Lebanon Round Two #1: Getting nabbed by a polite militia

I'm high up in the mountains now, west of Tripoli, in a little Christian town called Bcharré. Above me is a thousand year-old forest of giant cedars trees, which used to cover these mountains but have now receded into little pockets where no one has built a home yet. Below me is a deep valley that may well plunge to the earth's core, and the old stone-built town center, where poet Khalil Jebran was born and raised. On my computer, the distressed wails of Hossein Alizadeh and his Iranian satar hum from iTunes.

There's a lot to recount over my last month plus here, so I won't talk about any of it except one event.

Leaving work at the office in the newly-constructed and soulless central downtown of Beirut after saying goodbye to my perpetually-calm Lebanese colleagues, I decided to get my camera dirty and go take some photos of the beautifully bullet-riddled civil war-era buildings just blocks away. Stepping out of my building, the humid heat of 5 o'clock hit me like a giant pillow in he face. I pulled my camera from my bag, swung around a corner, and snaked up past the blast walls and soldiers around the UN complex behind us. I wrapped the shoulder strap of my camera around my wrist to secure it, walking behind two stereotypically overly made-up Beiruti women in tight, bright clothes, trying to give them distance so as not to be just another overbearing sexist for them to deal with on the streets. There's plenty of that in this country.

Passing under a highway, then beside a gas station, I crept up a hill quietly opposite an old house turned car repair shop, my head down so as not to attract too much attention. The house's terraces, decaying, held on by metal threads, and its bricks and stones looked like the bones sticking out from a wizened elder. A sweaty guy in flannel shirt sat out front of the haggard car garage reading the newspaper. I snapped a couple of so-so shots, and kept moving up the hill.

Seeing a set of ancient-looking stone steps, I pulled out my camera and aimed it. The steps by themselves were quite dull, so I tried to get a shot of a man crossing in front of them with a bag of groceries. As soon as he saw my point my camera at him, his alarm went off and he started yelling esh shaabb 3amySawwar ("The young guy is taking pictures.") I figured he was just being uptight, so I kept snapping shots of the stairs and the dull building they lead to. The moment I pulled my eye from the viewfinder, a burly, irritated-looking guy with an AK-47 hanging from one hand was just feet away, gesturing at my camera. Without thinking, I started to tell him I was just photographing the stairs, and that I would show him my pictures. In Arabic.

The lesson I've taken from this is don't speak to suspicious militiamen in Arab countries in Arabic, especially not during a period of heightened tensions in the country due to a string of suicide bombings. In his eyes, it was now very likely that I was an Israeli spy. He grabbed the camera from my hands with an air of "Don't struggle dweeb. You'll only make it worse."

Bringing me into the office of his militia, which I learned was just opposite the stairs I was photographing, I entered a tiny new world. Entering the office, which could have been just another apartment in the residential building, other burly middle-aged guys with the classic neatly-trimmed black beards in the Iranian Shia style, all sporting mediocre polo shirts, shuffled to and fro', looking important with documents in their hands. The guard plopped me down on a seat and went into a big room blabbing about the shaabb ("the kid") he just brought in. I spied posters of Shia leaders, probably Iranian Ayatollahs. Their beards and turbans gave them away, along with their stern, wannabe-heroic faces.

A guy came out of the big, nice-looking room, and brought me in. He asked me for my passport, and all my ID info. Grabbing it hungrily from my hand, he lead me back out of the room, and installed me in a giant florescent-lit room lined with couches. Before closing the door, he held out his palm as if to stop a car and told me, "Wait." I sat in the shiny white-blue room looking out the window at the nest of densely-packed apartment buildings next door, playing with my hat, and muttered little complaints and curses to myself in French: "Putaiiin! Qu'est-ce que j'ai fait? Les cons! Qu'est-ce qu'ils veulent?" I looked round at the few posters dotting the walls, mostly of blurry, saintly-looking figures with over-the-top religious rhetoric written in flowing script, which further confirmed my belief that this was the office of a Shia militia of some kind.

