July 26

“Egyptians basically have freedom of expression.”

“I mean, apart from a few things, like directly criticizing Mubarak, they can say just about anything they want.”

The pronouncement was so earnest and natural as to make it unclear whether the speaker was employing dead-pan sarcasm or was blissfully naïve about Egypt and totally unaware of the contradictions of the statement itself, even taken apart from the facts. He was an acquaintance of ten minutes who described himself to me as an amateur journalist from Barcelona. Amateur indeed, I thought, if he considers freedom of expression, or its subset freedom of the press, to be essentially respected in a country that allows you to say anything you want – unless it is directly critical of the government.

We were standing together on some electrical transformer boxes on the northeast side of Midan Tahrir, downtown Cairo. We met as all strangers meet, with a meeting of the eyes. Foreigners at political protests in Egypt are prone to looking at one another enquiringly: what are you doing here, making me seem less adventurous and brazen for ignoring the embassy’s warnings not to come? There were many foreigners at this protest, in fact. Since this was a rally in support of Lebanon and therefore not critical of the Eyptian government, it could be expected to be relatively safe.

Our eyes met just after failing to find a way up to the second floor of a building overlooking the square. The Spaniard looked at me, then, as an alternative to the stairs, tipped his eyes toward the transformers laughingly. Not sure if it was a dare or a joke, and equally eager either way, I climbed up, and he followed.

From here we could see the miniscule rump of protesters – five to six hundred in a city of 15-20 million (no one knows for sure how many live in Cairo) – surrounded by twice as many police officers. Usually, uniformed police outnumber protesters four or five to one in Egypt, so this seemed a surprisingly modest and measured show of force. But after the crowds had dissipated I realized it was not: fully one quarter to one third of the “protesters” were plainclothes police officers.

With semi-concealed radios and 8-10” clubs, or simply prying ears, the plainclothes percolate through the protest and mingle with bystanders. Everyone knows this and the police opt not to make a mockery of themselves by trying to keep the undercover presence secret once the protest is over.

Once things had wound down, the uniformed commanders shouted a few orders, waved a few hands, and like droplets of oil coalescing out of the unstable emulsion, hundreds of men emerged from the crowd to muster points in the Midan. They formed what looked like four or five columns of about one-hundred men each. Later, there was one further group of roughly thirty-six stragglers (about nine rows, four men in each row). The sea of people had parted into police on one side and citizens on the other in the blink of an eye.

The gathering of the plainclothes was striking. First because there were far fewer protesters – and far more police officers – than I had imagined. Second, because they drew out of the crowd so quickly. Everything, especially the clubbing and running, seems to happen so fast at a protest. But with the plainclothes, it didn’t look like military discipline or raw, pulsating fear that moved them. Watching them, one had the distinct impression they just wanted to go home. This impression comes from seeing the type of men these are, and the way they act.

The contrast between the boots and the officers is striking. If you had told me before going to the protest that the two were to be different, I would have bet on the bigger, tougher men in the lines, the slighter ones calling the shots.

Why? Because these are our myths. That un-tough men seem to throw themselves into the calmer, more intellectual pursuits, sometimes finding masculinity in control exercised over the lives of others. There is something very creepy about such men, perhaps a hidden homosexuality that causes them to submit others in retaliation for their own submission – which they hate, but towards which they are inexorably drawn. They are the ones from whom you fear treachery. All of the treacherous, deviant animals (metaphors for men) are little animals: the rat, the snake, the fox, the hyena. You do not expect them. Often you do not see them – until it is too late. They could never win in open confrontation, so they resort to connivance, plotting and subterfuge. There is something chilling and reptilian about these men – like the clammy sweat on their pale bluish brows – that makes their capacity for evil far greater than that of a big man. Their oppression flows only from the mind, not from muscle, making it exponentially more frightening. The mind is infinitely more powerful than muscle; the imagination may plunge to depths no mere diver has ever reached.

