Letter from Cairo: Lost and partially found

Retrieving this land not only brings back to the country the confidence it had lost when this land was gone, but also recovers this country’s image in front of the whole world so it would emerge proud and strong after it was only seen as broken and helpless, especially if the war in which this land was taken constituted the most shameful defeat in the country’s modern history, which was the case with the 1967 conflict. A drastic change in the balance of power takes place between the victorious country and its former occupier, too, as the former turns from a colony to a partner and starts holding negotiations from a position of power rather than as the weaker part always expected to offer concessions. The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel—putting aside the controversy over how wise it was to sign or how far it benefited us—bespeaks this change in the relationship between what used to be colonized and colonizer. But territorial dignity is short-lived, not because the land will be taken back, but because the euphoria that accompanies liberating it starts fading away gradually as people get caught up again in the daily grind and as they realize that winning the war is not related to any internal changes that would reflect directly on them. They still lived under a despotic regime where every voice of opposition was brutally silenced and their personal problems—be that poverty, unemployment, physical illness—have not be solved the moment the Bar Lev line collapsed. Territorial dignity, therefore, did not grant Egyptians any more civil rights; on the contrary, Anwar el-Sadat was getting more tyrannical by the hour and before his death he had already had all sorts of naysayers in jail—Islamists, Communists, Copts, feminists… you name it.

Years passed… territorial dignity became nothing more than a chapter in a history textbook… one despotic regime replaced another and made sure the word “dignity” is obliterated from the vocabulary of each and every single Egyptian, except maybe the occasional cynicism and the intermittent lamentation of old glories. With more than one third of the population illiterate, unemployed, and/or living under the poverty line and with rampant corruption inundating the pockets and bank accounts of the rich with the money on which the poor were supposed to survive and with regime critics jailed, tortured, and sometimes killed, dignity was nowhere to be seen. In fact, territorial dignity that was once looked upon as incapable of protecting citizens from all sorts of humiliation to which they were subjected for ruffling the authorities’ feathers started turning into the only source of pride for Egyptians and Sadat, previously slammed as a dictator, was hailed as a hero and his faults were suddenly overlooked. “At least he did something for Egypt,” was what you would here every time a comparison was made between him and his successor, Hosni Mubarak. Some even tried to dig a little bit further and summoned up the memory of Gamal Abdel Nasser who, previously held accountable for the loss of territorial dignity, became an icon of resistance and courage. “At least he confronted Israel,” went another comparison.

More years passed… the situation was getting worse by the minute… Egyptians turned out to have dug out “dignity” from some ancient dictionary right before the word, whose letters were barely visible, totally faded into the yellowness of the tattered pages. They tore it out and ran with the scrap of disintegrated paper, racing with the little time left before the last specs of ink disappear forever. They made it, and before it was too late, “dignity” was imprinted in gold with font 80 million on a one million square kilometer papyrus. That was what I would call “national dignity,” the type in which people are given the right of self-determination by virtue of their being the full-fledged citizens of a given country. The January 25 Revolution bid farewell to the era where Egyptians had no say as to who governs them, had no right to protest against injustices inflicted upon them and had to live in constant fear of retaliation in case they did so, and had no power to stray from the blindfolded cattle herd they had been made to become over the years. This kind of dignity started slowly injecting itself into the veins of Egyptians the moment they took to the streets, calling for an end to repression and vowing that the age of bowing is gone with no hope of return, then at a faster speed flowed into all the main arteries as the protestors’ determination proved unshaken by all criminal attempts to nip the revolution in the bud until it was finally pumped full throttle to a heart that trembled with that unprecedented gush of life when the regime declared its defeat by the will of the people. The forcefulness of the first flood required a few moments of repose, and the flow—now more like gentle waves rather than the initial tsunami—continued its course smoothly as Egyptians established their first real contact with ballot boxes and went out to vote on the constitutional amendments and to mark the inauguration of their involvement in that “restricted area” called politics. The referendum was not only fulfilling in the sense that it gave Egyptians that first chance to decide what they want, but also a big part of the pleasure derived from the process was that the fact that it served as a rehearsal for the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections that are supposed be the culmination of that type of dignity that turned out to be much more precious than its territorial sister.