I started to doze off a bit when the burly Shiite came back to the door, motioning for me to follow. Back into the big air-conditioned office, where I noticed a yellow Hezbollah flag (You can't miss it--it's got a raised fist holding an AK-47 in it) behind the guy in slick black suit who awaited me. bta7ki 3arabi? he asked. Ey ey ba7kia ("Yes yes I speak Arabic") I shot back. Despite this he carried on in English. "Where are you from?" he asked. "What do you work?" A few humble, lowered-head responses to his curt inquiries, and he gestured to the door. "OK. Just a few minutes please."

Back in my comfy waiting room, I did more looking around and muttering to myself, and over time started to relax and sleep crept up on me from one corner of my brain. But alas, the burly Shiite in polo shirt came to the door and told me to come back to the office, this time more gentle, more polite somehow.

The guy in black suit, who told me nothing of himself looked like he had it more figured out now. "You are a journalist?" "Yes, I'm doing an internship," I told him. He thumbed throufgh my passport, giving sideways glances at the multiple Syria visas I had, and entry stamps for Iraq and Somaliland. I was definitely a spy or a naive American kid travelling between different Al Qaeda branches. He scanned through photos on my camera, looking at my fantastically nonthreatening photos of stairs and blurry shots of mountains I took from a bus. "Where is this?" "Up in the mountains in Bcharré." "Oh," he muttered, and put my camera down disinterestedly.

"Give me a number of your... responsible," the handsome shaved-headed guy said. I scanned through my phone for the number of my bureau chief, and handed him the phone. He pulled out a black iPhone and dialed the number. I heard it the bureau chief's phone ring. Allo? she said. Lebanese James Bond introduced himself as an officer in the mukhabbaraat 3askariye, the military intelligence. "Young guy was taking photos near an office of such-and-such organization. Says he works for you. An intern? That so?" Fuzzy digital Arabic jabber in response. "Ah OK. What is your name? Position? Is this your personal number? Yes? Good. Thank you. No, it's no problem. Sorry to bother you. Yes. Yes. Thank you. We'll be in touch. Thank you. Bye. Bye. OK, bye. Yalla. Yalla, bye."

He hung up the phone and looked up at my from his leather seat. "Well Mr. Sam, we are finished. What is your number, please?" "Ughhhh," I thought. But I gave it to him.

"Look," he said. "We are in a very difficult time. The situation is not normal. You know: bombings and arresting terrorist. So everyone is very afraid of what it will happen. I recommend you not take pictures here."

"In this area of Beirut," he said.

"All of Beirut? What about places like Saida or other cities?"

"I recommend no photos in urban areas at all. You want to take pictures in the mountains, in Bcharré? That's OK. I recommend no photos in cities."

I felt smashed. In a tiny country like Lebanon, not much was left--people-wise--to photograph outside cities.

"We are very very sorry. It seems like everything is fine. Our apologies to you. And, if you need anything, anywhere--like on the rod you have a problem--please let me kow." Very generous. Except I didn't have any way to contact him, or his name. He'd be checking up on me though, I thought, whether I knew it or not.

With a big sour smile, he gestured for the door. "Alright. Bye. Take care." And one of the burly guards lead me out of the yellow-lit office. I said ma3 esselaama ("Goodbye") to one of the otherwise stern guys behind the reception desk. Ma3 esselaama he said with casual chuminess. But as I walked down the steps from the office, I could feel their eyes on my back, making sure I went far away.

Tunis #2: Sexuality and music in the rain

There was a pleasant feeling of serenity in my morning-mind (uncommon when I wake up) as I opened my eyes in the darkened room to the blaring ring of a cell phone. The woman who answered, I., lay under a thick but airy comforter, beside me on the massive bed, as beautiful as iron is heavy and confident too. With the cliché sexiness of her scratchy morning voice, she responded slowly to the almost whiny-sounding American man's voice on the other end. "How aaaaaare you?" he said. "Exhausted." "Whyyyyy?" he worried back. More talk, and as her slender arms dropped the phone back beside her pillow, I pulled her in so that her head was resting in the crook of my neck, her stomach and red bellybutton ring rubbing up against my side, with one of her legs folded up over mine. Her body was firm and smooth, to a degree I almost couldn't bring myself to believe, her skin very lightly toasted in a way that made her look as though she hailed from north of the Mediterranean, not the south. She smelled like sweet and soft things, and though I knew it was the aroma of a rainbow of cremes and perfumes, I breathed it like someone drowning breathes sea air for the first time. Feeling complete (or as close as one can get to that), and fighting off darting thoughts of fear that this moment would not last, I fell back to the blackness where even insecurity cannot reach me.

