Alaa Abd el-Fattah and the Hope of a Generation | The Nation
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As I write this, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who is often known in Egypt just as Alaa, is on his 67th day of a hunger strike. In solitary confinement at Egypt’s maximum security Tora Prison, he has been deprived of sunlight, reading materials, or the right to walk outside his cell for exercise, and forbidden from writing or receiving letters. So he has resorted to the only means of protest that remains to him. There is so much to be said about Alaa—his transformation from blogger to “voice of a generation,” from activist to revolutionary icon, from tech whiz kid to symbol of Egypt’s hundreds of thousands of nameless disappeared. But that his life now hovers at the edge of the bardo, sustained by water and rehydration salts, is the fact that must appear first. “I’m the ghost of spring past,” he wrote in 2019, as if to prophesy his fate.
BOOKS IN REVIEW
You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021
By Alaa Abd El-Fattah
Buy this book
Only 40 years old, Alaa has spent most of the last decade in captivity as Egypt’s most prolific prisoner of consciousness, jailed by each of his country’s successive dictators. In 2006, he was first detained for protesting in support of judges calling for an independent judiciary. He was released 45 days later, only to then be incarcerated in 2011 and 2013 for relatively brief periods. But it was in in 2015 that he would be sentenced to five years for allegedly organizing a political protest without a permit; and then, only months after his release in 2019, he was arrested again for the crime of sharing a Facebook post. Alaa had spent his few months of relative freedom forced to sleep at the Doqqi police station in Cairo each night; upon his return to prison, he was brutally tortured. “I become an object, something to be eliminated, destroyed, disappeared, negated, excluded,” Alaa has written. “I become a symbol or a bogeyman, with no physical presence.”
With You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, we are fortunate to have Alaa’s remarkable, collected writings now in a physical form, translated and edited by a collective that remains anonymous for their own security. With the book, we follow Alaa’s political trajectory and the evolution of his political thinking. Above all we see him ask: “What am I to do with a political self torn from its ordinary physical and human context? How do I live as a symbol however iconic it may be?” If what makes Alaa’s, or any person, “political” is their capacity to speak for, and represent, the aspirations of others, then can one ever really remain oneself? “Like a ghost,” he explains in “On Probation,” “I move in your time but I’m suspended in the past.” Imprisonment didn’t just aim to sideline him from history; it sought to deprive him of the rituals that punctuate the passage of time: He was permitted neither to be with his dying father nor to witness the birth of his son. And yet, as he reflects on his metamorphosis into an atemporal, spectral symbol, he cannot help but wonder, “When did it become OK for adults to communicate mostly in emojis and gifs?!”
I, like many others, first heard Alaa’s name around 2006 when, shortly after the execution of Saddam Hussein, and taking heed of labor strikes and a quest for judicial independence, Egypt’s longest-ruling dictator, Husni Mubarak, had permitted mild-mannered, middle-class public criticisms of his regime. Alaa was one of a handful of activists to take advantage of relatively fast dial-up Internet access in those years and the optimism that flowed from it, but the latter was short-lived: Alaa was among many blogger-activists to end up on jail. But it wasn’t until I flew back to Egypt in January 2011, to participate in the demonstrations that would turn into the revolution, that I became better acquainted with his ideas. It was soon after that night in February, which in the mythology of Tahrir was referred to as “the Battle of the Camel.” Like Palm Sunday, Ash Wednesday, Shrove Tuesday, the 17 days of revolution all had their holy monikers: Rage Tuesday, Departure Friday, Martyrs’ Sunday. And in those days I discovered the powerful constitutional ruminations of Alaa, whose name I had vaguely known but not associated with the kind of intricate political ideas on display in these collected essays.
At the time that I first became aware of his thinking, there was much talk of Constitutions. Everyone knew that Mubarak’s monstrous text, despite having undergone a few cosmetic and meaningless reforms around 2006, needed to be discarded. But what would the template of Egypt’s new constitution be? Would it be “the Turkish model,” or “the American”? Amid these fierce debates, it stood out in my memory that Alaa was alone to ask why we needed somebody else’s template at all. Why couldn’t we collectively imagine (or given his training in tech, crowdsource) our own? As I remember it, Alaa said this before a gathered crowd in the square. The ideas were soon developed into an essay published in July of 2011; in the same month, Alaa’s dream of a crowdsourced Constitution was launched, as the “Let’s Write Our Constitution” movement.
In “Who Will Write the Constitution?,” Alaa drew inspiration from South Africa’s Freedom Charter, which he considered particularly radical less for its content than for the process by which it was assembled. Mandela and his comrades didn’t presume that it was their role to “educate the public” but rather to receive instruction from them, disrupting the directional and elitist metaphors for how and why ideas travel. “Mandela and his comrades needed the public to educate them politically,” Alaa wrote. “Why assume that we’re any better?” A lack of humility, Alaa prophesied, would be our downfall. In a suburb outside Johannesburg, “in a space much like our Tahrir squares,” Alaa wrote, intentionally using the plural, “for two days, Kliptown lived the most important democratic experiment in history.” Yet democratic experiments, Alaa cautioned, are ephemeral, and necessarily tragic: Like cruel dreams that can only be experienced, felt, and seen, they disappear at the moment when we try to institutionalize them, or even translate them into words. Democracy flourishes at the interstices, the in-between spaces, at the place where politics pours into poetry. Whenever we try to render it eternal, it dies.
Many of Alaa’s words in the collection read like prophecies or seem clairvoyant in hindsight. Yet he refuses any praise: “To every Cassandra, there is no prize for being first to make predictions, and there’s no use in saying I told you so,” he writes. “Cassandra’s tragedy isn’t that she was unable to convince others. Her tragedy, as in all Greek drama, was the failure to accept the limits of her condition.” It is precisely in our collective refusal to accept our limitations that Alaa insists the defeat of the Arab Spring is found. Defeat, he shows us, cannot be located in the actions of others but in our own, sometimes necessary, delusions. For this reason, his essays resist enumerating painful litanies of state violence, largely because Alaa insists that focusing on the missteps of the enemy is a distraction from the incoherencies, the oversights, and the divisions within each one of us. If the political is born at the moment when we distinguish between friend and enemy, the insistence that the enemy is external to us may be a comforting if also dangerous fantasy. Revolutions succeed when revolutionaries are willing to also confront their own inconsistencies and the sparring forces at the heart of their very beings. Revolutionary slogans such as despair is treason are troubling, Alaa writes: “The denial of a natural feeling scares me.”
