Tagged: historical
‘Ecrasez l’infâme’
The Nature and Role of the Press and the Spreading of Public Ideas during the Initial Decline of the Old Regime in 1789, Together with Some Parallels Drawn into the Modern Period.
By Antarah Crawley | GWU ENGL 3481W | Spring 2012
Contents — I. Introduction: Drawing Parallels—Bringing the “Voltaire-figure” into the Modern Period — II. Classical Interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reactions: An Inevitable Consequence of Social Discrepancies? — III. The Significance of the Press: An Unprecedented Surge of Dialogue Between All Class Levels — IV. Repression Reenacted: Instances of repressed scholarship on the French Revolution under new Oppressive French Regimes and Abroad; What is the significance?
I. Drawing Parallels—Bringing the “Voltaire-figure” into the Modern Period
This is a time in which trends in world leadership are moving into an ominously monopoly-minded direction. Industrial and financial consolidation to the end of optimizing profit for those at the top of the corporate food chain, together with reckless investing and trading in the financial sector, is a reality that had led to near disaster—the 2008 recession. Such reckless habits of the American aristocratic class—that class that controls the means of production (footnote: what would be land in 1780s France)—has indeed sparked revolt from the lower classes, ineffective insofar as it has been. But the culture of dissent is present, just as it was in 1788 as the bourgeoisie began to find fault with King Louis XIV’s handling of the economy. We have in our society the broodings for a coup de tat of the industrial and financial superpowers that sway Americans’ lives. If the government cannot adhere to the wishes of the classes that serve as it’s support base—the small businessmen and entrepreneurs, or the modern bourgeoisie, as well as the large working class population—and break its ties with such entities, then as we can see from history, and overthrow of the symbolic corporate-monarchy is eminent.
Below this paper examines how the French Revolution unfolded and what factors contributed to its initial success, at the same time as it draws parallels between the events of 1789 and the current trends in the United States of America. With social media being a particularly effective and influential method of disseminating ideas in our modern society, it compels me to delve into the question of how the media of the 18th Century—the printed press and periodicals—affected popular opinion and reactions to the monarchy. Such answers may help us find similar trends in our own society of acute discrepancy between those that have power, both political and economic, and those who do not have it. And furthermore, 1789 is a perfect bookmark with which to compliment the modern period that I speak of here, 2012, because historians widely assert that the French Revolution ushered in the modern era with the creation of a “truly universal civilization…proclaiming the fundamental and inviolable rights of all people.”
It is the case, however, that the modern concept of politics, on which this country was based, is being eroded by government partiality towards big-business—we seem to be relapsing into a monarchal society. In this time of quasi-revolt, as Occupiers remove themselves from the system of economic and political abuse by the Haves, we should find value in looking to the ways in which 18th Century revolutionary figures confronted the monarchy and the aristocracy. What was the role of popular periodicals during the late 1780s, and can their impact be translated into modern trends like Facebook? What was the role of the Enlightenment—the elite, learned class—in influencing the popular revolt, if there were any influence there at all? How must a revolutionary, indifferent of his political opposition and bent only on self-improvement and social awareness—a “Voltaire-figure”—go about using the written word to combat an oppressive regime? What, if anything, can the history of the French Revolution teach us?
II. Classical Interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reactions: An Inevitable Consequence of Social Discrepancies?
The overarching significance of the French Revolution among historians had long been focused on its social consequences. In his introduction to the volumized collection of papers compiled for the annual conference on Studies on Voltaire and The Eighteenth Century (SVEC), Harvey Chisick patronizes the Classical, or Social, Interpretation of the French Revolution by saying, “[The Revolution’s] significance consists principally in the socio-economic disjuncture represented by the middle class or bourgeoisie overcoming the aristocracy and attaining the political power to which it’s economic strength entitled it. This process took hundreds of years and was accomplished only when the bourgeoisie was strong enough to make good its demands by force.” Such an interpretation of the Revolution had been championed by authoritative historians on the subject such as Georges Lefebvre. In his 1939 now-classic The Coming of the French Revolution, he maintains a rigid and illogical model of French society as the basis for the dissent of the bourgeoisie and the result of 1789:
At the end of the eighteenth century the social structure of France was aristocratic. It showed traces of having originated at a time when land was almost the only form of wealth, and when possessors of land were the masters of those who needed it to work and live. …The king had been able gradually to deprive the lords of their political power and subject nobles and clergy to his authority. But he left them the first place in the social hierarchy. Still restless at being merely his ‘subjects,’ they remained privileged persons.
Presently, however, a new class was emerging in prominence in France, whose wealth, in contrast, was based on mobile commerce. Called the bourgeoisie (or the Third Estate, inferior to the clergy and aristocracy in the three orders of old French law, but not too far removed from them), it proved useful to the monarchy by supplying it with money and competent officials, and through the increasing importance of commerce, industry and finance and the eighteenth century it became more important in the national economy. By the late 18th Century the bourgeoisie was beginning to usurp the aristocracy and clergy in terms of real economic power even though the latter retained its supreme legal and social status. Feeling as though it deserved more political power based on its economic contribution to the state, the bourgeoisie became discontent with the state. The Revolution of 1789 thus balanced the power of bourgeoisie with its real economic influence and eroded the prominence of the aristocracy. Thus, as Lefebvre states, “In France the Third Estate liberated itself.” But it’s not that simple, the author interrupts. Although Lefebvre separates the four stages of the revolution, characterized by the social classes involved, the respective measures of executing the Revolution were intertwined and made way for each other, all culminating in a victory for the bourgeoisie in which the regime of economic individualism and commercial freedom prevailed over the working class:
The privileged groups [the clergy and aristocracy] did have the necessary means [for forcing the king’s hand in appealing to the economic condition of the nation]… The first act of the Revolution, in 1788, consisted in a triumph of the aristocracy, which, taking advantage of the government crisis, hoped to reassert itself and win back the political authority of which the Capetian dynasty had despoiled it. But, after having paralyzed the royal power which upheld its own social preeminence, the aristocracy opened the way to the bourgeois revolution, then to the popular revolution in the cities and finally to the revolution of the peasants—and found itself buried under the ruins of the Old Regime.