How unusual this is, I think. This is not the first woman in this country with whom I've shared a bed, but this woman's comfort with herself and her surroundings was new. She didn't seem like she was trying to escape the world's troubles through sleep, as a previous partner had, nor did she seem to see in me her own gentle savior finally arrived, as another had. She was simply trying me out, but in a premeditated way, a way that had taken planning and preparation on her part. I had that to my credit. She had reached out to my roommate, Nicholas, on Facebook, the Tunisian make-friends-hook-up-find-a-spouse-seek-work-contacts all-in-one social network. Apparently it was while I had been away, in the US, and she boldly initiated with him, leading to a long back and forth Facebook chat conversation. Nick, himself no longer a bachelor, showed me their substantive conversation, including topics like photography and molecular biology, and told me I should connect with her, as it was obvious she was searching, as he put it. Not long into my flirt-filled Facebook chats with her she invited me to come see some live music and art at her university, which was supposedly related to my Master's research on local hip hop. Once I asked here where I would stay if and when I came down to visit, in the city of M., south of Tunis, and she said "Well we have our apartments ;-)" I gladly realized Nicholas had been right.

The night before had been a whirr of new. I had never visited M. before, though I had heard plenty of oft-repeated talk of its being the home of the family of a former Tunisian president. Yet, the rare rainfall over the small city, and the chipped and worn 1970's-looking campus that greeted me when I. dropped me off there, was underwhelming. A bunch of young men and women greeted me unsteadily, not sure what language to speak when I. introduced me in English but I greeted them in Tunisian Arabic. As it turned out, I had missed all the art, including a photography and graffiti expo, except for a final batch of bands. Sitting on a plastic folding table in the university's performance hall as the long equipment set-up went on, I chatted with a few young Rastafari-lookers who played in the bands, feeling thrilled by the body and calm presence of I. perched up against me on the table.

The music was good, mostly, prefaced by a one-man-show by a young guy in red face paint who imitated the Devil's voice, but who I couldn't understand at all because of the deafening chatter of the young audience. Three our four acts came to the stage, including a reggae band, some pre-teens and an old man singing "I'll Be There," and a badass rock group with a guitarist who had powerful chops on his instrument. It was all punctuated by I.'s touchiness, resting hands on my shoulder and thigh, and my wondering how to respond. The concert was drowned in covers of American--and Jamaican (Bob Marley)--songs.

When people finished dancing The Twist to Elvis Presley songs and the hall cleared out, we packed into cars and went to the city of M.'s reportedly only clean, almost-affordable, mixed-gender drinking spot. The menu was in French, they served BLTs, and the DJ played mostly really good hip hop, reggae, and local bands. Olives. Croutons. Tunisian beer in green bottles and rosé wine. I. disappeared and I remained seated next to a bunch of her rapidly chatting friends all sucking on cigarettes, me staring at bad Arab music videos on TV. Finally I found I. again at a different table and parked next to her, and her hands landed once more reassuringly on my thighs. Members of the bands--one a powerfully handsome guy with dark beard scruff and pony tail and another a fair-skinned fellow sporting a bowler cap--shot their opinions about good music at me, perforated with English phrases like "the blue note."

Head out, pack seven humans into a car that's only supposed to fit five, and we glode (past tense for glide) through the depressingly empty streets of the seaside city, slick with drizzle and lit here and there by the neon glow of local banks. After a few blocks one of the band members hopped out of the car and popped open the trunk, allowing the only other woman in the car aside from I. to step out and slip smilingly into the side street where she lived. I was nervous by then, not knowing where I would be spending the night, but hoping it would be with I..

