Hosni Mubarak addressing Egypt, and the world, on February 1st. (Photo: Reuters/Egyptian State TV)
Here is another post on the events of February 2, 2011 in Tahrir Square, when Mubarak thugs attacked the square in a last attempt to quash the protest. This is the first of a two-part post.
A week later, and two days before Mubarak stepped down, my friend A said that he thought many of the people in Tahrir were still recovering from the psychological trauma of the protracted assault on the square that began on Wednesday, February 2nd. Another friend, R, who spent the better part of Wednesday night and Thursday morning supplying water to the men fighting those thugs at the Egyptian Museum entrance to the square, said that that was the only day she cried. R is one of the bravest people I have ever met. She said she cried not out of fear but from having felt deeply betrayed, and from having been witness to an act of incomparable meanness.
Tahrir square was jubilant on Tuesday night, February 1st. It was exactly one week after protests began on the 25th and it was the first several million-person march, the largest yet. The occupation was still fresh. The square was not yet an object, not yet a symbol, but rather a live and vulnerable gesture, a collective will now manifest by the mere presence of tens of thousands. Jubilation felt natural. Merely being there felt like an accomplishment. It was still us occupying their Tahrir. There was singing and laughter and a dizzy, uneasy optimism. The regime had been dealt a severe blow and was now collapsing, taking with it its dogmas and the fear it had sown. Nothing was the same as before and nothing was certain, not even victory itself. The past now seemed a monochrome blur. All that mattered was the future. The present moment was overwhelming and difficult to fully comprehend. The only certainties were the people’s momentum, and that our side was the good side. We must have been the good side, it seemed, because the joy we now felt made only more clear the extent to which we had not been happy before.
I left the square shortly before midnight to accompany some friends on their walk home, up Kasr Al Ainy street. Soon after we left them at their address, we stopped at a coffee shop where some men were gathered round a television. They were watching Hosni Mubarak deliver his second address since the uprising had begun. In it, he said that he did not intend on running for another term and that his work was done and that he had never intended on running for another term, in the first place. The speech ended and a number of the men, middle class Cairenes aged between 30 and 60, walked off muttering that this was indeed satisfactory and that the protests should end. It frustrated me to hear this. I understood, on the one hand, their implicit eagerness to see their lives and livelihoods restored to pre-uprising normality. But on the other, I was repulsed by their apparent political obtuseness and by an indulgent, malevolent sort of impatience from which they seemed to be drawing strength.
I hurried, without knowing why, after one of the men as he exited the coffee shop and asked him why he thought the speech was good news. There had emerged over the previous week, particularly around Tahrir, a culture of conversation in which interruption and unsolicited vigorous inquiry were, not just acceptable, but themselves expressions of political will. We ended up discussing the matter for nearly an hour, him, myself and my friend W, with whom I had spent the day. The man said that this was indeed a victory and that major reforms would take place as Mubarak promised. He said that any more protest would be detrimental to the economy, to security, to us, to the country. He told us how a local thug who was on one of the neighborhood watch committees had suddenly decided to collect a protection fee from the pharmacy next door. It was high time that police forces returned to the streets. We can’t keep this up for ever, he said. We ended the chat on good terms. “Things are going to be okay,” he said, “trust me, there will be changes and things will get better.”
“Fine,” said W, with a smile, “I trust you. But I don’t trust that man. I don’t believe what he says. And if you’re wrong, you are buying us dinner.” The man told us his name and took W by the arm to show him the building where he lived, so that we would know where to drop by if he lost the bet. “Okay,” the man said, “And if everything works out like he just said it would, then the dinner’s on you.” We agreed, exchanged niceties and shook his hand before walking off. We decided to walk back to Tahrir to see what the decisions were.
Approaching the square, we happened upon a heated exchange between a number of youths, one of whom repeatedly emphasized the importance of civility and dialogue. They were having the same debate we had just had with the man by the coffee shop, except theirs seemed less amicable. W and I did not pay this much heed, as their conversation promised no news to speak of. We simply noted the urgency with which each of the sides argued their point. Back in the square, the mood was one of resolute indignation. There was an uneasiness and a clear, unanimous sense that no one was going anywhere just yet.