Chisick comments that the Classical Interpretation situates the French Revolution in France’s historical time as an “inevitable consequence of a long social and economic revolution,…following from scientific laws.” This would make the neither the press nor ideology a subject of interest. But it seems that bourgeois dissatisfaction would not have miraculously resulted in an organized revolt upon the state, an act of terrorism, as it were. Disseminated ideology must have had a place in rallying the organization of the greater Third Estate. And since Chisick is editing a collection entitled “The Press in the French Revolution,” his acknowledgment of the Classical Interpretation must ultimately be to set up a retort to it. While this Marxist-esque Classical interpretation went unchallenged throughout much of the history of the Revolution’s study, through Jaures and Mathiez to Lefebvre and Soboul, general acceptance of this formulation began to wane after the 1960s.
What then arose was a Revisionist Criticism of the Classical Interpretation of the French Revolution. The first body of criticism stemmed from Alfred Cobban and George Taylor’s conclusion that capitalism in France was not present enough or influential enough on the Bourgeoisie to be a motive for revolution. Furthermore, Taylor asserts that the nobility shared in equal part with the Bourgeoisie the most innovative and large-scale forms of economic activity. So, in contrast with the Classical Interpretation that the Third Estate rallied to establish themselves as the social superior to the aristocracy, the Revolution was “essentially a political revolution with social consequences and not a social revolution with political consequences.”
“Conceptualizing the Revolution in political and cultural terms,” says Chisick, “also has broader implications.” Revisionist historians, in contrast to Classical historians who focus on the social discrepancies in the French upper classes, emphasize government incompetence and botched reforms which led to a virtual power vacuum and the emergence of public opinion as a powerful new political force.
Let us take a step back here and examine this interpretation within the context of our society: The American public had expressed dissentient views on the government as being incompetence under President Bush with the trouble resulting from the finance bubble / housing bubble that burst in 2008. Although we were hopeful of President Obama, many sectors of the right and well as some of his critical constituents have expressed their feelings of his incompetence when it came to listening to the American public and ending a several hundred-billion dollars war in the Middle East (and furthermore, of their general dissatisfaction with the Congress who seems to favor large corporations over the working/entrepreneurial class and the Supreme Court who allows immigration regulations and women’s reproductive rights to suffer). This brooding dissent has led to the organization of different protest rallies like Occupy and other virtual dissenting communities through new social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The greater public, who call themselves the 99% in certain circles, are in a way equivalent to the Borgeoisie and the Popular/Peasant population of 1780’s France. Although they may not own the means of production (what would be the land in 18th C France) they feel that their political voice deserves more attention from the Congress and lawmakers, who currently only appear to be favoring the voices of large corporations like Monsanto, as opposed to the family farmer. Essentially, a corporation like Monsanto, who’s C-level administrators embody the 1%, is a stale form of political influence and legal exemption. Chevron has been dumping toxic oil-waste into the Ecuadorean Amazon and surrounding forests since the 1980s, yet the government had yet to take a serious action against the company until 2011 when a Federal Appeals Court allowed damages against Chevron for the Ecuador oil spill. In our present secular society, multi-million and -billion dollar corporations represent the clergy who benefited from “none of the ordinary direct taxes but instead…on its own authority a ‘free donation’ to the king”; the aristocrats are represented by those C-level administrators and shareholders who control these large companies which hold the market and lives of working and entrepreneurial Americans in their palm. The political power of the 1% in the minds of Occupiers and greater dissenters is disproportionate to their contribution to the greater good of American people. The question that arises at this point in our history is whether these present trends will develop into “long and silent social developments” that will erupt into another Western political revolution—and whether or not it will be successful!
Chisick summarizes the difference between the Classical and Revisionist interpretations with this:
The revisionist emphasis on politics and culture…tends to ascribe to the ‘people’ or working population a more marginal place in the Revolution. If politics, for example, are defined in terms of parliamentary assemblies, then the people will play only a small role in them. If culture is defined in terms of literacy, then a large population of the lower class will be eliminated from consideration altogether, and the rest will assume a passive role as an audience or public to which writes and publicists appeal.
What Chisick and The Press in the French Revolution focus on is not so much the marginalized place of the people in politics, but the new role, after 1789, of the people as a body through which writers, elite or otherwise, appeal radical ideas through printed media. Such a significant role in the common population could have only been accessed though the Revisionist Critique—thus arises the importance of the Press.
III. The Significance of the Press: An Unprecedented Surge of Dialogue Between All Class Levels
With public opinion being a new principle authority and a central component of politics in new Revisionist Interpretation, the role of the press and its shaping and influence of opinion takes on new importance during the coming of the Revolution. Yet even before 1789, the press was a tool that the monarchy knew it had to control, lest it lead to unwanted ideas spreading around the kingdom.
Daniel Roche in Revolution in Print explains the great extent to which the monarchy sought to control print media:
There was no freedom of the press under the Old Regime because from the earliest days of its power the Crown established surveillance of printers and booksellers and a mechanism for controlling the dissemination of ideas…. The royal power intervened at both ends of the chain that links creative writers to their public: readers and other authors. Before publication became a skillful exercise in censorship, applied through a policy of selective privilege that involved the prepublication inspection of manuscripts for content and the rewarding of publishers who, in return for their cooperation with the established order, enjoyed the advantages of a monopoly. After publication, control was further applied by police.
Such extreme and thorough action taken by the absolutist state indicated its keen awareness of the importance of the printed word. They saw it as the principle vehicle of radical knowledge and thought that it indeed would turn out to be in 1789.