These are but our myths. They were not true of these men. Here the little ones stand at the front. Most are conscripts. Most are just boys. You could see it in their faces and their bodies, dwarfed under their hand-me-down helmets and vests, which have probably been used by generations of conscripts, beginning even before they were born.

Most of the boys could have gone three days or more without shaving before attracting reprimand from a superior. Many were growing the thin little moustaches that adolescents sometimes grow in countries where they make an early entry into manhood. You never see them in North America where the High School’s keep us boys longer, and the mockery keeps us clean shaven.

The length of these boys’ mustaches testified to the earnestness and desire with which they desired to be men. But will alone would not suffice: they remained soft and straight, like mere hair combed downward from the nose to the upper lip. It will be many years still before they have the attractive roughness of stubble, or the richness, warmth and strength of a full beard.

The officers, on the other hand, are huge. They appear to tower behind their conscripts like giants. They are all big-boned (not meant euphemistically). Many also have bellies bulging out just the right amount to nicely complement their aviator sunglasses. None, however are really fat. They are the baton swinging equivalents of Jeopardy’s tournament of Champions line-up. These look like anti-social, bullying assholes that never would have made it in other calling but one where you had to scream at people and hit them.

At one point, early in the evening, my friend from Kentucky and I push into the crowd to photograph a Lebanese boy perched on a man’s shoulders. I know he is Lebanese, and not Egyptian, because of his beautiful, long eyelashes. He wears what for a boy of his age in North America would be a Karate-Kid headband. Except on this band the rising sun has bled out into the white fabric, making the band solid red. Magic-markered on top is an Arabic slogan I cannot read. He has a Lebanese flag tied around his shoulders and is waving another in his right hand. In his left hand he has a toy M-16 (There is no such thing as a toy Kalashnikov, but that hasn’t stopped children from playing with them).

We wander over to the line of little men. They encircled the entire crowd of protesters and with bent arms interlocked at the elbows prevented the crowd from moving at all, let alone marching. This uterus-of-the-State was two to six rows thick, depending on the location. It soon began to operate like a diode: the arms would part for anyone in the middle who wanted to leave, but not for anyone on the outside who wanted to get in. By gently squeezing in on the crowd, the police where able to whittle down the size of the protest over the course of the evening.

I stood face to face with a similar line once in Ottawa (I missed the anti-globalization boat, despite being close to both Seattle and Quebec City at the right times). There, the closer I got, the more intimidating it was. Canadian riot police are accessorized to bionic levels, have expressionless faces, and stand in geometrically perfect formations. Their inhumanity is all the more chilling for its aberrance in Canada: we actually have guys like this? It’s like they brought them out of the freezer just for this event, and will shortly put them back in to preserve them for the next protest, scheduled to take place in three years.

In Egypt my impression was reversed. Riot police here never walk; they run everywhere. Their approach is thus announced by the chilling sound of 200 heavy-soled boots hitting pavement synchronously. The sound tightens a spot deep in my gut, somewhere between the navel and the pubic bone. And I like it, because I think, “this is it man, this is it”, and I feel like crouching down and touching the bare earth before making my move. It all happens so fast.

But now they were not running, but rather standing in a kind of loose, undisciplined formation. And the closer I got, the less I felt that these people could club me to death. They yawn. They look around. One man’s cupped hand moves down to readjust himself in his pants (maybe his mind was wandering to the places it does when one must stand at boring events for hours on end).

We see their eyes. They are expressive, which makes them human. They look alternatively bored or scared. I’m not sure how I can tell this. Their eyes are not like the eyes I am used to staring into. Staring into them is like sighting through peep-sight: at the centre of a white background lies a black circle. I cannot distinguish the iris from the pupil. I think it is the size of the white that I see that tells me they are scared or tired: it is an estimation of how far back the eyelids are pulled, or how heavy and drooping they look.

Yet I am not totally reassured: scared and bored creatures can be among the most vicious. When children are bored, they burn ants with magnifying glasses. Were the kids of Columbine vicious or scared and bored? Lindy England and Charles Graner were just bored. Fear leads to disproportionate responses, and boredom to imagination and the employment of the devices in one’s control.

