No deus ex machina

By Nehad Selaiha

---

No words can possibly describe my horror, grief and anger at what happened in Beni Sweif on Monday 5th where I should have been but was delayed at the last minute. "We would've loved you to be with us, Nehad," said Mohsen Mesilhi on the phone on his way there. "Entrance exams, Mohsen. Can't wriggle out. Next time insha'allah," I said.

Many of those who died or got maimed in the fire in Beni Sweif were dear friends, colleagues and students, and all were a precious part of my life, and of that wonderful army of men and women of all ages who keep theatre alive in the provinces, working so hard, usually in atrocious conditions, putting up with so much official insolence, parochial intolerance and stupid bureaucracy, and giving up so much of their time, health and talent, and even their little money, in return for next to nothing in terms of recognition or financial support. The audience was all they cared about; and the audience was what they were invariably deprived of accessing.

Consigned to little pockets, small, stuffy concrete bunkers that barely housed the officials and guests from the capital or the governor's office and entourage, they always felt bitter that few of the people they really targeted had little chance of being there; and when allowed larger venues, it was invariably only for a few blessed nights. They were not naïve and knew full well that that system was using them either as a safety valve or to whitewash its face. They thought they could play along, since they had no other choice or outlet, and outwit the system. The game killed them at the end however.

How monstrously unfair that for such gifted, hardworking, dedicated and thoroughly lovable artists the reward should be such a horrible, senseless death. And let no one tell me it was their 'fate' or the 'will of Allah'. Leave God out of this and let us not lay all our shit at His door. When governments do not do their proper job, as recently happened in the southern states of the USA, people die, and it is usually the poor and marginalised who top the ranks.

What killed Hazem Shehata, Mohsen Mesilhi, Saleh Saad, Ahmed Abdel-Hamid, Bahaa El-Mirghani, Hassan Abdou, Hosni Abu Guweilah, Medhat Abu Bakr, Shadi El-Weseemi, Mohamed Shawqi... and many, many other dearly loved artists and critics whom I shall mourn for life was not fate or a poor candle acting as its minister of light, as the governor of Beni Sweif flippantly put it (in very bad taste) in a television interview. It was sheer criminal negligence on the part of the gang running the show and using those artists as a kind of artistic smoke screen to cover up their deficiencies -- a negligence born out of a long tradition of human apathy and cowardly fear -- a brutal indifference to human life and creativity fostered by centuries of political dictatorship and human rights abuse and translated into lethal administrative lethargy masquerading as religious resignation and a pious trust in 'God's good sense' and that, somehow, he will step in at the last minute, like the old Greek deus ex machina, to make things right.

Right now, we are struggling to reign in our grief and direct our energies to caring for the maimed survivors of this disaster and the families of its victims and making sure they get proper compensations. We are also working to see that justice is done and the culprits are punished. But when I speak of punishment I do not mean desiring to inflict an equal pain on the culprits as suffered by the victims, or merely a kind of vengeance lust; no kind of punishment in the world can bring the kind of comfort we need: the touch of a vanished hand, as Tennyson said, or the sound of a voice that is still. I am, we are, only calling for proper punishment that other future disasters may not occur.

And when, and if, this is done, we shall then have the time to mourn. Afterwards, we need to sit together and rethink, not only our cultural structures and politics, and the ideologies that underlie them, but, more urgently, our culture itself -- its basic assumptions about human freedom and responsibility and the values of life and art -- and where exactly it historically situates itself and us: in the distant past, the middle ages, or the modern world.