Hena w Henak

هم يقولون: "ليس من حقك أن تحزن على فلسطين"، وهي شوكة في القلب

توجعني

وأعبدها

وهي أول الحب

وعشب على ناي

ليس وجه محمد الدرة ما يطارد أفكاري، بل وجه طفل آخر، على غلاف مجلة "روزاليوسف" حيث كان يعمل والدي

أرى صورة الطفل المُترب

ذو العينين الواسعتين

أتذكر أن فمه كان نصف مفتوح، كأنما قد صُوّر في منتصف البكاء واغرورقت عيناه بالدموع

بكلمات كبيرة نشرت الصحيفة: لا لضرب العراق

لم أكن بعد قد اعتدت رؤية الأطفال (التي تشبهنا) باكين على الشاشات والمنصات

لا أتذكر وجه محمد، لكني أذكر أن بالصورة الكثير من الزرقة

بينما كان جالسًا محتميًا خلف ما لا يسمن ولا يغني من جوع

لا أتذكر وجه الدرة، ولكني أتذكر وجه أبيه

وصرخاته

وهو يرفع يديه معلنًا استسلامًا لم تتبعه رحمة

يذكرني وجه الأب بوجه أب آخر

يلبس جلابية بنية وعلى رأسه كوفية

أراه يقبل طفلته ويحاور مجانبيه

"صغيرة"

يعلنها بشكل عفوائي

لا راد لقضاء الله

ولكنها صغيرة

صغيرة على الموت

يضمها لصدره كأنما يأسى لحالها ولحاله قبل أن يضعها على العربة التي تنقلها بعيدًا

حيث الدرة

ربما أصبح ملاكًا

عينه ربه ملاكًا

ليقف على باب القبر

يأخذ يدها فور وصولها

تسأل عن أبيها

كانت روح الروح

فيبتسم الدرة بسمة حزينة

هل مازال يشعر بالغضب؟

أم أن الله كان قد غسله بالسكينة؟

ربما كان الدرة يبني جيشه الخاص

في أعالي الجنان

ينتظر الفرصة ليقود ثورة ضد شرعية الإله الذي سمح بموتهم جميعًا

ربما كانت صغيرته آخر الجنود

لدى الدرة ما يكفي الآن

فيأخذ خطوات واثقة تجاه العرش

وخلفه الأطفال

كل منهم يمسك زيتونة في يد وحجرًا في الآخر

يشير الدرة

فيرفع الأطفال أحجارهم ويلقوها صوب العرش

فيهتز عرش الرحمن

فينظر الله صوب الثائرين

Orange juice (light pulp)

Apple juice (best juice)

Cream cheese

Ice-cream: pistachio, caramel, stracciatella, mint, (Mint?) chocolate

Pears

Carrots

No tomatoes

Cheese (manchego)

Crackers (Ritz?)

Goldfish

Funfetti cake

Box brownies

Potatoes (french fries ++)

Tea

Pumpkin

Dr. Pepper

Ginger ale

No French cooking

Italian

Staple: Mac and cheese

Sweets:

Tiramisu

tarte de tropezienne

Caramel (candy)

Good and Plenty (candy)

Black Licorice

Peaches

Apples (reliable)

Most fruit.

Strawberry short cake. Important: with biscuit or biscuit-y cake and not with angel food cake or sponge.

Cream dress

puffy sleeve

white gold necklace

Black leather, western style buckle belt

Platform heels (silver, strappy, 70s disco)

Perfume

Little hoops earrings for everyday (little, silver or white gold)

Dill pickles, lettuce, mild cheddar cheese, butter on toast

Yellow lays + pickles

Prunes

Fudge

Hot chocolate

“Is this a Boy or a Girl?”

He interrupts his own conversation to pose the question to his friend as I walk by.

I put my head down and I walk faster.

“Hey Boy-Girl!”

He calls at me from across the street.

Once. Twice. Then Thrice.

I put my head down, grit my teeth in anger, and I walk faster.

“Are you a Boy or a Girl?”

He questions me immediately after I stop to ask him for directions.

“Both!”

He looks perplexed and that’s my cue.

I put my head down, first grit my teeth in exasperation, then force a smile back on, and I walk faster.

“Look at this Boy-Girl!”

I hear her whisper to her friend, followed by laughter.

I accidentally rode the women-only passenger car as the train was pulling away.

