IT WAS NOT A REVOLUTION

It was not a revolution.

We took away the king,

But left behind the throne. 

It was not a revolution.

We held a stranger's hand
And then we let it go.

It was not a revolution.

Our voices sang as one,
But we forgot the words

It was not a revolution.

We  gathered for our children,
But now they sleep in streets.

It was not a revolution.
God is on our side, we said,

But now we are alone.

It was not a revolution.

We opened up our  cage,
But found we could not fly. 

It was not a revolution.

We were a rolling tide,
But could not breach the wall.

It was not a revolution.

For our mothers’ lives, we said.
They’re weeping now for ours.

It was not a revolution.

We wanted bread for all,
But now we fight for crumbs.

It was not a revolution.
We marched to beating drums.
There is  thunder overhead.

More of my poetry can be read on http://www.odyssey.com, http://www.chanticleer-press.com/, http://www.vivimusmag.com/poetry.html

WHY AM I HERE?

As I write, Egypt is on the brink of another change. The country has been on hold for several days now.  Sunday 30th June is the one year anniversary of the election of a deeply  unpopular President. Big demonstrations are planned, gas masks bought, medications stocked up on, ATMs are running dry as are the gas stations, and people are stocking up on food. In downtown Cairo, the military has already moved to secure Media City and Parliament. It's  also trying to secure Sinai from what are believed to be  Hamas and Jihadi agitators.  More check points may be seen in Sinai soon and perhaps on the ring roads  of major cities. Wednesday and Thursday are going to be just as crucial as Sunday. The words 'military coup' are on everyone's lips - and there are many who will welcome it. "Uniforms and tanks bring security," one friend said, eyeing the empty space where his car was once  parked before being driven away by  a gang of young boys. 

My friends and family from home are  ringing me to get the hell out, and as usual ask me, 'What are you doing in that  dreadful place (Egypt) anyway?" 

Good question, and I ask  myself it several times a day. Here's an attempt at an answer. 

It's not for the pyramids, the ancient ruins, the food, the Nile etc.....It's for the Egyptian people themselves. They have been facing great hardship for two years now and it's getting worse. Every day living is becoming impossible. There are power cuts, which in this heat (often hitting the 40s) is devastating. Babies die, the elderly dehydrate. There are horrendous queues for gas, especially at the moment, and while tempers flare, people are generally patient and can be heard cracking jokes, usually against the government. The price of food has shot up, people with jobs are fearful they will lose them and those without, know it's unlikely they will ever find one. Those with businesses don't know how long they will run in this economic climate, not to mention the power cuts lowering productivity. 

Egyptians are tired, depressed and yet they never lose hope. They continue to protest against injustices; they have confronted their Mickey Mouse President so many times that he has often been forced to rescind. Politics here are dynamic, chewed over in cafes, argued about in front of the telly, in the streets, on social networks. Egypt is number one in the world for protests. This takes a great deal of energy, will and courage. Everyone has an opinion, and is no longer afraid to voice it. There is a political vitality in Egypt that we have lost in the West. Young people have organised themselves into organisations that want to bring change from the grass roots up - the environment, womens' rights, breaking the hierarchical mould, mediation, education, sex education, the arts...you name it, they are working to change it. They have the vision their politicians don't and it is where hope lies. Seeing this energy at work is an inspiration but is rarely reported on in the West. 

Bassem Yousef is a funny guy - a very popular TV satirist - who began his media life in his laundry room during the 25/11 Revolution. But he merely reflects the Egyptian ability to make a joke of everything, even themselves. (Much like the British). If I had a laughter gauge, I would say I have laughed more often and louder in Egypt, than in any other country I have been to. I cry too. I work and live with Egyptians who face an uncertain future. Their destiny, of course, lies with the destiny of their country, and no one knows where this boat is sailing. A dream has been crushed, and they are now glimpsing it again. These days Egyptians are particularly anxious, fearful and edgy. It is hard to be a witness to this and not be able to do anything to help. But it is much worse for them. Many Egyptians know they might not come back from the streets on Sunday and worry for their friends. They are literally viced between the military and the Islamists. An ineffective  opposition has left them stranded.

