The Aboul Fotouh Bandwagon

To kick off the official start of presidential competition, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh’s campaign did a smart thing and showcased the most energetic part of his base: university students. Bedecked in the cheerful orange color of the campaign, they packed into dozens of buses from across Egypt and poured into Alexandria’s famed al-Qaid Ibrahim Square where they put on a marvelous show, pulsating with hope and jubilation at the imminent prospect of real presidential elections.

It’s impossible to be around a gaggle of college students and not catch their enthusiasm, especially if they’re wisecracking the whole time while working like bees. After a march on the Corniche, they stationed themselves in a nice grassy public space next to the Ibrahim mosque and set up shop. An instant fairground emerged, with booths selling campaign commodities and booths to sign up more volunteers; a poet’s corner; a wall display charting milestones in Aboul Fotouh’s public life; art stations; two roving guys with a drum; and a huge orange mural constructed and painted by Alexandria University students.

The poets’ stage hosted a string of eloquent spoken word performances and one hilarious stand-up routine where a young man parodied some highly imitable public figures, including Hazem Salah Abu Ismail and the vulgarian Tawfiq Okasha.

God’s cutest creatures were also out in full force, showing their support for Aboul Fotouh.

An energetic, friendly woman was supervising the students constructing the mural. Dr. Yasmeen Zaki is a professor in the Engineering faculty at Alexandria University and was responsible for securing a permit from the Alexandria authorities and dealing with their bureaucratic obstructionism. “We’ve been working like ants for the past six days, almost round the clock,” she said cheerfully, as students carrying buckets of orange paint darted back and forth.

Zaki defines herself as a liberal, and began working with the campaign a couple of months ago during the collection of citizen signatures. She said that what most attracts her about Aboul Fotouh is his personal honesty and ability to gather together different currents, which she said secular candidates she respected like Hamdeen Sabahy and Abul al-Ezz al-Hariri have not been able to do.

The theme of beyond-partisanship was amplified by a group of recent college graduates from the town of Etay al-Baroud in Beheira province. Unprompted, they took turns introducing themselves as “I’m ex-Baradei, I’m ex-Ikhwan, I’m ex-April 6^th.”

Hailing from one of the Delta’s hardcore Ikhwan pockets that they said never allowed an NDP member into parliament in the past 30 years, they delighted in describing how residents reacted to their door-knocking for Aboul Fotouh. “I had dirty water thrown on me,” said one with a huge grin. “I had dust and dirt flung at me,” piped in another. Not to be outdone, a third quipped that he was lucky because he got only clean sudsy water thrown on him.

Muhammad Abdel Rahman Hamada, a recent law school graduate from Etay al-Baroud, explained why he’s a fierce Aboul Fotouh loyalist. “Non-partisanship is good for this juncture, because partisanship is exclusionary. My problem with the secular candidates like Hamdeen who’s a Nasserist and Khaled Ali who’s a socialist is that they exclude Islamists.”

Overhearing the Etay volunteers recount the hostility they faced from Ikhwan supporters in their district, an Ikhwan supporter interjected to explain why a strong party and organization were crucial in the presidential elections. A heated argument erupted over who Ikhwan youth would vote for. “The Ikhwan youth say they’ll support Mursi but they’re really supporting Aboul Fotouh,” asserted Hamada. “The problem with the Ikhwan is that their rank-and-file have no say whatsoever,” yelled a middle-aged man who was listening in.

By this point, the sun had descended into the Mediterranean and students had packed up the fair and filled the square outside Ibrahim mosque for the evening’s main event. Tens of thousands of students and Alexandria residents filled the streets radiating from the square, where a large stage had been set up and two giant screens were stationed farther back for crowds far from the stage.

Under huge strobe lights, in strode poet Abdel Rahman Youssef, starting things off with high-energy oratory that was met with wild cheers from the audience and drumbeats and chants from the Aboul Fotouh Ultras.

Like a series of warm-up acts before the entrance of the rock star, a string of luminaries then took the stage to deliver punchy, rousing endorsements that revved up the audience. AUC professor and Aboul Fotouh adviser Rabab El-Mahdi said that Aboul Fotouh represented the promise of true inclusion after decades of Mubarak’s destructive divide-and-rule policies, leading the crowd with rousing chants of “Yasqut yasqut hukm al-‘askar!”

A representative of the association of the deaf and mute announced their backing. A representative of the Revolution Youth Coalition, the most credible post-revolution youth alliance, announced his endorsement. A famous athlete, a young parliamentarian, an old friend of Aboul Fotouh: all tramped on and off stage, stoking the sense of anticipation.

The crowd went wild when it was the turn of Salafi Nour Party spokesman Nader Bakkar, greeting him with throaty chants of “One hand! One hand!” Khaled Said was there in spirit, as the Ultras invoked his memory and led the crowd in a haunting chant with heart-pounding drumbeats: “Fil Ganna! Ya Khaled! Fil Ganna! Ya Khaled!” And when Wael Ghonim came onto the stage to announce his endorsement, commotion ensued, with young people standing on chairs and screaming wildly.

“And now, the student who stood up and said no to Sadat….” but before the female MC could finish her sentence, the crowd erupted, the Ultras set off massive fireworks, a campaign theme song started blasting, and Aboul Fotouh strode onto the stage in a cream-colored suit sans tie. Before starting his speech, he had to wait a good three minutes as this corner of Alexandria thundered its support for his bid to become one of the world’s most powerful political leaders.

From his origins as a charismatic leader of a faction within the Ikhwan, in less than a year Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh has experienced a stunning political transformation, metamorphosing into a national leader to be reckoned with. Unlike other dissidents who shined under Mubarak’s debilitating dictatorship only to be eclipsed in the exciting rough and tumble of Egypt’s new politics, Aboul Fotouh has augmented and diversified his political capital, comfortably easing into the role of presidential contender.

His trajectory is but one vignette into what this revolution has done, smashing the brick ceiling on Egyptian politics and giving free rein to a host of political talents and possibilities.

Looking around me at the Alexandria rally, it wasn’t the hyperactive students who stunned me, but the middle-aged mothers and fathers (and a few grandparents) who came out to stand three hours in the open air on a weeknight to listen to a politician. Aboul Fotouh has tapped into the Egyptian middle class’s thirst for public engagement, the same middle class that Mubarak shoved away from politics and steered into parochial neo-conservative privatized pursuits and corrosive conspicuous consumption.

To this educated middle class, Aboul Fotouh’s scrambling of the old categories of Egyptian politics is profoundly attractive. Here are mainstream Islamists piled onto Salafis piled onto Wasat Islamists piled onto liberals and leftists and feminists and unaffiliated people and people who still harbor a deep disdain for and mistrust of politics (one of Mr. Mubarak’s many parting gifts). For this diverse voter bloc, ideological purity or even ideological co-existence is less important than finding a trustworthy problem-solver president who isn’t going to fleece us all over again.

