Cairo Report, May 4 till 30, 2010

Researching CULTURAL ACTIVISM IN THE MIDDLE EAST  

To conduct interviews with cultural activists, journalists and artists in Cairo, or Egypt, marked a decisive moment for my research on art and politics, which I started in 2006. I have been in the Arab region before but have not had the chance to dig deeper into the social asphalt to see below the surface of what at first can appear like an impenetrable social landscape if not shockingly different from (for the biggest part) spatially and physically controlled Europe. On the day of my arrival, Mohamed, the handy-man of the apt block where we (my boyfriend, my six months-old baby-son and me) would spend the next four weeks in, led us to a grocery store behind the house. The experience was mind-blowing. The environment appeared chaotic, loud, hyper active and more than anything else – male. The public space was appropriated by a mass of younger and older people who redefine its function; streets and sidewalks alike were turned into a vast car fixing place or parking lot, busy and brimming with men and a few women of all age shouting, standing, sitting and above all watching. I felt estranged and maladroit. Too white, too blond, too Western. I hardly dared to look around me. This was a place for people used to live with density and noise; for people who had learned to ignore the bad air and lack of space between things and among themselves. I went back to the apartment exhausted and emotionally drained. Afraid even.

The next day it all changed, and change would keep embracing me. I would learn to pass between moving cars, even cross four and eight lanes of fast driving vehicles if I had to. I started to see more than dilapidated sidewalks, litter and men looking at me too long. I started to look back into men’s and women’s eyes, exchange smiles with people of all ages, and I saw beauty and fragility. I started to ignore the constant hissing and the "what are you looking for?" as well as the relentlessly thrown at me  "welcome to Egypt, what's your name?" and instead addressed people myself. I started to gain my agency back, the feeling that I can decide when to interact and when not to. Although being Western in Cairo is a 24hour job, you're visible and Egyptians like to gaze and let you know that they do. Back in Switzerland I would miss this openness and accessibility but in Cairo it would first take me weeks to learn to draw a line in order to have some privacy in public. It is terrible to be treated as a tourist around the clock, to feel that men see just the Western woman that looks for company and more. There seemed to be little chance to satisfy my curiosity for the many layers of reality around me that I wanted to bombard with a million questions. In respond to this, I observed myself changing my behavior in the street, I started to use the attention paid to me to my advantage when possible, while being shortcut and decisive. I moved away from an attitude of general openness and became the stranger who knows exactly where she goes and what she wants. Which was partially a natural development and more true every day and partially trained and self-imposed. On the other hand, every exchange about everyday things, a smile here, a joke there, was tremendously enriching and relaxing, and made me feel "at home chez vous”.

An intensified exchange with the public is fruitful on many levels and makes a lot of sense in Cairo – for the many self-organized (and self-employed) Egyptians who only come by if being at the right time at the right place in order to do a little job here and there next to their many other occupations to earn a livelihood, as it is for the traveler, the tourist, the resident. I regret not having tried to set up language lessons from day one in order to be more capable of learning who the people are that I came across. (That is something Pro Helvetia could offer when enlisting people for Cairo, auggestive list of teachers.)  The interaction with people in the street is vital in order to understand what one is looking at, and what it, for instance, means if police is omnipresent, and why they can act as if thy were above the law while they represent it, and what many reasons there might be why 98% of all women are veiled, and why cars are such a hype in the absence of any traffic law, or why many men show a mark on their forehead and why the zoo is squatted like a public park by mostly socially underprivileged people, as it seemed. Through the interviews I conducted I could astonishingly quickly catch up with a lot of vital knowledge in order to get a sense of the complexity of the many Cairos around me as well as the many pasts of this vibrating city. A similarly enriching study place apart from the streets are the coffee places, the ones hidden away between the housing blocks where you sit at sticky aluminum or wooden tables on colorful plastic chairs, placed tightly next to each other like sardines in a tin can (I still remember the taste of hibiscus and mango juices and the ahua), as well as the formerly established coffee houses of grandeur that are spacious and low-noised, where young couples meet to sit and whisper, hold hands and where men make their girlfriend-fiancées little presents, business men have coffee as well as families gather –  like the Groppi and the Riche. There are street cafes where the musicians meet, and others where the painters come together. I didn’t have the time to visit enough of them, but I can say for sure that one does fritter time in these places. It is like stepping into a wormhole, before you know it darkness falls and it seems like soon after the waiters start to clean the streets in front of their establishment in order to close them up, the muezzins have long stopped singing and the unyielding “music of Cairo” (I am citing Mohamed the driver, “a good man”), the honking car sound, has ebbed a bit, while you have done nothing but sitting, watching, talking, and sipping.

