Issue No. 601
Opinion
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29 August - 4 Sept. 2002 Issue No. 601 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Reflections
Phantoms of liberty
A 1969 poem, a long dead poet and the transcendental space called the World Wide Web. Such an ethereal realm, one would have thought, is out of reach for even the most control-obsessed state bodies. But it isn't.
Last June Shohdy Surur, Al-Ahram Weekly's extraordinarily talented web-master was handed a one-year prison sentence, allegedly for publishing -- on the web -- a poem by his late father, the celebrated 60s poet and playwright Naguib Surur. The court found that certain phrases in the poem, known as the Ummeyyat (a modified form of the original, vulgar title), were in violation of public morality. Shohdy was released on LE200 bail pending his appeal, which came up for judicial review this week.
The 1969 poem, which the late Surur had taped in his own voice, was never printed in Egypt, though it eventually appeared in book-form in the then hub of Arab free expression, Beirut. But well before the World Wide Web was a twinkle in Pentagon- attached scientists' eyes, Ummeyyat was making the rounds of the Egyptian leftist intelligentsia and members of the left-led student movement, in the form of tapes and hand-copied manuscripts. Written in colloquial Egyptian Arabic and using sexual imagery in its most vulgar street-form, the poem is a fierce critique of the Nasserist regime, and indeed of the left-wing intelligentsia that regime so successfully co- opted and from whose ranks Surur himself came. The Ummeyyat was the poet's bitter response to the June 67 defeat, a cry of rage at a regime which had thoroughly (and often with extreme ruthlessness) impounded civil liberties in the name of "the national battle", only to resoundingly lose that battle within the space of a few hours.
The ever-impending war for the liberation of Palestine proved to have been a phantasm whose sole purpose was to keep the "home front" in line, even as the military rulers of the country were too busy mismanaging, and plundering, the state sector, overseeing sports clubs and "dabbling" in the worlds of art and culture. This latter interest was a source of particular chagrin by Surur.
The rage was by no means specific to Surur. It was out there on the street, palpable and, indeed -- as is the habit in streets the world over -- expressed, more often than not, in the most vulgar terms.
Street-language, along with a whole range of other aspects of lived culture including, most notably, sex, has long been the arena of a cat-and-mouse game between artists and the state. Unlike the decadent, licentious West, we pride ourselves on our moral uprightness. Which is not to say that the vulgar sexual imagery used by Surur in the Ummeyyat is in any way remote, it's out there on the street, in places of work and, prominently as well as ironically, in police stations, shouted in insult or whispered in the latest joke. You can't escape it; the point, however, is not to acknowledge its existence. This might lead to the wicked suggestion that our cultural superiority to the West is essentially based in hypocrisy.
All of this, however, begs the real question about the case against Shohdy. Why is there a case at all, let alone an appalling one-year prison term? The poet has been dead for quarter of a century, he was never prosecuted for the poem though it was readily available in print outside the country and, less publicly, within it. Indeed, Naguib Surur has been posthumously honoured by the highest cultural bodies of the state, and his plays are regularly produced by state-run theatres. The service provider for the web-site on which Ummeyyat is posted is in the US; the site, up until the security bodies decided to make it a cause célèbre had few visitors (after all, it is one of millions); and it is actually next to impossible to prove that it was Shohdy who posted the poem in the first place. Why, then, this war on ghosts?
Two answers come to mind, both of which are telling. The first concerns the attempts to control the web by control- obsessed state bodies. This is a dilemma, since unlike some other Arab states which close the tap at source Egypt prides itself on its free web access, which is viewed as an essential aspect of economic liberalisation, attracting foreign investment, and all the rest of the catching the globalisation train imperatives.
But the web is uncontrollable. And what with Internet cafés sprouting all over the country you don't need to own a computer to access millions of savoury and unsavoury sites, anything from the Israeli Foreign Ministry to a whole range of militant Islamist groupings to sites similar to the one that the adolescent daughter of a friend of mine shockingly fell upon when she misspelled "hotmail".
Now what do state bodies that feel responsible for setting the parametres of our ideological and political leanings, religious persuasion and moral values do? Whatever new high-tech departments these bodies have set up to oversee the web, their mandate seems to be defined by the crime being committed in the Arabic language and/ or having an apprehendable culprit.
Then there is the state's attitude to cultural production and what they deem morality. In a society where politics has all but disappeared the only thing that seems to remain is a hypocrisy-grounded politics of morality (defined essentially as sexual control), which in its own turn acts to perpetuate the demise of politics. Our region may be on the brink of disaster, our economy is in shambles, we've never been as maligned and humiliated, but, hey, we remain as chaste as the driven snow. The late Naguib Surur, his voice echoing from the grave, begged to differ, rather graphically.
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