Abstract
This article looks at how symbols in the urban environment are intentionally produced and modified to regulate a community’s collective memory. Our urban environment is filled with symbols in the form of images, text, and structures that embody certain narratives about the past. Once those symbols are introduced into the city space they take a life span of their own in a continuous process of reproduction and reconstruction by different social actors. In the context of the city space of Cairo in the five years following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, I will look on the one side at efforts of activists to preserve the memory of the revolution through graffiti murals and the utilization of public space, and from the other, the authority’s efforts to replace those initiatives with its own official narrative. Building on the concept of collective memory, as well as Bartlett’s studies of serial reproductions and theorization of reconstructive remembering, I will follow the reproduction of different symbols in the city and how they were perceived and remembered by pedestrians.
City spaces are filled with symbols that communicate certain stories about a community’s past. Symbols are understood here as signs embodying multiple meanings, carrying a face and an underlying sentimental value that gives the symbol its stability and effectiveness (Bartlett, 1924; Wagoner, 2017a). Symbols could be seen in monuments, historical buildings, politicians’ billboards, graffiti and street art, or ruins of destructed structures. They are all symbols that shape the public space by preserving certain memories while intentionally concealing others.
Since 2011, the city space of Cairo has been through several transformations in parallel to the political and social changes. The revolution in January 2011 succeeded in overthrowing Mubarak and in bringing different opposition groups together with the support of the army against the old regime. However, this short-lived harmony was disrupted shortly after the deposition of Mubarak and the assignment of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces for a transitional stage. The army started to use its power against protestors, and the different opposition groups were divided by their different ideologies and visions for the future. Mid 2012, presidential elections occurred and Morsi from the Muslim Brotherhood group won. During his one year of presidency public dissatisfaction grew against his policies, which led to widespread protests mid 2013 demanding his resignation. The army took a leading position again by arresting Morsi, declaring Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group and assigning Mansour as the interim president. Mid 2014, presidential elections occurred again and El Sisi—Former Defense minister and the one who carried out the removal of Morsi—won while many groups—mainly activists and Muslim Brotherhood supporters—boycotted the election questioning its legitimacy.
These quick transformations in less than four years created a rupture for the city and its people. The young activists who took part in 2011 revolution, for example, went from the spotlight as the youth who fueled the revolution to a prosecuted group in 2013 facing political imprisonment. The Muslim Brotherhood also experienced the privilege of being the group in power in 2012 only to later suffer the consequences of being declared a terrorist group in 2013, facing imprisonment and death sentences. These shifts triggered a change in how each group reconstructed what happened in recent history and created a need to document and advocate for certain narratives.
Narratives of the past varied between—and within—the army, activists, and Muslim Brotherhood, among other groups. The current research followed three narratives: (1) For the army—and now official—narrative: the army is the trusted guardian who saved Egyptians in the “two” revolutions—the one against Mubarak and the one against Muslim Brotherhood—and the protector of Egyptians against terrorism. (2) For the activists: they made all the sacrifices for the aspired change but were then betrayed by the politicians, the army, and the Muslim Brotherhood. (3) For the Muslim Brotherhood: they are the only legitimate group who won in the democratic elections after the revolution, and were betrayed by the coup.
Upon this contentious political background, I will attempt in this article to look at those three narratives through the dynamics of city space. I will start by discussing key terms relating to the research, namely: urban space, collective memory, and reconstructive remembering. Then will discuss some of the changes in the city space of Cairo post revolution, followed by identifying the social actors involved and the data gathering process. I will then present specific examples of images, text, and structures from fieldwork and how participants perceived them. The article ends with some concluding remarks about the pedestrian experience and the potential effects of those urban transformations.
