Top Quotes: “The City Always Wins” — Omar Robert Hamilton
“There, in the center of the landscape, the ever-smoldering ruins of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party headquarters, the sun setting perfectly behind the charred concrete skeleton. Khalil loves that building, loves that it stands there every day as a testament to all that’s possible and all that’s impermanent to the tens of thousands of people who drive past it every day. A symbol in cinders of our victory, our antimonument to the future. A giant billboard stands tall amid the scorched ruins. Untouched by the flames, its meaningless electioneering slogan become flesh: For your children’s future.”
“We are fighting a slave army, she thinks: conscripts kidnapped from the countryside and forced to do battle in the capital. If they weren’t here they’d be sweating in assembly lines in military factories or operating industrial deep fryers for the army’s potato chips. But here they hurl rocks at children until they are locked back into their own prison trucks and driven back out to their supermax barracks in the desert. The officers don’t get hurt, they don’t even break a sweat.”
“Some of the families, they know the names of the police officers who killed their children. They see them in their neighborhoods. Can you imagine.”
“With a great thud the gunfire begins. A heavy artillery sound followed by an automatic. Thud. Tktktktktktktk. People are running in all directions. Thud. Tktktktktk-tktk. A bulldozer is slowly chewing its way through the encampment, crushing the tents and fragile barricades before it, men push a refrigerator toward the front and hide behind it and pop up from their hiding places and throw rocks, but they bounce off it harmlessly. Behind the bulldozer comes an APC and the guns. This is the Ministry of the Interior. You are ordered to vacate this area. Thud. Tktktktktktktk. They are running, away from the guns and deeper into the camp, through the alleyways, and a man falls and another and thud. Tktktktktktktktktkt ktktktktktktktktktktktk. They’re coming fast. A car siren is sounding, the bulldozer is inching closer, the wooden tent poles crunching underneath.”
“Sisi is everywhere. On posters on every street, on car windshields, on necklaces and key rings and cupcakes the Great Savior’s saccharine smile beams out at us, his sweating underlings. Downtown Cairo has become a military-themed fairground of Sisi sandwiches and fridge magnets and posters and cooking oil relabeled with his name and cupcakes iced with his face and women in camouflage pants posing for selfies, flashing their vampiric smiles and CC claws. No talk show dares air without a paean to his virtues of manhood and charisma, no storefront is safe from the burning mob without his Apollonian gaze staring down at you, there will be blood, blood, and more blood. Nine hundred killed in a day.
Egypt has never been more glorious. We’ll kill nine thousand for our homeland. Are you not relieved? Are you not Egyptian? Do you not love your country? Are you trying to keep her on her knees? Now we see your true colors, now we know who to come for in the night. We are free of the terrorists, at last, we have been delivered.
The country was crumbling, Egypt was on her knees, the Brotherhood was an occupying force and we now have been liberated by the great Sisi. Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last. Sisi, did you know, was the true name of Ramses III? Sisi the lion and the lionhearted. Our eagle and our beret and our flag are one in you, Sisi, and the victory you have led us to. Oh Sisi, my Sisi, you have returned Egypt to the Egyptians, you have led us out of the desert. Women grow weak in the knees and men rise firm at the sound of your name.
We will face down the terrorists together. Oh Sisi, my Sisi, the last three years have been so very, very hard. Oh Sisi, my Sisi, you are the answer to my crossword puzzle.
Your name, in its perfect and eternal symmetry, can sell my potatoes.
“Masks! Get your Sisi masks! IDs! Sisi IDs!”
I stand before a street vendor’s collection: Sisi posing proud on posters before a photoshopped lion, Sisi masks with their eyes hollowed out, Sisi ID cards. Name: Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Address: Ministry of Defense. Job: Savior of Egypt.
At least fascists are never funny.”
“Are we in some sick laboratory? Can you take this man, this black hole of charisma, this oozing miasma of featurelessness and turn him into a leader? Can you follow the simplest playbook of power and morph this Quasimodean combination of bureaucrat’s paunch, jowled cheeks, and balding scalp into a demagogue of the month to be washed down with your Coke? Identify existential enemy, mobilize killing forces, pump hysterical nationalism onto the airwaves, pose for photos with lions, use basic fonts, invoke mythological pasts, have choirs of children sing your name and voilà: sit back and look upon your works. Frankensisi. A man who came from nothing, who is nothing more than a collage of outdated ideas bolstered by a brute strength. A man born of crisis and fear and shortsightedness, the product of peak mediocrity. At least Mussolini had a chin you could hang your laundry off but Sisi, this tubby bureaucrat whose speaking voice belongs in a bingo hall, this is what we get?”
“I didn’t need to see Nancy standing in the crowd in Tahrir. Her toxic Twitter feed is enough.
I’m tired of these phony revolutionist Brotherhood lovers destroying Egypt … Hasn’t Egypt been through enough without her own citizens working to corrupt her?… If we don’t stand behind Sisi now we are endorsing terrorism … Enough is enough. Standing with the Brotherhood is treason and traitors must be dealt with to the full power of the law.
How could this happen? How many nights did we spend working and fighting together? When did everyone become a fascist? Nearly every supposed liberal intellectual with a newspaper column or a TV talk show is lining up to kiss Sisi’s ring in a feverish media orgy of millenarian nationalism.”
“Sisi wants to make protesting illegal now that he’s ridden a protest into power. Smart man.”
“Tahrir swarmed with narcs and plainclothes officers circling around us with their mobile phone cameras while state television barked day and night about the swamp of immorality festering in the middle of the city. We tried to end it, to withdraw on our terms, but the men on security refused to leave their posts and we, the nice revolutionists, wouldn’t leave anyone to stand alone.
Two days later those same men were wearing military-grade body armor and pulling people out of their tents.
I watched from the sides as our ex-comrades tore down the camp, watched them laugh as they beat and arrested everyone they could grab hold of.”
“Every time she joined a protest, every time she joined a call for disobedience, every time she used her son’s name to push his revolution forward she cut short a young life. She can’t do it anymore. She can’t speak for him, she can’t tell people what to believe, or what she believes Ayman would have done, or what might lead us to justice. She can’t sit with another young mother returned from the morgue. She can’t carry the names of all the dead anymore. There is no stopping them. They will kill them all. We have to find a new way. Every protest, every human chain, every time we set foot outside they shoot to kill. She can’t send any more young people to their deaths.”
“Alexandria, they say, has become autonomous. The government has disappeared entirely from its streets and civilian brigades are running the city. From Luxor one man jokes how his brother has kept a unit of policemen under siege for four days. Four days! He howls with laughter. They sent them in some water and said they’ll let them go when Mubarak falls. Everyone bursts into hysterics.”
“I watch four egrets picking through the pile of trash that no one even sees anymore. They are supposed to be white. A brilliant and proud white, but these wading birds are long grayed by the trash they hunt through. I see the bats flitting through the trees on the Corniche during the silent nights of the 18 Days. Adapt or die. The egrets have made a choice, given up on grace and beauty in exchange for survival here.”
“We had the fucking numbers. Seven million people voted for the revolution. If the vote hadn’t been split between Aboul Fotouh and Hamdeen, if they’d put their pride aside for five fucking minutes, things would have been different. And now where do we go?”