I would see that this was true later when some psychological tension crystallized suddenly and their was a bout of clubbing and running. No one could tell why it started – it happened so fast. I was up against the waist-high wall of the stairs down to the metro talking to a middle-aged human rights lawyer who trains activists. She tells them what their rights are when they are arrested and the like. But she said, “interestingly, a lot of the NGO’s are asking for more practical advice”. Of course: a pair of running shoes, a phone call to the right person, and techniques for resisting torture are more useful in avoiding problems here than knowledge of one’s due process rights.

The hitting erupts right in front of us, sending people flying like sparks from exploding fireworks. She mumbles “oh, shit” and scurries off to the right. Now the human rights worker is taking off – is this my cue, I wonder? I jump up on the wall and ready myself to jump down 12 feet onto a stairway leading into the metro if necessary, but it subsides. Then the gate to the metro is closed and I imagine what would happen if a crowd of people tried to escape down with the gate closed.

You would only notice one or two steps in. By then, those behind would be falling and pushing and the whole crowd, not knowing the gate is closed, would keep converging on the stairway, pushing the front line until they hit the mesh. They would then try to climb up a few feet, and back over the heads of those who would continue to be compacted down the stairs against the gate.

Better not try and escape the next explosion by jumping, I think. It was after this that I made my way to the building, to try to view the crowd from a safe distance. On the transformer, peering over the crowd, I said to my Spanish journalist friend:

“How can you say that there is adequate freedom of expression in this country when these people, gathered here to express themselves, are being squeezed and totally contained by riot police?”

“Oh, well, en espanol we call this “libertad de associacion”, rather than “libertad de expresion,” he answered me.

“Igual en ingles,” I replied, adding, however, that I thought his notion of freedom of expression was too narrowly constrained to freedom of the press. Even at that, it did not impress me. Are newspapers to palliate us with endless entertainment and sports columns?

This was neither in difference in language, nor a European-North American difference. I thought of the phrase popular in the European Court of Human Right’s jurisprudence on section 10 of the European Convention: freedom of the press is the “watchdog of democracy.” The fifth column naturally sets itself up – or where it does not, it should – as an adversary to government. It is the gadfly of the society too large to be kept in line by a single ambulatory philosopher.

My frustration was with the failure of categorization. Categories, in law especially, aid in comprehension and ease analysis. Often, like much of legal process, they are gross oversimplifications made necessary by limitations in the human ability to know, understand, and reason.

In short, variety and possibility are infinite whereas we are finite; our lives are more complex than we are. Or: the human brain cannot understand the human brain. So we must use categories to translate ourselves to ourselves. We cannot understand phenomena for which we ourselves are responsible without simplifying them through caricature (i.e. category).

The categories are unavoidable and more than that, useful and enlightening, but they are not things unto themselves. My Spanish friend, however, had swallowed them whole. Now he could look at a country with a fetid political climate and say that there was no real problem with freedom of expression, but perhaps there was one with freedom of association.

The failure of categories was mostly directly proved in the second half of the night, which I spent talking to police officers. I spent the first half amidst the protesters, recording their thoughts on the events. Many spoke English, and seeing me with a pad they thought I was a journalist. One woman came over to speak to me, or shout as it turned out.

“Look at how they are pushing closed the circle. Look at how the police are pushing us. This is democracy in the Middle East. I am outraged.”

I looked around. I wondered if the police understood what she was saying. If I sympathized, even nodded my head, I was afraid I might be “corrected” with a baton. I kept looking at the woman, who was about my mother’s age I think, and taking notes silently.

“Tell your people abroad that Bush and Blair are creating terrorism here. My children, when they see other children slaughtered, they are so angry. I am sure half of our country will join Al Qaeda.”

“Tell them to stop the bombing. We don’t want your bullshit aid, just stop the bombing.”