Urban space and collective memory
Urban space is approached in this research as an arena through which we can understand wider social dialogues and tensions. Urban space is understood as a social product, dominantly produced by a centralized power, but also influenced by reproductions from different social actors in resistance to this power (Lefebvre, 1991). The buildings, street names, monuments, and street art all produce meaningful symbolic spaces that tell a story; a spatial narrative (Connerton, 2009). Studies in urban psychology explore how meaningful places emerge as an outcome of how individuals experience space. Individuals’ perception of space is diverse and is based upon their future relation to it as well as their memory of all past experiences in it (Kharlamov, 2011). Thus, to adequately understand the urban environment is to capture the physical as well as the mental representations of the space (Foucault, 2008), to explore it as a “fully lived space, real and imagined, actual and virtual, a place for individual and collective experience and agency,” what Soja (2000) refers to as third space.
This space is created and mediated by different social actors through the use of signs. Cultural psychology looks at how individuals as well as groups within a society construct and use signs to transform their present settings through a parallel closeness to and distancing from their current situations (Valsiner, 2007). This research looks at material signs, physical and concrete entities either in the form of painted images, written words, or built structures. It is these concrete signs in the city space that gain symbolic value as they embody dynamic meanings and representations that communicate different narratives. These symbolic entities get constructed and reconstructed by different social actors in the society each producing a space that is representative of their group. As such, there are as many ways of representing space as there are social groups (Halbwachs, 1950).
The narratives represented in the symbols then become cultural tools for members of a collective as they recount the past, feeding into their collective memory. Collective memory is a “representation for the past shared by members of a group such as a generation or nation-state” (Wertsch, 2008). This representation is not a static account of the past, but rather a fluid reconstruction that feeds into current needs as well as future imagination.
It is in these dynamics that urban space and collective memory become closely interrelated, where every collective memory unfolds within a spatial framework, representing the affective relationship that a community has with its past (Halbwachs, 1950). It is for this significance of the urban environment in representing our past that deliberately transforming this environment through symbols becomes a powerful tool for authorities as well as other social groups to preserve certain memories and conceal others.
This brings us to how individuals in society perceive their city space and construct memories relating to material symbols, as many of our acts of remembering are site-specific, triggered by objects and places in our environment. From a socio-cultural perspective, memory is understood as social, embodied and dynamic. Remembering, from a Bartlettian perspective, is not a literal recall from a stored collection of mental images, but rather a creative process of reconstruction. When we recall a certain memory we engage in a continuous process of reconstructing past experiences based on the demands of the present time and influenced by the current social context. This sets our remembering as affective and emotional—not only cognitive—involving a process of self-reflexivity. One important aspect in this understanding of memory is that it is both a personal and social act, influenced by the possibilities and constraints of the environment around us, and open to reinterpretation and adaptation to fit our present concerns and circumstances (Wagoner, 2017a).
Events in Egypt being relatively recent and subjected to many changes, this case study deals with collective memory in the making. While narratives about the past always change and get reconstructed, those reconstructions are accelerated at a societal level in the period following a major social transformation. This will be the focus of the first research question: how are symbols in public space intentionally produced and modified to communicate a certain narrative and regulate a community’s collective memory? The second research question will focus on how are those symbols perceived and remembered by pedestrians.
Transformations of Cairo’s city space
Cairo is a busy city space, where chaos and harmony co-exist. It is a city in continuous motion with a dynamic public space that is experienced differently by its varied dwellers. The politics of public space ownership is exercised mostly by police and security officers, bawabeen (buildings’ guards), soyas (self-appointed car keepers), and street vendors, while the average pedestrian has a minimum ownership in this dynamic. This relationship however experienced a temporary shift during the beginning of the revolution, when protestors did not only claim public space but also produced political spaces with new symbols and practices that challenged the existing representations of space (Gunning & Baron, 2014).
Since 2011, Cairo experienced unprecedented fluidity in how public space was proclaimed and re-inscribed with new practices and meanings. There was the proclaiming of space by protestors’ sit-ins and the creative use of street art in mobilization, remembering, and reconfiguration of spatial barriers (Abaza, 2014; Awad & Wagoner, 2015). There were structured neighborhood watchers who locally organized themselves to guard their own neighborhoods during the withdrawal of interior ministry forces. There were also those who made use of the chaos to build illegal structures and occupy empty spaces (Nagati & Stryker, 2013; Sims, 2012).