Aboul Fotouh’s programmatic appeal lies in an effective mix of a bold foreign policy (“strong Egypt” is his chief slogan), a centrist economic program, and an inclusive, ecumenical stance on identity issues that plays up Egyptians’ shared benign conservatism, whether they’re Muslims or Copts, and rubbishes the inward-looking aggressive conservatism that’s flourished within both communities over the past 15 years.

Personally, Aboul Fotouh is an unassailable character. He has plenty of integrity, lacks artifice in his political speech, possesses a pleasant old-fashioned reserve, and has a strong sense of dignity that doesn’t come off as imperious or in any way entitled (that’s Amr Moussa’s territory). He’s one of those rare Islamists who are not embarrassingly provincial like Muhammad Morsi, or remote, calculating organization men like Khairat al-Shater, or fence-sitters like Muhammad al-Beltagui, or any of the yet-untested Salafi upstarts.

It’s an open question whether Aboul Fotouh’s personal and programmatic qualities can bring his brand to the lower classes, who are equally intent on political participation but lack the time and leisure of middle class citizens. Here lies the significance of the Salafis’ bombshell endorsement of Aboul Fotouh, for it is they who’ll carry his message to the lower and working classes. However, given the internal diversity of the Salafi world, it remains to be seen whether Fatehoon Salafis can convince their communities to switch allegiance from Hazem Abu Ismail and Muhammad Morsi to Aboul Fotouh.

If he does make inroads into the pious, suffering lower classes and peels off some supporters from the nervous upper classes, the divided Copts, and the fractious secular left, Aboul Fotouh’s bandwagon will be hard to beat.

On the Trail of an Audacious Presidential Campaign

As Egyptians are on the cusp of choosing their chief executive for the first time ever, the idea of popular participation is under attack. Revolution-fatigue is manufactured and promoted by the same intellectual peddlers who served Mubarak. Bookstalls and air waves are full of ancien regime figures, holding forth on “the missed opportunities” of the Mubarak era. Old myths about the fecklessness and gullibility of the people are refurbished and packaged under the respectable labels of “public opinion” and “the general mood.” Mubarak’s old trick of belittling and smearing aspirants to the top job is alive and well in those corners of the media bankrolled by his erstwhile cronies.

In this setting of military rule supported by anti-revolutionary cultural production, enter a group of citizens backing a dynamic activist lawyer for president. Having just turned 40 last month, the minimum age required to run for the office, Khaled Ali is the youngest presidential hopeful, but age is not his most striking asset. It’s his disarming sincerity and fierce dedication to his core constituency, the downtrodden who he belongs to and doesn’t just talk about.

In this maiden presidential race, electability is hard to gauge. But if credibility is a criterion, then Khaled Ali has it in spades.


Banking on the Black Box
Like any campaign headquarters, Ali’s is a den of chain-smoking, sleep-deprived organizers, fresh-faced college student volunteers, and the odd journalist or visitor roaming the halls. A good chunk of Baradei supporters gravitated to Ali’s campaign after their guru pulled out of the race, bringing with them a fondness for political marketing gimmicks. What’s unique about the Ali campaign are the legion of laborers backing his candidacy, real flesh-and-blood workers determined to claim their share of the new Egyptian state (under construction).

Different subcultures coexist in the campaign office, operating on parallel tracks. In one room, a group of burly local labor leaders sit around a large table planning outreach and canvassing strategies, led by a vivacious middle-aged Mahalla woman who was arrested during the April 6, 2008 protests in the town.

In a corner of an adjacent room, a handful of intellectuals are smoking up a storm and heatedly debating something. The next two rooms are occupied by young organizers staring intently into their laptops or pacing back and forth talking on their cell phones, a whiteboard listing the details of Ali’s campaign visits above their heads.

Amr al-Qadi is a third-year engineering student at Ain Shams who became a campaign volunteer shortly after Ali declared his candidacy. Al-Qadi had initially supported Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh, considering him the most viable pro-revolution candidate to compete against Mubarak holdover Amr Moussa. Then he met Khaled Ali by chance and was impressed by how modest he is.

“It felt as if I was sitting with one of my friends. He’s not arrogant at all and he doesn’t insist that we call him Ustaz and stuff like that. I could imagine how if he became president, he’d treat everyone equally. He’s also the only candidate who’s serious about social justice, and something he said stuck with me: we need to translate social justice slogans into public policies.”

An Egyptian academic who lives in Europe said she was a big Baradei supporter but transferred her loyalties to Ali when Ali joined the race. She was drawn to the Ali campaign’s responsiveness and solicitation of citizen proposals, volunteering her expertise on cultural resource management. “It’s an individual initiative of many individuals,” she said, capturing the campaign’s micro-organizational ethos.

That ethos worries Ali’s core group of advisers. Veteran human rights defender Ahmed Seif al-Islam is Ali’s mentor and fellow traveler in the fields of law and politics. He identified the influx of volunteers as one of the campaign’s two main challenges. An asset in terms of raking in fresh ideas and embodying participatory politics, managing the volunteers is a daunting organizational task, especially for a grassroots campaign high on enthusiasm but short on funds.

But Seif harbors no worries about the utility of what they’re doing. “We’re running a different kind of campaign. We’re not in this to sell our candidate, but to mobilize voters, that’s the whole point.”

He brushed aside all the ambient theories purporting to map out the preferences of Egypt’s electorate based on the parliamentary election results. “What people don’t understand is that Egyptians didn’t vote for the Muslim Brothers and the Salafis because they’re religious parties, they voted for them as a reward for opposing Mubarak. The logic is, ‘we’ll reward you and let’s see how you make out now.’”

Out of the 30 million voters expected to take part in the presidential poll, Seif thinks maybe five million will vote with fixed preferences, including the bloc of religious voters, based on his reading of the Shura Council elections. “That leaves 25 million voters that we don’t know anything about! They’re a black box.”

He believes four elements will structure the vote: region, ideology, age, and occupation. Each voter’s calculus will be some alchemy of these four, he says, but we can’t know it in advance, especially since there’s no precedent of electing an Egyptian president.


Native Son
On a balmy moonlit evening, the campaign bus rolled into Khaled Ali’s home village of Mit Yaeesh in Markaz Mit Ghamr, Daqahliyya. Before it could stop, the bus was encircled by athe crowd and a boisterous band of musicians playing the mizmar and drums. The scene could’ve been out of a film: the native son gets a rousing hero’s welcome for doing his people proud.

Ali’s family and supporters hugged and kissed him as he was serenaded by the troupe, then he ducked into the front seat of a car that was part of a large cavalcade of cars and pick-up trucks slowly making its way to the rally site, snarling traffic something awful but no one complained.

Two huge amplifiers on the back of a pick-up truck blasted music, and carefree girls in hijab hung out of car windows, drumming on the car roofs and swaying to the music. Every few minutes, a tractor headed in the opposite direction squeezed by the procession, its driver raising both arms in celebratory greeting, and one local notable with a mighty turban passed by on his horse, raising his cane high up in the air to salute the procession as his mare clop-clopped on its merry way.