"Sharp right here. Now go slowly. Now left. Great, this is me," I. said as the car headlights fell on a naked, bone-colored building with a small gate in the front. I pushed out of the car's back right door to let I. out of the pile of bodies in the back seat. "Whatever man, just take it as it comes. Don't get too attached," I told myself, trying to keep my hopes from climbing too high. The I heard I. say, "O Sam? He's coming with me," to the crew in Tunisian dialect. Excellent.

Mounting the smooth white steps on the front of the building, following I.'s leather jacket which glistened slightly in the rainlight. Into her pale white apartment, clean as a dentist's office, and holding my breath, I readied myself to meet the roommates. As it turned out, incredibly, there were none. I. had the whole fresh-smelling dentist's office to herself. This brings me to a few important points: Tunisian women, despite some appearances to the contrary, are significantly bound by a web of constraints on their personal and sexual freedom, mostly having to do with community and family pressures around ideas of honor and dishonor, womanhood, obedience, and membership in the community (I as an American non-Muslim am not fully part of "the community," a concept we can talk about later). Most young Tunisian women are not free to choose their sexual or romantic partners at will, and many, it seems, don't try overtly to create such relationships. As far as I can see, this is usually out of fear about how their family and the community in which they live will react to premarital sexual relations, which usually involves some degree of at least covert shaming through gossip, with community members subsequently interacting differently with the woman out of a feeling that she doesn't deserve their full respect.

However, Westerners like me, especially after having lived in "more conservative" Arab Muslim countries, are often surprised to observe a greater freedom of expression of physical affection among higher-class Tunisian women (the ones who we tend to spend the most time around) towards men. Further, because of the numerous burdens on women that are lightened the world over by greater financial and material resources, there are less intense pressures on upper-class Tunisian women to submit to societal norms by which their honor tends to be judged; thus having one's own private living space, in a middle-class neighborhood less beholden to conservative gender and sexual norms, and living in a neighborhood or city far removed from one's family (I.'s family lives in Tunis) are all factors which ease the constraints on a Tunisian woman's sexual behavior (by my general and humble estimation). These circumstances set the stage for the rainy night sleepover with a woman I had only met a few hours earlier.

My right hand between her back and the pad of a couch, my left hand under her lightly-toasted neck, I. says "I shouldn't be doing this," with a groan like somebody who was just woken from deep sleep. "Why not?" I ask. "Ughghgh, 'cuz I have a… boyfriend," she said, with eyes squeezed shut as though drawing back from a blow.

Streets Urban Festival Kasserine

From: Streets Urban Festival Kasserine

Tuesday’s update from the Streets team:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdmrlweMXqA

The frigid air crystalized the anticipation in the streets of Kasserine this Tuesday morning. As motorbikes coughed by, struggling past horse-drawn carts, most Kasserinis wouldn’t have dreamed that in a few hours the avenues and back alleys of their city would be home to giant graffiti murals; courtesy of world-class artists the likes of Zepha, Shuck 2, Sim, and Tire. Nor would anyone have expected the vibrant workshops in rap, photography, and breakdancing that animated the conference rooms and courtyards of the local youth complex, seated behind a low dusty wall on Kasserine’s outskirts.

But as locals and artists alike finished lunch and walked out of the dining hall at the youth complex, they were greeted by local youth contorting themselves in the middle of a circle

in an old-skool B-boy battle; onlookers cheering loudly at their best moves. Despite the chill, the battle was hot, and dancers pulled off their shirts before plunging back onto the mat while classic breaks played from the DJ booth behind them. The competition was fierce, but the B-boys kept the battle peaceful, throwing fake blows at each other and dodging them with laughs and backflips.

Just steps down the road from the youth center, graffeurs Tire and Shuck 2, both from the cités of Paris were putting their mark on a wall facing a municipal building. Both characters are as colourful as the calligraffiti murals they were creating. Tire, originally from France, has been living in Montréal for the last three years. He’s a former streetball player, and after leaving Tunisia will be moving to Yemen with his wife and children. Shuck 2 began his graffiti career in the late 1980s with his gang in the Parisian suburbs, and was one of the first to practice graffiti using Arabic script.