Tahrir square was a central space for this transformation. It is the center of the capital and the home of the state’s key institutions. Since its establishment in the late 19th century it has been the most symbolic space for the citizens as well as the different governments. It has been the stage for official national celebrations and the meeting point for protestors against the monarchy, the British occupation, and all succeeding governments (Meital, 2007). In 2011, it hosted the protestors’ idealized state and witnessed the subsequent street battles, barricades, and checkpoints. When looking at Tahrir Square in January 2016 in contrast to January 2011, we see a space once proclaimed by the public to a heavily militarized zone guarded closely with security forces everywhere. We also see several renovation projects that date back to the government’s plan “Cairo 2050” initiated in 2008 and put on hold during 2011 (Rabie, 2015). As order was steadily restored, renovations continued but with an adapted vision. The current changes could be interpreted as renovation or as destruction of any signs of the 2011 revolution. There are fresh coats of paint covering revolution graffiti, new structures, newly installed CCTV cameras, gradual relocation of government offices and removal of street vendors, and gentrification of old buildings—buying them from their local residents and owners and turning them into businesses. Stakeholders taking part in these renovations include the governorate, national insurance companies, and private sector with no public involvement in the plan or what to expect of the new space. The governorate officials express a cultural vision in the area to restore the cultural front of Khedive Cairo as a historical area, while Al-Ismaelia company—a consortium of Egyptian and Saudi Arabian investors—has a more modern and practical vision for downtown centered on cultural gentrification and the reclaiming of its place among major cities of the world (Berger, 2014; Rabie, 2015).
Historically, this re-representation of Tahrir Square has been a common act of each regime to conceal the memory of its precedent. Khedive Ismail established the area with a representation of the modern state, naming the square Ismailia after himself and demolishing the British barracks in a sign of independence. After the Coup d'état of 1952—also known as the July revolution—the Free Officers promoted a new discourse of nationalism, changed the Egyptian flag, officially renamed the square to Tahrir (liberation) and replaced royal family street names by names such as Aljumhuriyya (the Republic) and Algeish (the Army) imposing a sense of alienation and negativity on the monarchical past, while celebrating the nationalist present (Meital, 2007).
A major part of this research was to observe the transformation of the city space since 2011 embedded within its historical, political, and social context. Tahrir square was chosen as a critical area to follow, but other significant symbols were also followed in other areas of Cairo, mostly those that communicated a narrative about the recent past.
Social actors
In the context of the urban space, graffiti artists, authorities, and pedestrians are viewed as different social actors in dialogue who actively produce, reproduce, and interpret symbols (Awad, Wagoner, & Glaveanu, 2017). The focus in this paper will be on the pedestrian experience, however, the research will also build on fieldwork between 2013 and 2016 that includes city walks and photo documentation in different cities in Egypt, interviews with graffiti artists, and material from news and social media.
For the pedestrians’ experience, 25 interviews were conducted with participants. The only prerequisite for participation was to be a Cairo resident. Interviews lasted for an average of 45 minutes and constituted three main parts; first, a discussion of participants’ relationship with different parts of the city, their memories of those spaces, and where they felt included/excluded the most. Second, they were asked about their memories in relation to Tahrir Square and to recall any changes they have noticed in the square over the past five years. Third, they were shown a series of 20 to 30 photos of different symbols from authority and graffiti interventions and asked for each symbol if they remember seeing it in the street, where they saw it, who do they think put it there, and what memory or perception did it trigger for them when they saw it, whether in the street or in the interview. The methodology in the photo elicitation was in part inspired by Bartlett’s experiments on remembering, using his qualitative and ideographic analysis (Wagoner, 2017a). I looked at the variety of interpretations participants came up with, how they reconstructed their memory of the stories that the symbols triggered, and how this reconstruction was affected by the participants’ own political views and social positions.