On either side of the narrow streets, residents leaned out of their balconies and stood outside shops to watch the spectacle. A young storekeeper cradling an infant swaddled in a pink blanket gently gathered the blanket around her ears. A toddler sat on a stoop, clapping delightedly to the music. A baqqal stood on a stool with his back to the street, fussing over the already artfully-arranged wares on his shelves, never once turning around to see the commotion.

Ali got out of the car to greet a gathering of women standing in a bend in the road, their joyful ululations rising to the moon and rippling its surface.

There’s a negative stereotype of the Egyptian human rights lawyer jet-setting from conference to conference and spending more time on television than in the courtroom. Although he’s very much a part of the Cairo human rights crowd, Ali is an outlier.

Unlike many professionals from poor backgrounds, he speaks unashamedly about his past. His father’s salary as a coast guard wasn’t enough to support a family of five girls and three boys. So as the second oldest child, Khaled worked odd jobs before and after Law School to help meet his own and his siblings’ expenses, insisting on helping his sisters marry first before he married in 2002.

In an interview with talk show host Hala Sarhan, Ali poignantly recalled his experiences as a worker at a rice-hulling plant and a machine operator at a biscuit factory. For a year after Law School he worked as a waiter at a coffee shop, eventually leaving the job for the humiliation inflicted on him by the boss.

In 1996, he began his human rights career by joining the revered leftist lawyers Ahmed Seif al-Islam and the late Hisham Mubarak, heirs to the Egyptian tradition of cause lawyering pioneered by Nabil al-Hilali. Ali developed a reputation for defending the rights of laid-off workers and arrested protesters. In 2009, he started his own NGO, the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, where he honed his strategy of filing lawsuits before the administrative courts to challenge the corrupt privatization of state-owned factories under Mubarak.

A handful of high-profile court rulings in his favor in 2009 and 2010 brought Ali to national prominence. He began appearing on television, especially after he succeeded in persuading Magles al-Dawla to rule in favor of a national minimum wage in March 2010. Inspired by the court ruling, a minimum wage was one of the four core demands of the January 25, 2011 protest action, and has since become a key item in the revolution’s political economy agenda.

After the revolution, Ali’s NGO was a key facilitator for the independent trade unions supplanting the defunct state labor federation, and he went after SCAF’s March decree criminalizing protests. His most recent legal success is a court ruling stipulating a special monthly pension for those injured during the revolution.

Ali received and refused an offer to join Essam Sharaf’s cabinet as Minister of Labour, and later he also turned down an offer to become an appointed member of parliament. He insists on the bottom-up route to presidential candidacy, vowing to collect the required 30,000 citizen endorsements and to drop out of the race if he can’t meet the threshold.


The Dignity of Work
At an ahwa in Boulaq al-Dakrour after Friday prayers, under a flimsy plastic tarpaulin rustling in the spring breeze, Khaled Ali has the attention of around 70 neighborhood men who’ve gathered to hear him out. They listen intently as Ali reels off the ill-gotten gains of Mubarak’s cronies. “They carved up the country between them like a cake!”

Ali isn’t a smooth talking politician or a natural performer. His speaking style is very much that of a lawyer making his case before the bench, piling up facts and figures in a dizzying succession of details than can tax his listeners. But he shines in interactive question-and-answer sessions, engaging meaningfully with the audience, cracking jokes, and capturing the essence of his message in pithy one-liners.

The ahwa audience particularly appreciated his phrase, “We import even pencils from the UAE, while our country has become a display case for Chinese goods.”

All of the presidential hopefuls are making requisite nods to social justice, but Ali relentlessly harps on the imperative of redistribution. His stump speeches are almost exclusively focused on the basic economic conditions that structure Egyptians’ lives: the human fallout of privatization; the extinction of public services; the erosion of local manufacturing; and the misuse and under-use of Egypt’s natural resources.

The fact that Ali doesn’t tailor his message to different audiences irks some of his diehard supporters who want him to win, not just be an also-ran.

At the campaign headquarters, in a packed room discussing the game plan for collecting the 30,000 citizen endorsements, a seasoned labor activist stood up to plead with Ali that he needs to broaden his rhetoric to reach a wider range of Egyptians, not only the working classes and the poor. “You need a truly national discourse,” the man said, gesturing with his hands for emphasis.

Ali seems reluctant to dilute his trademark message. The emphasis on redistribution is what makes him different from the carefully calibrated, intentionally vague speeches of the typical vote-seeking politician. And he’s gifted at translating the clunky terms of political economy into the lived experience of regular Egyptians.

Speaking from his own experience, he’s especially effective at rendering the material and emotional toll of unemployment.

At a town hall meeting in a middle-class social club in 10th of Ramadan City, in front of a crowd of businessmen and professionals for whom redistribution is a scary word, Ali’s description of work as constitutive of human dignity drew appreciative nods and murmurs from a skeptical audience.

“Egypt is not poor,” he said. “It has resources and brains, but it has policies that keep poverty in place. I know what it’s like to be a laborer, because I was one. I know what it means to work hard all month to finally get your wages that are sorely needed for the family’s expenses. And I know what it means for a family’s breadwinner to lose his job. Millions of Egyptians have these same stories, and even more difficult than mine.”

But his advocacy of a partial return to the public sector got heated pushback. “Have you ever worked in the public sector?” An older man prodded him. Ali said no. “I didn’t think so. The public sector was our worst experience and we don’t want to go backward. There is no role for the public sector.”

A few minutes later, he won over the audience when he passionately delivered one of his best lines, “Mubarak is not a person. It’s a system and a network of interests that refuses to leave and will not leave.”

An older man went up to the microphone and said, “What I like about you is that you’re unaffected, mafeesh takleef. I fear that this presidential race is going to be dominated by the big people with the puny brains. You’re a fida’i among the dinosaurs. Rabbena yawfaqak.”

“Please stop or you’re going to make me cry now,” quipped Ali from the podium, flashing a boyish smile as the hall filled with laughter.


"فلاح! فقير! رئيس من التحرير"
Ali’s message of taking back a stolen country resurrects the ethos of popular empowerment that made the revolution but has been under attack ever since.

Popular participation isn’t being threatened just by the SCAF’s decrees and use of violence, but in the reproduction of conservative ideas about the futility and danger of bottom-up action. Already, the presidential elections are being sold as a matter that will be decided by the big people striking deals behind closed doors, and the little people will go out on voting day in a folkloric pageant simply to certify the elite pact.

Trial balloons about a “consensus candidate” between SCAF and the Ikhwan are met with a counter-elite argument to forget about choice and competition and anoint Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh as the only viable alternative to the man chosen by the powers that be.

How ironic. Even after Egyptians stunned themselves and the world by overturning a vile and immovable structure of domination, they’re now being goaded to forget all that and “be realistic,” i.e. to please cooperate in rebuilding the foundations of their exclusion.

Thankfully, Khaled Ali’s campaign and the campaigns of other honorable candidates are fighting tooth and nail to defeat the loathsome doctrine of politics as elite pacts. “The people have to protect the elections,” Ali told the huge crowd in Mit Yaeesh. “They want to force someone down our throat, but if all Egyptians go out to vote, they can’t do that.”

