Soueif - Cairo: memoir of a city transformed

Copyright 2012, 2014 by Ahdaf Soueif

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies. Originally published, in different form, in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing, London, in 2012.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Soueif, Ahdaf.
Cairo : memoir of a city transformed / Ahdaf Soueif.
pages cm
Revised edition of: Cairo : my city, our revolution.
London : Bloomsbury, 2012.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-307-90810-0
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-90811-7
1. Cairo (Egypt)History21st century. 2. Cairo (Egypt)Social conditions21st century. 3. EgyptHistoryProtests, 2011. 4. EgyptPolitics and government21st century. 5. EgyptSocial conditions21st century. 6. Soueif, Ahdaf. I. Title.
DT148.S69 2013 962.16056dc23 2013003190

www.pantheonbooks.com

Cover photograph by Zeinobia
Cover design by Peter Mendelsund
Maps by Omar Robert Hamilton

v3.1_r1

For the young people of Egypt;
the shuhada who died for the revolution,
and the shabab who live for it

Writing some of the sounds of Arabic in Latin characters has been an issue since the Middle Ages. Systems of transliteration vary, along with their levels of complexity.

What Ive chosen here is to adopt a new system that was, I believe, initiated by Arab bloggers. Its very simple:

1. Where there is a traditional acceptedand uniquespelling in Latin letters for an Arabic sound, I retain it. As in: gh for like the French r; kh for as in the Scottish loch.

2. Three sounds are written as numerals:
The hamza, , pronounced as a glottal stop in the middle or at the end of a word, is written as a 2. So if we were doing this in English, the cockney butter would be written bu2er. The ain, , a soft vibration in the back of the throat, is written 3. The heavy h, is written 7.
However, where words already have an image and a presence for the reader of English, Ive kept them as they are. So Tahrir has not become Ta7reer, Ahmad has not become A7mad, Aida has not become 3aida, and so on.

Almost twenty years ago I signed a contract to write a book about Cairo; my Cairo. But the years passed, and I could not write it. When I tried, it read like an elegy, and I would not write an elegy for my city.

Then, in February 2011, I was in Tahrir, taking part in the revolution and reporting on it. Alexandra Pringle, my friend and U.K. publisher, called me; this, she said, must be the moment for your Cairo book. I fought the idea. But I feared she was right.

I say feared because I wanted more to act the revolution than to write it. And because I was afraid of the responsibility. Jean Genet, in his book that I most admire, Un captif amoureux, writes: I am not an archivist or a historian or anything like it. This is my Palestinian revolution told in my own chosen order. I cannot say the same. This story is told in my own chosen order, but it is very much the story of our revolution.

It proved impossible to sit in a corner and write about the revolution. What was happening needed every one of us to be available at all times to do whatever thelets call it the revolutionary effort might need, whether it was marching or standing or talking or mediating or writing or comforting or articulating or So I tried to revolute and write at the same time, and I soon realized two things: one, that I could not write what was fast becoming the past without writing the present; and two, that for this book to be as I wanted it to be and believed it should be, an intervention rather than just a record, it needed to take inand onas much of this present as possible.

And so I wrote Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, which was published in London in January 2012. The present that it took in went up to October 2011. And the structure, the storytelling mode, that seemed truest to the story then, showed the period from 12 February to 31 October as an interruption to the course of the revolution. It was still possible then to believe that the revolution as we knew it, as we had lived it, would continue, and that we would pick up from where we had left off.

Now, over a year later, we can no longer believe this. What we are living now can no longer be seen as an interruption; we are living the revolution in the course and the form it has had to take. Our revolution does continue, but it has become bigger, harder, more real(istic), and more diverse; it has lost a lot of its innocence and may, perhaps, have to lose even more.

And once again, it was a friend and publisher who made me deal with this change: LuAnn Walther, my U.S. editor. So this, the American edition of my book, takes in this later period: the winter, spring, and summer after October 2011. In preparing it, I was tempted to tidy up the story, to make it more streamlined, to sweep through our Egyptian story from January 2011 to now in chronological time. But the story resisted, and something in me resisted. Because the story Ive been writing is not just about the events that took place, but about how I, how we, perceived and felt and understood them. And its also a story about me, my family, and my citytold to a reader, a friend, out of a particular moment, a particular emotion.

And so I have preserved the integrity of my text. I have not rewritten it but have let the past remain unchanged and carried on with it in the only way I could: picking up the story from where I had left it before. The revolution is not an event but a process, a process were all going through, and this book is going through it with us, fitting itself to the altered forms of the revolution and to the transformations of the city.

And at its heart there are those eighteen golden days, eighteen days that were given to us, when we all pulled together to get rid of the head of the regime that was destroying us and our country and everything we held dear; eighteen days that brought out the best in us and showed us not just what we could do but how we could be. And it was this way of being, as well as what it achieved, that captured the imagination of the world, that made the Egyptian revolution an inspiration for the peoples movements that are crystallizing across the planet. Every Egyptian I know is both proud of this and humbled by it. I know I am.