After speaking to activist friends and saying goodbye to them I wonder if I will see them again after Sunday. But music is still played; every concert fuelled with heady emotions that only music can release. The arts flourish, in a way, I've been told, it didnt before. City walls are alive with protest. In the past two weeks, three grown men have sat down with me on different occassions and just cried for their country. Egyptians know their country is a benchmark for the Middle East, and I believe their genes still carry a memory of ancient glory from achievement. They desperately want to be proud of their country, but for a long time now have felt only shame. Many Egyptian (Muslims) rally to protect Christians during attacks on them by Islamists, many men support women in their work against sexual harassment and rape, the recent  lynching of four Shias has horrified everyone, except the government.
 

I'm not romanticising. It's not perfect here: human rights abuses, sexual repression, religious oppression, FGM, sex trafficking, lack of womens rights, a growing sectarianism etc etc. And...... Egyptians can drive you nuts sometimes!!!! As a foreigner I can only be a voyeur - peeping through a tiny keyhole at history being made. It's a privilege because of the courage, persistence and humour of the Egyptians. One day they will be captain of their own ship.

SONG OF ISIS

 

I seek my love in a  land  as dry as the bones of prophets.

Scriptures burn  on a demon’s breath.

It is written

he will come as a serpent,

shedding skin like rope.

Twine it in your hair,

 but do not look back.

So sayeth the Lord.

Words fall like widows  from a pyre.

Ashes vault across the sand.

My mouth filled with sorrow’s stone.

Love compacted on the tongue

is a weight that cannot call him.

His silence, a chamber  of broken flight,

feathers falling

without mercy.

Revolution from the east

Footsteps from the south

Rumours from the north

Gunshot from the west

You are a constellation of broken promises

glittering in the ancient dark,

resurrecting the deaths of every moment

When will you come my warrior, adorned in grief,

your one eyed snake wet with conquest?

My longing for you

is  the aim  of an arrow

a miracle of coincidence at war with fate

crossing  this land.

My crown of stones

Shadows birth in the dying light, bearing  shrouds,

but  I am no buried  bride banished to dust.

My sorrow is a lust

rising like a hawk .

I shall  drown  you in the delta of my thighs.

Love will tear

The lotus from its roots.

In this land of scarab and scorpion, the carrion crow is king

Come! Beak of  divine oracles,

pluck out my eyes,

blind me to what is gone.

The whore of darkness whispers her trade:

lifts her skirts over the river,

straddles the sun

Snivelling tides salt our harvest, singe the barley.

We march on a map of famine, 

lost in  loss,

finding fools

slicing air with  cunning blades of fear,

until his body is a

scattered tribe.

Grief has worn me to a sparrow.  Even the moon  is a widow, her breath a broken mirror. He will not come .

His heart is

a robbed drum 

His voice a locked door. Silence is a messenger

kinder than the

gossip of death.

My arms hold each piece of you: thirteen  suckling babes.

Resurrection without memory is a wasted song,

your body  an empty casket,

your shrines  turned to sand.

I hear your voice whispering, flooding my dreams,

your divinity unshed,

your soul unsheathed

 I am Isis, she whose tongue is the waters of the Nile,

Whose mouth is a vessel for your thirst.

LOSING ALEXANDRIA

-->

Alexandria  in the rain is melancholic  -  as good as a poem by the Egyptian poet,  Konstantin Cavafy .  His  poems of lost passion, Alexandria’s ancient past   and  its gods befit the moody, subdued Alexandria that I  can see from the eleventh floor of my apartment.   

Cavafy, was born in Alexandria and spent most of his life here until his death in 1933.  His parents were Greek and he was  a true son of what was then, a cosmopolitan  city. Cavafy was a man  obsessed with the transitory nature of beauty and  happiness and like his friend, Durrell,  saw  Alexandria as a City of Memory. 

A secretive man, probably because of his homosexuality – Cavafy worked for most of his life as a part-time clerk in the Egyptian government’s irrigation department. His tempered routine life, belied the rich inner life of a poet who looked at the human condition through  history with a sensual irony.

