I want to write about a few things that have recently led me to reflect more on the importance of knowing and studying history. A couple weeks ago, I attended a lecture at AUC's downtown campus entitled "Archiving the Revolution." It happened to be in the middle of a large-scale student strike at the university, which managed to not affect us academically but involved students blocking the gates to the main campus, the administration canceling classes for a couple of weeks, and some staff members actually being assaulted by students. Over at tranquil Tahrir, however, a symposium was in full swing on Aesthetics and Revolution. Oriental Hall, which sparked a pang of nostalgia for the Princeton cocoon, is an architectural palace of wonders (colorful painted ceilings, carved wood, classical Islamic patterns, etc.) was built by the university in the 1930s and capable of satisfying every orientalist fantasy. Academics gathered from all over the world to nibble miniature sandwiches and discuss what happened happened to be, in this case, my thesis topic. The head of the history department at AUC, Khaled Fahmy, spoke about his efforts as head of the Committee to Document the Revolution to collect testimony from all kinds of people who had witnessed and participated in the events surrounding the January 25 revolution. As he and the Minister of Culture with whom he collaborated on the project pointed out, they faced some serious obstacles first in defining what really counts as "the revolution" -- did it start on January 25? with the overthrow of Ben Ali in Tunisia? with the death of Khaled Said? is it over yet? -- and then with convincing people to feel at ease telling their stories to the committee without fear of retribution. After all, although it was an initiative designed to preserve the memory of the revolution, people had learned to fear government collection of personal information. Who knew if Dar al-Watha'iq (the National Archives) was in cohoots with the Interior Ministry and those who admitted to activism would soon be put in jail? As a result, it seems, this official project essentially petered out.
At the same time, one of the other panelists was from the filmmakers' collective Mosireen, another group I'd written about. This man explained that Mosireen didn't spend time worrying about what counted as the revolution -- they would simply allow people to define the revolution themselves and submit whatever footage they wanted. One problem with this citizen journalism approach to documentation, however, is that a giant amount of material is amassed that doesn't tell a story. Whose job is it to sort through the mountains of digital footage and choose the "important" bits? One could argue that no one should do this, that an archive should simply be indexed and remain a dormant archive waiting for the people of the future to come dig through it. But the speaker pointed out that Mosireen is not intended to be neutral: its mission is to support the revolution and its ideals. (Of course, those are not necessarily the same for everyone these days.) Its filmmakers want to organize the material and distribute it in a useful way -- but that requires a lot of triage, as well as tailoring different products to different audiences. Is the goal to target those who are already hardcore liberal revolutionaries, since even they, in Mosireen's experience, are often shocked when they review footage from well-known events that happened a few months earlier? Or is it to reconnect with those who have lost faith in the revolution and just want security? Etc etc.
What struck me after listening to both Fahmy and Mosireen was how much of what gets remembered later depends on the choices that are being made now by groups like theirs. When I first started writing my thesis, I blurred citizen journalism with writing history more than I should have -- because indeed, in January when I conducted my field research, no time had passed in which to reflect on the revolution. (And even today, when the climate is certainly different than it was 10 months ago, you will find many differing opinions on the revolution's end date.) But it's important to observe from the beginning who the archivists are talking to -- and who will talk to them. Who is deciding how to index and narrate the material that's collected, and what is the reasoning behind these people's decisions? What gets relegated to the dustbins of the archives, and what gets highlighted in documentaries, reports, and websites? Writing the history of the last year per se - that is, reflective, composite storytelling - will take some time, I think. And of course it will be colored by the way events have progressed since the overthrow of Mubarak: As I mentioned, many former enthusiasts have grown disillusioned with the outcome of last year's events, and many liberals have become very resentful of the perceived hijacking of their revolution by the Muslim Brotherhood. The mural that long occupied the space of the first one (the artist facing the police) in my last blog post, for example, did not make any reference to the Ikhwan at all. That, a primary source for understanding people's revolutionary sentiments as of some months ago, was erased, and in its place came another mural condemning Badie along with Tantawi and Mubarak. For now, at least, important decisions are being made about how to collect and organize records of the events of the past year and a half, records collected from an unprecedented number of popular sources. Still, the disparate voices of citizen journalists, while they made history, do not write it alone.
* * *
Last Saturday, I walked into a trailer classroom with electric blue siding and walked to the white board to prepare for my students. It was a strange feeling, because I had been there before. Then, six years ago, I had come with my exchange group from the States, and we had watched a group of high school students perform a short play in this trailer. Then we went outside and played kickball or basketball with them in the courtyard, and exchanged e-mail addresses. I have stayed in occasional touch with two of the girls these last six years. The place is St. Andrew's Refugee Services, a nonprofit center in downtown Cairo that focuses on resettlement and education for refugees from Sudan, Eritrea, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia. Both girls I happened to keep in touch with since I was last here were resettled, in the US and Canada. The vast majority are not so lucky: they either stay permanently in Cairo or eventually return to their home countries. Egypt already has such enormous economic problems itself that dealing with refugees is not anywhere near close to the top of the agenda, and the African ones in particular may suffer from animosity and racism.
