Creating Spaces of Hope: Young Artists and the New Imagination in Egypt

By Caroline Seymour-Jorn

An exploration of how young artists imagine and maintain hope in post-revolutionary Egypt

Creating Spaces of Hope explores some of the newest, most dynamic creativity emerging from young artists in Egypt and the way in which these artists engage, contest, and struggle with the social and political landscape of post-revolutionary Egypt.

How have different types of artists—studio artists, graffiti artists, musicians and writers—responded personally and artistically to the various stages of political transformation in Egypt since the January 25 revolution? What has the political or social role of art been in these periods of transition and uncertainty? What are the aesthetic shifts and stylistic transformations present in the contemporary Egyptian art world?

Based on personal interviews with artists over many years of research in Cairo, Caroline Seymour-Jorn moves beyond current understandings of creative work primarily as a form of resistance or political commentary, providing a more nuanced analysis of creative production in the Arab world. She argues that in more recent years these young artists have turned their creative focus increasingly inward, to examine issues having to do with personal relationships, belonging and inclusion, and maintaining hope in harsh social, political and economic circumstances. She shows how Egyptian artists are constructing “spaces of hope” that emerge as their art or writing becomes a conduit for broader discussion of social, political, personal, and existential ideas, thereby forging alternative perspectives on Egyptian society, its place in the region and in the larger global context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781649030115

Caroline Seymour-Jorn

Caroline Seymour-Jorn is associate professor of comparative literature and Arabic translation at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the author of Cultural Criticism in Egyptian Women's Writing: Anthropological and Literary Perspectives (2011).

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

January 25, 2019 marked the eighth anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak and ended his thirty years of draconian autocratic rule. Since that time, Egypt has experienced massive street protests, clashes between supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and other religious and secularist parties and government forces, three heads of state, significant constitutional changes, an Islamist insurgency in the Sinai desert, and a number of terrorist attacks of varying size and impact. ¹ Even as I write this introduction, new protests are taking place on the streets of Egypt’s cities, as people level charges against the al-Sisi regime. However, throughout these years of transition and unrest, Egypt’s ever-vibrant artistic world has continued to operate. Indeed, in the larger regional context, the uprisings that occurred throughout the Arab world as a result of the ‘Arab Spring’ included a florescence of artistic activity.

In 2012 Professor of Arabic Literature Samia Mehrez argued:

One of the most remarkable accomplishments of the various uprisings in the Arab world since January 2011 has been the radical transformation of the relationship between people, their bodies, and space; a transformation that has enabled sustained mass convergence, conversation, and agency for new publics whose access to and participation in public space has for decades been controlled by oppressive, authoritarian regimes. (Mehrez 2012, 14)

In the early years after the 2011 Revolution, one way in which this new freedom was marked in Egypt was with graffiti and street art, public performance art, and studio art exhibitions, in which Egyptians claimed space for themselves, expressing their relationship to the state and to international entities that have so profoundly impacted Egypt’s politics and economy.

More recently the regime of President Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi has brought new forms of oppression to bear upon the artistic and cultural scene in Cairo. Al-Sisi took office in June 2014 and his regime has authorized the harassment and arrest of many young activists, journalists, writers, artists, and others critical of his presidency. During my research in Cairo in July 2015, one young artist expressed his dismay and surprise that al-Sisi had achieved a new level of oppression far beyond that of the Mubarak regime. This includes arresting and summarily executing activists and protesters and shutting down NGOs. There is to this day a continued hush over Cairo’s creative spaces, cafés, and intellectual discourse. As one activist and writer put it to me in early 2018, It’s like walking on eggshells; you have to be careful who you talk to and what you say. Other writers and artists I spoke to expressed fear of delivering any sort of political critique in their creative production. At the same time, the art world still has a strong and active presence in downtown Cairo, though some of the gathering points and art exhibition sites seem to be shifting and changing, and people—young people in particular—are very aware of heightened surveillance of their activities and gathering spots, particularly in and around Tahrir Square.