The apartment where he spent his last 35 years, in Lepsius Street - now renamed "Charm El Sheik" has been turned into a museum honoring his life and works. The building once housed a brothel, and overlooked a hospital and a church.  Cavafy once remarked, “Under me is a house of ill repute, which caters to the needs of the flesh. Over there is a church, where sins are forgiven. And beyond is the hospital where we die.”

The apartment  was turned into a cheap hostel after his death before becoming a museum dedicated the poet. The museum is supported by money from Greece, where Cavafy  is considered a national poet. Egypt's celebration of his work is  uneasy  and ambiguous - his homo-erotic poems do not sit well in a society which is becoming increasingly conservative.


 As I climb the two flights of marble stairs  to his apartments thick wooden  main door,   I can hear a voice reciting  Ithaca - the poem that Jackie Onassis requested to be read at her funeral. The voice - American and recorded hangs eerily in the stairwell. When I step into the museum I am greeted by the  lines ..... To arrive there is your final destination /but do not rush the voyage in the least/Better it lasted for many years/and once you are old cast anchor on the side…  Shivers ran down my back.

  

The hall is long and gloomy. Furniture meant to replicate the original is dowdy.  A brass bed catches the light from an open window, a replica of his desk stands in a dark corner. I sit at it and stare across the black stained floors towards the hall and imagine Cavafy returning home from a liaison with a beautiful young man, closing the door  behind him with a sigh, and standing by the window.

 

‘He is entirely devoted to books – but he’s only twenty-three years old, and very handsome; this afternoon Love passed through/ his ideal flesh that is so full of beauty / passed the erotic fever; /with no silly modesty about the nature of pleasure…..

The paintings on the walls, many of them by Cavafy himself,  are unremarkable. Books from his library are scattered throughout the rooms, while Cavafy looks down owlishly  on visitors from portraits revealing his angular nose and round glasses.  

Just as much else has disappeared from Alexandria, the hospital and brothel are now replaced by a garage and a store. Only the nearby  Elite bar remains from a number of taverns  where Cavafy sought his  illicit liasons with young men.The rest are gone, along with  the cosmopolitan community and its tolerance. In Cavafy’s era, the city was a mix of Greek, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Maltese, Jews and the British and other nationalities adding to the majority Arab-Egyptian population, all lured  by trade in cotton and wheat. 

Alexandria was once a place where women strolled in sun dresses, not headscarves and jelabayas, and where religion was a matter of personal choice, not political campaigning.The foreigners  left  after the ousting of the monarchy in 1952, and  the rise of Arab nationalism.  Cavafy’s cosmopolitan Alexandria disappeared.

Cavafy did not live to see the exodus, but he would not have been surprised.  His historical poems draw on Alexandria’s Hellenic past, and are infused with a tragic pessimism – all human beings are doomed to defeat, with, or without their gods.  

.

In the past two decades, the emergence of Islam as a prime source of identity among many Egyptians made Cavafy’s sensuous subject matter unfashionable. Alexandria is a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood - Egypt’s biggest opposition party and majority winner of the Lower House of the  new Egyptian Parliament. The Brotherhood wants Egypt ruled under Islamic law.   Sobhi Saleh, a Muslim Brotherhood member of parliament says Islamic law precludes publishing Cavafy’s poetry.

“Cavafy was a one-time event in Alexandria,” he says. “His poems are sinful. It’s an extreme misunderstanding of Islam. In any case, Cavafy was brave to write as he did. Now, he probably could not be a poet in Alexandria. He’d be driven out.”

Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference to  Cavafy. In his poem “In the Same Place,” he wrote of the coffee houses, home and neighbourhood where he spent his years,  not as they were, but as he made them..... I crafted you amid joy and amid sorrows: Out of so much that happened,/ out of so many things/And you’ve been wholly remade into feeling; for me.

 

In The God Forsakes Antony,   Cavafy writes of the doomed Marc Antony watching in despair as  the Roman troops enter the city.  Perhaps, by then, the poet  already sensed the end of the Alexandria he knew and loved. He urges Antony to  …… bid farewell  to the Alexandria you are losing.

