‘Anticipating’ the 2011 Arab Uprisings DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739 Also by Rita Sakr: MONUMENTAL SPACE IN THE POST-IMPERIAL NOVEL: An Interdisciplinary Study (2011) THE ETHICS OF REPRESENTATION IN LITERATURE, ART AND JOURNALISM: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut (with Caroline Rooney, 2013) DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739 ‘Anticipating’ the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies Rita Sakr Research Associate, University of Kent, UK DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739 © Rita Sakr 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 ISBN 978–1–137–29472–2 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. 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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. www.palgrave.com/pivot For Janet and Luca DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments ix 1 Introduction: ‘Anticipating’, Writing, and Rebelling in the Arab World 1 2 ‘A Way of Making a Space for Ourselves Where We Can Make the Best of Ourselves’: Writing Egypt’s ‘Tahrir’ 21 3 ‘Here It’s Either Silence Or Exile’: The Stories of ‘Rats’ that Rebelled in Libya 47 4 ‘We Would Meet Them One Day, and Call Them to Account for Their Oppression’: Post-2005 Prison Writings in Syria 71 Bibliography 100 Index 109 vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739 Preface In 2010, I was finishing my monograph Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study that engages with literary representations of various political geographies across which revolution, the fall of empires, and the rise of fledgling democracies are envisioned and in many cases ‘anticipated’. Lebanon and Turkey were at the heart of the project. But in February 2011 when decades-old oppressive regimes started to unravel across the Arab world, I wrote a post-script to the monograph with the title ‘Monumental Space and the Collapse of Arab Dictatorships’ that would become the first step in a two- year-long close engagement with literature and changing political geographies in the Arab world. From this perspective, this Palgrave Pivot study is the product of the intellectual and political environment in which it was written. In 2010, I was reading Richard Jacquemond’s Conscience of the Nation: Writers, State and Society in Modern Egypt and Samia Mehrez’s Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice while re-reading, for the third time, Alaa al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building. It was a time when their understanding of the role of writers with respect to history had not yet been either fully validated or qualified (as it has been since then) by the historical transformations that would sweep over Egypt in the fol- lowing years. This was also a time when particularly Egypt’s writ- ers and artists, ignored by political scientists and area studies specialists, became the center of the attention of very few engaged academics and critics who saw the DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739 vii viii Preface inter-connections between literary visions and democratic possibilities in the country. I was fortunate to collaborate, through a visiting schol- arship then my current position as Research Associate on a ‘Global Uncertainties Leadership Fellowship’ at the University of Kent, with a brilliant academic and activist who has been at the forefront of this engagement. Caroline Rooney, as part of an ESRC-funded fellowship titled ‘Radical Distrust’, visited Egypt and interviewed writers and young bloggers who would become some of the prime forces behind the revolutionary popular imagination of the 2011 uprising. Her co-edited journal issue Egyptian Literary Culture and Egyptian Modernity (Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.4, 2011) brings together not only interviews with people like Ahdaf Soueif and Rehab Bassam who in 2010 expressed their faith in change but also excellent essays by academics, based in Egypt and Britain (including Ayman el-Desouky, Marilyn Booth, Julia Borossa, Monira Soliman, and others) that explore the relationship of Egyptian literature to freedom and activism. Rooney’s pioneering insights with respect to Egyptian literary culture and its ‘prospective’ dimensions are summed up in her introduction to the JPW volume that will be referred to in the following chapters. My conversations and work with Caroline, as well as with colleagues who participated in conferences on the ‘Arab Spring’ cemented my interest and work on this subject. As well as my debt to Caroline’s invaluable contributions to this field, I was particu- larly inspired by the work of Ayman el-Desouky, Joseph Massad, Ziad Elmarsafy, Miriam Cooke, Barbara Harlow, Rami Khouri, and Delphine Pagès el-Karoui. The recent period made me realize that while Egypt’s visionary litera- tures and spaces continue to be closely analyzed, there was relatively less substantial work (with few exceptions) on specifically the dynamic of revolutionary literatures and political geographies (in monumental sites, houses under surveillance, exilic territories spaces of ‘disappearances’, and political prisons) especially across Tunisia, Libya, and Syria, and on the wider significance of this dynamic to both the recent and ongoing events in the Arab world and the larger post-imperial histories of the region. From this perspective and as part of the ongoing multifaceted intellectual debate on the topic, this Palgrave Pivot volume re-visits the fascinating spaces of writing and rebelling that are introduced in the first chapter and developed in the following three, within the framework of the intersections among literature, cultural geography and human rights discourse. DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739 Acknowledgments In February 2011, as I was finishing a book on the liter- ary representations of memorial spaces in post-imperial contexts including the Middle East, I began an exciting but also troubling research journey into the revolutionary Arab ‘republic of letters’ and its various citizens: writers of international fame, marginalized voices, exiles, ex-prison- ers, and others among the discontented and visionaries of a region on fire. But the journey would not have been completed without the support of friends, colleagues, and loved ones. I thank Benjamin Doyle of Palgrave Macmillan for embracing this project and enthusiastically supporting it all the way through. I thank Professor Caroline Rooney for giving me the invaluable opportunity to work with her at the University of Kent on exciting, pioneering projects funded by the ESRC under the ‘Global Uncertainties’ research pro- gram. Caroline believed before hardly anyone else in the transformative role of writers across the Middle East and North Africa. Her understanding of these dynamics is tremendously inspiring and her publications in this area have been of great significance to the ways in which I formulated this study. I am hugely grateful to Professor Liam Kennedy for granting me a welcoming space to present, share, and develop my ideas on the inter-disciplinary approach to conflict in the Middle East within the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin where I DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739 ix