The audience roared back with the most popular chant of the evening:

"فلاح! فقير! رئيس من التحرير"

Public Choice

It is an incredible thing to see an Egyptian election with queues of unmolested, smiling voters instead of lines of riot police. There are no knife-wielding thugs, no smug State Security officers scurrying about gaming things. The sky is clear, there’s no tear gas clouding vision. Voters aren’t scuffling with police outside, banging on the doors to get in, chanting slogans of woe and injustice.

Inside, there are no poll workers huddling to stuff ballot boxes.

For the first time ever, people are voting with their national ID card, no complicated voting cards needed. Nobody is obstructing volunteer poll monitors, gruffly asking them what they think they’re doing or kicking them out. Judges are back, in their unusual but essential role as the best election supervisors Egypt can have. Photographers are free to snap shots inside the stations, there’s nothing to hide. And yes, voters are young and old, men and women, religious and not, rich and not, literate and unlettered. Egypt today held a real referendum that looks like its people, not a fake acclamation staged by an absolute ruler.

Does it say anywhere in the books that revolutions make the unreal happen?

*AP Photos

Fin du Régime

In the end, they leave, with hollow eyes and a few plain words. Stripped of their ill-gotten power, they are miserable, ashen, and base. All of the rhetoric they spewed lingers like a bad smell, soon to evaporate in the fresh air of freedom. "The Egyptian people still need to develop a culture of democracy. Their grievances are economic, not political. The ruling party won a sweeping victory. The extremists are going to take over. The government supports limited income groups. Police torture is just a few individual cases. The constitutional amendments strengthen democracy." Today, all of that is over.

How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished.

(AP Photo)

Popular Sovereignty

A citizen outside the gates of parliament, 9 February 2011.
(AP Photo)

To Egypt, with love

Tahrir Square, February 1, 2011; "We've come from Aswan; neither Mubarak nor Soliman." Photo: Tamer El-Ghobashy

Before we enter the phase of intense politicking to game a post-Mubarak order, the deals being made to contain the public’s unequivocal demand to choose their leaders, I want to express love and awe of all those average people who said enough. Enough repression. Enough thievery. Enough rotten ideas about the apathy and inaction of the people. I have no doubt that the grim realities of elite politics will soon overtake events, as they always do. But I’ll never forget how ordinary citizens completely upended the best laid plans of the rulers in Cairo, Washington, and Tel Aviv. They forced Hosni Mubarak to ditch his dynastic project, posthaste, and to openly express his hatred of the Egyptian people. They forced the Americans to yet again confront the folly of building alliances with loathed dictators. And they reminded Israelis that Arabs want to rule themselves, whether Israel likes it or not. No amount of muddled theories or elite compromises will ever mask the extraordinary clarity of what happened in Egypt this winter. I'm happy to be alive to see it.

Clinging to power at any cost, with criminal disregard for human life, Hosni Mubarak dispatched armed gangs into the amassed peaceful pro-democracy crowds in Tahrir Square. Plainclothes police and hired baltagiyya armed with whips and batons tore into the crowds on horseback, beating the demonstrators like savage marauders. NDP members and public sector clerks marched in processions, including uniformed police officers, holding aloft Egyptian flags and photos of Mubarak to perform support for him.



This is what Mubarak meant in his speech yesterday, that "everyone must choose between chaos and order," between his rule and his violence.

(AP Photos, February 1, 2011)

(Getty Images, January 31, 2011)

(Getty Images, January 30, 2011)

It's about Representation

Today, Yemeni protestors went out into the streets of Sanaa to call for an end to social inequality, vote rigging, and the chokehold of president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s ruling party.

In 1968, American civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin wrote, “We would be mistaken to think that the only desires of young Negroes today are to have a job, to have a decent house, to be well educated, to have medical care. All these things are very important, but deeper and more profound is the feeling of young Negroes today—through all classes, from the lumpenproletariat to the working poor, the working classes, the middle classes, and the intelligentsia—that the time has come when they should have power, a voice in the solution of problems which affect them.”

Today in Suez, 29-year-old glass factory worker Mohamed Fahim told a reporter, “It’s our right to choose our government ourselves. We have been living 29 years, my whole life, without being able to choose a president. I’ve grown bald, and Mubarak has stayed Mubarak,” he said, rubbing his bare scalp.

*AP Photo.

A Day in the Life of an Egyptian Electoral District

Balteem is a captivating town of majestic palm trees and generous people situated on Egypt’s northernmost tip. Jutting out into the Mediterranean and flanked by Lake Burullus to the west, the city and its adjoining modest resort town were best known as Umm Kulthum’s favorite place to spend her summer holidays. But it was suddenly thrust onto the national political map in 1995 when charismatic neo-Nasserist activist Hamdeen Sabahy ran for parliament to represent the large constituency comprising Balteem and the adjoining southern town of Hamoul. Since then, Balteem has become a flashpoint district in every national election.

Sabahy’s 1995 bid was unsuccessful. Two of his female voters died when security forces fired into a crowd of women amassing before a polling station. He ran again and won in 2000 and 2005, thanks to the onset of judicial supervision, unseating the NDP’s four-term incumbent Ahmed Se’da and losing another voter to police violence in 2005 named Gom’a al-Ziftawy.

Sabahy is an unusual figure in Egyptian politics, a leading member of the Cairo opposition political class who happens to have a large and loyal constituency in his provincial hometown. Born in July 1954 to a father who made a living as a farmer, Sabahy was one of millions of beneficiaries of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s redistributive policies. He majored in journalism and mass communications at Cairo University and had his first sampling of national fame when he and fellow university student activist and Muslim Brother Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh carried on an unscripted, live televised debate with President Sadat on 2 February 1977. Sabahy’s ties to his base fit none of the familiar categories that structure Egyptian electoral politics. He doesn’t come from a family of local notables. He’s not an Islamist, in a district with a Muslim Brother following. And while he does provide services to the district, notably irrigation pumps for Balteem’s farmers, the scale of benefits is nowhere near what even a middling NDP member can muster.

The links between Sabahy and his constituents are based on his politics and personal qualities. On domestic policy, he supports the package of constitutional reforms long demanded by the opposition and recently taken up by Mohamed ElBaradei, and favors a large government role in the economy. On foreign policy, he advocates a stance independent of American and Israeli interests and much more pro-active in defense of Palestinian rights.

This year, Sabahy’s main contender is NDP member Essam Abdel Ghaffar, backed by the NDP’s Ahmad Ezz and dubbed a “distinctive deputy under the parliamentary rotunda” by the government party. Abdel Ghaffar is a local entrepreneur with a support base centered in the town of Hamoul. He secured the labor seat for the district in the 2005 elections but this year is running for the professionals’ seat, after an NDP rival sued to compel him to change his labor affiliation, pointing out that Abdel Ghaffar is a businessman listed in the city’s commercial registry. His moment of fame came when he and two other NDP MPs assaulted a parliament photographer during a plenary session when the latter photographed Abdel Ghaffar chastising a Wafd MP for printing in the Wafd newspaper a photo of Abdel Ghaffar sleeping in parliament.

