Awaiting Retribution

The whole city of Cairo, and perhaps the whole country, is on edge as it awaits March 9. That's tomorrow, the day when the verdict will be issued for the remaining 54 defendants in the Port Saeed soccer match stampede that left 74 people dead and 1,000 injured in February 2012. "3/9" is tagged on buildings, police vans, and the walls of the metro. Often, the tag is paired with the word qesas, retribution. This forces one into an ominous internal countdown to game time.

And so tensions have been rising. Yesterday, 30 police stations closed, striking against the Ministry of the Interior and refusing to be deployed to quell the unrest in Port Saeed. Yet on other days, the police presence in Cairo has seemed to be surging. On Tuesday evening, I was eating dinner at a friend's apartment in my neighborhood when we heard several fire trucks pass quite close. I read a few hours later that Ultras had tried to burn down the apartment building of the former Interior Minister, who had presided over the Port Saeed incident. He happens to live in Dokki as well, at the end of the street and across a square from my friend's apartment. And so this morning I awoke to a message from an Egyptian friend, urging us to stay in tomorrow in anticipation of more clashes around the minister's house. We should treat it like a snowstorm, he said.

Every Tuesday and Wednesday, I go to the translation lab at AUC’s downtown campus off Mohamed Mahmoud St. for class. Underground, I pass through a long, inexplicably lightless tunnel that leads from the metro out to the corner of Tahrir Square. The tunnel reeks of urine, but it is always pulsing with subterranean life: the guy with fake robotic birds, the guy with the red satchels, the layer upon layer of “qesas” tagged on the beige tiles. Every so often, the authorities wipe off the graffiti, and it begins again. Like the murals that begin just above the tunnel, it has not yet become an artifact. When I emerge from the underworld, I see the familiar flag salesman who plays Qur’an at earsplitting volume, and a wooden stage from which people are occasionally giving speeches when I leave class. There hasn’t been normal traffic flow around Tahrir for a while, so people stroll around among the tents and the vendors at will.   

Meanwhile, President Morsi announced a few weeks ago that parliamentary elections would be held in four rounds beginning at the end of April. (This is because the previous People’s Assembly was invalidated, and currently there is none.) But this week, the Administrative Court struck down the upcoming elections and Morsi says he will not appeal the decision, so no one really knows when they will take place. The liberal opposition (the National Salvation Front of ElBaradei and Moussa) had said in any case that it would boycott those elections, even more emboldened in their (in my opinion, highly unwise and shortsighted) decision by what they felt was American pressure to participate. Earlier this week, a prescient Egyptian friend who had just returned from a high-powered executive training program abroad told me that boycotting or not boycotting the elections would be irrelevant anyway: much more important things would happen before the end of April. In any case, she added, It will be ten years before we can begin to be hopeful about the economy. It will probably be the Muslim Brotherhood’s downfall, because they don’t have the solutions, she said, but neither does anyone else. Anyone in power now would fail.

As Egypt gears up for tomorrow’s verdict, and whatever chaos that incites, I want to mention a rousing concert that I attended several weeks ago. It was Valentine’s Day (or, as we like to call it, Galentine’s Day) and we ladies teamed for a crazy night out at the fast food chain Gad. Afterward, we went to my favorite performance space in Cairo, El Mastaba Center. This is the unassuming hole-in-the-wall filled with 30 or so stools where we previously danced with Sufi dervishes and Sudanese folk singers wearing skirts made from sheep’s teeth. That night, however, El Tanbura band was performing: a group of middle-aged and older men from Port Saeed who perform protest songs in the husky, working class folk style of the canal cities. The restiveness of Port Saeed did not begin with the Ultras in February 2012. It has always been a bastion of antiestablishment leftists and labor organizers. For the people of Port Saeed, this is just the latest episode in a long history of civil disobedience (and, at times, armed revolt).

Unlike some of the other concerts we’ve been to at Mastaba, this one was packed – and not just with hip expats. In the row in front of us sat several aging Egyptian ladies. The one directly in front of me, in an elegant red blazer and a neat bun, was wiping away tears as she watched the oldest musician – who at perhaps 75 or 80 sat ramrod straight and wore a red fez unselfconsciously on his head. A long past romance! whispered Robin in my ear. True or not, the band’s words were filled with venom, humor, and emotion. Many in the audience knew the words to the old songs: they recalled resistance to foreign occupation during the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956 or the leftist movement of the 1970s. Much of the music was sung to the tune of the semsemeyya, a lap harp especially popular along the canal. Despite the Eastern instruments, I was reminded by the heartiness of the songs and the roughness of the singers’ voices of Irish folk music.

The littlest semsemeyya player, Abdallah

At the end of the concert, the band performed the newest song in its canon, following in the tradition of Port Said’s historical protest songs. This one was about January 26, 2013, the day when fighting broke out after the first part of the soccer riot verdict was released. This was our January 25, said one of the musicians. O our free youth, our righteous martyrs, the song mourns. A cutthroat regime is killing peaceful protesters… and does business in the name of religion. At this last punchy line, a direct hit at the piety of the Muslim Brotherhood, a cheer rose up from the audience.

Video of Tanbura's rousing performance of "26 January"