Of course, no system of repression is one-hundred percent effective. The royal government was never able to wholly prevent the circulation of forbidden books, anti-monarchist pamphlets, and the writings, songs and satires that made up an entire body of printed criticism. This body, interestingly, was deemed by the monarchy to a dangerous dissemination of “philosophical” works, “philosophy” being all works deemed “dangerous” or “bad” (which may enlighten us to the monarchy’s unstable relationship with the Enlightenment figures, especially Voltaire). The Old Regime enacted every feasible method of control over print media that it could, including the practical monopolization of the system in 1699 when abbé Bignon became Director of The Book Trade. The role of the Office of the Book Trade was to examine all works destined for legal publication and to maintain that all such books be registered with the state. Under the direction of C.-M. Lamoignon de Malesherbes from 1750 to 1763, censorship defined the forbidden zones of literature as God, king, and morality. One can only imagine where that puts Enlightenment figures like Voltaire in the eyes of the government when such a “philosophical” a tale as Candide was published in 1759. Given, Voltaire did not admit his authorship until 1768 when he was not even within reach of the Office of the Book Trade and the monarchy. But notwithstanding that fact, neither the 1759 ban on the book by Paris officials or its ambiguous authorship deterred it from becoming one of the fastest selling books in history, selling twenty thousand to thirty thousand copies by the end of the year in over twenty editions. So it can be said that there are notable examples of books that slipped through the cracks of the censors, but all in all, between 1660 and 1680, the beginnings of an increasingly close supervision of printed matter and the employment of “hard-nosed” Firemen arose and persisted until 1789.
After 1789, the most immediate and dramatic change in the way public opinion came to be formed and expressed was in complete freedom of the press. With the elimination of the machinery of State regulation of publishing and the sudden collapse of censorship in the Spring and Summer of 1789, Chisick writes, “writers and publishers found themselves free of the constraints that the monarchy had imposed upon print media almost from their inception. Books, pamphlets and periodicals could now be published without obligatory prior examination by a censor and without the publisher having to apply for a privilege or to ascertain that he was not infringing upon someone else’s legally established monopoly.” What resulted of this was an emergence of new career opportunities in writing, publishing and journalism, wherein more personal and more partisan expression could appeal directly to the public. Chisick writes that, “The periodical press that now emerged was far more political in content and far more engaged than was its counterpart of the old regime,” which was primarily devoted to the arts, sciences, and literature. In addition to the content of print media, its format also changed; journals treating art, plays, et cetera needn’t appear more regularly than every one or two weeks, however the new political papers that began to appear in 1788 had a popular readership to satisfy who were avid for the latest political news, and these papers came to be regularized in dailies in 1790 and 1791.
Continuing with the trouble-making habits that they used even before 1789, the Enlightenment figures also played an important role in post-censored France. What resulted of the absence of authoritarian filtering was a surge of political and social dialogue through print. The function of censorship had been to “impose an officially sanctioned consensus on public discussion, or, formulated negatively, to prevent the expression of opinions that deviated too widely from what the authorities defined as the accepted norm.” After the fall of the state—which was the filter of public discussion—political dialogue flourished, primarily through the work of Enlightenment figures. Chisick writes:
The literature of the Enlightenment was overwhelmingly a literature of dialogue. Its world of discourse, its political theory, social criticism, literature and popularization, was open and aimed at persuasion. Characteristically, even Voltaire’s cry of ‘Ecrasez l’infâme’ [‘Crush the infamous thing’] was moderated in practice, and the philosophe sought less the destruction of his ecclesiastical foes that that they moderate and modernize their beliefs and actions.
Often, the aim and influence of Enlightenment literature was painted in a less-than-humane light. Such writing was aimed at what the Enlightenment figures believed to be the realm of possible social and political reform—and such parameters often limited them to the learned classes. With respect to the audiences for which periodicals like the Ami du roi and the Journal de la Montagne were intended it cannot be denied that, both being descended from the Enlightenment, they were addressed to a cultural elite. But to be fair, the elite bourgeoisie was the class which was most concerned the goings-on of the years that immediately followed 1789, thus the Enlightenment writers would have felt it imperative to appeal to them first and foremost. In any case, no matter the Enlightenment’s targeted appeal group, a larger-scope popular press emerged after 1789 that sought to make a direct and regular political appeal to the people. For example, the more radical Ami du peuple and Pére Duchesne sought to speak directly to the working population. Jeremy Popkin even acknowledges the purpose of an anonymous Belgian journalist in launching the Esprit des gazettes in 1786 as being a reaction to the segmentation of the press market and a reaction to the “elite press.” Such “elite” papers were considered the “concerned papers, the knowledgeable papers, the serious papers…the papers which serious people and opinion leaders in all countries take seriously,” similar to The New York Times today. However, with the surge of uncensored popular publications in 1789, it proved exceptionally difficult for a stable elite press to survive. It nevertheless persisted that an exception to the rule existed, and the Dutch-based Gazette de Leyde, a French-language newspaper and one widely considered to be the most important serious news journal at the time reached the height of its fame at the outbreak of the French Revolution. It may have been the case that its being published outside of the control of the monarchy and its taking serious political issues of the day allowed it to transition well into the popular culture of revolutionary France, in which “sophisticated readers” liked to think of themselves as “students of events, rather than as mere consumers of information.”
So in general, there was a mixture of “elitist” and popular publication circulating through France after the Revolution began, and all of them were open-minded and political in nature with having to be constrained by a monarchy. Chisick defends the elitist publications stemming from the Enlightenment; even though they were not targeted at the public in terms of language, he says, “The Enlightenment may have been élitist, but it was humane, progressive, pragmatic and…committed to an open mode of discourse that worked on the principles of a free exchange of ideas, rational persuasion, and consensus.” In essence, the Enlightenment encompassed the spirit of the free press.
Here, I would like to take one more step back. By the transitive power, the dialectic, free-spirited passion of the Enlightenment also encompasses the essence of the Internet, or what John Man would say is the fourth turning-point in human contact in the last 5,000 years, after the explosion of the printing press in Europe. Using this model of long-term political revolutions paired with innovative information movements, can we say that the modern political trends referred to above, paired with the widespread use of Facebook, Twitter and blogs for personal and political expression will evolve into some greater social revolution? Widespread use of social media could favor either the greater population or the Silicon Valley companies that control the means of disseminating the information. Either way, a change will erupt in the way all people conduce commerce, relationships, and protest. In fact, it may have already happened, with Amazon.com in control of commerce, Facebook.com in control of interpersonal relationships, social awareness and business promotion, Google.com in control of information dissemination, and the Apple Corporation in control of the method of accessing it all: the smart phone. What social media looks like on the outside is the power of dialogue and commentary in the hands of every individual person, but what we may actually have is a monarchy of the big four companies upon our entire civilization.
