the first days...

I am still not sure where to begin to talk about the past two weeks, but things began on Tuesday, January 25, which was an official government holiday in Egypt, Police Day. There were large demonstrations in Tahrir Square downtown, and I stayed at home (the university was closed) preparing my classes for the spring semester. This was also the first day of telecommunications disruptions. Twitter was shut down. FB was hard to access. An Egypt-based Gmail email account was offline. The demonstration was clearly a success as protesters organized at Tahrir Square, and the police responded in their typically brutal way. It was clear though, at this moment, that something special was happening. And it was clear that the government feared it. The sense was that if demonstrators were able to hold part of the Midan, that the mass demonstrations called for Friday following noon prayer would be historic, and indeed they were, beyond almost anyone's expectations.

On Wednesday and Thursday, as I was in the office at the university in New Cairo, I was following events online, in the local and international press. At home, our internet was sketchy before the government shut it down, and we do not have satellite television. Still, there was something surreal about following online from international sources what is happening in your city. Second, third, fourth hand reports and lots of rumors accumulated.

Friday morning, we woke up and went to supermarket to stock up on supplies (kind of how some Americans do in anticipation of a Nor’easter blizzard). By Friday afternoon, things jumped off with folks from throughout Cairo converging at Midan Tahrir. During the afternoon, as demonstrators converged, the government responded. Cell phone and internet service was severed throughout Egypt. (We have a landline at home, but very few people had the telephone number.) Friday was also the first night of a curfew—set for 6pm, enforced by the military. Though the time changes from day-to-day, the curfew is set to continue indefinitely.

We had, several weeks earlier, organized a party for that Friday night and a few friends actually came. Through it, we could hear shots of some sort or another in the distance. A friend with military experience thought they were tear gas canisters. Folks in our neighborhood even said they could smell the tear gas in the air when they woke up on Saturday morning. They sounded like they were relatively far away though there were reports of an attack at a local police station and a fire at a nearby government office. Still lots of conflicting reports. Our friends broke curfew to walk home—our neighborhood was still quiet and foreigners have a certain kind of liberty to move around under the circumstances.

Throughout the night, we got occasional news from friends who have satellite tv, and were watching reports on Al Jazeera. We also had friends who were down at the demonstrations. Without cell phone service, it was hard to get in touch with folks, and there were some scary moments, though by the next day we were able to track down everyone. Friday night also saw the burning down of the ruling party’s headquarters, the NDP building, which you can see in this picture I took on Wednesday. (The ochre building to the right is the Egyptian Museum.)

Friday night ended with a speech by Mubarak, apparently recorded much earlier in the day, but not broadcast on television until well after midnight. Mubarak’s second speech on Tuesday night was also broadcast quite late. Both were unbelievably foul. As for their timing, apparently he did them as late as possible so that they would not further enrage the demonstrators to mobilize, and march on the presidential palace, which had been threatened all week. A friend told me that apparently the previous regime in Tunisia took a similar approach.

Friday was also the day that the police were sent home and that the military moved in. Briefly, the police come under the Interior Ministry and are hated, brutal, and corrupt. The military had much more broad popular support, something which initially surprised me. The sight of demonstrators and civilians welcoming the soldiers and tanks were as shocking as they quickly became commonplace. One of my favorite pictures I took was in Garden City on Wednesday, less than a mile away from Tahrir Square, in an area where there are a lot of embassies, and large military installations blocking the roads. A family that was walking in front of me stopped and took their son’s picture wearing one soldier’s helmet in front of a makeshift barricade.

The View from Cairo

I am not sure where to begin the story, since the Egyptian government shut down the internet and prevented me from blogging in real time. But hopefully I can spend the next week sharing stories from the past week, which I mostly spent indoors, where I felt the excitement of a great revolution (coupled with some occasional, frightening moments). Our decision to leave on Thursday was one of the more difficult I have made, but things remain volatile. And while my fear for our family’s personal safety is minimal, there are enough concerns about what will happen during the next few weeks--if the banks remain closed, if food becomes scarce, if medicine is scarce, if water or electricity are turned off, if telecommunications are interrupted, if the police revolt—that convinced me our family’s decision, such as it was and based on the resources available to us, was the best one at the time. The university is closed until at least February 13, and I plan to return to teach at the start of the semester, whenever that is.


On Wednesday, I did attend the demonstrations in Tahrir Square. To express solidarity. To witness. To experience a liberated zone under an authoritarian regime. To take pictures. It does not amount to much, and I have many friends who spent (and continue to spend) far more time there than I did, but it was a profoundly affecting few hours. These are some images...more words and photos to follow.