This book explores innovative artists and writers in the Arab world’s most populous country and the way in which they engage, contest, and struggle with a postrevolutionary Egyptian modernity. Most of these creators are considered members of al-jil al-jadid (the new generation) or al-jil al-shabab (the youth generation) of creative producers in Egypt—individuals who are in their twenties or thirties, although a few are in their forties. They are all generating innovations in their fields of painting, sculpture, graffiti, or lyrical and literary production. Because I focus on works from 2010 until 2018, this book is not primarily about revolutionary art, nor does it focus only on what Marwan Kraidy calls creative insurgency, although a few of the works discussed herein are characterized by the mixture of activism and artistry characteristic of revolutionary expression (Kraidy 2016, 5). Rather, I discuss works that address a wide range of topics and explore how art and creativity have developed and become a part of a critical discourse about creativity and its relationship to society before, during, and after the events of January 25, 2011. This discourse circulates in the creative community, traditionally defined as arts and literary circles—the people who attend to, critique, and acquire art and literary production. However, it also includes a new, broader public, a generation of young people who are involved in or view new forms of creative production including collaborative music and theater production, and street or public art.

This study asks important questions about how different types of creative producers—studio artists, graffiti artists, musicians, and writers—have responded personally and artistically to the various stages of social and political transformation in Egypt in recent decades, but primarily during the period after the January 25 revolution. At the same time I also consider how artists have responded creatively to very personal events in their own lives—events which in some cases have their roots in social or political realities. Some of the creative production that I analyze relates to and critiques a specific recent time period or regime, such as that of Mubarak, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the Muslim Brotherhood, or President Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi. In my consideration of these pieces I explore the ways in which artists contribute to public discourse about recent periods of repression, change, and uncertainty. Given the current level of political oppression in Egypt, it is natural that the social and political critiques emerging in artistic production are sometimes quite indirect, and do not take on the policies of al-Sisi in any transparent manner. Yet many artists clearly engage with pressing socioeconomic issues even as they generate highly innovative works. My analysis includes close consideration of these aesthetic aspects, and discusses how artists and writers engage in experimentation with style and form to craft complex works that address a range of subjects. This book considers the production of several different types of cultural creators: a collaborative musical group and its director, Salam Yousry (b. 1982); three studio artists, Hany Rashed (b. 1975), Bassem Yousri (b. 1980), and Yasmine ElMeleegy (b. 1991); and two writers, Hani Abdel Mourid (b. 1973) and Mennat Allah Samy (b. 1983). The fourth chapter effects a close reading of mural painting and graffiti along downtown Cairo’s Muhammad Mahmud Street from a series of photographs that I took in July 2015. One of the paintings is Ammar Abo Bakr’s well-known portrait of the deceased artist Hisham Rizq.

The strategy of relating several forms of cultural production together—and in some cases against each other—unsettles traditional ways of analyzing Egyptian arts and opens up the possibility for seeing new parallels. Traditional modes of critique focus upon individual genres of creative production: literature, painting, sculpture, and musical and theatrical creation and performance. This book engages with works across genres to examine both new modes of experimentation and the themes and approaches common to artists working in various fields and mediums. This approach also elucidates various ways in which the momentous political and social changes that have occurred in Egypt since 2011 have been expressed by a highly observant and thoughtful group of its young citizens. As a group, the individuals I discuss in this book represent some of newest and most dynamic cultural creativity in Cairo. Their work has been well received by critics in Egypt and several have also garnered significant international attention. In what follows, I present some recent historical background to serve as a framework for thinking about the artists and writers treated in this book. This includes a brief sketch of the revolutionary and postrevolutionary years. I position my work in the context of other recent scholarship on art and literature and detail my contribution by providing a theoretical framework for thinking about creativity.

Why This Book?

In recent years, scholars have called for more nuanced analyses of creative production in the Arab world in response to a western reductive way of thinking that focuses on conflict, hyper-religiosity, sexism, and violence in the Middle East. There are many excellent studies of modern Arabic literature, but few that consider creative production from an inter-arts perspective that analyzes both sociopolitical critique and aesthetic innovation.² There is a paucity of serious analysis of contemporary studio art, street art, and music. Of course, there was a flurry of interest in graffiti art during and immediately after the so-called Arab Spring; however, these treatments did not fully explore the stylistics and approaches of the various artists contributing to public art during this time.³ Many of these studies focused primarily on the political context of art or examined it as a form of resistance. As many scholars of the Arab world have noted, reduction of creative production to the narrative of resistance risks simplifying artists’ complex ideological and philosophical positions and the sophistication of their stylistic approaches (Arebi 1994; al-Ariss 2013; S. Selim 2000).