This capacity to criticize both her own country and the West in the same breath gave a complexity and texture to the message that wasn’t present in the slogans chanted by the crowd. This I liked. The woman was a person of thought. And her conviction impressed me. Her face was red and veins were bulging in her temples and neck. This wasn’t tear gas and adrenaline, this was her life, and her children’s lives.

She told me to tell the people in my country, and so I am telling you.

I met another young man with a poster in English and Arabic. He translated some of the slogans for me. They don’t have quite the nuance, but slogans never do.

“Hosni Mubarak sad el nom”, or wake up. “Hosni Mubarak el abdallah”, a sell-out. (That means a sell-out to the USA, Ezz adds, just to be sure I understand).

A chant of “Allah Akbar” erupts from the crowd spontaneously and carries on for a few minutes. I’ve got that one, no need to translate I say to Ezz.

“Ya Nasrallah, Ya Habib, dammar Tel Aviv”, which means Nasrallah, our friend, destroy Tel Aviv. They chanted the same thing when the war in Iraq was beginning, but with Ya Saddam, ya habib, he tells me.

These people must be mad if they’re calling Saddam and Nasrallah their friends, I thought. Their perception of reality is completely warped. They are the other, the militants who will never understand me, and whom I will never understand. But I realized: the reason they chanted it with Saddam in 2003 and with Nasrallah now is because Habib and Tel Aviv rhyme in Arabic. It’s just a slogan. It’s meant to be provocative. Protests are not debates.

I realized the importance of this point later when I was reading Yahoo news. The report was on a similar rally in front of Al-Azhar Mosque. Al-Azhar is the oldest university in the world, pre-dating the early Italian and Spanish and English universities by several hundred years in most cases. However, like most things in Egypt, it’s days of glory are faintly remembered relics of the past. I have heard it still functions, but the Al-Azhar name belongs in the Egyptian museum in Midan Tahrir along with the Sphinxes and sarcophagi. Maybe one day the University will again be worthy of that great name, and its students will be able to march on the museum and reclaim what is rightfully theirs.

The piece reported that the chant I have translated above was chanted by the crowd. There was no explanation, it was merely stated as a fact. Facts speak for themselves, right? I’m not so sure. What do endlessly looped newsclips, of dead people or explosions teach us? They are facts, but we do not have the tools for assimilating them. To me this kind of news is like reading the phonebook, except that it is entertaining. All of those numbers, all of those facts, exist, but mean nothing to me until I must call on one of them. I will never remember them all since they appear random and unconnected to me. Some web of meaning – such as my network of friends and family – could allow me to assemble and remember those that are important to me. Taken in bulk, however, the material is overwhelming and unhelpful – totally unhelpful.

So it was with this news piece. The fact that people chanted “Ya Nasrallah, Ya Habib, dammar Tel Aviv” tells very little on its own. It is a more violent choice than “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido” as a chant, but it is not a spoken sentence, and cannot be seen as a quotation.

Later I did speak with some people and they frightened far more than the chants did. I asked what they thought of Hizbollah. I had told them what I thought: that they sadly dragged their whole country, much of it unwilling, into a conflict that would bring only suffering to all. The one fellow replied:

“It [Hizbollah] is nice. Every day they kill at least two. I think if they get more, everyone, not just me, will be very happy.”

I write this down, then ask, “what do you think of this protest?”

“I think this will stop nothing. I want police to leave people to do what they want. They say we are protecting buildings, property, other bullshit.”

Suddenly he stops. A man is walking nearby us. After he passes, the speaker explains,

“He could be police. Everything is police here.”

I write this down. And pause. Then my friend says,

“It’s nice to get what you want, isn’t it.”

“Huh?”

“It’s nice to get what you want. But that was just a bullshit. Egyptians are not stupid people.”

I realize that he is referring to what he has just said. He means that he has told me what I want. I must have understood from the hands, because seeing the transcription of his words in my notebook later I see it doesn’t give this impression

I think: again! Thank goodness I didn’t tear out that page of my notebook and run off holding it up like a winning ticket at company Christmas raffle. Some journalists might sent it right down the wire to be published, making these people look extreme when in fact they are very reasonable. I was looking for my story: “If they kill more than two everyone will be happy” is a great boxed quotation.