As for my interviews, I rather quickly developed a certain strategy that helped me to begin the conversation. I would start off with the question how my respective dialogue partner would describe the political situation in Egypt and Cairo specifically and what she or he felt the impact of contemporary art was. The political situation in Cairo at the time of my stay was tense. People were demonstrating against the government since many, many months. Mubarak, the leader of the country since 1981, was old and sick. Al Baradei, who was dealt as a potential alternative when I arrived in Egypt, in no time disqualified himself as a serious candidate. He was not very politically minded, not a fighter, just a charmer, someone who enjoys the publicity, playing with the population's expectation for change. Two weeks into my stay people stopped talking about him. Mubarak's son seemed to become the sore but accepted only solution. Someone who has “no political credits, but will be powerful anyway”, as he is the son of the president in an authoritarian regime, explained an artist to me. An other artist teaching at a public art education school in Cairo as well as at the American University in Cairo (“a schizophrenic professional situation”) told me that he expected no more from the government than to keep the chaos at bay, to make sure that things roll on, not that they get better but that they continue and the state doesn’t fall apart.  A Palestinian artist who lives in Jordan and was in residency in Cairo stated that he didn't care who was next in power, it was a corrupted position anyway; all the same, he believed in Egypt, he had to believe in Egypt, he said, as it was the only country that could get the Middle East out of its complacency. Only Egypt can propel the Arab region out of its stasis, he was convinced.

Egypt is a dictatorship, everyone agreed on that. Some said things have never been as bad as they were now. Pointing to the increase of poverty, the lack of jobs and schooling, let alone health care and social serviced, while the government obstructs change that would come with new social policies and legislation, defending its privileges and invested interests. People are kept busy struggling with life so they cannot build up opposition, I often heard. The prices go up constantly while the wages, being already very low, only follow up in baby steps (something the self- or non-employed do not benefit from at all). Demonstrations were being held by the urban poor, the underprivileged, the low class, the informal, a mass that daily grows. People can get loud in this country. They are technically free to shout out their misery publicly as long as they are not informing an audience that becomes active. Censorship cannot be felt as long as what you are doing doesn’t threaten the status quo on the other hand, it I shard to know what in the governments eye is a threat (specific content? Working with international organizations? Building new communities?). Activists are put in jail if they can raise a mass. Splinter groups of young people are mobilizing against the government, this is a new phenomenon I am told, they form groups and strategically collaborate, young people who choose not to marry and start families, who have nothing to loose, "nothing to cry about at the end of the day", they fight for change, with less fear than anyone else. Marriage is a big topic in a culture where you are not allowed to have sex before you got a ring on your finger. The veil is back; fashionably accessorized young women show it off in the streets downtown, wearing tighter clothes with it than most western women would choose too. Governmental representatives speak about a new religious shift, and lament about it – but has the veil specifically really got that much to do with religion, or is it a reaction to a social desolation? With unemployed being so high, someone tells me, it becomes harder and harder for young men to satisfy their fiancées demands (for washing machines, cars, TVs etc.). In order for these young women to be able to make these demands they themselves have to be impeccable “goods of exchange”, superwomen, saints, untouched, without fault, and what else but following the (more than easily available) religious instruction can prove that. The veil is chosen in Egypt and not dictated by law, but are these young women taking it freely?

I enjoyed the naughty veiled young women pulling faces and being loud, and the crowds of school girls teasing each other veiled or not. A cultural activist told me the story of his mother choosing the veil in her fifties, much less for sociopolitical reasons than as a reaction to the lack of intimacy her husband could offer her. I assume that every headscarf has its own story to tell.

Anyways, social Islamism is rising and plays probably a more important role than political Islamic parties like the Muslim brothers.

In contrast to the individuals who felt that Egypt reached its low-point, there was also a fraction of people who thought that things where never better. On some paradoxical level the latter asserted the former group’s opinion of the desolate state situation. What the optimists referred to was the fact that people didn't wait for the government anymore, they lost all hopes in that direction, and had no tears left (unlike Nasser when he resigned and his dream of a free Egypt came to an end, Nasser who still is a hero for many people old and young, and is often used for politically engaged artists to deconstruct the blind nostalgia at stake, two artists who employed original TV footage showing Nasser for their work got under serious attack from the conservative and Nasser party press while I was in Cairo).

