On January 25th, 2011 protests broke out in Cairo that led to the toppling of then president Hosni Mubarak and that wrote history as part of the Arab Sping. A founding member of Nawara on the commemoration ten years later in exile.
Ten years ago I went to Tahrir and participated in a revolution that changed the modern history of my country. I took part in a historical event. I witnessed great courage and brutality. I stormed the Bastille. I stomped on oppression. I laughed in the face of death. I embraced fear.
Today, I got a new haircut. It looks good. I like it. I look like myself, marked by a revolution that passed through all our bodies in varying ways. I am lucky I just have psychological scars. Some of us lost eyes and limbs. I got a new haircut to mark the end of a decade, to shed my skin, to transform. It is time to become.
I am privileged. I have the space to become. Some of us cannot move on, stuck in legal limbos, diasporas, prisons, economic turmoil. I have the luxury to reflect, so reflect I must, because reflecting is a privilege. If you can, do so. It is our duty to ourselves and to our comrades. We have come a long way. We need to acknowledge our generational pain and struggle. We have lived ten lifetimes in the last ten years.
We dared to dream and failed so many times. So, I did what Iman Mirsal talked about in her book and cut my hair. I see the wrinkles. I am marked by what I witnessed at 25. We were young. I remember what I saw. I know what I witnessed and I will live to remember, to remind. I am a living, breathing archive. It happened. I was there. I am both witness and evidence. My story is a living testament of a revolution they want to erase. So, we remember. What else can we do?
Why do we remember?
As I approach the tenth anniversary of the revolution, I find myself holding on to the memory almost obsessively. I am forcing myself into a conversation that I may not be ready for and am pushing others into it too, even while wary of the consequences. I find myself asking: Why do we remember? Why do we celebrate the anniversary of a failed revolution? What is there to celebrate in defeat and failure, estrangement and fear?
Why bring back bitter memories or reopen old wounds? But that’s the thing. These wounds are still open and still bleeding. This is our difficult reality. We are the living remnants of a failed revolution and we are destined to embody its memory.
We are burdened with the memory, haunted even, touched, possessed, obsessed. It lives within us. It has shaped our trajectory, wherever we are now. We are marked by a revolution. It altered our existence, our purpose, our worldview and sense of being. We have each had our own personal revolutions over the past ten years. A transformation that broke all of our boundaries.
We are the embodiment of the revolution. The pain. The torture marks on our bodies. The lost eyes and limbs. The fallen comrades. The PTSD. The depression and anxiety that latches on to that moment. The grief that refuses to leave. We embody a failed revolution.
Why do we remember in Berlin?
Because we need to remember who we are and where we came from, not only geographically, but affectively. The diasporic condition intensifies the feeling of disorientation, the feeling that one exists on a plane completely disassociated from one’s surroundings. The lonesome experience of migrant melancholy does not allow one to connect with one’s immediate environment, to one’s new and perhaps permanent home. One starts to exist in a state of constant transience. Everything is suspended and temporary.
Time stopped in 2011. And then accelerated, spawning forth ten years of movement. One of the biggest waves of movement in human history. Literally, the movement of bodies. A surge in migration on a scale that has only happened a few times in history. Failed revolutions across the region brought forth a meeting of peoples like none other in places like Berlin, where we were thrown into a new reality.
In 2021, time needs to stop again. We need a minute. A moment to pause and ask what the hell happened in the last ten years? We need to breathe.
Who can remember?
Remembering is a privilege. Most of us can’t. We need to hold space for those who cannot or don’t want to remember. We need to remember for them, to validate their pain and reality. To those who will maybe need to stay away in January and block every trace of the memory: It is completely understandable and in some cases even necessary.
We do not all have to remember. But some of us should. Those of us who can and those of us who need to remember to survive. We are survivors. We crossed lands and seas and found a shore. We are still here. Remembering.
Will you join us?