Be it internet-based social media or the physical spread of pamphlets in 1780s France, the spread of ideas sparks dialogue and makes people question the powers that govern them. The Old Regime recognized that and that’s why they so painstakingly censored the media. But the Enlightenment figures also recognized that and used it to the advantage of the people. Yes, they targeted their publications toward the elite, but could you blame them for trying to appeal to a more learned audience. Perhaps the “elitism” of Enlightenment periodicals actually helped to lend some authority to their positions. Surely no one takes every Facebook campaign seriously—that’s because so many people of such little intelligence use it. It may be the case that the modern person needs to filter what they read and believe through an Enlightened lens before they comment on current issues.
IV. Repression Reenacted: Instances of repressed scholarship on the French Revolution under new Oppressive French Regimes and Abroad; What is the significance?
What becomes clear after moderate research into the French Revolution is that even after 1799, books about the Revolution have been repressed by government who find the very notion of political dissent dangerous. Even authoritative writers on the topic who we revere today were repressed upon their initial publication. R. R. Palmer, the translator of Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution comments on the books history from its first publication in 1939: “The French Republic collapsed before the assault of Hitlerite Germany, and was succeeded by the Vichy regime that governed France until the liberation in 1945. No sympathetic understanding of the French Revolution was desired by the authorities of Vichy France… The Vichy government therefore suppressed [The Coming of the French Revolution] and ordered some 8,000 copied burned, so that it virtually remained unknown to its own country until reprinted there in 1970, after the author’s death.”
Gaetano Salvemini’s highly revered book also underwent similar treatment. “[The French Revolution] has come to be regarded as a classic in its field,” says I. M. Rawson in his Translator’s Note. “It may seem strange that a work so well known on the continent [of Europe] should not have been made available to English readers long ago. The explanation lies in part in the fact that the author, an exile for over twenty years from his own country [of Italy] and actively engaged in the struggle against Fascism, as well as in writing a number of works on modern politics, had no time to give his study of the great Revolution a further revision in the light of recent historical research, and was unwilling to allow it to appear in English before this had been done.”
What we see here are Voltaire-figures who, even after the iron claw of the Old Regime had long fallen, still combated oppression and political injustice with that same passion. Like Voltaire, who was imprisoned in the Bastille twice and was constantly in fear of being jailed when he dared set foot in Paris, Salvemini contested the Fascist regime and honorably suffered more it. That is the kind of spirit I hope may come of this brooding internal political struggle in America. Perhaps the melting pot isn’t hot enough yet.
© 2012 by Antarah Crawley
The Fire in the Belly
A Short Story for Edward P. Jones
By Antarah Crawley
12 September 2012
I don’t know what day it is. I awoke this morning with my head on the belly of my companion Shams. I am a boy in a country which isn’t familiar to him anymore. The only boy I know is Shams here, whose situation just twelve hours ago I knew nothing of except that he, like me, had been on a bus to Cairo. From where, again, I don’t know.
I sat on one of the chairs reading the menu while I waited for Shams to wake up. The merchant didn’t seem to be preoccupied with us, as his business was filled with men and women—workers, other merchants, mechanics, students, elders, young men like myself—whose collective voices were loud and mesmerizing. Shams and I were just two of them, and I’m sure we weren’t the only ones who slept here last night. The sun was now coming in through the street windows and the atmosphere in the café was grey with smoke on which lingered smells of honey, coffee, apple, tobacco, eggs and fal. The tinkering of cups and spoons and the bubbling of pipes accented the voices of organizers and unsettlers. Shams, however, continued sleeping as though he was born into this place.
Not eleven hours ago he had asked me if I had a cigarette while Altair Sawalha stood atop an overturned van and shouted for the end of the regime. He smiled at me, recognized me as his friend, another boy in belly of the madness. I gave him one from the pack I had in my pocket and watched him light up and then turn back towards Sawalha and shout with the crowd. I felt like I had known him before, and that that fist in the air with a butt sticking out smoldering between knuckles was something I was responsible for.
He finally awoke, subtly shifting up and wiping his eyes. “Shams,” I said. He looked and smiled at me with his eyes still half closed.
“These fuckin’ beds, huh,” he said putting his hand in the arch of his back and stretching.
“Yeah. Let’s get a move on then, right.” And we got up and waded our way through the crowded cafe out to the street.
I heard them blocks away: chants of “Go! Go! Leave! Leave!” and “He shall leave!” I listened to them. Shams listened too. He had heard enough that he knew what it meant, and he joined in with his fist up. Then he looked at me and smiled and we laughed as we walked toward where the sound was coming from.
We found ourselves on a particularly crowded section of one of the big streets; I think it was Ahmed Ourabi. The noise had become monotonous—crashes, sirens, yelling. It was all atmosphere now. As we walked we talked about how much we despised Mubarak. It was mostly recounting things we had heard at the rallies and what we had learned from talking to other protesters, but it was liberating nonetheless. Shams had never heard of the other world revolutions, so I took great joy in recounting the uprisings of the French and the Russians and at seeing the looks of astonishment on his face as he learned they we were not alone in this cycle of revolution.
I said, yelling above the crowd, “You see it was all a matter of time. Revolution is inevitable; you can’t keep the people down and oppressed indefinitely. All dictators make that mistake. Ali made it. And he paid. Now Mubarak is going to pay.”
“Right on!” he said. He would always yelp in agreement. He was childlike and I loved him for it. I loved to see him grow, like a young schoolboy learning his alphabet. I wanted him to know as much as me.