Election day begins at 6:30 am. A gentle sunrise blankets the town as campaign workers and early bird voters make their way on the hushed streets to their voting stations.

7:10 am. A women’s polling station in Balteem junior high school. Sabahy’s authorized representatives review the day’s checklist before the official start of voting at 8 am. “You have to check and make sure that each box is empty before voters come in, especially if it’s a wooden box,” instructs the most knowledgeable representative who’s been working with Sabahy since 1995. “Never for a minute leave your ballot box unattended. Stay glued to it until it’s safely transported to the counting stations in Hamoul. If the head of the polling station asks for it, give him a copy and not the original of your certification papers.”

An elderly woman voter comes in ten minutes later, panting from the strain of the walk. I look at her and she breaks out in a huge smile. “I always vote for him,” she says shyly.

8:30 am. Sabahy’s representatives rush to photocopy the new certification papers required to gain access to polling stations. Early that morning at 12:30 am, Sabahy’s campaign was dumbfounded to learn of sudden new regulations for the papers, requiring that they be stamped from police precincts rather than notary publics as had been announced earlier. Certain that this is an 11th hour rule manipulation to bar Sabahy’s agents from accessing polling stations, campaign workers spend all night driving to police stations to get the necessary stamps. Now they’re scrambling to photocopy the agents’ papers so that they can hand them to heads of polling stations when asked, retaining the originals.

9:10 am. The first reports of foul play trickle in. Candidate agents from 12 polling stations phone in that they have been kicked out of polling stations, and one says her certification papers were ripped up despite having the necessary police stamp.

10 am. Campaign workers convene in the courtyard outside Sabahy’s house to plan next steps. The burning issue is how to get to the town of Hamoul to check on the conduct of polling there. The NDP’s Essam Abdel Ghaffar is from Hamoul, which has a larger share of the district’s votes than Sabahy’s base in Balteem. Campaign workers strategize on who should go to Hamoul and how to avoid the ubiquitous threat of assault by either security forces and/or thugs hired by the government candidate. They decide on a select all-male group who will travel to Hamoul in cars with Cairo license plates rather than plates from the governorate of Kafr al-Shaykh (where the electoral district is located). The Kafr al-Shaykh plates would be more easily identifiable as Sabahy’s partisans and thus more likely to come under attack.

11:15 am. A polling station for both men and women in Borg al-Borollos primary school. Borg al-Borollos is a hamlet in Balteem with a voting bloc of approximately 15,000. Borg residents have no fixed allegiance to either Sabahy or Abdel Ghaffar. Some see a split in the town’s partisan support along generational lines, with youth supporting Sabahy for his national political profile and older residents preferring NDP candidates born and bred in the town. Turnout appears to be relatively active. Several riot police trucks are parked unobtrusively nearby, along with a large tour bus holding conscripts. This year, riot police were bussed into districts in tour buses in addition to the customary olive-green trucks.

A pick-up truck with a large megaphone planted on top pulls up directly in front of the school and stands there for five minutes. The megaphone exhorts voters not to give their support to “outsiders” (a reference to Sabahy) but to government candidates who pledge their support to president Mubarak, “the caretaker of all Egyptians.”

A pack of 9-12 year old boys disembark from the truck and gather round the Sabahy campaign car where I’m sitting, and a round of infectious giggles ensues.

1:00 pm. Sabahy’s representatives sent to Hamoul and agents of other candidates who are sympathetic to Sabahy begin to phone in reports of ballot-stuffing in favor of Abdel Ghaffar in villages surrounding Hamoul.

1:25 pm. Reports of rigging in Hamoul come in fast and furious. Now reports from the Borg al-Borollos primary school where we were earlier are also coming in, noting severe irregularities. A sense of defeat and disappointment begins to seep into the Sabahy campaign. A male journalist and ardent Sabahy supporter begins to weep quietly. Campaign aides say Sabahy should hold a press conference immediately to denounce the fraud. Campaign cars and Balteem youth on foot make their way to the courtyard outside Sabahy’s house.

1:50 pm. Balteem’s main streets are lined with men congregating and sitting on the sidewalks, expressions somber and nerves frayed. A procession of cars and pickup trucks loaded with youth speed past in the direction of the highway. “They’re blockading the highway!” Spontaneously, Balteem and Borg youth decide to blockade the highway to protest what is now a certain sense of election rigging. The news travels like wildfire and some cars change route and head for the highway rather than Sabahy’s house. Frantic calls to campaign cars instructs them to make sure no women are headed to the highway, in anticipation of violence between protestors and riot police.

2-4 pm. Town youth blockade the highway with burning tires and clumps of tree branches and wooden sticks. Highway traffic comes to a standstill, with freight trucks backed up as far as the eye can see. A campaign worker says to no one in particular, “Didn’t I say that this morning was the quiet before the storm?”

Crestfallen residents mill about outside their houses, some cursing the government and others eerily silent, sitting on the stoops of their houses with blank expressions. The elements seem to be in tune with the general mood; the day’s earlier blinding sunlight has given way to grey clouds. It finally dawns on me that the government is serious about keeping Sabahy out of the 2010 parliament.

4 pm. Townspeople converge on Sabahy’s courtyard and the candidate comes out to speak, standing on a pick-up truck. Livid, fiery youth and men climb on the pick-up truck and demand revenge. Sabahy struggles to control the crowd’s emotions, saying he’d rather withdraw and give up his seat than join this scandalously handpicked parliament. A fully veiled woman in black climbs on the truck and pulls the microphone from his hand, screaming, “Don’t you dare withdraw, Sabahy! Don’t you dare withdraw!”

The crowd chants, “Balteem boxes won’t leave! Balteem boxes won’t leave!” By law, counting stations for the entire district are located in Hamoul but since Hamoul was experiencing rigging, residents feared their ballots would be destroyed or disappeared en route to the counting station.

5 pm. A contingent of the crowd breaks away like a renegade train car and heads for polling stations, to confront the clerks engaging in fraud and ballot-stuffing. Riot police are called to the polling stations and begin firing tear gas canisters into the crowds, blockading streets, and chasing down any young men. I accompany a handful of journalists trying to get close to the action to take photos. The gas burns our eyes as we get closer and I can’t see well from the tears. I ask a matronly woman standing outside her house for a couple of onions. Without a word she rushes inside and comes back 15 seconds later with two onions sliced down the middle, stuffing them into my hand. We snort the onions and immediately feel better, our sinuses and eyes completely cleared.

We ask a couple of residents for access to their roofs so we can take photos, but they refuse. “Why are they scared? I would’ve let you in if it was my house,” says a high school student walking along with his mate, their school notebooks under their arms. “The private lesson is cancelled today,” his friend quips as he sees me looking at his notebooks in puzzlement.

I come upon a row of riot policemen with their backs to me, blocking the street to a polling station. I start to get closer to take a clearer photo but one of them turns his head, spots me, and starts moving towards me with an extremely long rifle slung over his shoulder. A journalist comes out of nowhere and grabs my hand, and we run like mad.