The twenty-something-years-old's laughter draws the attention of the other passengers.

Feigning foreignness is the only way I can think of to successfully pass outed shame for linguistic unintelligibility.

So, I put my head down, first grit my teeth, then I force a smile back on, call my friend, and I can’t go anywhere else but into their stories.

“Get off at the next station. This is not your passenger car.”

She taps me at the shoulder to tell me after loudly consulting with her friend for the past minute.

They're both in their late forties, and I think her sentence is more of a question than a statement.

She wants me to tell her “what” I am.

I intentionally rode the women-only passenger car. This late, the other cars are no longer an unequal mix of genders. This late, the other cars are, by conclusion, men-only passenger cars; and I got scared.

I’m high, a little drunk, tired, and thinking about her. And I got scared.

I put my head down; I first grit my teeth; then I don’t have it in me to force a smile back on; it’s late so I don’t call my friend; I roll my eyes as if to mock the women, but really, I’m just trying to buy myself a little more time; and I get off the train.

The men don’t say anything.

But their eyes follow me the entire time.

I stand at the very corner of the busy carriage, and I try to make myself be as small as possible.

I wish I could fold into myself.

I wish their eyes didn't linger for as long as they did.

I know about men's curiosity. And I fear it. I fear it with everything.

I wish I wasn’t as scared.

'What do you want to write your essay on?'

"I have been in love with no one and never shall unless it should be with you."

Development. Development? Decolonising. Decolonising?

What are we developing?

A sense of self? A home to call our own? A people? A community? A life? A bed? A safe space? A love?

What are we decolonising?

A sense of self? A home to call our own? A people? A community? A life? A bed? A safe space? A love?

Governments. Governments and law and police and their blue trucks and their tear gas and hurt and prisons and war and death and deaths and coffins and sadness.

Land and crops and green and home and a goat and a rooster and a cow but only in the morning and my home and my grandma and a hole outside in the garden dug with a منجرة.

صديق الفلاح

"عمال وفلاحين وطلبة"

و queers و feminists و gays

وأنا؟

"I loved her against reason. Against promise. Against hope."

What the fuck, man?

What do you want to decolonise?

What do you want to develop?

Where do you see the world in 10 years?

How about 20?

Technology, flying cars, flying trains, flying, flying.

The sky is the final frontier. The horizon above. The heavens. Maybe احنا كمان هنهز عرش الرحمن

Small, no technology, nothing, nothing. Nothing but people. Nothing but people and little things. And A home.

A sense of self.

A people.

A love.

وإني أحبك، لكني أخاف التورط فيك"

أخاف التوحد فيك

Necropolitics

Terror-formations

I thought nobody liked to talk about money

No one wants to talk about life and death

Biopolitics, Necropolitics

You graft all of the interaction (encounter) onto yourself

The impress: "You want to be so arrogant?!"

Thing-Power Materialism

Affects on Camera

(Drone War, right? The worst kind of fact: does not care about the metaphor nor its own materiality)

A graffiti: “Class War!”

What are we organizing for?

Take your pencil while you read and work with it

The pencil is: yellow and black vertical stripes, a dark pink eraser with silver around where the rubber meets the wood

The wood is more on the dark side

It is sharpened, but not so much. Not hard lines but with bits of the graphite eaten up on the side (carved out)

A few bite marks

“Sara Ahmed, The Phenomenology of Whiteness.”

Says, the white boy to the angry brown queer kid.

"Thi-ss- izs seery" (sic).

Capital ‘T’ seery.

The scotch tape, you know scotch tape?

I hoped I would die at 23

I did not

And it sucked

But you roll with it

Like scotch tape

And capital T ‘theory’ is what sticks

Lacan

Mirrors

A sense of self

I could go on forever

But I saw a revolution fail

And I it's because it didn't have enough theory

So now my thesis advisor thinks I'm in the business of shopping for one

"I came to theory because I was hurting... I came to theory desperate... I wanted to make the hurt go away"

What if I take all the hurt in the world and I write words on a paper that-- in theory-- tell me why it hurts?

(An Archive of Feelings)

My Derive

1- Right as I'm getting ready to leave, I hear the sudden, albeit familiar, sounds of the Baladi Mizmar. I spent so much of my childhood daydreaming about learning how to play the instrument so I, too, could sell cotton candy. I rush to the window to take a quick video.