Not the most precious, though… not on its own at least. When a country secures its borders and gains sovereignty on its territories then its citizens are given the right to exercise all their democratic rights, you have covered two sides of the triangle. Now remains the last and most difficult to achieve, what I would call “personal dignity.” If territorial dignity can be obtained by war and national dignity reclaimed by revolution, personal dignity requires a series of complicated procedures that, unlike many might expect, are much harder to implement than those other massive actions that alter the fate of nations and change the face of history. In a regime that made tightening its grip on power, plundering national resources, and silencing all opposition its top priorities, robbing citizens of their feeling of self-worth was a very important step toward guaranteeing the maintenance of the status quo. When people are deprived of all the possible tools of a decent living from food and shelter to education and employment, not to mention a human treatment that might at least make up for material losses, they start seeing themselves as the regime sees them and wants them to see themselves—useless, incompetent, and dispensable. They begin developing a nihilist attitude and nothing but religious prohibitions keeps them from committing suicide. In fact, I have always thought that the Tunisian Bou Azizi set himself ablaze on behalf of all his disgruntled fellows in Egypt. With killing themselves out of the question, they had decided to cope with the undignified life they seemed to have been stuck with until God chooses to relieve them of its agonies. Known for their outstanding adaptability and their general tendency to accept what appears to be unchangeable, this lack of dignity became no longer a source of misery and gradually turned into a style of life.

A civil servant won’t try to be implicit when asking you to grease his palm in order to process your driver’s license or issue a copy of your birth certificate, a policeman would tell you bluntly that he will cancel your violation ticket if you give him “whatever your generosity admits, madam,” a self-proclaimed valet would pop out of nowhere and forcefully helps you to park and bangs on your car if you don’t pay him in return, and the security guy at the bank smiles at you saying, “Many happy returns”—for apparently some daily occasion that I am not aware of—and expecting you to pay him after every single time you take money from the ATM machine. As for the amount of people, ages three and up, who descend upon you from the heavens above asking for money for several reasons—the most common spectacle being a woman holding a child and swearing he is being treated for some fatal disease or a man on a wheel chair swearing he needs an operation for half a million pounds—they are on the verge of forming their own trade union. When you don’t give them money, you always end up being called all the names you can imagine. I remember one of those little girls actually spitting at me and yelling most vengefully, “You will never get married”—as if that was bad!

There is no way I would dare lay the blame on them because I don’t think that anybody would be given the chance to live in dignity and choose humiliation instead. Like all Egyptians, they are the victims of a regime whose utmost ambition was to rule a kingdom of the submissive disenfranchised whose only means to deal with their already deplorable situation is making it all the more deplorable by stripping it of any traces of dignity. If relinquishing dignity will help them get for themselves what the government no longer considers its duty, then to hell with this dignity that makes you sleep with an empty tummy.

Has the revolution changed that? No, it has not, because you need to feed people before talking to them about democracy and you need to get them jobs before familiarizing them with potential presidential candidates and you need to provide them with four walls and a ceiling before you introduce them to the importance of establishing a civil state. Most importantly, you have to acquaint them with the concept of dignity… teach them that the reason for the debased life they have suffered is no longer there and that it is high time they raise their heads up high and know that they belong to a great people who made a revolution so that no one will be anymore ashamed of being Egyptian or feel that Egypt does not belong to him or her… so that youths won’t risk their lives on homemade boats and drown on the way to Italy.

A friend of mine once called me ruthless for refusing to give money to beggars and street children and I told her that this country is going nowhere as long as people do not have dignity. “This country is not going anywhere anyway, darling,” she scoffed. That was before the revolution. Now, I insist more than ever on doing the same thing because only then can the marginalized move to the center and can Egyptians hereby certify that they are a truly dignified people.