6 pm. It’s getting dark now, but people are still milling about on the side streets. I come upon a group of mirthful women clustered outside a house, clapping, laughing and loudly chanting one of Sabahy’s campaign slogans: Shemal, Yemeen, Benhebbak ya Hamdeen! I never expected this corner of joy on such a grim day, and I start laughing too. They implore me to take their photo and I’m happy to oblige.

6:30 pm. Everyone convenes back in the courtyard of Sabahy’s house, and rumors fly about that elections in the district have been suspended. The mood is suddenly jubilant, and people mill about waiting for Sabahy to come out and give a speech.

7:00 pm. Sabahy comes out and is immediately mobbed by the crowd, lifting him on their shoulders and giving him a hero’s welcome. He gives a rousing speech in which he denounces the government and several Amn al-Dawla officers by name for fixing the elections in Hamoul, and reiterates his position of withdrawing from the elections. The crowd presses him to authorize and lead a peaceful protest march to the police station to protest the rigging, but Sabahy fears security forces’ violent response and does not want injuries and casualties among his supporters, as in the past. The back-and-forth goes on for an hour that feels like an eternity, but in the end Sabahy prevails and the people are dejected, though none take matters into their own hands as some did that afternoon. Things wind down quietly and people begin to disperse, while others sit in silence mulling over their stolen election.

8:15 pm. In the large mandara of Sabahy’s house, partisans and campaign workers sit in exhaustion on large couches arranged in a U-shape along the sides and back of the room, trading election war stories and surveying the day’s catch. A tear gas canister from the afternoon confrontation is displayed, its noxious powder causing people to sneeze and tear up all over again. Crumpled, voting cards filled out for Sabahy and the Ikhwan labor candidate Ali al-Sheshtawy are passed around, said to be found thrown outside polling stations and replaced with forged ballots for the NDP. A spent live bullet is passed around in awe, the initials A.R.E. (Arab Republic of Egypt) engraved clearly on its bottom. News comes in that 18 residents have been arrested in the day’s events, but no serious injuries are reported.

10 pm. Time to get some sleep. I walk down a lane and am greeted by the shrill cry of the insomniac rooster who kept me up the night before. No one is sleeping in Balteem tonight.

*Photos 2 and 6 from the Sabahy facebook group.

Control the Message

The sacking of maverick newspaperman Ibrahim Eissa is only the tip of a vast iceberg. The broader project is to discredit and intimidate independent media outlets and those who run them, ahead of the 2010 parliamentary elections and the 2011 presidential selection. The regime’s goal is clear: to control the flow of political information at an exceptionally sensitive time, limiting the public’s exposure to alternative constructions of political reality. Here’s the true import of Ibrahim Eissa as a media maverick. He didn’t just criticize Hosni Mubarak and his cronies. He challenged the entire set-up of their political language, puncturing the government’s mystifying rhetoric with no-nonsense, down-home critical thinking. Eissa promoted a clear-eyed view of political reality, a dangerous thing during elections. (AP Photo)

Let’s put aside the silly spin that Eissa was dismissed for his incompetent management of al-Dostor, or get trapped by distracting minutiae about Eissa’s monthly salary, his chauffeured car, and what have you. These discrediting attempts by al-Dostor co-owner al-Sayed al-Badawi are transparent and risible. The purpose is to portray Ibrahim Eissa as just another sleazy careerist on the take, banking on the Egyptian public’s weary cynicism about any public personage. But unlike other fake dissidents and phony self-professed gadflies, Eissa has street credibility and an unassailable reputation for service in the public interest.

Ever since he was a cub reporter at Ruz al-Yusuf, Eissa had ambitions to be different, to bring down all sacred cows and smash conventions of deference to the rich and powerful. He implemented this vision when he helmed al-Dostor in its first incarnation, from 1995 until 1998, when the government cancelled its Cyprus-based operating license. Motivated by a notion of the public’s right to know—the newspaper’s tag line was and remains “popular sovereignty”--the weekly tabloid represented something entirely new in the Egyptian media landscape. It was a boisterous, opinionated, oftentimes sensational takedown of ministers and their shady dealings with emergent big business. There was next to no news reporting, the focus was on audacious exposés of erstwhile untouchables, a precursor to the adversarial brand of journalism Eissa would pioneer in the newspaper's second incarnation.

When the newspaper was no more, Eissa pursued his muckraking itch in novelistic form, penning Maqtal al-Rajul al-Kabir (Murder of the Big Man), a funny, gossipy, expletive-filled whodunit set in the presidential palace. For the longest time, Maqtal was prime samizdat; in 2008, it was reissued by Dar Merit and is now widely available at all bookstores. This paradigm shift in the tolerable boundaries of political discourse was triggered by mavericks like Eissa, and later by writers such as Eissa’s fellow traveler Gamal Fahmi (Egypt’s greatest satirist, in my opinion), Abdel Halim Qandil, Magdi Mehanna, and the political articles of novelist Alaa’ al-Aswany.

When al-Dostor resumed publication in 2005, now operating under license as a domestic publishing company, the Egyptian media market had dramatically changed. Privately owned print and broadcast outlets had mushroomed everywhere. Some were purposely sensationalist, like Sawt al-Umma and al-Fagr, and others were self-consciously “professional”, such as al-Masry al-Youm and al-Shorouq. A few years later in 2008, electronic media such as youtube, facebook, and weblogs became vehicles of political communication and mobilization, making possible the 6th April movement, the exposure of police torture, and Mohamed ElBaradie’s petition drive for political reform. The government monopoly on political communication had broken down; gone were the days when state newspapers al-Ahram and al-Akhbar were considered go-to sources for decoding the official mindset. The diversified media market necessitated new strategies of command and control.

First, the government sponsors its own agents to enter the market and get its message across; hence the daily Ruz al-Yusuf newspaper; the daily party rag al-Watani al-Yawm; talk shows on state-owned television such as al-Bayt al-Baytak and Lamees al-Hadidi’s various inane vehicles; and talk shows like Amr Adeeb’s al-Qahera al-Yawm on the Orbit satellite television network. Regardless of his self-proclaimed status as “a media star in the Arab world” and his scripted, phony populism, Adeeb is scion of the Adeeb media empire, a family corporation that has always served the powerful and profited handsomely. Adeeb’s brother Emad interviewed Sadat and then carried out the six-hour interview with Hosni Mubarak during his 2005 presidential selection spectacle. Adeeb’s wife Lamees al-Hadidi was the PR manager of Mubarak’s campaign. Adeeb’s brother Adel heads the Good News film production company that operates several posh cinemas.

Second, the ruling regime cheerily takes credit for the diversified media landscape, presenting it as a “significant result” of its political reform process. Government agents represent the hard won gains of the opposition as mere effects of government largesse. As the dutiful press attaché in the Egyptian embassy in Washington avows, “Criticism of the government, even the head of state, is now a staple diet of the media,” going on to laud the expanding scope of freedom of expression.