We left and spent the night at my apartment a couple of blocks up Kasr al Ainy street, and we made our way back to the square around noon the next day. It was not an option to be anywhere else. There was also, for me, a pressing concern, a curiosity: What now?
On our way, we saw others heading to the square as well and we walked next to an elderly woman. We greeted her and she told us she had come on foot from the Citadel, several kilometers away. She was angry. I thought she was angry like we were, provoked by the previous night’s speech. The woman said that she had two sons, each with a vocational degree, and that they were wasting away at home because they had no work. Her story seemed no different to the dozens I had heard from fellow protesters over the past week- heart-wrenching accounts of the miseries of life under Mubarak’s rule. But the woman continued, adding that this was enough, that she could bear no more, that the country could bear no more and that she was here to tell the protesters to go home. W and I did not respond. We hurried our steps. We arrived at the army checkpoint at the Kasr el Nil bridge entrance to the square.
Scores were gathered, waiting, it seemed at first, to pass through the checkpoint. It then became clear that they, like the woman we had just met, were there to tell people to go home. I saw one man nervously pull himself away from a group who had been taunting him. Someone had been holding him by his jacket. He looked terrified, as though he feared immanent assault. I became confused, thinking maybe it was the crowd that was anti-Mubarak and the lone man a protest-opposer. There seemed no way to determine who was what without asking people explicitly, but it felt neither safe nor pleasant being there and so we proceeded past the checkpoint and army tanks and into the square.
The mood was somber, and somehow frantic. Many empty stares and little conversation. Several times we would see a small crowd nervously escorting an individual out of the square, with bystanders imploring them with their hands and voices. There was a young news reporter near us, holding a microphone and speaking to a camera. He looked like he had just finished his report, having lowered his microphone and now speaking to the cameraman as he scanned the scene around him. He was facing the large roundabout at the center of the square, around which several thousand people had gathered, and his back was to the relatively empty streets leading from the Kasr el Nil bridge. I heard shouting and saw T, a cinematographer I had once met some years ago, approaching the reporter, who was himself now awkwardly moving away.
A man intervened and told T to calm down and T. insisted on speaking to the reporter directly. A crowd gathered and there was shouting and calls for equanimity. The small crowd dispersed and I approached the reporter, whose expression was now a milder version of that of the man I had seen pulling away from the angry crowd at the entrance to the square. I asked him what the problem was and with a placating sort of bewilderment he said that he had only positioned himself where he did because of the sun’s angle and not for any other reason. I asked him what channel he was from and he said Al Hayah. His eyes darted around as he spoke and his hand tugged gently at the front of his blazer just below the lapels, as if to adjust it or to affirm a cool-headedness.
From a few meters away T shouted, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” He was standing alone, with his hands on his hips, as though all he could do was wait for the anger inside him to dissipate. He looked enraged, and I tried to recall the conversation we had had that time we met and I wondered as to what it was that seemed to be gripping him so firmly. I walked towards T. and I greeted him and reminded him of my name. He remembered me and gave a modest, tired smile.
I had left W standing on the median, taking in the conversations around us. When I returned he asked me whether I had heard what one particular passerby had said. I told him I didn’t. He indicated a middle-aged man and said that he heard him repeating, as though to himself, “We will not lose our temper and we will not fight them.”
W stood, his eyes shuttling between some distant point across the square and the ground at his feet. He looked like he was calculating something. I asked him what was going on and he waved his hand and slowly stepped past where I was standing. “Hold on,” he said calmly, as though concluding a delicate mental operation. “I’m about to cry.” His words did not make sense to me. I stood in silence and watched him sit on the curb and place his fingers on his brow. W was both articulate and aloof enough to not need to invoke crying to emphasize a situation’s gravity. I sat beside him and could see in the shade of his hand a gentle, unwelcome grimace take hold.
In all the years I had known W I had never seen him cry. I had, at that moment begun to make sense of what was now happening, but my thinking stopped when he began to cry. I went dumb like a child might have, thoughtless and totally uncomprehending of W’s face and, more importantly, his state. W’s friendship had evolved over the years to serve for me an almost epistemological function. He often seemed to have a raw sort of access to matters that I didn’t see. A sense of the bigger picture, perhaps. I looked on, shuddering at the possibility of there having emerged for W, in those few moments in the square, the image of something unbearable.
