The inimitable Anglo-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr has given us a superb little essay on the Revolution that appears to have failed.:
"Still falling off that cliff." It deserves to be read in full, but few excerpts will convince you, beginning with a paragraph that is brilliant writing:
The inevitable, painful, question is whether it was worth it, whether
those lives shattered and destroyed have laid the groundwork for
something or are just gone. This isn’t a question we (people who lived
through it and supported it) can answer – not only because we perhaps
don’t (yet) know but because of the impossibility of answering
objectively. Wishing for a world where it never happened would
re-animate the dead, return sight to lost eyes, unbreak shattered bones.
It would free thousands of political detainees. But it would mean the
death of those fleeting moments of untrammelled hope and happiness, of
friendships, even love, found during the battle of Mohamed Mahmoud and
then lost, of the possibility of a future we are now trying to un-see,
of that tomorrow that never came but of which we got a glimpse. How can
we wish for that never to have happened, when it has become part of
those that lived it – even if today it is a hidden scar. That time we
jumped off a cliff reaching for the moon.
That paragraph is a gem. But the last lines also deserve quoting:
The ghosts of January 25 are all still there, the faces painted on the
walls of Mohamed Mahmoud Street staring out accusingly at all their
work undone. But there are times when the events of 2011 - 2013
seem almost apocryphal. It is only the regime’s revenge-driven torment
of individuals associated with it that keep its memory alive. But that
will stop eventually and then the embers will die out completely and the
real revolution will live only in our heads, where perhaps it always
was anyway.
But read it all.
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