Every now and then as we walked we’d see a pile of debris, charred sticks and bricks. Shams would go into the pile and pick out a stick with a charred end, then go to a building or concrete wall and inscribe some amusing message like “Fuck Mubarak” or “Down with the fascist regime!” I felt proud seeing him do that. I feel proud knowing I spread the revolution to another fellow countryman. After each message we eagerly tried to alert passers-by of our accomplishment while many cheered laughed in amusement.
As we walked, I would muse things over with him, ideas that I had been thinking about. I felt like a great outlaw leader telling him these ideas; he seemed to absorb them like a sponge.
I said, “It seems to me that there are certain tools that every human needs—that they should be equip with from the earliest parts of their life until they get old and wise. How to eat, how to breathe, important things. But people don’t talk about another really important skill that people need. And if they’re not going to use it, then they should at least be well versed in it.”
“Yeah, what is it?” he’d interrupt, eager as ever.
“I’m getting to that. This skill—the ability to revolt—I believe every person should have!”
“Yeah! Of course!”
“Yeah, I believe every person should live through at least one revolution. And it doesn’t even have to be violent. It can be like, changing your hair color to red when you and everyone around you has natural black hair. You should be able to say ‘fuck them!”
“Fuck ‘em!”
“I think revolution is a natural and organized process in the grand scheme of things. If everything is smooth and level where you are, and everyone is living the same and indefinitely, then something’s wrong! You’re being oppressed and lied to.”
“Well we’ve been being oppressed and lied to for decades!” He was getting it.
“That’s right, Shams; that’s why it has to go. That’s why this revolution is so important. Man, it’s probably the greatest thing to happen to this country.”
“Yeah,” he screamed, and he screamed loud and jumped in the air with his fist up. Our fellow protestors, walking around us, with us, would sometimes join it. I don’t know if they heard what I was talking about or not, but their common cry of agreement made me happy. I turned back to Shams:
“You ever heard of Daoism?”
“No what’s that?” he asked, not surprisingly.
“In China they have this thing called Daoism—I don’t know why more people don’t know about it. In Daoism, the world and the universe and the people and animals are all one and this whole entity is always going through revolutions and transformations.”
“Wait, what’s an ‘entity’?”
I laughed. Why go to school, huh, if you’re not going to learn about the world or Daoism, or simple vocabulary. Shams was like every other kid in 6th of October City before he met me: wasting his time at technical college. Being taught the expendable things in life. While he was doing that I was learning the good stuff. Before I left for Cairo, before I knew anything about the revolution, I was already on my way to stirring up trouble.
About ten months ago I lived with my uncle In 6th of October City. All while living with him we would leave the house every morning and walk in opposite directions. He went to the auto-body shop where he was the manager and, to his knowledge, I went to Al-Khamsa Technical School every day to learn mechanical engineering so that one day I could work in his exciting shop. And that was true for a while.
About a year ago I met Alex, an American who worked at October 6 University. We had got to talking on the street because I was wearing a Smiths tee shirt. I didn’t know much about international history then, but I was big on American and English rock. We talked Smiths, Adolescents, Mott the Hoople, Patty Smith, Libertines, Strokes, Moldy Peaches, everything. He seemed to like me. I guess I wasn’t like my classmates, whose hair was shorter and who wore Polos and Levi jeans. I looked like a young tanner Kirk Hammett, with straighter hair. He asked me if I was busy; he said he had had some 45s at his apartment which was a couple blocks away on No. 27 street. I told him that I didn’t have anything to do even though it was Monday and I know I didn’t look any older than nineteen.
I’m grateful now that he was so unsupportive of my technical education. If I hadn’t gone with him I’d probably be in my uncle’s auto shop right now, learning how to change a transmission or whatever you do there.
Alex’s apartment was in a nicer building than I’d seen some of my friends live in. We went in the ground entrance and walked up the steps to his flat.
It was also nicer than where uncle and I lived. It was more ethnic—more Egyptian, I guess. He had several hookahs and a painting of the flag’s crest, an eagle, on the ceiling. When you walked through the door there was a window right across from you looking out to the dusty street you just came off of. I saw a counter with some bar-style chairs with no backs—stools—to the left of me. That was where the kitchen was. When I turned to the right I saw his living room, the walls of which were lined with shelves, some of them makeshift, mounted with more books than any household or institution I’d ever been in. I didn’t even know what one would need with so many books. I suppose Alex saw my astonishment at his collection:
“Do you read much?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
I went over to the shelves. To the right of the window on the wall opposite the door were two bookshelves separated by a television on a stand. There was a whole bookshelf with a makeshift annex on the wall to the side of that. I walked, briskly perusing the titles; I had a fine grasp of English for a mechanics student. There was A People’s History of the United States, Naked Lunch, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Nietzsche Reader, Walden, law primers, Chemistry books, the theory of relativity. When I got through browsing both walls I turned back and began browsing them again.
Alex laughed as he shut the door and turned into the kitchen. “Here’s the finer parts of the entire Western World. Right at your fingertips.” He went into the refrigerator and brought out two beers. You-eng-ling. “Want one,” he asked rhetorically as he handed me the freshly opened bottle. I walked over and lifted the cold beer, putting it too my lips. Terrifically watery, but I suppose that was America.
“I might just substitute school for this,” I joked.
He laughed, “Hey, by all means. Make yourself at home,” he smiled. And turned with his beer and went down the corridor gesturing something like he’d be right back. “Oh,” he cried back, out of sight, “Feel free to look through the records and put on any one.”
I turned to look. On the wall of the entrance door, to the farthest side, there was a stereo with a cassette/CD player and a turntable sitting atop four milk crates of vinyl records and CDs. Beside it was a worn in looking leather couch. But it wasn’t worn in like a poor family’s like some of the kids I knew. It was ripped and duct-taped real cool-like. It was a red couch with black trim with white cotton sticking out where it was ripped. It sat low and broken-in in front of a black chest that served as a table, facing the television that I realized was covered in dust. On the trunk-table were Rolling Stone magazines, jars of shisha, a pack of cigarettes—an American brand, Parliaments—a cereal bowl housing a fern of some sort and a zip-lock bag of what looked like densely packed nuggets of green herbs. There were text books on the floor, I suppose for teaching.