2- There aren't really any bus stops in Cairo. You just flag the bus down. You stand almost in the middle of the street, you find the bus driver's ceaselessly wandering gaze, and you communicate, by refusing to lower your gaze, that it's him you're waiting for!

The bus I have to take is almost always crowded. I sit next to a woman in her mid-forties and she spends (most of) the two hours we're on the bus chatting away to her friend on the phone. The only time she looks up is when she makes eye contact with me and asks if I would like to sit. She unintentionally genders me correctly. Passing as a man on public transportation has its benefits, but it makes me scared to think I could get found out.

She proudly flaunts her recent (unofficial) recognition at her workplace where she received a certificate as part of the "female cadres" of what sounded like a government agency.

3A- I sit on a bench somewhere. The first things I notice are always people's shoes.

Open toe brown leather sandals. I catch glimpses of them as his grey jalabiya rises when he walks. His jalabiya looks to be from Upper Egypt. I know just enough to know he's not from the Delta. He has a strong moustache and a stubble. His hair couldn't be more than a centimeter in length. He's talking on the phone as he passes by. His phone looks to be one of those impossibly old Nokia or Samsung. I can't make out much of what he says, just enough to know that he's in Cairo for business. It's only 5 PM, but I can imagine he has a long way back ahead of him.

A pair of white and grey New Balance. Short yellow socks. She walks with a bounce. But she's clearly in a rush. Young enough to walk with confidence, but old enough not to flaunt it down any Cairene streets. Black sweat pants. They look like the kind that would make shuffling sounds as soon as you touched them. A blue knee pad sits atop her right leg. Bright red shirt. I recognise this red anywhere! Al Ahly is just around the corner and she's clearly heading to practice. She carries a light pink and blue backbag. I wonder what sport she plays. If I had to guess, I would say probably handball.

Clean white sneakers. There is a group of boys that hangs near the shop. He must be no older than 15, right in the awkward stage of having a body that seems to be too old for him. He's wearing a cool pair of sweatpants that differs primarily from the girl's in that it is definitely not meant for workout. It's tight and sits relatively low on his waist. He chose to pair it with a black shirt that almost makes it all the way down to his knees. His hair is his most distinctive feature: big and a little out of control with some loose curls. He puts his hands in his pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He lights one mid conversation, but his motion looks just awkward enough that you can tell smoking is a recent development. He puts one hand on his friend's shoulder as he speaks loudly, and he throws his head back as he laughs. These guys are not going anywhere. The street is theirs, or at least, they don't notice the street enough to register it as a public space that serves any purpose past their togetherness.

4- Trees in Cairo coexist with the urban in a way that certainly differs from any other place I have lived. To be sure, there are parks, of course, but that is not where most of us encounter a tree. They blend so seamlessly as our neighbours that it took me this exercise to notice that the street where I live has 5 tress of its own.

5- "What are you thinking about today?"

The door will always creak. Monotonous. Consistent. Concrete. And with time, familiar.

6A- "How do you feel recently?"

7- If I think about the biggest differences I've noticed in Faisal over the last 10 years, my brain immediately jumps to the changes in the demographics following, first, the war in Syria, and, more recently, in Yemen. In this low-to-middle class neighbourhood, many refugees have now built their own lives with new restaurants popping up every day.

The first picture of  ̔rbiyit elfoul is a prime example of thing power. Just the image of the parked cart, before it starts its morning service, is enough to reference, with the casualness of ubiquity, a longstanding history of early morning Cairene breakfast, where daily labourers and wage employees come together to grab a cheap bite.

In the second image, Karam El-Sham, which translates to generosity of the Levant, stands at a highly spectacular location, a testemant to its Syrian owners' success in the last 10 years. I remember when the franchise first started in the early 2010s following the wave of incoming Syrian refugees in Egypt. Now, the franchise spans at least 3 locations across Cairo and one in Alexandria. By now, most of their customers are Egyptians.

In contrast to their Syrian counterpart, the Yemeni refugees remain relatively newcomers to the Cairene scene. As opposed to franchises in spectacular locations or casual food carts in the street, their restaurants themselves often serve as integral communal locations. Right next to Reem Al-Yemen, which serves Yemeni food and drinks, stands a Yemeni bakery, and a small Yemeni-owned office for "real estate and public services". Despite being only a minute away from my house, my family (and I suspect most Egyptian families in the street) has yet to try Reem Al-Yemen.

It's night when the phone rings loudly. He wakes up in bed beside me.