Even farther down the road, French street artist Zepha balances precariously on a motorized lift, dragging his spray can over the top edges of an apartment building with broad strokes, assembling a twisted formation of Arabic letters with shapes of natural objects. On a crumbing wall below him, Tunisian graffeur Slim fills in the outlines of his work in progress with bright pink paint. Local boys, who were practicing parkour nearby, or Free Running, stand at the street’s edge in rapt attention.

Haron Hesi, 16 years old, said, “The graffiti here encourages us to be creative. If someone has creativity, he can imagine, he can become someone else. Creativity gives us hope.”

Written by Sam Kimball. You can also follow Sam on Twitter @SamOnTheRoad

Wednesday’s update from the Streets team:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzpoQcYH7SI

As the chill of the morning wore off on Wednesday, young men from Kasserine warmed up on yellow and blue mats in the open Air beside the local youth center. The smallest children imitated the bigger kids on another mat just meters away. As time went on, renowned break dancer Selim, the founder of French dance crew Pokémon, began his workshop with the youth. With simple electro beats lording over the crowd, they youth all moved in unison following Selim’s lead. Still later, the rows of dancers turned into a circle with one-on-one battles exploding within, Selim serving as judge.

Walid Kafi, a filmmaker from Montréal, had his lens focused on the dancers before turning it to Seifeddine, a twenty year-old from Kasserine who is the focus of a documentary film about the Streets Festival. Kafi shot a scene with Seifeddine and American journalist Sam Kimball as they walked slowly along a path beside the youth center, as they spoke about Seif’s interest in graffiti and acting as forms of expression, and his hopes for the festival.

Later in the afternoon, up the hill from the municipal youth center at a private arts center called Al Rawabi (The Hills), children sat in rows before a local teacher of the oud, a traditional Arab stringed instrument. Following his notes in unison, their voices climbed climbed through traditional songs. But minutes later, as Canadian-Iraqi rapper The Narcicyst and French rapper Medine entered the courtyard of the center, the children poured from their classrooms and stood quietly before Medine as he spoke to them about the importance of positive creative outlets. Then with beats from producer Sandhill pounding, Narcicyst and Medine took turns freestyle wrapping in Arabic, French and English. In an interview outside the center, Medine said, “Our professors educate us. Our parents educate us too. But I think at this festival, the artists have educated us.”

When night fell and the deep cold returned, the local basketball stadium packed with the bodies of contorting their bodies before a stage where a local DJ spun old breaks. The final B-boy battle had begun. In round after round, dancers went in round after round, first one-on-one, then two-on-two, then crew versus crew. There was even a special round for children, 8 and 9 year-olds. After hours of round after round, Selim made his decision and one of the crews won the battle. The prize for the winners is an international show with Selim’s celebrated Pokémon dance crew.

Written by Sam Kimball. You can also follow Sam on Twitter @SamOnTheRoad

Thursday’s update from the Streets team:

For Kasserinis tuning into the radio this Thursday morning, they heard the program host introducing Montréal-based rapper The Narcicyst, and announcing his upcoming performance scheduled for that night. Next they heard The Narcicyst’s song Batal (Hero) produced by fellow visiting artist Sandhill. Following, festival founder Karim Jabbari jumped on the microphone and updated Kasserine on the festival’s progress.

As the sun began to lift into the midday sky, the day’s activities opened once-again at Dar Esh Shabab (Youth Center) on the edges of Kasserine. Imen, a young woman from Kasserine recently graduated from a fashion and design program at the local university, was demonstrating to children seated around a table how to make simple sculptures from various types of pasta. The children used fingers and rollers to shape dough into faces and stars. Girls, who hitherto hadn’t had a strong presence in many of the workshops, made up nearly half the group. Nadir Soultani, 15, who participated in the workshop, said, “Workshops like this are important because they allow us to be creative, they give knowledge to the local kids, and provide a model for how we can be.”

On the other side of the courtyard, producer and beatmaker Sandhill was assembling drums and guitar samples on a mixing console, while heads of curious local youth nodded with the rhythm. Sandhill encouraged some of the rappers in the crowd to pick up a microphone, and within minutes a crowd had formed, with a freestyle rap battle in full swing. The Narcicyst, who had seen the battle and come running, spit a few bars between some of the local talents.

