.

5Bourgeois district of Cairo.

6Cairo district north of Zamalek.

7German philosopher and jurist, member of the Nazi party between 1933 and 1936.