Third, the government mobilizes its arsenal of penal laws to silence, intimidate, or wear down independent journalists and editors. Ibrahim Eissa has been the most targeted; in 2006 he was sentenced to one year in prison (later commuted to a fine) simply for publishing an article about a citizen’s lawsuit against the president. In 2008, he was sentenced to two months in jail when he wrote about Mubarak’s deteriorating health in 2007. In one article, he wrote “The president in Egypt is a god and gods don’t get sick. Thus, President Mubarak, those surrounding him, and the hypocrites hide his illness and leave the country prey to rumors. It is not a serious illness. It’s just old age. But the Egyptian people are entitled to know if the president is down with something as minor as the flu.” Eissa was spared jail with a presidential pardon on 6 October 2008.

Eissa has been removed because he’s a newspaperman with a vision and a superior communicator. When al-Dostor went daily in 2007, the paper’s diverse opinion pages were supplemented with solid news reporting that illuminated key spheres of Egyptian society. Eissa cultivated beat reporters who began systematically covering the universities, the courts, protests and demonstrations, and the Coptic Church. He continued to pack the newspaper’s opinion pages with the widest range of political viewpoints of any Egyptian broadsheet. And he managed to keep on writing his own daily column of hard-hitting socio-political commentary, all while also hosting a television show that showcased his skills as a communicator. In one clip, Eissa broke down weighty matters of political economy into an accessible, digestible, humorous module for public edification.

As Egypt heads toward parliamentary and presidential elections, a time when the free flow of political information takes on heightened significance, the government is intent on controlling all sources of alternative knowledge. Newspapers like al-Dostor that pose the greatest threat are effectively shut down, via an elaborate scheme using al-Sayed al-Badawi as the agent and poor management as the pretext. For other independent dailies such as al-Masry al-Youm and al-Shurouq, they are deterred with veiled threats, inducing them to self-censor and scale back their news coverage during election season. Witness the recent series of openly threatening editorials in the government daily Ruz al-Yusuf, warning the editors and owners of all independent dailies and even threatening them with disappearance by 2012.

For the broadcast media, new regulations have been handed down prohibiting the filming of courtroom proceedings. Little to no information is released about the Higher Elections Commission, the new body tasked with overseeing election supervision after judicial monitoring has been scrapped. And new regulations on election candidacy are issued by the Interior Minister in virtual secrecy, without publication in the official government press.

In this climate, it’s no wonder the government has silenced a man who makes it his life’s work to provide the public with unvarnished information. As he wrote in his penultimate column, “It’s impossible for the Egyptian regime to give up election rigging. So the solution it has devised is instead of putting a stop to rigging, it would put a stop to the talk about rigging. Hence the steps to rein in the satellite media; up next are newspapers; and perhaps soon we’ll see urgent legislation to snuff out Egyptians’ freedom of expression on the internet. And several understandings will be arrived at with representatives of the Western media in Egypt.”

The Truth Teller

It’s a wonderful thing when poets write prose. Their perceptions are so acute, clarity of expression so exquisite, and images so fresh that reading their prose awakens the mind and refreshes the spirit. When poets write, they restore the act of reading as active engagement and appreciation, like listening to a stirring song, offering a respite from reading as necessity, as chore, or as mild form of torture. For this reason alone, reading Mourid Barghouti’s I Was Born There, I Was Born Here is a stimulating experience, whether or not you’re emotionally attached to Palestine and the Palestinians. If you happen to be so attached, Barghouti offers rousing reading plus a haunting, heart-piercing love song.

Because Barghouti is a poet and not a journalist, policymaker, academic, or any of the other very important people that determine how we perceive Palestine, we experience it anew. We experience the permanent disorientation of being Palestinian, either constantly on the move or forcibly fixed in place, always at the behest of others. We see things that are never shown, like the petty joys and idiosyncrasies of ordinary people striving for normalcy. We smell the oranges, jasmine, and coffee that have a special place in the poet’s taste-memory. We hear the sublime voices of Fairouz and Luciano Pavarotti, sacred parts of his writing routine. Reading I Was Born There is like living in Barghouti’s mind for a while, a rich, funny, profoundly insightful place to be.

Written in the same contemplative voice of his earlier I Saw Ramallah (1997), Barghouti’s I Was Born There, I Was Born Here(2009) continues his journeys into Palestine after a 30-year exile. Unlike his first visit in 1996, however, this time the poet’s shuttling back and forth between Cairo, Amman, Ramallah, and his birth village Deir Ghassanah are shadowed by grave events: the al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, Ariel Sharon’s 2002 reinvasion of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Iraq war in 2003, the 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power, and the subsequent machinations of the losing Fatah to unseat Hamas, backed by Israel, the United States, and client Arab regimes. The book also takes in events of personal significance for the poet, like accompanying his son Tamim (himself an accomplished poet) on Tamim’s first visit to Dar Ghassanah and Jerusalem in 1998; Tamim’s deportation from Egypt in 2003 by Mubarak’s government for opposing the Iraq war; and the poet’s brief, unhappy tenure managing a World-Bank funded cultural project for the PNA in 1999.

Barghouti’s pensées are structured in 10 intricately arranged chapters and a four-page coda, chapters that move back and forth in time in a non-sequential ordering that mimics the workings of the mind. The sensibility that made I Saw Ramallah so original and compelling fills the pages of I Was Born There. There’s Barghouti’s poetic concision, the capacity to distill volumes into a few arresting lines. “The occupation soldier stands on a piece of earth and confiscates it, calling it “here”; all that’s left for me, the owner of the earth exiled from it in faraway lands, is to call it “there.” There’s his distinct approach to philosophical rumination. I don’t mean the declamatory, vacuous musings that often pass for philosophizing, but the sort of disarmingly simple, sharp, quiet observations of an introspective soul. As he and Tamim stroll through the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, Mourid wonders what it must be like for Tamim to finally experience the city after only knowing it through stories, statistics, and photos. He thinks, “But imagination cannot be cancelled out by reality. The reality that surprises us soon generates in the mind another image. I wonder, is there a reality outside of human imagination? The answer perplexes me.”

But the real pleasure of Barghouti’s memoir are the images that grace nearly every page, images that can only be crafted by someone of uncommon sentience. The powerful opening chapter is chock-full of these. Titled “The Driver Mahmoud,” it tells the story of Barghouti’s trip from Ramallah to Amman via Jericho, on the eve of Sharon’s reinvasion of Ramallah and other Palestinian towns in spring 2002. The Israeli army is on high alert and has blocked major roads. Barghouti takes a taxi from Ramallah to Jericho with six other passengers, helmed by an indomitable young driver named Mahmoud who’s determined to get his passengers safely to Jericho, from where they will take a bus to cross the bridge into Amman. To avoid Israeli checkpoints, soldiers, and tanks, he veers off the main road and takes unpaved back roads in the middle of fields.