And just as the sun fell that night, The Narcicyst appeared on stage at Kasserine’s indoor sports complex in a woolen bournous (cloak) and Tunisian skullcap with mic in hand and Sandhill at the sound booth behind him. While videos for Narcy’s various songs flitted across a projector screen beside him, the eager youth piled up in front of the stage rocked their fists in the air to the beat. After Narcy finished his mixed English/Arabic set and the audience settled down, Tunisia’s own MC Killa and the group Debo came to the stage for a freestyle battle, Kasserini youth filling the sports complex further in support of local talent.

Written by Sam Kimball. You can also follow Sam on Twitter @SamOnTheRoad

Friday’s update from the Streets team:

On the final day, the atmosphere was light. With a bright sun shining, the air of Kasserine’s dusty streets was warm. Renowned Chilean graffiti muralist Saile One was raised three stories above Kasserine’s downtown on a hydraulic lift. The mural, a collection of different collaged faces, began on Tuesday and is still in progress. Saile says he’ll stay in Kasserine as long as it takes to finish.

Filmmaker Walid Kafi continued filming his documentary on the festival, taking up-close footage of artists Tire and Shuck 2. Both had completed their expansive graffiti pieces on the wall facing a mosque and a municipal building, Tire’s composed of elaborate but bare Arabic letters, Shuck 2’s old-skool latin script with Kasserine written in neon green Arabic splashed in the middle. By today they had moved on to another wall closer to the center of town, Shuck 2’s rapidly assembled and simple Arabic mural covering a huge swath of the wall, while Tire’s giant tag was made up of a few latin letters adorned with crowns and paint drips. Kafi’s camera hovered below spray cans and behind ladders, capturing every movement.

Later on, Kafi, along with The Narcycist, Tamara Abdul Hadi, Sandhill, graffers Vajo and Kim, and Seifeddine, around whom Kafi’s documentary is oriented, all went to a Roman amphitheater just outside Kasserine. The Narcicyst gave an interview on his experience at Thursday evening’s concert and spoke about his hopes for the festival, but also about his understanding that it will not immediately change the economic and social situation most Kasserinis live in. Photographer Tamara Abdulhadi explained the techniques she used in her photography workshop, particularly allowing students to take their own photographs as a means of allowing them to choose how they are represented.

Kafi then turned his lens back on Seifeddine. In front of one if his Graffiti murals, Seif explained to journalist Sam Kimball the meaning behind his writing “My Country is My Responsibility.’” He painted this during a graffiti competition shortly after military operations against extremists, which left many locals angry and fearful. The piece was Seif’s attempt to give Kasserinis hope and strength in a period of uncertainty.

Streets Festival wrapped up with a three-on-three freestyle basketball competition, with local youth up against a French freestyle basketball team, along with Tire.

The local youth tried as best they could to catch up with the French team’s Harlem Globe Trotters-like moves. The Kasserini youth didn’t come out on top for this one, but the game ended with high-fives and pats on the back; a warm end to the festival as cold night fell once again.

Written by Sam Kimball. You can also follow Sam on Twitter @SamOnTheRoad

Tunis #1 - The Architects of Tunisia's "Undergound"

It's interesting to witness the growth of "underground" culture in Tunisia, or Tunis at the very least. I was at a concert last night at the École Nationale de l'Architecture et de l'Urbanisme (ENAU) in Sidi Bou Saïd, one of the more affluent suburbs north of the center of Tunis, where I found, before the mesmerized bobbing heads of young architecture students draped in empty dreadlock hats, a Canadian woman rocking anti-war songs with more than a mild Bob Marley flavor. Her pale dreadlocks were bound up in black cloth, and the beard of the drummer behind her tastefully overgrown. This was a better-off section of Tunisia's growing underground culture and music scene, which includes reggae.