On the other end, my sister is panicking; she doesn't know what to do.

Neither do I.

I can only get in contact with them sporadically.

I comb the news, trying to find them somewhere. Instead, the faces staring back at me are all starting to look the same.

Every little boy reminds me of my brother.

يا رب

..

...

....

Deep breath.

..

...

....

I'm staring at the ceiling above my bed.

I can feel the heaviness on my chest settle as it carves a black hole right between my lungs.

It's just a nightmare. It's just a nightmare. It's just—

My parents are going to be refugees soon.

..

...

....

‘Stability’ haunts me for days to come.

I have to grow up. I could be their best chance to survive and I need to start acting like it.

I need to settle.

Make somewhere my own so they can make it theirs.

I could try and get my brother to come live with me... hmm he can finish his school here.

If he is with me--

well, the pulling power of two is greater than one.

Maybe the more of us across borders, the easier they become to cross.

..

...

....

Do they know that their son and not their daughter would be on the other side of that border?

..

...

....

I keep imagining my parents in a place I call my own.

In my head, I am a little bit older, a little bit more settled.

I would stand in front of the mirror the night before they would come and I would shave off my beard.

When they finally arrive, they would sit awkwardly on the sofa.

My mum would look around.

I would forget a picture of us kissing somewhere, and her eyes would find the ground in shame.

She can't reprimand me.

I am too old.

She is in my house. 

I don't want my "tolerance" to come as an exploitation of their vulnerabilities

..

...

....

My parents would probably tell my siblings not to ask for too much.

And, I-- I would want to give them the world.

I would find my dad staring at the wall too often.

He probably wouldn't ask me too many questions he doesn't want answers to

And so we would slowly be reduced to silence.

Still, I would find him secretly reading the news,

But he would never talk about it.

..

...

....

1/12/2017

I get into my Lyft ride and follow my route on a map application. I’m high and paranoid and every wrong turn the driver takes fills me with dread. I’m going to die tonight. I decide to speak up and ask him where he’s going. He tells me he’s picking up other customers. I sigh.

My femme body knows how to fear. My muscles wound up around my back, my neck stiffens, my heart sounds like Arabian horses galloping. I swallow around the dryness in my mouth. I look around for a way out. My trans femme coloured body always looks for a way out. My hands sit on the door handle, ready to burst it open and jump out of the car at any time. I calculate how fast the car is moving, how much the concrete is going to hurt, and which parts of my body I have to protect. Just cover your face with your hands. The rest of your body can take the bruises and the scratches. Evolutionary models still got me thinking of my body as a thing that is being led and my duty is to protect the leader. Most of my sensory organs are in my face. My eyes, ears, tongue, nose. The way I apprehend the world. Not to mention my brain. So I decide quickly to protect “what matters.”

“Where’s that accent from?” 

I feel exposed. No one I ever met has asked so directly. People can’t usually even tell I have an accent. The way my mouth and tongue move, another physical sign of my otherness, exposes me. I can’t escape my body once again; the one barrier I can’t break through. Unlike my mind, it doesn’t want to forget. My tongue refuses to embrace English in the same way my body once refused every outfit my mum tried to put me in. And while I try to let go, my body holds on. I don’t know if it’s by choice or if it’s compelled to. My mind is stuck on what’s to come and my body can’t let go of what’s happened, and in the middle, I think I stand timeless. Is that the present? The temporality of it.

"I’m Egypti—Arab. I’m an Arab." 

"Muslim?"

Yup. Definitely going to die tonight. 

"Yeah." 

"As’salamu A’laykum."

He whispers it so vulnerably. He and I are characters in one of those dystopian novels, secretly sharing our allegiance. Peace be upon you. It’s a reassurance, a guarantee, an I-will-not-hurt-you. And it opened up the floodgates.

How is it that I become aware of my pain as soon as it’s not there?

When I think of things to hide I always think of my transness. I think of sex. I’m not a very “visible” Muslim I guess. I have “passing” privileges in that regard. I didn’t even think I need to be reassured or guaranteed safety like this. Not with regards to being Muslim.

But he says peace be upon you and the words have the exact effect. 

Peace descends. 

The knot in the middle of my chest releases. 

Muscles I didn’t notice were tense suddenly relax. 

I calm down–

For a second. 

Next thing, I try to act super Muslim. Because now that I know he’s Muslim, I have to be the most Muslim. I don’t want him thinking about my short hair or the stubble on my chin.