I walked back over to the books and looked up and down the shelves, sipping at my beer. I saw two titles that looked intriguing—The Story of American Revolution and The Catcher in the Rye. I took the books and my beer and sat them down on the trunk-table. I took the liberty of lighting a new coal for one of the hookahs that was out and reclined on the couch while I read.
I read whole books on days when Alex was home all day, working as far as I knew. Eventually, when we got to know each other better, he’d let me stay in while he went off to the university. He trusted me not to steal anything. And in fact I never took anything of his out of the house except a cigarette or two. He never let me smoke his cigarettes. He said it was because he only had half a carton left, but I think he was peculiarly suspicious of Arabic cigarettes. But not Arabic shisha for whatever reason. We talked about the world and its revolutions; I was fascinated by that stuff. I read or skimmed about half of the books on the shelves—more than I think any working countryman under 50 has ever read in their lifetime. I listened to every record he had, from the Cure and Fugazi to Cat Power and Adele. Ramen and Parliaments, revolution and rock and roll. Day in and day out for nine months.
“An entity is…um,” I had to think about how to describe it. “It’s a body of matter and meta matter, I suppose.”
“I still don’t get it,” Shams said. But I don’t think he cared.
The street we were on was getting agitated. The people were getting rowdier, but the street itself felt like it was heating up. I told Shams I thought we should turn off onto another street when we saw one. We were trying to move out through the crowd of excited men to the sidewalk so that we could get onto a less intense street when we heard shots. The shot of an automatic rifle was followed by shots of voices. They were chastising and cheering, for what, I don’t know. I was shaken up by the rousing of motion around me. People were jumping up and knocking into each other, screaming and yelling at whomever. I tried to use the wave of the crowd to see who the agitators were, ‘cause Johnny Rotten said the pit was always in front of the stage. I caught a glimpse of green cameo uniforms and beige vests. It was the military. I caught another wave. They had their tanks with them. I was going to join in with provoking them, but it seemed like the crowd was commending them. I couldn’t see if anyone had been shot. They might have shot a pro-Mubarak type, which by all means would have been grounds for commending. But they were the army; I didn’t get it. I was being railed in the head by another man’s elbow, and at this point I was being dragged along. The voices and the crowd where all one, but I remembered Shams. I looked back and saw him, integrated with the crowd. He was chanting what they were chanting, something I didn’t pick up.
I called to him: “Shams! Shams!” He was in a trance; he kept on moving with the men around him with their fist in the air shouting as gasoline spittle flew from their inflamed tongues. Then I realized I had stopped moving as one with the crowd. It had stopped moving as a unit and I could break away from the current to go back and tap him. “Shams, Shams, come this way!” I led him by his hand to the sidewalk, which was no less crowded but closer to one of the side streets. We turned and stumbled to the ground. Shams panted furiously and turned to look at me.
“What energy! Whooh!”
I lay against a building catching my breath as he and I continued to witness the power rising up off of the crowd. They were turned towards the middle of the street responding to the army that was marching through. Others, the mellow ones, where around us watching on; periodically screaming something I wasn’t listening to.
I continued to sit even after I had caught my breath. Shams came over closer and sat cross legged.
“Lemme get a cigarette,” he said.
I pulled the battered pack of Parliaments out of my pant pocket and handed him one.
“Why do they have these open parts?” he asked, looking at the end of the filter.
I looked out into the street at the men and women with their signs: He Shall Leave. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Do you know who was ruler before Mubarak?” Alex had asked one day, at the time when I had completely stopped going to school.
I was lying back on the couch as usual, with a book on Lenin and the Bolsheviks on my face. Alex was working on his computer at the kitchen counter. I didn’t look up from the page as I tried to think. “Nicholas II,” I joked.
“No, really.” He wanted an answer.
“Um,” I tried to remember but I couldn’t find the answer. “I don’t know; I don’t keep up with that scene.”
“That scene?” he laughed. “You mean your scene.”
“I don’t know, man.” I continued reading about Russia, far away.
“Well when did he take over?”
“Mubarak?”
“Yeah”
“Um, I told you, I don’t know. Why do you need to know?”
“My students. I’m trying to brush up on my Egyptian history so they don’t think I’m a total outsider.”
I put down the book and got up and went over to peruse the bookshelf again. “Maybe if you had some books on Egypt you’d have better luck,” I teased him.
He responded, “Maybe if I had some books on Egypt you’d actually learn about your own country.” I looked back at the book I was reading, sprawled out on the table.
“Uncle’s probably wondering where I am by now,” I said.
“Alright, that’s cool. I’ll be out tomorrow morning, so I’ll leave the key under the mat.”
“Thanks.” I left.
About a week ago, before I left the city for Cairo, I went to Alex’s place. I walked down No. 27 Street and saw him in his raggedy Circle Jerks shirt and sandals smoking a cigarette, looking intently at nothing in particular.
“What’s up? Can I get one of those?” I asked. He offered me the pack in silence. I took one and tried to see into his eyes as I lit it. “What’s going on?”
He took a drag. “You been watching the news?”
“We don’t have a television.” I looked to where he was looking, at a bar across the street. Then I turned back to him, “But you don’t watch television either; your set is covered in dust.” I smiled at him.
“I was at Gazura. They had Al-Jezeera on. People are getting wild. They’re calling for Mubarak to leave. I was there yesterday and today. It’s getting wild in Cairo.”
“What do you mean? Rioting? What did Mubarak do this time?” I turned back and chuckled taking another drag.
“It wasn’t about this time.” He squinted his eyes looking up at the sun. “I suppose it’s a culmination of everything. The past thirty years of his bullshit. And they saw Tunisia speaking out so…why not, huh?” He flicked the butt into the street and turned to go back into the building.
“What happened in Tunisia?” I took a last drag and flicked the butt too, following him in. We got up to his flat and I plopped down on the sofa. I picked up a book I had laying there—Stranger in a Strange Land.