But the university students packed the small courtyard in which she played, waving hands and heads, plugged in to her songs, which, being in English, may not have been understood by all (Hell, I didn't make out a lot of what she sang.) But the spirit of the music, which was defiant and overtly political, was lost on no one. And yet, the middle-class youth, most of whom who have been little-touched by the economic--and political?--woes of Tunisia before and after its national uprising, cheered her on as if she sang their class demands out loud (I realize, however, that many of the students come from elsewhere in Tunisia, including the generally impoverished interior regions. However, I don't think it would be way off to say that even those hailing from poor interior towns come from the local middle-classes or petty bourgeoisie, considering the kind of means it would require to put them up for several years in Tunis while at school. This is obviously a very general impression. Correct me if I'm wrong.)

What she was certainly connecting to, however, appears to me a general anti-authoritarian impulse among the students, who lived much of their lives under the silent iron grip of former president Ben Ali & Co., who participated in the protests of December 2010 onwards that precipitated in Benny boy's downfall, and who are now witnessing an elite battle in the halls of power with Islamists, old-regimers, and lefties that is keeping the economy stagnant and freedom of expression precarious. 

This impulse was illuminated even more so by the following act, whose name I didn't catch. A proper band this time,  also smelling strongly of reggae, I found myself really engaged by the singer/rapper's lyrics. Though they were all either in Standard or Tunisian Arabic, I was able to catch some song titles like "خدّام أوزينة" of Factory Worker in Tunisian dialect, and the lead vocalist's dedication of the songs to the "poor, the factory workers in Redyef, in Kasserine, Gafsa, and Sidi Bouzid (Where the Tunisian Revolution began)." I often heard him spit the word rāsmēlia (capitalism) over hid thickly-bearded face in his mildly Jamaican-sounding sing/raps. Exactly what his comments about capitalism were I couldn't tell you, but judging by his song titles, it was likely not positive. I don't think he was championing an international socialist revolution, as I've noticed a prominent anarchist bent among a lot of the hip hoppers (part of the underground) I've met with, but this was certainly an anti-business-as-usual concert.

Something else to note is the unusually high-level of pan-African sentiment I see displayed among Tunisian youth in the underground. The following act was a band called Mama Africa. Normally made up of 7 members, all from West Africa, only three played that night: one from Senegal, one from Guinea, one from Mali. They were pure percussion and vocals, complete with the hip too-modern dyed-blond hair or flat brim baseball hats. Though they were not Tunisian, and singing in West African languages which the audience DEFINITELY did not understand, the young architects when wild. The whole crowd shook in sync with the complex rhythms of Mama Africa's drums, and endlessly sung back choruses the band shouted over their drums, IN LANGUAGES THEY HAD NO KNOWLEDGE OF (Bambara? Wolof? Serer? Fulani?). After Mama Africa wrapped up a half dozen pounding pieces, the audience kept chanting one of their call-and-response choruses for a couple minutes until Mama came back on and did a messy quasi-encore. This surprised me for sure, for I often hear Tunisians speaking about "the Africans" as something else, separate from themselves but on the very same continent. Along with widespread acceptance among locals of their Berber (indigenous non-Arab) origins, and this limited but enthusiastic acceptance and solidarity with black non-Tunisin Africans, I was starting to feel as if the plates of Tunisian identity were beginning to shift under my feet in post-Ben Ali society.

A Lay Guide to Egypt’s Biggest Current Issues: The Genesis of Morsi’s Ouster (#1)

A Lay Guide to Egypt’s Biggest Current Issues

The Genesis of Morsi’s Ouster

Mohammed Morsi, the recently ousted president of Egypt, is the son of a farmer, born in Al-Sharqiya governate in northern Egypt in 1951. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1979 while studying for his doctorate in engineering at the University of Southern California. Morsi returned to Egypt and rose in to the Brotherhood’s guidance bureau in 1995. In 2000 he was elected to the Egyptian Parliament as an independent, as the Brotherhood was banned from participation in official politics under President Hosni Mubarak.