I ask if he means that he does not believe Hizbollah is nice. He replies,

“No, that is a bullshit. It is small compared to what I think.”

And our conversation ends with me staring at him, wondering what it is, exactly, that he thinks. But I can’t see tell his iris from his pupil, and I feel like without that, I’ll never know.

The second half of the evening I spent talking with police officers. I first tried to talk to the guys with interlocked arms, the ones who were my age or younger. I asked a couple in Arabic where they where from and how old they were. They wouldn’t talk. I got only one to tell me he was from Alexandria. At first many seemed to not realize I was talking to them. Either I didn’t realize I wasn’t supposed to talk to them, or didn’t realize that they weren’t supposed to talk to me, but they looked as if they had been awakened from their wandering mental state by a slap when they realized I wanted to talk to them. Their faces would go suddenly stern like real military men. But still they showed their age: their eyes would drop and avoid mine rather than staring proudly ahead.

So I tried the officers. Many of them spoke English, but unlike the protesters, they did not come to me to talk – I had to go to them. I opened with the first officer by asking him what he thought of the protest. Wrong. They don’t have opinions on the protest; they are there to do a job.

I said, “May I ask you factual questions”. He nodded. “How many police officers are here tonight?” Wrong. That information is part of the job we are here to do and cannot be disclosed. “Five hundred?” I ask. He smiles and shrugs. Later I would meet another officer and say “One thousand?” He gave a nod that somehow told me I was getting warmer. I never had the chance to try fifteen hundred. But I’d have know if I was over, because they would have given a different nod. When people cannot confirm or deny the veracity of a fact, chances are its true. If it is actually untrue the temptation to negate is too great to be contained.

“Am I in danger here as a Westerner?” No he says. I had asked this question at another protest about two weeks earlier when I started taking pictures. I asked a protester with whom I was walking and his reply was disconcertingly vague. “Take them,” he simply said.

In the course of the night we met a number of officers, all of whom were friendly, and many of whom joked with us and offered us cigarettes. I did not accept the cigarettes, but they sure seemed nice to offer.

There was one particularly large fellow. Mustachioed, but not in the Turkish/Arabic style. More like a route 66 traffic cop. He typified the description I gave earlier and I suspected he would survive at least the first two to three rounds in an ultimate fighting ladder tournament. He was a mean mofo.

I went over and asked in Arabic if he spoke English. He replied in English that he did. As it turned out his English was impeccable. This immediately threw me off. It was like seeing the lovely, perfect handwriting our roughest guide, Bill Rankins. Bill Rankins had been in the Pen on at least one occasion. His handwriting was too pretty to come from a man like him. Similarly, the officer’s English was unsettling because it couldn’t emanate from someone in the category in which I had already placed him.

He was very nice, and oh so polite. He saw the bag slung across me had a Canadian flag sewn on and said,

“I have a friend from Edmonton, Alberta, here in Cairo.” He began telling me about all the wonderful things they did together. How could a man with a friend from Edmonton Alberta ram a baton into skulls?

“You see that we are here unarmed tonight.”

“But it is not like that at other protests,” I reply. “Could I be beaten if I attended one of those protests?”

“No, we have instructions not to harm foreigners.”

Pause.

“But if you are in the middle of – excuse me – that shit [referring to the body of the protest] doing something, then you can expect something too.”

As my friend from Kentucky put it later, even oppression has a human face.

This friend has a spirit that missed its time, and was born too late, and we seem naturally to understand one another. Later, I gave him a leather bound notebook from an ancient atelier de reliure in the Bazaar. I was happy about this because men don’t so often give each other gifts. I haven’t seen anything like it in fifty years, so I wrote “To David Degner, a book from another time for a journalist from another time. Cairo, 2006, +jamie”

You can find photos taken of the protest by David at bloggingcairo.com, posted by me. I have been having trouble posting my photos on here.