Arnon Grunberg

Supporters

Piece

On Egypt, green cards and bearing witness – Yasmine El Rashidi in NYRB:

‘I do not mean the army’s ouster of Egypt’s first freely elected post-revolution president, Mohamed Morsi, on July 3, 2013, after three days of enormous protests against his authoritarianism and Islamist policies.
Nor am I referring to the subsequent crackdown on his supporters, an estimated 80,000 of whom camped in a Cairo public square for forty days demanding his reinstatement. I don’t refer to the bloodbath that ensued when police stormed the square or the swift rise to power of the defense minister, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. These events were all adequately documented by the press and in reports by human rights agencies. Rather, I am speaking much more particularly about my life, and how it was thoroughly altered for several years by an article I wrote in these pages during that time.
The events of that summer divided Egypt. You were either against the ousting of the president and the crackdown on his supporters or, if you did not publicly state this, you were classified as endorsing the brutality of the police, which by the measure of the intellectual left and international observers meant you were morally bankrupt. It was in this second category that I found myself by default.
The reason was that in writing about what is referred to as “Rabaa,” after Rabaa al-Adawiya, the square in which Morsi’s supporters were camped, I had not used the terminology that almost every other writer and journalist reporting in English had: some version of “the Egyptian army massacred one thousand people.” Rather, after a year of reporting on the human rights abuses of the Morsi regime and its supporters, on that morning when the camp was dispersed, and amid the chaotic experience of witnessing crossfire, I tried not to take a position. As a writer, I attempted simply to bear witness. I tried to step back that day, and in the days following, to tell two sides of a story. I wrote about the death counts among both the police and the Islamists, and I also posed questions and offered evidence regarding not only the actions of the police but also the Muslim Brotherhood’s incitements to violence, including against Egypt’s Coptic Christian community.’

(…)

‘I took as many opportunities as I could to get away from Egypt after that summer. A residency here, a fellowship there, teaching positions when they came. I made an attempt to relocate permanently to New York, and although I wrote a novel during that time, for the majority of those years I could hardly write about my home country, even as it was the only thing on my mind. I returned often to Cairo to visit, but there was, for me, the question of legitimacy: what it meant to be writing about a place from afar. Exile might have been easier to negotiate.
In America, I watched the 2016 US presidential election through the prism of what I had experienced in Egypt. I recall telling a gathering of colleagues at Princeton University, where I was teaching, that Donald Trump seemed likely to win. He was his supporters’ Morsi, the anti-establishment figure.
My suggestion, which included recollections of what I had witnessed in Egypt, was met with dismissal, even scorn, as was my insinuation months later that Trump was acting like an autocrat. It gave me a deeper insight into my own country’s history. It was also at Princeton that I had my first encounters with white bigotry.
For those of us who left Egypt for America following the 2011 revolution and its aftermath, Hillary Clinton’s loss—despite the fact that many of us loathed her positions on Middle East policy —dealt a devastating blow. Trump’s “Muslim ban” affected many close to me. Although Egypt wasn’t included on the list of countries from which travel to the US was forbidden, we feared it might be added, and for some seven months I felt anxious about leaving the US to visit my parents in Egypt and not being able to return. As a “resident alien” I had no claims. At the time, it was hard to grasp which of the two evils—Trump’s America or Sisi’s Egypt—I felt more ready to fight. The accounts I received from home of arrests, censorship, and abuses of power seemed to escalate by the day. I had been threatened in the past by Egypt’s “deep state” and was traumatized by the possibility of persecution.
The answer eventually came in a letter from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). My immigrant-track visa, a petition-based EB-1A that would give me a green card, was questioned and ultimately denied. Among its citations was the “assessment” that my writing did not demonstrate “original” research, discourse, or contributions, because “in general” such original content “has footnotes, endnotes, or a bibliography.” Despite follow-up letters of support from distinguished professors, writers, and editors across the US, including a National Humanities Medal recipient, all vouching for my qualifications and the “originality” of my work, the USCIS was resolute: “Expert opinion testimony does not purport to be evidence as to ‘fact.’”

(…)

‘After months of rumors, and as I was beginning to put my life together again, in February 2019 Egypt’s parliament announced a national referendum on a constitutional amendment that would allow President Sisi to remain in office until 2034. I walked the streets of Cairo diligently in the weeks before the vote, in search of a sign that a “no” campaign might emerge. Although the result of this vote was predictable—one parliamentarian told me the result was “pre-cooked” and that, to his dismay, he was “in the kitchen”—it struck me at the time that as citizens we were being offered an opportunity to make a visible statement, even just in the guise of a “no” campaign, against this presidential power grab. I wrote as much in an opinion piece for The New York Times criticizing the referendum and proposing that the president himself reject the amendment, in the name of the will of the people, which he frequently invoked.
Reaction to the piece was immediate and fervent—friends, colleagues, and government contacts warned me that I was openly crossing a line by criticizing the inner circle of the state. My father called one morning with words of counsel from a retired general, a friend with whom he spent mornings, and we discussed a contingency plan in the event of any threat against me by the government: whom he would call first, second, third, or as a last resort. It brought a certain sense of freedom, as well as consolation—less perhaps “the plan” than the realization that I still harbored political stamina, as well as the will to write.’

(…)

‘The outbreak of Covid-19 came as a convenience to the government, allowing it to shut down all forms of gathering and public space. It was the perfect cover for political repression, if one was needed. During that time, and certainly in the first few months when there was a daytime curfew, there were moments when the pandemic felt like the revolution ten years earlier—that sense of open-endedness and of a situation greater than us, with no clear end in sight. The only thing missing, perhaps, was hope.
In many ways, the feeling remains of being stranded in place, hostage to time. I’ve spent most of the pandemic reflecting on the revolution and what it opened up in our lives—beyond activism—and then eventually took away. I understand now my father’s cautious response when the protests broke out in January 2011. I would call him from Tahrir Square several times a day, sharing developments, conversations, news. He would tell me not to get too excited and repeat how he had lived through it all before.’ (…)

‘The difficulty of writing about the place you are from is the difficulty of writing about these intimate stakes and struggles—most often without being able to precisely name or describe them, for fear of what that spotlight may bring and out of concern for the privacy of loved ones, as well as because of the emotional difficulty of living with situations so open-ended and unresolved. I see now in friends my age the same sense of resignation that I saw in my father. Some have been lost to exile, but some to trauma or depression. And there are those, of course, who were lost to the political divides that erupted in 2013 and to this day have not been bridged.’

Read the article here.

A brave and depressing piece. Depressing, not in the last place because it offers also an inside look into the workings of the Department of Homeland Security (‘Among its citations was the “assessment” that my writing did not demonstrate “original” research, discourse, or contributions, because “in general” such original content “has footnotes, endnotes, or a bibliography.”’).

And I still like the idea that a writer doesn’t take a position, just bears witness.
Perhaps this comes close to neutrality, about which Walter Benjamin wrote that neutrality is only for Gods.

But nowadays taking position is easily confused with civilian courage, even though taking this position doesn’t cost more than the time that is needed to tweet about any social injustice.
Oppression produces a different kind, a special kind of resignation, the most bitter resignation.

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