I wear a pink flamingo shower cap to make sure I don’t wet my curls.

I use the soap his mum makes us; a rose-scented pink cuboid that I always take home to my own mum.

My shampoo is sulphate free. It’s made with onions. It’s also pink.

When I step out of the shower, I put hair food. I think it smells like bananas, but everyone keeps saying it’s coconuts.

I use a dropper to coat my chin in argan beard oil.

I stand in front of the mirror for at least half an hour, trying on different facial expressions and movements.

I’m ready to start the day.

.

.

.

I grew up in a house with a younger sister who needed all the bathroom shelves. Her skincare and haircare products would sit everywhere as she experimented with masks made out of yogurt and egg whites.

She religiously used sugar waxing once a month. In fact, over the last year, she started laser hair removal sessions.

Meanwhile, I was the ‘serious’ sibling. Relatives at random weddings, funerals, birthdays—it didn’t matter—all found it necessary to comment on how beautiful I could be if I tried a little harder. My desire to move away from feminization regularly left me outside the aesthetic realms the women in my family orbit. Often times, that meant I rarely got the gossip as the spontaneity of instant closeness with ‘girls’ in my family was usually lost on me.

I’m the asexual girl. I’m the quasi-boy. I’m the scientist.

.

.

.

“Do you prefer to be called pretty, beautiful, handsome, sexy, or hot?”

I don’t know, depends on how many different ways you are looking to hurt me.

I am the prettiest boy I know. (My brother gets an honorary mention.)

Handsome makes me feel English. Handsome makes me feel white.

I am still too Brown and too Muslim to think of myself as anything that includes ‘sex’.

Hot is just confusing.

And beautiful holds too many words, moves too many ways.

What I’m trying to say is: hi, my name is Yunus. Let’s start there.

.

.

.

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror

which we are barely able to endure and are awed

because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

Each single angel is terrifying.”[1]

I can theorize everything I find beautiful as a terror formation.[2] Home, land, love, family, sex, friendship, water—they all terrify me, and they all have the potential to so easily terrorize me out of the self I precariously balance atop their shaky foundations.

Once, in Tahrir, my dad and I made our way to the very edge, right where Mohamed Mahmoud St. pours its heart into the Square. From there, I could look onto what we had created.

I remember knowing I was in love. I remember thinking it was beautiful.

Today, it snowed. We looked out our window and the trees were covered in white. It was beautiful.

Now, I know it means it’s time to be terrified.

.

.

.

The first thing Cash, my best friend in college, taught me was that: “hoes don’t get cold.” The idea is you take a couple of shots of vodka right before you go out into Maine winter in shorts and a see-through top and you trust the hoe-ness to keep you warm.

Nowadays, we get ready together, sharing gaudy jackets and coloured pants. M holds an impromptu make-up station in our bathroom. My favourites are the glittery eyeshadow and the blue crystal beads.

By the time we’re ready to head out, a couple of us have already asked the question: ‘Are you saying I should wear this because it’s cold or because it looks good?’

My friends are an aesthetic. Red lipstick, sarees, green tattoos, flaming hair, layers masquerading as different outfits, ripped jeans, platform sneakers, Kashmiri shawls, heart-shaped sunglasses, and too-cool-for-school vibes.

.

.

.

A cyclone of aesthetic labour—turned work because motion, turned economy because transnational—often drags my body along. I move diagonally between the eye and its many arms.

Sometimes, it forcefully removes, forecloses possibilities, and bans spaces.

Other times, I, like histories before me, wield it to make a home, to find community, and to labour (work) in collectivity.

Of course, “visibility and positive representation of under-represented communities do still matter” (Rosenberg, 288). This feels out of place and out of time.

This week, premier league clubs across England are supporting the annual Rainbow Laces campaign to “raise awareness and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community”. Captains’ armbands, laces, LED perimeter boards, ball plinths, handshake boards, and substitute boards all shed their usual colours to don the rainbow. To date, former Norwich City forward Justin Fashanu remains the only player to have come out as gay while still playing professional men’s football in England.

Jordan Henderson, Liverpool captain, wearing a rainbow-coloured captain's armband during the 2020-2021 season.

