Ahmed Khalifa - Imagining Liberty - Volume 1

Up and at ’em, faggot was the first message displayed. The perfect English, the slur so utterly devoid of any actual homophobia. It reeked of the anarchy personified that was my best friend. I saved the number to my contacts and cycled through his four other texts, all colorful variations on the same central theme.

Your country’s awake and you’re asleep. Come to Tahrir! was up next. I hazarded that this was Omar, although I couldn’t be sure. Almost no one else I knew texted in Arabic, except maybe Ismail. Whoever it was had sent the message twice, two hours apart. Once at 9am and another at 11, only a few minutes ago. The last two texts were from a restricted number and said only Don’t come to Tahrir. Cheerful.

I was preparing to stretch my aching back- stiffened from the harsh pressure of the mangy cushions- when a crushing weight landed on my chest. As I focused, the shape extended a hand and stuck a finger in each of my nostrils. I opened my mouth wide, panting for air and swatting blindly when I felt a thick, sweet liquid trickle into my open mouth. I sputtered and bucked the figure off. Youssef arose and collapsed once again, this time in the throes of uproarious laughter. A clatter; a pot of honey fell by his side.

“Your mother was a street dog,” I managed to choke out, on all fours, as the last of the honey dripped to the dirty floor.

“You weren’t answering your phone, so I came over,” he said, as if what he had done was a natural tendency of humans in possession of their full faculties. He stood toying with an errant strand of fabric hanging from a dusty tapestry. The melancholy of the previous night was all but gone. “And now you’ve had breakfast. Get dressed. We’re going to Tahrir.”

I straightened up and stopped to consider. I’d heard things, of course. Filtered through the rose lens of CNN and Al Jazeera, I’d heard that the unwashed masses had taken to Tahrir Square once again, this time protesting the hairy ape of an Islamic despot nature had deemed it necessary to deposit on our doorstep. From what I could gather, it hadn’t quite picked up the same steam as last time. “Why?”

“Do you have anything better to do?” He had me there, the cad. I had no one in this country, no one else I’d kept in touch with over the years. My parents were back in the States with my little brother, scrabbling for citizenship. If I passed on Tahrir, I’d have to while away the day in empty coffee shops while the rest of Egypt messed around without me. I didn’t like missing out. I acknowledged this fact out loud and got dressed under Youssef’s triumphant smirk. Before we left he rummaged through his backpack and fished out a belt with a heavy steel buckle in the shape of a skull; one of the ones we used to wear in eighth grade when heavy metal was social lubricant. He held it out, buckle dangling.

“It’s really not my style.”

“Self-defense. They search us for knives and batons, but if you get into trouble just wrap it around your hand like so.” He demonstrated. “Let the buckle hang and smack the offending party on the head. I call it the Flail. Patent pending.”

I stared at him for a moment, not sure if he was serious. Knives? Batons? What had they been getting themselves into? He read my uncertainty and rushed to reassure me. “It’s just keda, in case. Nothing ever happens but just in case…”

In the interests of expediency, I latched it around my waist and grabbed the other backpack he offered. A quick search yielded snacks, water and a flare gun, the latter again ‘just in case’.

I was wrong. I was unquestionably, undeniably, full-heartedly wrong about Tahrir. It wasn’t a shallow shell of the January 25 revolution. It wasn’t the pathetic attempt of a dying country to capitalize on the limelight of unscripted fury. It was a party of the most Gatsbyesque proportions. Red clothed the floor and red clothed my eyes as the banners screamed NO at the skies. The incandescent rage of January 25th 2011 was replaced by a will of iron as the Egyptian people heaved and rippled as a single entity. The young came, with toys and coloring books to do their homework in the Square. The elderly came wielding walkers and insulin shots and yet forward they marched. The men in suits brandished briefcases and huge flags and the mechanics wiped the grease off their hands before leading the harmonic chanting. They had not won a battle- not yet- but already they were celebrating their freedom, flaunting their freedom, wearing their freedom down the trash-strewn catwalk.

And I was in the eye of the storm, surrounded by the people I loved; not my friends, but my people. We travelled to the heart of the Square in single file, hanging on to the person in front to avoid being swept away by the human ocean. Omar took the lead, his burly frame cleaving a path like a bulldozer. Youssef followed, dancing merrily in the shadow of the giant and whooping with the best of them. I had a firm grip on the strap of his backpack and stumbled along with the conga line, stunned by a sheer immensity of character that stirred something dormant within me. Sabah walked behind me, her hands resting light as a feather around my waist and giving me goosebumps with their every fleeting motion. Every so often a strand of red hair fluttered across my face and I felt faint. Ismail came last, his beard out of place among the clean-shaven masses but his smile as broad as any of theirs. He beamed at us and he beamed at strangers and I understood the colossal inexplicable happiness he felt, the same one that threatened to expand through my chest like a balloon and spill from my mouth. We breathed happiness that day.

The hours passed in a matter of seconds. We marched and sang and chanted – My address is Tahrir until Morsi goes! My address is Tahrir until Morsi goes!- and simply stood and marveled. For the first time since my return I shed my seasoned-traveler persona. I was no longer the bold Marco Polo, braving the shores of America to bring their light back to my cave-dwelling brethren. I was a sheltered child, hapless but not alone, dwarfed and made insignificant by a proud, battle-scarred people well versed in the art of merry warfare. As drums sounded, their reverberations thrumming through the fast-disappearing light, we collapsed onto a rare patch of grass and regained our bearings. Before long a stooped man with a lined face and a massive sack approached us with a familiar apparatus and inquired whether we wanted to partake.

“ Shisha? Even here!” announced Omar with childish glee. He handed the man a five pound note and watched him break the Guinness record for fastest assembly in history. As he packed the bowl, Omar stopped him and handed him a small brown block. A fleeting wry grin folded the man’s face as he began breaking it into bits and scattering them into the tobacco. Ismail caught the exchange and gave a rehearsed sigh. “Must we taint this beautiful moment with meaningless artificial sedation?”

He was summarily ignored, and plastered a sullen look on his face in protest. The potent stuff did not tarry in filtering through us, drained as we were, and soon we were appreciating the majesty of the square on a different level altogether. If it had been red before it was a lifeless carmine whereas now the world was coated with a thick slop of pomegranate syrup, blinding to the eye.

When the hose passed to Sabah, Ismail grabbed it from her hands and shoved it back in our direction. We ascended while the siblings lingered in the mortal plane. In an attempt to diffuse the tension and fortified by the hash, I broached the topic that had weighed on my mind all day. “Ismail, is this where you’d like to be?”

He looked taken aback, then regained his composure. “This is where my friends are, despite what they might be doing,” he said, with a pointed glare at the shisha . “This is where I need to be.”