When I returned to Cairo this summer, I had nice memories of the day spent with the children at St. Andrew's, many of whom had then been my own age. So I responded to a call for volunteer high school history teachers. The center is about to graduate its first class of high school seniors, after offering only extracurricular courses for some time, using the English-language Sudanese curriculum with which most students are more or less familiar. Except then Sudan split, and English-medium South Sudan is still getting its business together while North Sudan is not interested in recognizing the degrees these kids have been working for years to get. So, St. Andrew's decide to throw the high school seniors the GED, which they will have to take in May. The GED, of course, includes a social studies component, including a large dose of American (and world) history. This is where I come in. For two hours every Saturday morning between now and May, I will try to teach twenty-nine Sudanese 17-year-olds everything there is to know about the history of the world. This may seem difficult. Yes, in fact only one of my students says she has ever taken a history class before -- and it was History of Sudan. There is no textbook, so I've been adapting PowerPoint presentations online and winging it with my own lectures. So far, I don't think much I've said has made an impression.
The first week, the topic was Prehistory and Early Humans. I tried to make things interesting with a couple computer-enhanced videos of apelike men rubbing stones together from the History Channel. I certainly felt, as I lectured animatedly about migration patterns and the Neolithic Revolution, that I was mostly talking to myself. Nobody had questions. Nobody wanted to answer my questions. Nobody would summarize the main points of the video. Okay, high school wasn't that long ago for me and I know what it's like to have that feeling that if maybe everybody keeps his mouth shut the period will end faster. But that's a sad dynamic when you're on the teacher end. I left feeling that they didn't particularly like me, and didn't seem to catch any spark of passion about the subject, but that I still had a long time to win them over. They don't see me as a fellow young person: I'm just a teacher imposing things on them they don't especially want to do just like all the others, which I sometimes forget.
On week two, we began with a review quiz from the previous week's vocabulary. A few students got them all right, most had only 1 or 2 out of 5. Worse were the real GED questions: almost all the students left almost all the questions blank. It became clear to me that although their conversational English is pretty solid, most do not have the vocabulary or linguistic complexity to understand GED questions about historical topics they've never studied -- nor do they have experience reading the charts, timelines, and maps that this exam really relies upon. I don't really know how to establish these basic skills, or if it can be done in time. The principal of the school has told me that the students are solid in the other subject areas, and this is the one that they need to make huge progress in in order to pass the test in the spring. Of course this makes me feel anxious and responsible, since many will be caught in limbo if they fail and may drop out rather than repeat more classes. At the end of the second class, in which I attempted to cover the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China in one fell swoop, one girl approached me and said simply: I didn't understand anything, ma'am. I am sure she wasn't the only one. When I taught prison inmates during college, there were often enormous gaps in their knowledge. But I could often find a base, an anecdote or cultural reference that we shared, to grab their attention and a glimmer of understanding. Here, I have no idea what these Sudanese teenagers, whose mostly village lives were uprooted by war early in their childhood, do know. Many of them are quite smart, and some quite motivated. But I feel like I am deluging them with names and dates and stories that they cannot put into any context they know. How do I make that connection?
At the same time, one of the other panelists was from the filmmakers' collective Mosireen, another group I'd written about. This man explained that Mosireen didn't spend time worrying about what counted as the revolution -- they would simply allow people to define the revolution themselves and submit whatever footage they wanted. One problem with this citizen journalism approach to documentation, however, is that a giant amount of material is amassed that doesn't tell a story. Whose job is it to sort through the mountains of digital footage and choose the "important" bits? One could argue that no one should do this, that an archive should simply be indexed and remain a dormant archive waiting for the people of the future to come dig through it. But the speaker pointed out that Mosireen is not intended to be neutral: its mission is to support the revolution and its ideals. (Of course, those are not necessarily the same for everyone these days.) Its filmmakers want to organize the material and distribute it in a useful way -- but that requires a lot of triage, as well as tailoring different products to different audiences. Is the goal to target those who are already hardcore liberal revolutionaries, since even they, in Mosireen's experience, are often shocked when they review footage from well-known events that happened a few months earlier? Or is it to reconnect with those who have lost faith in the revolution and just want security? Etc etc.