On the other side of the world, particularly in Qatar, the BeIN Sports global network exclusively broadcasts the premier league in the Gulf and North Africa to millions of, mostly Muslim, young people across the region. This week, during one such broadcast, former Egyptian player (and current political exile) Aboutrika, called for Muslim players to boycott the English premier league and to publicly register their objection on the grounds that campaigns, like Rainbow Laces, do not suit Islam and go against the natural human instincts. This was, of course, widely reported on and criticized by English media including the Athletic who first broke the story. Less reported on, Aboutrika went on further, accusing such campaigns of propagating a dangerous ‘Western ideology’. Unsurprisingly, Aboutrika’s comment saw an outpour of emotions that continues to dominate public discourse in Egypt. It is hard to ignore Aboutrika; great player that he was, and perhaps more importantly, someone who is continuously viewed either as a man of principles or an extremist.

Aboutrika revealing a T-shirt with the message "SYMPATHIZE WITH GAZA" after scoring a goal against Sudan at the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations in protest of Israel's ten-day blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Debates continue to rage on. Aboutrika is brave and fearless. He is also an ignorant terrorist, who “comes from behind the buffalo” (implicating both the famous story of his early-life poverty and his family’s rural origins). The gays are apparently no longer (or never been) oppressed since as one Egyptian football youtuber puts it: “They (the gays) cannot claim they are oppressed while the biggest platforms in the world like the premier league, the UN, Microsoft, and all these different companies continuously support them… What is this “cute” resistance where everyone is already on your side?”

.

Campaigns like Rainbow Laces claim to have positive representation at the heart of their message. So, who is the ‘positive representation’ for and how does it travel? Because, between the ‘Western ideology’ and the incessant femo-/homo-nationalism, I am left wondering where do the ‘queer’ young Muslim bodies go?

Post-Feminism gives way to New Traditionalism through the discourse of ‘choice’ where the distribution of resources is constructed horizontally in such a way as to render ‘choice’ ahistorical by failing to acknowledge its structural pre-configurations. Thus, the decontextualised choice is domesticated in the service of the normalising techniques of New Traditionalism where the heteronormative ‘family’ and ‘home’ claim stability in the face of the disruptive Other of feminism.

I think the mutually beneficial relationship between New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism relies heavily on post-logics insofar as they construe contained, neat pasts that do not spill over. This is not to suggest that all events are endless or timeless, though. Rather, considerations of time demand more respect than the cursory, fleeting character of post-logics. 

Indeed, post-logics function by privileging and sponsoring a hegemonic (national) narrative of the past. In turn, this narrative allows for and serves the spatio-temporal (re)production of a present condition best suited for the production of capital. The negative emphasis on “choice” in post-feminism thus exacerbates the effects of post-logics by further disguising the disciplinary techniques of the social machine of late capitalism and the empire.

So, do other post-logics follow a similar pattern or enter into similar cyclical relations of normative (re)production?

I am thinking specifically of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), especially in the Palestinian context of settler-coloniality. 

Roughly two years ago, Samah Jabr, then chair of the mental health unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, gave an interview in Quartz where she maintained that PTSD is a ‘Western concept’. She argued that the post-ness of PTSD cannot be made to fit the Palestinian context where the trauma is insidious and continuous. Moreover, the emphasis PTSD places on phantom pain/imaginary distress cannot bear witness to the material, every-day realities of settler coloniality.

Here the post-logics of PTSD function similarly. Indeed, the active demise of native present and futurity exists in a self-feeding-loop with denying native pastness (native claims to land/water/air for example). In tandem, the post-logics aid settler coloniality in (re)producing and privileging a present condition suited for the production of settler futurity.

Thus, in regulating what/who moves into “post-ness”, settler coloniality effectively freezes native present and evades the responsibility of acknowledging a different present—one animated by imprisonment, incessant violence, maiming, death, and dispossession.

Last week, we spoke on “soaping” as a common accusation levelled against politicians that implicates a politic proper that is centred around logic and reason. As days pass, I find myself lingering on the notion of the reasoned politic as a defining quality of politic proper. In Egypt, following the coup in 2012 that saw the El-Sisi assuming office, the Egyptian military has come to saturate every corner of life. The military produces pots and pans, sells vegetables and meat, as its football teams compete in the Egyptian league. The Egyptian Military Intelligence Unit takes control of a phone network company that provides internet services and proceeds to take control of at least 30 TV channels, 5 radio stations, and 10 newspapers and magazines. Among their expanding media empire, at least 3 production companies produce and direct TV shows ranging from talk shows to series that premiere on Egyptian (and Saudi) TV channels as well as on Watch It, the Military Intelligence Unit’s own version of Netflix.

