Their only protection lay in their numbers. Across genders and generations, the groups belonged to different social classes, different ethnic, cultural, and community groups. They gathered voluntarily and of their own will, free of coercion, fully cognizant of the risks they were taking. They marched, stood steadfast, and sometimes even danced in public spaces in defiance of prohibitions from despotic regimes that demonstrated time and time again an unrestrained license to resort to violence. In other words, this political event was physical. II.Īt the most basic level, the Arab Spring consisted of protests that mobilized hundreds of thousands of people, in capitals and provincial cities, who stood and squatted in public spaces, demanding political freedom and economic justice-or “a life of dignity,” as several of the uprising’s slogans relayed. They had chained themselves to their machines, while their husbands brought them meals accompanied by their children, visiting mothers voluntarily locked on-site. Some of the videos attested to the previously unimaginable political acumen of the striking workers: one such video documented workers occupying the space of a factory that mostly employed women, who were refusing the new management regimes. Similarly, video footage captured by the striking workers of Misr Spinning and Weaving Company were “smuggled” through networks of activists in defiance of a total media blackout imposed by the Moubarak security forces. Images of actions captured by striking activists emerged a few days after they started using untraceable circuitous networks furnished by international hackers. Eventually Internet services were shut down momentarily to prevent activists from sending reports to Tunisians and to the rest of the world. When the strike broke out at the Gafsa Phosphate Mines in 2008 in Tunisia, the government imposed a very tight media blackout. The film includes scenes of poultry farms, in direct reference to the avian flu, as well as scenes of the recurring protests in Wust el-Balad. The film’s central theme is the profound mal-être of Cairenes, with an opening sequence that is especially stunning: the camera hovers above the nighttime landscape of Wust el-Balad as a man says in a voice-over: “I am scared.” In a long monologue, he then proceeds to list all that scares him. In the buildup to their encounter, secondary characters that intersect with their lives speak directly to the camera, almost in confessional mode. 7 The film’s plot tells the story of the encounter of two listless souls: Laila (Sabry), a radio host for a late-night talk show who listens to people’s woes and provides advice and Youssef (Waked), a loveless and emotionally numb anesthesiologist who is coming to terms with his father’s slow and impending death from illness. The film cast Egyptian stars Amr Waked, Gamil Rateb, Bassem Samra, Ahmed el-Fishawi, and Tunisian-born Hend Sabry. Yousry Nasrallah’s The Aquarium is an entirely different story: the film was an international coproduction between Egypt (Misr Films), France (Archipel 33), and Germany (Pandora Films), with additional funding from ARTE France and the World Cinema Fund. Therefore, sadly, only researchers or passionate amateur students of Arab film are today cognizant of this rich, subversive, and captivating patrimony. The memory and history of political and social dissent are also embodied in the film production of the Arab region, but-unlike songs, poetry, and novels-Arab films travel and are exhibited with far greater difficulty, for the dissemination of film was, prior to the advent of digital media, constrained by contingencies that curtailed movement and access. That history is also recorded and transmitted in song, poetry, literature, and film, which in turn have become a repository of the memory of struggle and dissidence rising up against tyranny. This is a history that has been recorded, archived, and studied yet still represents a marginal, counterhegemonic scholarship within the study of or engagement with the Arab world. The Arab Spring, the wave of popular insurgencies that spread in that region between 20, springs from a solid history of large-scale political mobilizations that coalesced outside (and sometimes against) the framework of such established and enshrined political organizations as political parties and unions.
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