In the contemporary art scene a new kind of agency and cultural activism seems to rise or is already in place. Step by step becoming more daring and independent after each tiny success. These individuals act cleverly and cunningly always aware of the invisible but very real sword of censorship hovering over their heads. It is not a resistance movement that wastes its energy on trying to change the big picture top down, but chooses to act bottom up and implement difference in its close proximity. It is not a grass root movement, or a “social nonmovement” as Asef Bayat describes it, something that individuals do in their daily practice, not connected to each other, a change that comes about over time. What we see in the art scene in Cairo is the result of decisive action coming from mostly upper middle-class subjects with a strong sense of responsibility, well traveled people with an ambition for their country and good connections to Europe and the US. They organize themselves with like-minded peers; some work under the radar of the government, others try to communicate with the ministry of culture without involving it too much. “It is important that you follow through with your program, your ideas, to pause and doubt is suspect to them, after a while they let you work”, a director of a cultural institution tells me. These activists seem not frustrated but impatient. They have been abroad, they know that the world turns fast and that they have to become visible in order to matter. It is a new drive to take action and to make others understand that they have nothing to wait for, and that there is no one else to blame. Many cultural organizers speak of new projects ideas for this year and especially during the upcoming Cairo Biennale in December. I am curious to find out what they can achieve and where new strategies will become necessary. It is this social engagement, the intellectual and cultural activism that I will further observe in different countries in the Arab region, with a focus on Egypt.

Lillian Fellmann, June 2010

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Beirut, June 7-10, 2010

I was invited by Culture Resource as an observer participant at the “1st conference on cultural policies in the Arab region” in Beirut on June 7-9, 2010. This gathering impressively showed that the other seven countries apart from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, have to work under similar conditions: authoritarian states, ministries of culture who don’t know or don’t want to know what the reality of the art scenes they govern look like (the Iranian minister of culture reproachfully stated that he did not recognize his country when reading the report two researchers accomplished for the conference report publication, and demanded for more experienced examiners in the field), and a civil society that is fragile and not well connected to their communities, while many NGOs deny the exchange with the government, which leads to a situation where the NGOs take on tasks that should be state affair. The gap between civil sector and government is painful and needs to be filled if social change truly is the goal of all these activities. All people presents have experienced some sort of harassment and different degrees of censorship from the government. In conversations with representatives of cultural institutions from Morocco and Tunisia it seemed to me that the concept of contemporary art and with it the distinction between what the artist and what the curator does was not established yet. The demand on the artist as a community builder seemed overwhelming and to my mind in many cases dangerous. On the other hand, the engagement for change coming from the representatives of the eight countries at the conference was stimulating, and the readiness of the international NGOs and foundations present to assist with their experience inspiring. There was a tangible will to listen to each other. A Jordanian cultural activist said, she felt that there was an elephant in the room on the first day, and people got sensitive to make sure it would disappear.

The importance of a general awareness campaign as well as the collaboration with academic, cultural and other multipliers for the broader awareness of the goals of the conference and the concept of “cultural policies” at large was established. The near future will show whether the ideas collected and the momentum gained can be translated into collaborative and intensified practices of exchange between the countries and sustain further national research and production for the implementation of cultural policies in the Arab countries as an ongoing project. I will continue to observe this vital and complex project as well as evaluate the research done so far as soon as the English translation of the material will be online (September 2010) or in print (end of the year.) The independent Palestinian researchers except for one Palestinian official were not admitted entrance into Lebanon; they did not get visas. The Embassy simply didn’t get back to them until it was too late.

Lillian Fellmann, Beirut, June 2010

While I sit in the café Younes late at night in Hamra finishing my report for Pro Helvetia, a Syirian poet comes up to me. He hands me over a note with two lines of a poem where the poet describes the eyes of his girlfriend. The lines are written in Arab as he could not translate the words into English. He saw me working and saw my eyes and remembered these two lines. He left Syria because he was put into prison several times for his art. He is not completely safe in Beirut he says but “it is better here”. He hopes to be in Berlin in a year. I wish you all the best Mouhamed Diab. You are couragous.