Older than his years and unconsciously heroic, Mahmoud takes out a thermos of fresh coffee and small plastic cups and distributes them to his passengers. Barghouti notes, “With the pouring of the first cup, a cunning race ensues between the scent of cardamom and the scent of coffee. The cardamom gets there first, of course.” He looks out the window and sees massive uprooted olive trees as far as the eye can see, “lying out in the open like humiliated corpses…For every olive tree uprooted by an Israeli bulldozer, a Palestinian peasant family tree falls off the wall. ” As the car winds its way through the wilderness and the misty grey valley, it comes to a complete halt in a ditch. Now only a deus ex machina can save them, thinks the poet. Within minutes, a huge yellow crane appears between the trees, gleaming under the drizzle, operated by two young villagers gesturing to Mahmoud to prepare for the rescue operation. Mahmoud reassures his passengers, “Fasten your seat belts, don’t be afraid. We’re going to ride the carousel!” The metal fingers of the crane clasp the taxi, “like fingers plucking a pomegranate seed,” lift it and put it back down on the embankment. All disembark and hug one another, and “we find ourselves clapping, as if celebrating a grand victory.”

Barghouti’s image-making, poetic concision, and philosophical rumination in the new memoir recover the same themes he broached in I Saw Ramallah, themes that are by turns political, aesthetic, and formal. For it would be a mistake to read Mourid Barghouti as a Palestinian poet, rather than a poet who is Palestinian. To be sure, his identity is one wellspring of his art, but his art is not contained by his identity. His sensibility as a writer is just as acute as his love of homeland. Formally, Barghouti uses to great effect the technique of association of ideas. An observation or sensation triggers a memory, which calls forth another memory, which may be followed by a meditation on some object, a preview of some future event, or a return to the present. Each of the book’s chapters is intricately structured in this way, narratives nested within other narratives that flow back and forth across time and space. In the remarkable, eponymous fourth chapter of I Was Born There, while visiting Deir Ghassanah with Tamim, father and son come upon the village school. Mourid is prompted into a reverie on the contrast between his hardscrabble childhood and his son’s relatively privileged upbringing. We’re then transported to an extremely moving flashback into the poet’s childhood, his first time in school, and why his birth certificate lists his first name as Nawaf. The memory morphs into a loving, heartbreaking portrait of his orphaned mother, robbed of an education and forced into a marriage, twin tragedies that she spends her whole life ensuring that her children and grandchildren won’t experience.

Chapter 6, “The Ambulance” is another standout example of the technique of nested memories. At the height of the Israeli reinvasion of Ramallah in 2002, when Israel besieged the city and blocked entry, Barghouti undertakes a risky venture to cross into Ramallah from Jericho in an ambulance. The experience prompts a memory of the first time he rode an ambulance years earlier in Amman, while accompanying the body of his beloved brother Mounif on its return from Paris. A small detail about the devastating death of Mounif recalls for the poet his presence at the hospital bedside of Palestinian historian Emile Touma when he died in Budapest in 1985. Then, Barghouti is momentarily jolted back to the present when the ambulance worker asks him a question, which prompts another memory and portrait of fellow Palestinian poet Hussein Barghouti, who had recently died of cancer as Mourid was being smuggled into Ramallah in an ambulance.

Given the events of the past few years, what was only hinted at in I Saw Ramallah is spelled out in I Was Born There. That’s to say politics, the corruption of the PNA, and its groveling before the Israelis. A stand-in for this state of affairs is the detested figure of Nameq al-Tijani (Glorifier of the Crown), Barghouti’s sarcastic moniker for the lowly, careerist PNA underling who will sell his soul for a handful of shekels. Whenever he sees this type on a bus or at a café, the poet tenses up and removes himself from the premises, so revolted is he with what the Nameqs of Palestine represent. The poet reacts the same way to his one-year stint in 1999 directing a PNA cultural project riddled with corruption. An episode bitterly remembered and elliptically recounted, Barghouti first confronted the corruption at his new workplace, then resigned in protest and went off to Amman for 35 days. After the mediation of trusted friends, he returned to Ramallah to reluctantly finish out his term, though mentally he retreated into the security of his inner world. Of the experience he states tersely, “I decided to respect my voluntary isolation and resume it forever.”

Disillusionment with the PNA isn’t the only political theme in I Was Born There. More original are Barghouti’s reflections on the Palestinian condition. Much more sharply than he articulated in I Saw Ramallah, in the new memoir Barghouti nests Palestinian displacement within the broader regional condition of dictatorship. “Occupation, like dictatorship, doesn’t just ruin political and party life but also individuals’ lives, even those who are non-political.” No Palestinian family is without tangible experiences of ill-treatment and obstruction at the hands of Arab governments. So what is the difference between Israeli occupation and Arab dictatorship? Watching helplessly as Egyptian policemen yank Tamim out of his home in 2003, rifles pointed at his back, Barghouti says, “Violent power is the same, whether Arab or Israeli. Brutality is brutality and violation is violation, regardless of the perpetrator.”

Barghouti is a gentle soul and a discerning mind, but that doesn’t mean he won’t occasionally lapse into unoriginality and coarseness. I grew tired of his gratuitous jabs at Arab feminists, his predictable disdain for the overt religiosity of some Palestinians, especially women in his family, and repeated announcements of his disgust at the PNA. An unusually hateful remark about Palestinian women who veil their face (p. 241) made me sad, not simply because it’s the secular mirror-image of religious bigotry and intolerance, but it commits the same blithe reductionism that the poet so vehemently detests.

For it’s his uncompromising refusal to simplify that makes Barghouti a writer to reckon with. In I Saw Ramallah, he spelled out his disdain for cheap rhetoric masquerading as art: “I wondered again about that rubbish they call the ‘poetry of the stones’ and the poems of solidarity with the ‘children of the stones.’ It is the simplification that takes the accessible and the easy from the human condition and so blurs that condition instead of defining it, misrepresents it at the moment of pretending to celebrate it. It is the eternal difference between profundity and shallowness. Between art and political rhetoric.” (Ahdaf Soueif’s translation).

The battle against platitudes, derivative language, and sheer numbness is fought out on nearly every page of I Was Born There. The poet-philosopher isn’t merely “resisting” but engaging in the most difficult, the most rewarding task there is. “I don’t weep over any past, I don’t weep over this present, I don’t weep over the future. I live with the five senses, trying to understand our story, trying to see.”

Neither the lamenter of his people’s sufferings nor the chronicler of their greatness, Barghouti is something else. “We will tell the story as it ought to be told. We will tell our personal histories one by one. We’ll tell our little stories as we lived them, as our souls, eyes, and imaginations remember them. We won’t leave history to be the history of great events and kings and soldiers and the tomes on dusty shelves. We’ll recount our individual stories, the stories of our bodies and senses that to the ignorant eye appear to be shallow, incoherent, and meaningless. The meaning is etched in us, one by one, women, men, children, trees, houses, windows, and cemeteries where no national anthem is played, and forgotten by a historian blind of pen. We’ll recover history as the history of our fears, our anxieties, our patience, the desires of our pillows and our improvised braveries, the history of preparing a dinner meal.”