Alex was in the kitchen with his hand over his mouth in thought. He was staring at a boiling pot of water. I could smell the steam after a while and feel the room getting hotter.
“Making Ramen?” I asked.
“I got a call from my mom in Cleveland. Ohio. She said the US government was strongly suggesting for American citizens to get on the very next plane back.”
“Oh, you’re gonna be a frightened cat now?”
“Fraidy Cat?”
“Yeah.”
He stayed silent, looking at the boiling water. Then he walked back through the hall to his room and closed the door. I continued reading, not offset in the least. It was a normal day at Alex’s until I left at the usual seven o’clock, biding “goodbye” to the house, and shuffled back home.
The next day, I got over to the flat at around noon. The door wasn’t unlocked like it usually was. I flipped up the dusty map and used the key underneath to let myself in. I walked up the building’s steps and went into Alex’s apartment. It looked deflated. Most of everything was still there except several books on the shelves, making the remaining titles fall diagonal into each other in a real depressed scene. The records had been taken from the milk crates. The trunk-table was cleared except for a note on a piece of loose-leaf paper that read: Went back to USA. Be back when the shit subsides. I could read it from the threshold where I was standing.
I walked into the kitchen and looked through drawers. I don’t know what I was looking for. I found half a pack of parliaments and put them in my pocket, then I went back over to the couch and sat down. The television was still there. The stereo and most other things a sane person would cherish remained. I told myself he was probably coming back.
The next couple of days I tried to tell my uncle I was sick so I could stay home. He didn’t buy it. Nevertheless, when I parted with him in the morning I’d just lap the block and go back into the house using a copy of his key that I made. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling wondering what to do.
A couple days ago, before I left the city, I was in Gazura Café having a hookah. Two men were sitting immediately in front of me, a little to the right:
“I’m convinced the day has finally come,” said one. “There will be a large protest tomorrow in Tahir square. I’m going to go into the city with Madhat and his woman and little girl. They have a fair sized van if you’d like to come. If I were you I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
“Madhat has never been a man of good judgment. Why bring your woman and child to such a ruckus of an event? They’re sure to be knocked up,” said the other man.
“No, no. That’s the thing; this is no riotous complication. This is organized. Delicate and thirty years in the making. It’s so precise; Mubarak has to go.”
The other man took a sip of his beer and crossed his arms and scratched his dark beard. “Mubarak has to go because of the uprising, or he has to go because he has to go?”
The first man leaned in: “this is the end of the line. Everything will be different in several days. We have no idea how, but it will change. Undoubtedly for the best, whatever happens.” The rumbling bubbling of the hookah sounded, and the man bellowed a great cloud that rose into the dark ceiling and diffused into the grey atmosphere.
The other man continued to muse, scratching his beard and rubbing his neck. “I’ll need to talk to Alimah.”
“She’s a wise girl. She’ll understand if she’s been watching. This is momentous. Every countryman should attend. I know Anwar in Alexandria is organizing.”
“Okay,” said the second man.
“Okay what?”
“Well, you go with Madhat tomorrow. But I will surely be there in the next day. I’ll look you up when I get there.”
“I’m glad to hear it! You will have no trouble finding me or anyone else you know that’s going in a group. The community will be strong! He will leave!”
The next day I left uncle a note; I knew he wasn’t going to take a day off of work. I went down early, before uncle was even up, to Gazura, where I had heard a group was gathering to go into Cairo. I saw a group of them around a van: beautiful people, men and women, elders and young workers. Some of them I had seen before and some I hadn’t, but they all had this sort of reflexive quality. It was as though these people who I had known my whole life were more real now, so real and concrete, solid, finely built men, graceful old women with faces like stone statues, each wrinkle precisely placed and eroded, deep like the Nile. I greeted them as I approached and professed my deep love of the revolution. They graciously invited me aboard their party. To fit everyone into the van, I sat on the roof as we drove onto the highway towards Cairo. I felt like I was in one of Alex’s books—like Che in the company of Castro and the party. We were on our way into the heart of the struggle.
After five hours of driving, as the sun was just rising, we finally got to the city, but the traffic was already congested to the point of stagnation. I was anxious. I had never been to Cairo, and now I would be there in the midst of the greatest event in Egyptian history! A fantastic urge came over me and I jumped off of the roof of the sitting van. I knocked on the window in a gesture of thanks and walked off towards the center of the city winding between the vehicles. Many others had taken this course of action, too. I imagined them unapologetically abandoning their vehicles to go be with the masses. They waded and hopped over caravans and at that moment, whether you were in a car or not, we were all one, and I felt it.
* * *
I called to Shams, “Let’s go find an open restaurant or hookah.” He got up real excitedly; I’m sure he was hungry. I hadn’t seen him eat, at least for four or five hours, from the moment I offered him a cigarette in one of the squares. I got up and we walked away from the busy street toward a section I had heard was still serving food for the protesters.
We walked until we ended up on Al Sabaa Banat, about four blocks from the square where a place called Jawhar was open. It was fantastically crowded, or at least it seemed that way because many people were standing in the middle of the establishment talking in high voices to each other and to no one in particular. Shams and I found our way to the back of the place and took the only two empty seats. We sat beside a quite, content looking man who wore American sunglasses—Ray Bans, like Alex had—and kept his arm folded in an authoritative fashion with his hose in his hand but not lifting it. His head lay against the wall and I couldn’t tell of he was asleep or awake and simply observing. There wasn’t much light coming in through the street windows by now and the weak lamps hanging from the ceiling and the small candles on the tables in front of us made for a sedative environment. Even the whirr of voices like gears of a machine became monotonous and a part of the atmosphere.
A woman brought us a hookah and two beers. Shams said, “and a fal in aysh baladi.”
“Two,” I added.
The woman gestured in acknowledgement and went back behind the curtain next to the bar. I took my beer and sipped; Shams tapped his foot rhythmically with his hands folded in his lap. He seemed to be interested in the debate that was occurring in the middle of the restaurant.
“I didn’t know we were living under such conditions, you know,” he said to me, or to himself. I’m not sure.
