Abstract
Egyptian writer Adah Soueif’s book, Cairo, My City, Our Revolution was written during and soon after the outbreak and first tribulations of the Arab Spring. As both a writer and an activist, she was faced with a dilemma: “I wanted more to act the revolution than to write it.” Commenting upon the different episodes of the revolution, Soueif tries to articulate activism and writing and to come to terms with her role as an artist in critical times. Soueif attempts to define a literary strategy that allows her to convey the immediacy of the events, while finding the right balance to give them a more universal dimension.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
http://palfest.org/about, accessed on November 22, 2017.
- 3.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/23/arab-spring-five-years-on-writers-look-back, accessed on November 22, 2017.
- 4.
This article refers to the 2012 edition of the book. A revised edition was published later as Cairo, Memoir of a City Transformed (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
- 5.
https://langaa-rpcig.net/+In-times-of-crisis-fiction-has-to+.html, accessed on November 22, 2017.
- 6.
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/15715/Egypt/Politics-/Who-are-Egypts-thugs-.aspx, accessed on November 22, 2017.
- 7.
I prefer the Arabic word midan because, like piazza, it does not tie you down to a shape but describes an open urban space in a central position in a city. The space we call Midan el-Tahrir, the central point of Greater Cairo, is neither a square nor a circle but more like a massive curved rectangle covering about 45,000 square meters and connecting downtown and old Cairo to the east, with the river and Giza and the newer districts to the west; its southern boundary is the Mugamma 3 building and its northern boundary is the 6 October Flyover. Six main roads lead out of its center and a further six out of the larger space surrounding it (Soueif 2012: 10–11).
- 8.
This refers to the oxymoronic definition of the term revolution , which is both a repetitive circular, therefore endless, movement and disruption.
- 9.
See Jacqueline Jondot, “The Geography of the Creation of a Myth,” Creativity and Revolution . Proceedings of the Eleventh International Symposium on Comparative Literature (Cairo: Cairo University, Department of English Language and Literature, 2014).
Works Cited
Jondot, Jacqueline. “The Geography of the Creation of a Myth.” Creativity and Revolution. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Symposium on Comparative Literature. Cairo: Cairo University, The Department of English Language and Literature, 2014.
Soueif, Ahdaf. Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground. London: Bloomsbury, 2004.
Soueif, Ahdaf. Cairo: My City, Our Revolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.
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Jondot, J. (2018). “Revoluting” or Writing? Ahdaf Soueif and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. In: Letort, D., Lebdai, B. (eds) Women Activists and Civil Rights Leaders in Auto/Biographical Literature and Films. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77081-9_3
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