What struck me after listening to both Fahmy and Mosireen was how much of what gets remembered later depends on the choices that are being made now by groups like theirs. When I first started writing my thesis, I blurred citizen journalism with writing history more than I should have -- because indeed, in January when I conducted my field research, no time had passed in which to reflect on the revolution. (And even today, when the climate is certainly different than it was 10 months ago, you will find many differing opinions on the revolution's end date.) But it's important to observe from the beginning who the archivists are talking to -- and who will talk to them. Who is deciding how to index and narrate the material that's collected, and what is the reasoning behind these people's decisions? What gets relegated to the dustbins of the archives, and what gets highlighted in documentaries, reports, and websites? Writing the history of the last year per se - that is, reflective, composite storytelling - will take some time, I think. And of course it will be colored by the way events have progressed since the overthrow of Mubarak: As I mentioned, many former enthusiasts have grown disillusioned with the outcome of last year's events, and many liberals have become very resentful of the perceived hijacking of their revolution by the Muslim Brotherhood. The mural that long occupied the space of the first one (the artist facing the police) in my last blog post, for example, did not make any reference to the Ikhwan at all. That, a primary source for understanding people's revolutionary sentiments as of some months ago, was erased, and in its place came another mural condemning Badie along with Tantawi and Mubarak. For now, at least, important decisions are being made about how to collect and organize records of the events of the past year and a half, records collected from an unprecedented number of popular sources. Still, the disparate voices of citizen journalists, while they made history, do not write it alone.
* * *
Last Saturday, I walked into a trailer classroom with electric blue siding and walked to the white board to prepare for my students. It was a strange feeling, because I had been there before. Then, six years ago, I had come with my exchange group from the States, and we had watched a group of high school students perform a short play in this trailer. Then we went outside and played kickball or basketball with them in the courtyard, and exchanged e-mail addresses. I have stayed in occasional touch with two of the girls these last six years. The place is St. Andrew's Refugee Services, a nonprofit center in downtown Cairo that focuses on resettlement and education for refugees from Sudan, Eritrea, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia. Both girls I happened to keep in touch with since I was last here were resettled, in the US and Canada. The vast majority are not so lucky: they either stay permanently in Cairo or eventually return to their home countries. Egypt already has such enormous economic problems itself that dealing with refugees is not anywhere near close to the top of the agenda, and the African ones in particular may suffer from animosity and racism.
This is me at St. Andrew's in 2006, when I visited with the LINC program. Some of the children I was playing with, like these, are about old enough to be in my class this year.
When I returned to Cairo this summer, I had nice memories of the day spent with the children at St. Andrew's, many of whom had then been my own age. So I responded to a call for volunteer high school history teachers. The center is about to graduate its first class of high school seniors, after offering only extracurricular courses for some time, using the English-language Sudanese curriculum with which most students are more or less familiar. Except then Sudan split, and English-medium South Sudan is still getting its business together while North Sudan is not interested in recognizing the degrees these kids have been working for years to get. So, St. Andrew's decide to throw the high school seniors the GED, which they will have to take in May. The GED, of course, includes a social studies component, including a large dose of American (and world) history. This is where I come in. For two hours every Saturday morning between now and May, I will try to teach twenty-nine Sudanese 17-year-olds everything there is to know about the history of the world. This may seem difficult. Yes, in fact only one of my students says she has ever taken a history class before -- and it was History of Sudan. There is no textbook, so I've been adapting PowerPoint presentations online and winging it with my own lectures. So far, I don't think much I've said has made an impression.
The first week, the topic was Prehistory and Early Humans. I tried to make things interesting with a couple computer-enhanced videos of apelike men rubbing stones together from the History Channel. I certainly felt, as I lectured animatedly about migration patterns and the Neolithic Revolution, that I was mostly talking to myself. Nobody had questions. Nobody wanted to answer my questions. Nobody would summarize the main points of the video. Okay, high school wasn't that long ago for me and I know what it's like to have that feeling that if maybe everybody keeps his mouth shut the period will end faster. But that's a sad dynamic when you're on the teacher end. I left feeling that they didn't particularly like me, and didn't seem to catch any spark of passion about the subject, but that I still had a long time to win them over. They don't see me as a fellow young person: I'm just a teacher imposing things on them they don't especially want to do just like all the others, which I sometimes forget.
On week two, we began with a review quiz from the previous week's vocabulary. A few students got them all right, most had only 1 or 2 out of 5. Worse were the real GED questions: almost all the students left almost all the questions blank. It became clear to me that although their conversational English is pretty solid, most do not have the vocabulary or linguistic complexity to understand GED questions about historical topics they've never studied -- nor do they have experience reading the charts, timelines, and maps that this exam really relies upon. I don't really know how to establish these basic skills, or if it can be done in time. The principal of the school has told me that the students are solid in the other subject areas, and this is the one that they need to make huge progress in in order to pass the test in the spring. Of course this makes me feel anxious and responsible, since many will be caught in limbo if they fail and may drop out rather than repeat more classes. At the end of the second class, in which I attempted to cover the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China in one fell swoop, one girl approached me and said simply: I didn't understand anything, ma'am. I am sure she wasn't the only one. When I taught prison inmates during college, there were often enormous gaps in their knowledge. But I could often find a base, an anecdote or cultural reference that we shared, to grab their attention and a glimmer of understanding. Here, I have no idea what these Sudanese teenagers, whose mostly village lives were uprooted by war early in their childhood, do know. Many of them are quite smart, and some quite motivated. But I feel like I am deluging them with names and dates and stories that they cannot put into any context they know. How do I make that connection?
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