The Italian cemetry, Alexandria


http://www.cavafy.com/


 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_P._Cavafy 

WINDOWS

View from the window of Egyptian poet, C.P Cavafy

Within these dark chambers, where I live through 

oppressive days, I pace up and down,

trying to find the windows. - When a window opens, it will be consolation

But the windows are not to be found, or I am unable

to find them. And perhaps it's better that I don't.

Perhaps the light will be a new tyranny.

Who knows what novel things it will reveal.

C.P Cafavy

TENTS AND CAKE

Alexandria's Revolutionary dead

Alexandria's Victoria Emanuel square  once served as a field hospital for the injured and dying in the recent demonstrations against the ruling military. The recent  elections have preoccupied  protesters  and now only a hard core of activists remain, sleeping in tents  pitched in the square (which is actually round)  – several hundred yards from the police headquarters.

Egyptian flags have been placed in the hands of two large statues. They flutter above the clutch of six tents and the   traffic circulating around the square. Drivers honk their horns in support. 

Ahmed walks around the tents, taking photographs. 

'I’ve got 8GB of photos already, “ he says and slumps when I suggest he edit them.

We walk across the grass looking for Abdul.

'I’m worried about him,' Ahmed says.  'He looks terrible. He has no money. He breathed in a lot of  toxic gas during the demonstrations.’

He rings Abdul’s number but there’s no reply.  He tries again but is diverted by an approaching woman.   Like the other women in the square, Zainab will not be camping all night, although she is there everyday, and intends to stay until the military step down. She and her friends are very keen to know what the British  think of Egypt's  25^th January Revolution.  Uncomfortable with my role  as spokesperson for the UK, I say  that the Egyptian people  are an inspiration for us,  and that one day Trafalgar Square could be our Tahrir. 

‘You’ve never had a revolution, and you never will,' someone scoffs. Zainab looks puzzled.

'Everyone should have a revolution,’ she says.

Zainab brings  tea and Mary joins us.  She’s a slight figure in her twenties and  is dressed entirely  in black.  Unlike Zainab, her hair is uncovered and hangs in a loose bunch down her back. Ahmed whispers in my ear.

‘She’s been in prison for three days. She was demonstrating and the  police accused her of murdering  someone – I don’t know who. “

Mary overhears and says  the charges were dropped.

“Close shave,” Ahmed says.

‘How were you treated by the police?” I ask.

Mary  looks up at me with wet eyes. Zainab casts me a warning look.

Suddenly there’s a loud explosion  and the clattering of what sounds like guns. Zainab jumps and turns white. She clamps her hands over her ears.  She begins to shake.

Ahmed tries to convince her it’s a wedding party, but Zainab walks away from the noise.

'I was in the crowds outside the police headquarters and they kept firing toxic gas at us. We ran, but you can never get away.  The noise was dreadful. I can’t bear to hear loud noises any more.'

Zainab is a widow and has a small daughter.  Her husband was killed  while working in Iraq during the  American and British occupation 2003.

'I’m sorry “ I say and she claps her hands together and laughs.

'Didn’t you like him much?”  

She shakes her head. ‘If he was still alive I wouldn’t be allowed to come here on my own like this. The Revolution is my life. It is dangerous but I have made many friends. We are equals here.’

Ahmed  points across the gardens  to a hunched shadow passing through the trees. Abdul is wearing a reverse baseball hat  and his computer is, as usual, slung around his back.   When he lifts his head to greet us, I am shocked  at how thin he has become and by the grey yellow tinge of his skin His eyes are dark  and glazed. He fixes me with an unnaturally bright stare .  Ahmed takes him to one side, and they stand whispering to each other.

‘Money has been stolen from the funds,' Ahmed tells me later. ‘We are trying to find out who it is. We have our suspicions. ‘

Abdul  sits outside  the management tent and clicks through his various Facebook accounts. I express concern at his appearance.