Morsi, though detained for a period in 2006 in the wake of mass protests against the Mubarak regime and also in 2011, has little in the way of alternative social or economic programs to that of Mubarak. In an article for Le Monde Diplomatique titled Extreme capitalism of the Muslim Brothers, scholar Gilbert Achcar quotes a former member of the MB in Bloomberg BusinessWeek: “The core of the economic vision of Brotherhood, if we are going to classify it in a classical way, is extreme capitalist.” The MB’s Freedom and Justice Party, established in 2011 following the fall of Mubarak, according to Achcar and others, has been actively emulating the model of the ruling AKP party in Turkey—the party against whose policies hundreds of thousands of Turks have been revolting this summer. The AKP claimed to represent the interests of all capital, big, medium, and small, wedding their interests tightly with the state’s policies. The MB has done this, even including old crony businessmen tied up with the Mubarak regime in its embrace.

As a result, the priorities of the MB government during Morsi’s year in office, after winning the presidential elections in Egypt in May 2012, have been taking on an IMF loan of $4.8 billion, and Morsi “promised a delegation of businessmen on a September 2012 visit to Egypt organized by the US Chamber of Commerce that he will unhesitatingly carry out drastic structural reforms to put the country’s economy back on its feet.”

Anyway, I see how this is sinking into the esoteric minutia that Western media pundits love to indulge in in order to obscure general truths from listeners and viewers. So let me wrap up by asserting that the economic program of the Muslim Brotherhood, it appears to this newly-arrived foreigner, was actually an accelerated version of the neoliberal agenda Mubarak had been imposing on Egypt since the 1980’s if not earlier. This meant continued gutting of public services (already at a serious minimum here: for a global “megacity” like Cairo, I’m amazed by the very limited underground metro service and sparse and unreliable bus networks), severe repression of union organizing activity and workers’ actions like strikes or sit-ins, neglect of infrastructure, appropriation by the state of peasant land for commercial crop harvesting, invitations to foreign capital to invest in the now ultra-low wage industries available in Egypt which offer maximum returns, and taking on IMF loans for “development” which stipulate many of the above policies.

Further, the MB seemed more concerned about working out the nitty-gritty (and in my view, totally needless) religious agenda for Egypt, pushing hard for the committee charged with writing a new constitution for the country to include all kinds of sexist language that did not include rights for women, and only sanctioned the three Abrahamic religions for legal protection, thus actively encouraging the persecution of religious minorities, if I’m not mistaken (which I could be). All the while, inept MB ministers were badly handling the country’s affairs, and wouldn’t you know it? With continued cooperation with the corrupt Mubarak-era ruling elite in policymaking, and further cuts to the Egyptian working class’ social wage, unemployment soared to new heights, as we see in this recent UNICEF graphic:

 

At any rate, it appears that with ballooning unemployment and the weight of conservative Islamist governance bearing down on society (ex: I ride along the jam-packed, flashy Al Haram Street, once the go-to spot for clubs and places for dancing and drinks. I see that most of them were closed down since the Revolution of 2011, the rate of closures, I believe, accelerating during the MB’s time in the presidency: Just one sign that their priorities for getting Egypt back on its feet were oriented around traditionalist social reforms and restrictions), many Egyptians were fed up with the situation. This seems to include a wide swath of Egyptian society, from young middle-class folks in Cairo, to aged Coptic Christians, to farmers in the rural villages of southern Egypt. 

From here, the Tamarrud ("Rebellion") Movement was born. Who birthed it originally is still not clear to me, but I imagine it involved many of the liberal and radical revolutionary youth who were active in the uprisings between January 2011 and December 2012. They would have had the energy and the clearest understanding (generally speaking) of the political situation and that the Muslim Brotherhood were not protectors of the Revolution now Egypt's saviors. And they began their petitioning campaign around the country, asking people for their signature promising that they would demonstrate in the streets on June 30, 2013, demanding the resignation of Morsi from the presidency. By that date, they claimed to have collected 22 million signatures. And on June 30, (actually, protests kicked off at least 2 days before that) the largest protests in Egypt's history shook the nation. After 3 days, and with the intervention of the army, Morsi was toppled.

I just spoke to an Aussi photojournalist who's been in the country for well over 2 years, however. From what he knows, he confirms claims that have become widespread among Egyptian Morsi supporters that the Tamarrud Movement, at least after it gained traction, was funded by third-part elite elements interested in removing the MB from official power. Thus their success.

More on those claims to come.....