Blood-Burning Moon

I have a new Arabic teacher. And he speaks no English, which is fantastic for me. That means all of our communication is in Arabic. When we talk on the phone to schedule classes, we must do it in Arabic. Still progressing slowly but I really like this new wrinkle. It pushes me.

Plus, he is a really literary guy. He brought in an anthology of Arabic translations of 20th Century American short stories to show me. It is fun to read the names in the table of contents, because they are all phonetic spellings so I can figure them out without being limited by my vocabulary. Always interesting for me to learn who and what is translated: Hemingway, Faulkner, Nabokov, Jen, Oates, Barthelme, Porter, Cheever, Munro. There was one African-American writer represented—Jean Toomer with “Blood-Burning Moon.” It would not have been my first guess, but pretty cool.

Losing French?

I met some other parents at the playground earlier today; they were speaking French to their 18-month-old son. I am excited for any opportunity to speak French but found myself out of practice and dropping in occasional Arabic words. It could be taken as a sign that my Arabic is really taking off, but more likely it is a sign that my French is slipping.

Tommy Davidson

Short blog: We took R to see Tommy Davidson do stand up tonight. She laughed at all of the right spots, so we know she has great timing. He was excellent. It was kind of inappropriate for a toddler, but she won’t remember anything. At least not without the aid of psychotherapy.

Tommy Davidson is really brilliant. I know him from In Living Color, of course. But his performance in Bamboozled shook my world. Such an edgy movie, and his performance really challenged the line because he was performing these destructive stereotypes but figured out a way to be funny in the process. In a film that is critical of what (I recall) it calls new age minstrelsy, Spike let Davidson and Savion Glover do they damn thing. And get down. Really brilliant and unsettling and challenging. I wish I thought to tell him that when I met him.

I will try to blog here from time to time.

A bathroom conversation at Harrisburg International Airport

On Thursday morning, I was at the Harrisburg Airport, en route to Seattle, Washington. I took R into the restroom to change her diaper. She was fussing, as she has been recently when I change her. I am talking to her, trying to be calming and reassuring, “You will be alright” and such.

Sixtyish white guy walks in and hears her crying. “You are ok. It is not like you have anything to worry about.” Then out of the blue: “You weren’t born in Haiti or Africa...”

Huh? I cut him off, “Actually, she was born in Africa!”

He looked and sounded shocked and shaking his head says, “I don’t know where that came from.” I hope he was referring to his own presumptions (and much worse). I didn’t say anything else and neither did he. He seemed genuinely dumbfounded as he exited the men’s room.

I was glad I was able to disrupt whatever he had in his mind. I walked out of the men’s room laughing at the absurdity, only to find my laughter occasionally interrupted by deeper thoughts about his presumptions, where they come from, and where they may lead him.

beer

Now that I am visiting the US, I have time to blog about Cairo. It is kind of a funny thing how living in Cairo can get in the way of blogging about Cairo.

In this case, about beer, actually.

In Cairo, you can order via telephone or internet almost anything for delivery and it is remarkably efficient. More so than anyplace I have been. If we want beer, we call a place called “Drinkie’s” (no I am not making this up or changing the names) and they deliver within 45 minutes for no extra charge. And you can request it cold. Also for no extra charge.

Other than Heineken, you have two Egyptian beer options—Stella (not the be confused with its Belgian namesake) and Saqqara. Both are lagers that I, as someone who does not drink very much, find quite satisfactory. Sometime last year, however, we found out about an Egyptian label called Luxor that has a hefeweizen, an unfiltered wheat beer, that is quite delicious.

A few months back, when I telephoned Drinkie’s for beer, I asked if they had Luxor. They said no, so I ordered Stella. Transaction done. A few minutes later, I got a telephone call.

Me: “Hello.”

Caller X: “Hello. Do you need beer?”

Me: [long pause] “No? Thank you.”

Caller X: “OK.”

End of conversation. Me left scratching my head.

My Stella order arrived shortly thereafter.

It took me a few minutes to figure out what probably happened. When I called and asked for Luxor, the dispatcher passed along my telephone number to someone else who does sell it. It is a beautiful example of the way that informal economic networks still infiltrate this highly efficient system.

More recently, the place we ordered Luxor from was closed (closed down, we later learned). We were desperately (ok—that is a dramatic overstatement) seeking Luxor, so the idea hit me. Why not call Drinkie’s again and ask for Luxor, and when they say they don’t have it, hang up and wait for the call from some mysterious beer distributor? I actually thought about doing it, but it seemed a bit too strange...though it might have made for a much better blog entry.