‘What do you expect?' he says. 'I’ve been hit with five different gases….mustard gas, nerve gas, CS gas. You name it - I've inhaled  it. ‘

When I ask if he is taking the medicines and vitamins necessary to counter the effects, he says he was, but has  run out of money.  I offer him some money so that he can  buy more. He  instantly  doubles the amount. I agree. We cross the road  to  a patisserie to change some notes.  Abdul stops in front of the shop window and  stares at the display of  gateaux glistening  in phosphorescent light. He fixes his eye upon the eclairs. 

‘Two people died  where we are standing,’ he says. 

.

BEARDS

Alexandria is beard city – it is  the headquarters of  the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party and the Al Nour party of the ultra-conservative Salafi. Beards have  been sprouting on chins  like weeds. There's   the uncut version, the running-wild look, the trimmed bush and the beard that can't seem to make up its mind whether to come or go.  

Posters and banners still  festoon  the city like decorations left in a room long after the party is over. The  Islamist candidates continue to gaze at us with benign  authority and reassuring smiles. Not all of them are bearded, but  all of them have the  middle of their foreheads  marked by the zebeeba which means ‘dehydrated grape.’  The dark mark indicates the amount of times their foreheads have hit the floor praying.

    

The  Islamist’s campaigning was slick, pumped with money and included free handouts in the name of charity. Their success  in the first leg of Egypt's three-stage parliamentary vote has surprised and alarmed those Egyptians worried about what this might mean for freedoms and tolerance.  The Muslim Brotherhood party and the  Salafis are likely to emerge as a vocal bloc in the first legislature since Hosni Mubarak was deposed by the Egyptian people. The Salafis are predicted to come second to the  more moderate Muslim Brotherhood.

Many Muslim scholars do not believe beards are compulsory.  Mohammed never stipulated facial hair was must for his followers in the Quran, although he himself is believed to have sported one – probably   because  he was so busy  being a prophet he didn’t have time to shave.

Sayings of Mohammed reported  after his death give the impression he was a militant beardist. ‘Trim the moustache closely but let the beard flow,’ he is reported to have said. One Muslim scholar states, ‘No one has called it permissible to trim it (the beard) less than fist-length as is being done by some westernized Muslims and hermaphrodites.'  In a statement that could   put barber’s out of business, he stated ‘It is  forbidden for a man to shave another’s beard.

Beards themselves are not the issue. George Clooney looks great in one. The 25^th January Revolution was led by young people most  of whom wanted to see Egypt become a  modern leading nation  in the 21^st century. Instead, a large group of bearded men (and a few covered women) will be a major influence, viewing the world from the 8th and 9th centuries.

When Salafist leader and Alexandrian parliament candidate, Abdel-Moneim El-Shahat  recently described the literature of the late Egyptian Nobel prize winner, Naguib Mahfouz, as ‘inciting promiscuity, prostitution and atheism,’ he sent shivers through the artistic community.

In a television  interview, El-Shahat  (who looks like a gnome with a third eye) said, Mahfouz’s novels ‘are mostly set in areas involving brothels and drugs,' and that his  acclaimed,  Awlad Harretna (Children of our Alley),  was a novel 'whose symbols promoted atheism.’

The  beardless bartender at the Four Seasons Hotel says he voted for the Salafis and for the Muslim Brotherhood as they  ‘will be fair and just.’

When I pointed out that he would be out of a job if the Salafis   succeeded in banning all alcohol, he merely shrugged his shoulders.

‘I’ll find another job,” he said, apparently  oblivious of Egypt’s high unemployment rate.  

 When asked if he knew what Al Nour  would do for the economy, he shook his head. In conservative Egypt, moral rectitude is taking priority over economic sense.

I recently watched a television  interview with  a Salafist who clearly had his eye on the Ministry of Tourism. He said that all female tourists arriving in Egypt should be given a uniform on arrival which would cover them from head to toe. The Pharonic statues they had come to see, would also be covered. He also promised to increase the revenue coming into the country from tourism.

Mahfouz once said, ‘If you want to move people, you look for a point of sensitivity, and in Egypt nothing  moves people as much as religion.’ He also said, ‘It is clearly more important to treat one’s fellow man well, than to be always praying and fasting and touching one’s head to a prayer mat.’