In Ramadhan 2020, “El Ikhtiyar” premiers. It is an Egyptian TV series that focuses on the ‘heroics’ of the Egyptian army (and police) in fighting ‘jihadi terrorists’ in Sinai and during the revolution (in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood).

Everyone I know could feel their stomachs drop during Iftar knowing the show would be playing as it twisted facts and manipulated memories that were no older than a couple of years. Under the military rule (and before that as well), politic proper, the guise of reason and logic, has come to stop mattering altogether. The citizen, no longer positioned as a spectator, can no longer accuse a politician of ‘soaping’ since the very genre is now part and parcel of a cultural dissemination of the dictatorship. Instead, the soap is better conceived as a biopolitical technique of governance as its dissemination coincides with surveillance and discipline. Politic proper has become politic despair.

A politics of despair means you keep silent. What show are we watching when everywhere we look a small pit settles in your chest and tugs? Where is the guise of logic and reason when brute force and insidious violence is sensationalized and normalized as a mode of governance?

Griffin considers the ‘paradoxical popular culture’ through Scandal, a television show which she describes as “both progressive and problematic” (Griffin, 35). What stuck with me the most this week is the notion of ‘the progressive’.

Progress, for me, emphasizes a linear passage of time, which brings about a whole set of regulatory ‘norms’ such as normative, developmental, and reproductive time. To assign ‘progressive’ as a value, one would have to continuously and persistently make decisions about what counts as progress. This entails an already configured destination, valued positively a priori in relation to a ‘regressive’ pastness. But I don’t think any project of liberatory ends (I have to still believe in the potentiality of the revolution) can follow the logics of progress. Instead, I firmly believe in a theory of multiple temporalities, parallel and sometimes duelling imaginaries and futurities. The paradox cannot, and should not, be between progressive and problematic, but it may lie precisely in this multiplicity of meaning and time.

For example, here is a song by 47Soul, Gamar.

In Gamar, the main character is firmly rooted in the future. He is not outside it. He does not exist in some ahistorical bubble, nor does he represent some romanticized return to a pastness prior to settler-coloniality. He is also not stuck to the seemingly endless present of post-colonial logic. Even at the end of the music video, the enduring image is that of the main character wearing the space helmet.

Indeed, the futurity of the drone, of the surveillance, and of the white-coated scientists—is in fact being juxtaposed by another futurity, one that draws on a different multiplicity of pasts to depict the camel as a space-vehicle, and the native child as a jellabiya-donning astronaut.

What I like about a research methodology that focuses on affect is its potential for capturing what Cherríe Moraga calls “theory in the flesh”, a fusion of physical realities that give rise to a “politic born out of necessity” that refuses to give any easy explanations to a “collective history of… “unnatural disasters”” (Moraga, 1983).

To allow affects the ability to do this hard work, to locate situatedness in this way, they can’t be fleeting. Instead, I think research of affect needs to focus on how affects unsettle normative space-time.

In terms of time, Skeggs and Wood hint at how affects disrupt linearity. There is a history of affect that sediments over time with an accumulative force to shape and move people/things around. At the same time, in blurring the line between reaction and signification, affects are also rooted in a “now + then” framework since they both: super locate the body in its present and also move it away/toward others.

As for space, affects bring to my mind questions of spatial extensions, reflections, and refractions as boundaries of the self that gets affected are constantly (re)drawn. Affects might move (according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) between a global discourse and a local one, travelling through different mediums and continuously refracting as a result.

If affects disrupt space-time, then constricting them to be momentary happenings seems to force a normative understanding of space-time where it is not needed nor useful for the research. Instead of asking where do viewers grimace or laugh when watching reality TV, I would have liked to ask where is the viewer drawing the boundary around their conception of the self now? Where will the same grimace/laugh show up again in their day? How is the meaning of their reaction/affect constructed in the context of their affective negotiation of space-time? These are all questions that I feel gets left behind when we don’t allow affects to stay behind and linger, shape, and move.

   Bibliography  

Last week, we spoke on the narcissistic devouring gaze where a one-to-one relationship between viewer/viewed is assumed in such a way that no interpretation is needed. I’m specifically interested in how the bodies of women are dematerialized in representation where the body transcends its materiality. In a sense, women’s bodies become the sublime that transcends its own located-ness.

