Between Tahrir and ‘Tahrir’: Some Paradoxes of Memorializing a Revolution in Real Time (original) (raw)

Abstract

November 18, 2011: Barely had the largest Friday protest in months in Cairo’s Tahrir Square begun to thin, when a mostly young, obviously energized audience filled the nearby Rawabet Theatre for a performance called “The Tahrir Monologues.” This show participated in an ongoing trend of memorializing, celebrating, even reifying the period in early 2011 (now called the “Eighteen Days”) that dethroned Egypt’s Mubarak family. Telling stories of actual participants and building to a climax with Mubarak’s removal, the play harnessed the rhetorical power of personal experience ( “autopsy”) and documentary drama (interviews); some audience members, recognizing their own revolution experiences, wept with pride. But the reminiscing was premature: the successor junta’s worst yet violence against protesters would begin the very next morning. Amid tear gas and beatings was born the revolution’s “second wave” – almost instantly celebrated, in turn, by a new round of memorializing artwork. This paper will examine some of the Tahrir-themed writing and art that has emerged in Egypt since February 2011. How do protest and memorialization interact, particularly when they use many of the same forms and media (Facebook posts, folk songs, vernacular poetry, photographs, banners, wall murals) and occur nearly simultaneously, sometimes overlapping? How do those communal forms differ from the suddenly prevalent genres of “revolution diary” and Tahrir memoir? I argue that real-time iconization, while not unique to the contemporary Arab context, must be understood as constitutive of the “Arab spring” phenomenon.

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