This book draws upon approaches from literary and critical theory, art criticism, anthropology, and postcolonial studies to analyze the creative achievements of young Egyptian artists as they experiment with performance forms, materials, spaces, and artistic styles to explore contemporary social and political issues as well as personal and philosophical concerns. Many of the creative works I consider address social or political matters. The engagement with such issues by Egyptian artists and writers does not necessarily diminish the aesthetic value of creative works in the eyes of Egyptian critics and other consumers (Ghazoul 1994). My multidimensional approach to analyzing creative works derives from a politics of representation that seeks to expand our understanding of Egyptian and Arab youth and the art and literature that they produce. Thus it engages social and political critiques but also details artists’ and writers’ stylistics and aesthetic approaches. I aim, after Alfred Gell (1992; 1998), to maintain a focus on the aesthetic approaches that illuminate the specific objective characteristics of the art object as an object (Gell 1992, 43) while at the same time delineating important elements of sociopolitical commentary.

Furthermore, I argue that artists’ innovative engagement with artistic and literary strategies allows their creative activities to become spaces of hope in which creativity becomes a means of creating belonging and inclusion within the context of a political—and sometimes social—landscape characterized by exclusion and limitation. I adapt this phrase from Richard Phillips, who is one of the scholars who have challenged negative hegemonic views of Muslims and defined spaces of hope in many areas of the everyday lives of Muslims living in the West. These include Muslim engagement in multicultural public spaces, in inventive, cosmopolitan cultural practices, but also in their advocacy for and improvement of their own neighborhoods and private spaces (Phillips 2009, 9; P. Hopkins 2009; Sardar 2009). I have adapted this concept to explore the creative production of primarily secular Muslim youth in the context of their own nation, a social and political situation which is difficult in very different ways from that of Muslims living in the West. These young people experience a form of alienation related not primarily to their religious or cultural status but to their position as active and critical youth living in an oppressive political situation. However, it is true that their secular orientation does contribute to a sense of alienation from the more conservative and political strands of Islamic thought and practice that have become highly visible in Egypt in recent decades, and some of their creative production reflects their critique of this trend. I argue that these young Egyptian artists are also constructing spaces of hope by means of creative action. These spaces emerge as artists receive serious attention from critics, family, friends, and other audiences, and as their art or writing becomes a conduit for broader discussion of social, political, personal, and existential ideas.

The inter-arts aspect of this study aims to elucidate the diversity of artistic expression in Cairo, but it also examines commonalities in matters of topic, imagery, and artistic strategy. Notably, a 1996 edition of ‘Ain: al-funun al-tashkiliya (‘Ain: Visual Arts Magazine) published a discussion about a perceived schism between Egyptian creators of the visual arts on the one hand, and literary writers and other intellectuals on the other. The debate came about as editors of the magazine observed a lack of intellectual and artistic communication between these two groups and asked questions about the contribution of the visual arts in Egypt at the social, cultural, and political levels (Yunus et al. 1996). This concern resonates with recent remarks I have heard from artists and intellectuals in Cairo. The Egyptian novelist and short-story writer Ibrahim Aslan has written that this schism is significant and detrimental to all creative producers. He remarked that, in his personal experience, I discovered that the problems of expression that I was concerned with as a writer were dealt with more significantly by visual artists than writers (1996, 97). He suggests that increased interaction between different kinds of cultural creators would lead to development in all fields of creative expression (Aslan et al. 1996, 97). Creating Spaces of Hope: Young Artists and the New Imagination in Egypt aims to address this issue as well, in that it attempts to draw parallels between the ways in which practitioners of different artistic forms explore and express a range of subjects—from the personal to the social and political.

The Social and Political Context

The artists and writers treated in this book bring a broad spectrum of experience to their creative production and the personal, social, and political commentary that lies therein. Some of these individuals come from middle-class families, while others have their roots in the lower middle class but were able to take advantage of the tuition-free university system and acquire work in the professions and the arts. Several have had the opportunity to pursue university or postgraduate studies in Europe or the United States. They grew up under the regimes of Anwar al-Sadat (1970–81) and Hosni Mubarak (1981–2011). They and their families were forced to contend with the economic difficulties ushered in by the Open Door policy (infitah) instituted by Sadat in the early 1970s. This policy of economic liberalization benefited wealthy Egyptians but triggered inflation that resulted in economic hardship for the lower classes and a consumerism that made more evident the gap between rich and poor on the streets of Egypt’s towns and cities. As young adults, this cohort witnessed the corruption and increasing repression of the Mubarak regime, and suffered from his economic mismanagement and dependence on foreign aid. Throughout the decades of Mubarak’s rule it was commonplace to hear Egyptians critiquing the regime for siphoning off public monies in order to line the pockets of the regime faithful who held positions of power.