Whichever it was, I respond, “Well, to tell the truth, neither did I.”
“I wish I could join in,” he said. There was desire in his voice.
“You—we are joining in.”
“I mean in talking and debating.” He took his beer and put it in his lap. “I saw this man fighting with a pro-Mubarak type when I first got here, you know. Someone on the bus had told me there were clashes and people were beginning to get violent. And this man was wrestling with this supporter. And he was yelling that the supporter was just propping up a corrupt government, distant or something from the people.”
I sipped. “You want to fight? Physically with them?”
“I don’t know. I want to…know.”
“Well we may not have been following it before, and that was our fault. But we can show our full support now by adding to the numbers. And adding to the voices.”
“But what if we need to do more than that?”
I looked at him. “Non-violence prevailed in the American South.”
He chuckled. “America sounds cool. They know how to handle situations.” He was quiet for a while and we both just sipped on our beers. “Revolution, man,” he said, and shook his head in apparent disbelief. “We’re in it. It’s just surreal.”
“Yeah,” I smiled into my glass.
“We’ll never get this rush again. I’m just trying to a make it last, you know.”
The ambiguous man beside us joined in, moving nothing but his mouth. “Revolution!” We turned to look at him; Shams leaned over. “Revolution is life!”
“Right on,” Shams said.
His staccato declarations were prophetical: “Revolution is life! In this grand cycle, it is the facilitator. It disrupts monotony. Monotony is silence. Silence is death. Revolution is life.” And like that he seemed to resolve back into peace and silence. Any other time, I’d have thought he was crazy, but the eccentric tend to be revered more in eccentric times.
His words resonated with my own. “I’ve been saying that too! I was talking to my friend here about that, and how in Daoism revolution is natural and is a part of the way.”
“Right on, man,” he said still looking forward through his glasses, “We’re all one, man. Us, the revolution, the country. Even if you don’t know it. Even if you don’t know why it’s going on. Even if you’re supporting the ones in power. You’re a part of it all. In revolution, the conservative are progressive. It’s all good, you know.”
“It’s all good, you know,” Shams smiled at me.
“This violence was no accident. They had to react, the government and their puppets.” I leaned in. The man went on, turning to us for the first time, “The peace will prevail over this setback, no question about it.” And then he paused like he remembered something, and turn back looking out into the restaurant in his original position. “But even so, at this moment it’s dangerous out there. Where are you boys staying?”
Shams and I looked at each other.
Shams turned back to the man: “We’ll let the Revolution handle that.” He turned to me and smiled. “We’ll let the Dao handle that, huh, Aalam?”
The man laughed heartily. “You boys. You boys are blessed by your naivety. True revolutionary minds. Natural, with your age and temperament. Leaned, no doubt, but naïve all the same.” He turned and tilted his head to us so that he could see us with his eyeballs. He then turned back around: “Truly one with the way of world. But also at its mercy.” Then he took the first drag of his pipe that we’d seen him take since we sat down.
“What a cool old fellow,” Shams smiled as or waitress brought out our food. Shams dove in.
It took him all of three minutes to inhale the plate and scarf down the rest of his beer. I was still shoveling fal onto the aysh as he lay back with his hand on his stomach. He reached over and took the hose of our hookah and started bubbling. The great dark grey cloud moved throughout the room; there was now almost no light coming in through the street windows.
I was only about three-quarters of the way done when Shams tapped me and said in a low voice, as if to conceal his desire, “Let’s go out.”
“Well…we will. I gotta finish.”
“I’m feeling it tonight, Aalam.”
I just looked at him and continued eating. I heard some glass break from out in the street. The voices of yelling pulled out of monotony and I heard conflicts.
“We need to be careful, you know,” I said.
“I know. But this the real thing here.”
“What? The real what?”
“Nothing,” he said. He was looking outward with a real content look. Finally I finished and Shams and I left the establishment and went back out into the street.
We stood outside of Jawhar for a minute as we looked up and down the block. At the end of each corner I saw activity.
“Let’s go this way,” Shams said leaning to the right. He was walking with a bounce, almost skipping. I pulled out my pack which was dwindling down to the last few cigarettes. I lit one up and surveyed my surroundings. For some reason, this cigarette was burning my nose and eyes with a heavy smoggy smell. I looked at it, then looked up to see Shams on the corner pointing down the street where I couldn’t see.
“Look!” he yelled. He was illuminated.
I got to the corner and looking to my right saw a fire on an overturned car igniting the block and protesters in orange glow. Silhouettes of men in battle danced on the ground in front of the burning vehicle which was situated in front of a warehouse about thirty feet tall. There were protesters yelling and throwing bricks up at what I guess were pro-Mubarak types up on the roof of the warehouse. And I suppose some of the Mubarak supporters were also down in the group of protesters because there were fistfights, group beat downs and confrontations on the street.
“Shit,” we said in unison. My brain crippled with emotion, I was frozen.
So I didn’t know what to say when Shams ran out towards the debacle screaming “Fuck you, Mubarak Fuckers!” at the top of his lungs. I watched him, my cigarette hand still frozen in front of my face in disbelief as he sprinted two hundred feet, jumping and plunging feet first into a man who was beating on another man with a piece of debris. He got up and kicked the assaulting man in the face. He then raised his fist and screamed along with the other protesters at the pro-Mubaraks on the roof. I saw a man come up behind him as he shouted and choke his neck from behind in an arm-lock. I dropped my butt and started to run over, slowly and hesitant at first. Shams slammed the man with his elbow and blood flew from the choker’s nose. As he held it, Shams reared back and smashed into the man’s temple with his fist with the force of a tank. The man fell limp. Shams turned back. I ran faster. I ran towards that boy with his fist in the air as he screamed in euphoria into the night. At a star.
Then I don’t know if I slowed down or if the world started going in slow motion but I saw that star, a bright flame in a bottle hurled from a supporter on the roof, arc and fall, smashing into Shams and engulfing his torso in fire. That torch raged, and fell to the ground, and I had stopped and fallen to my knees. I watched that fist I was responsible for, smoldering.