I first want to go back a little to the reading by Huyssen in the first week. What stuck with me the most that week was the idea of the feminized masses, the fear of ‘woman’ as a threat to the social order. It stuck with me, I think, because I have seen the opposite side in a way. Not that the discourse “‘woman’ = masses” does not exert an incredible amount of force; but it travels differently.

In Egypt and in the Levant, engulfed in post/colonialism and deeply affected by the imaginary of Arabic-language cultures and Islamic cultures, “‘woman’ = masses”, is much more readily visible as “‘woman’ = revolution”.

Mahmoud Darwish, for example, (and many others like Amal Dunqul, Abdullatif Akl, and Nizar Qabbani, Salah Jahin, etc.) all wrote so many love poems (in the genre of Ishq) that aggressively disrupt the transcendental one-to-one relationship between viewer/viewed.

فلسطينية العينين والوشم

Her eyes and the tattoo on her hands are Palestinian,

فلسطينية الاسم

Her name, Palestinian,

فلسطينية الأحلام والهم

Her dreams, and sorrow, Palestinian,

فلسطينية المنديل والقدمين والجسم

Her Kerchief, her feet and body, Palestinian,

فلسطينية الكلمات والصمت

Her words and her silence, Palestinian,

فلسطينية الصوت

Her voice, Palestinian,

فلسطينية الميلاد والموت

Her birth and her death, Palestinian,

- Darwish; “A Lover from Palestine”

Relatively new artists such as Bu Kolthoum (and many more like Faraj Suleiman, El Far3i, El Morabba3, etc) carry on a similar tradition, especially in the wake of ‘Arab Spring’ and wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

Importantly, woman’s bodies are still dematerialized. The body must still transcend its own materiality, its own location. However, the devouring narcissistic gaze with its clear references to discourses of modernity cannot unilaterally (and productively) describe how women’s bodies are dematerialized. Indeed, the transcendence in Darwish’s poetry or Bu Kolthoum’s song is not entirely vacated of materiality. In fact, ‘woman’ is represented (imagined/viewed) as ‘land’, ‘homeland’, ‘migration’, ‘authenticity’, etc—all material discourses that are not as immediately collapsible onto the self of the devouring narcissistic gaze. Moreover, while the transcendence remains haunted by a sense of loss/death, its temporal implications are different. That is, ‘woman’ is not frozen in time, but, instead, gestures to a historic loss, a present claim to land, and a hopeful future return.

Originated in Egyptian Arabic, but soon adopted within the Arabic language culture in general, the word ‘sharmooṭa’ (pl. sharameeṭ) is often used to describe a woman as a whore or a bitch. It mostly implies promiscuity, but it can also be used in nonsexual context as a general cuss word.

In one origin story, the word comes from the ancient Egyptian word khcr mout (خعر موت), literally dead skin, which was later adopted in Coptic language to shar mout (شار موت) as per the dialect of upper Egypt where a significant number of Copts lived. The word was used to refer to sex workers since they were viewed as performing a profession with no feelings. Although most online sources maintain that the word was primarily used for women; it is unclear if that is the case, or indeed if the word was used derogatorily at all.

In another, the word originates from the Aramaic language, where it first travelled to old Hebrew and then to Arabic. In Hebrew, it means a female dog, a prostitute, and the cunning.

A more recent history claims that sharmooṭa comes from the French word ‘Charmante’. According to this story, during the French campaign in Egypt and Syria (1798- 1801), Egyptians would hear French soldiers use the word flirtatiously when soliciting women for sex. The word was, then, taken up by the Egyptians who would associate the term with both promiscuity and collusion with the French.

From my own history, I first heard the word in my village, al-Bouha, northeast the Nile Delta, when playing out one night. I had seen a piece of cloth strewn about the street and foolishly went to pick it up only to be warned against it by the other girls. It’s a sharmooṭa, they explained: a piece of old cloth that women in the village used during their periods since sanitary pads were not yet as widespread in my village when I was 7-9 years old.

A historically specific understanding of the cultural, as per Lury’s plea, recognizes the cultural and the social as “historically related in changing ways,” marking the cultural field as a “site of political contestation” (Lury, 38, 41). In failing to take the cultural as a category of analysis—that is in separating the cultural and the social or falling into cultural essentialism—the political potential of the cultural is diluted.