This generation is heir and witness to significant and continuing social, economic, and religious changes in their society. They grew up in an era of increasing religious conservativism, a trend that became evident in Egypt in the 1970s. This current developed over succeeding decades with the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and of Salafist trends from the Gulf states, where many Egyptians labor as guest workers (Abu-Lughod 2005; Esposito 2011). Individuals who eventually returned from the Gulf region often adopted some of its norms and social practices, including pious dress and comportment, and the ideal of female segregation (Allam 2018, 127–28). Writing in the early 1990s, Arlene MacLeod noted that while the Islamic movement has occasioned the performance of pious behavior and social conservativism in Egypt, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries also saw increasing work opportunities for women, even as women’s work and professionalism challenged family structures and the traditional authority of women in the home (MacLeod 1991; 1996).⁴ More recent scholarship has explored Egyptian women’s involvement in the Islamic movement—from preaching to social and economic activism—and the ways in which the movement has impacted women’s and men’s lives (Ahmed 2011; Sherine Hafez 2011; Mahmood 2012). The artists discussed in this book are generally critical of what Mara Naaman describes as the Islamification of Egypt—that is, displays of Muslim identity and religiously justified forms of social policing (Naaman 2018, 186). However, they address various aspects of this phenomenon to different degrees and in various ways.

As Cairenes—or as people who have done significant work or exhibition in the city—this group of artists and writers have also witnessed striking changes to the physical face of the metropolis. They have experienced first-hand the housing crush in Cairo which makes it difficult for lower- and middle-class youth to find apartments in which to begin their married life. Cairo has experienced significant building and development within the heart of the city, which has resulted in the state-mandated displacement of people from old neighborhoods and their resettlement in state-planned housing projects (Ghannam 2002). In recent decades, Cairenes have also witnessed the growth of large ‘ashwa’iyat (unplanned districts), which feature substandard buildings and poor living conditions. At the same time, the rapid development of sprawling satellite cites built out into the desert have offered the economically privileged an escape from the crowding and pollution of the city center. This trend has only increased the segregation of socioeconomic classes in the greater metropolitan area. This situation also puts strain on the inadequate public transportation system and creates arduous commutes for many people, a phenomenon often mentioned by the young people I spoke with and which is also addressed in recent artistic and literary production.⁵ Young people’s creative production—whether it be in the form of fiction, painting, lyrical production, or graffiti—responds to the multiple ramifications of these social, religious, economic, and physical changes.

The creative producers addressed in this book are also part of a deeply alienated generation that the novelist Ahmed Alaidy describes as the gil ma‘indish haga akhsaruha (the I’ve got nothing to lose generation) (Alaidy 2009, 41).⁶ This is a generation that is thoroughly disenchanted with the aspirations, accomplishments, and failures of the previous generation and its focus on Egypt’s 1967 defeat by Israeli forces. As a group, this generation faces abysmal economic prospects and very limited opportunities for effective civic and political involvement.

This group of artists were in their twenties and thirties on the eve of the January 25, 2011 Revolution, and they witnessed the momentous events that brought down their autocratic ruler of the previous thirty years. Like many artists, writers, activists, and journalists, they participated actively in the demonstrations and sit-ins during January and February 2011. They witnessed their generation’s first massive demonstrations, including the Million Man March of February 1, when Egyptians demanded that Mubarak step down, only to receive his placating pledge that he would leave office after the next election. They were among jubilant crowds that finally celebrated Mubarak’s departure on February 11, when he handed over control to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) under Field Marshal Tantawi, only to witness further violent conflict between SCAF forces and demonstrators during conflicts such as the Maspero Massacre (October 9) and the Battle of Muhammad Mahmud Street (November 18) (Cambanis 2015).

The years that followed the revolutionary year of 2011 saw multiple political shifts. Continuing protests against what many considered a continuation of the Mubarak