However, this was the final structure of the interview; the methodology was a learning process with an exploratory nature. The first five interviews used the go-along ethnographic method to capture the spatial practices and discuss the symbols as they come along (Kusenbach, 2003). Due to security measures around key areas and the erasing of several graffiti images, the method was changed to photo elicitation while meeting participants in coffee shops in different areas around the city. Another adaptation was changing the interviews from recorded to unrecorded after the tenth interview, as these allowed participants to talk more easily and to comfortably choose what goes off record. Also, suspicion of any research activity relating to politics made reaching out to participants challenging, this led participation to be limited to snowballing. Participants belonged to the upper-middle class and their experience of the city was mostly from their cars. This limitation has affected how representative the data is of the wider public, since class is an important regulator of how individuals experience the city. The sample was purposefully diverse in terms of age and political views: 7 participants identified themselves as supporters of current government, 13 were against it, and 5 were neutral towards politics and preferred not to be involved. Their ages ranged from 25 to 71, with an average age of 36. For anonymity, names used below for data excerpts do not correspond to the real names of participants.
Symbols in the city space and their social life
Broader transformations in the city space can be inscribed on specific symbols, as we follow those symbols, we can see small-scale representations of what is happening in the wider scale of the city space (Nagati & Stryker, 2013). Symbols once created have a social life of their own; they get transformed, re-understood, and changed by different social actors in a continuous dialogue. As will be seen below, many symbols were produced to respond to or to resist other symbols in a competition over the narrative that gets exposure in public space.
I will present below different examples of symbols that were used in the photo elicitation in the interviews. I have categorized the symbols into three different categories of graphic images, verbal symbols, and structures. In this section, I will discuss the evolution of the symbols as a kind of Bartlettian serial reproduction, especially in examples of graffiti images, how they were transformed in transmission, elaborated, simplified, keeping certain aspects of the original while omitting parts and transforming others to respond to the changing context (Wagoner, 2017a). Also how the changes implemented by different social actors reflected a process of reproducing repertoires, unfolding a continuous performance in the city space that visually narrates the multiple forms of remembering the revolution (Abaza, 2013).
Graphic images
“Images are not just a particular kind of sign, but something like an actor on the historical stage,” they are endowed with a unique status that feeds into the stories we tell ourselves (Mitchell, 1984, p. 504). Photographs, arrangement of colors (flags), and paintings all tell us something about where we are, hint at the power dynamics, and make us feel foreign or at home. Images are not just objects, but communicative devices in a narrative. They give figurative shape to abstract meanings and give substance to stereotypes and social representations (Lonchuk & Rosa, 2011).
The revolution graffiti created and re-constructed certain images that fed into the representation of the revolution. An example of a widely diffused and controversial image is that of army soldiers stripping a protestor while hitting her during protest dispersal (Figure 1). Graffiti artist El Tenin re-constructed the image of the woman as a symbolic hero of the revolution changing her posture from that of humiliation and weakness to that of heroism and determination (Figure 2, text reads: continuing). The blue bra (Figure 3), a private object now on public walls, quickly became a symbol of army violations, sexual harassments, and more generally the revolution. Using Bartlett’s (1932) terms, the symbol was here “simplified” into a blue bra, while simultaneously “elaborating” its meaning to signify the larger cause. Moreover, it effectively circulated not only on many walls in Egypt, but was also appropriated by Lebanese graffiti artists in solidarity with the cause and in opposition to authority (Figure 3 captured in Jisr El-Cola, Beirut, text reads: against the regime).
A protester beaten by army soldiers during clashes in Cairo's Tahrir Square in December 2011. Photo Credit: Stringer/Reuters/Landov. Graffiti by El Tenin. Photo credit: Rana Jarbou.
When the image of the blue bra (Figure 3) was shown to participants in the pedestrian interviews, 12 participants identified seeing it before in the street, and 19 out of the 25 participants related it to the incident in Figure 1. It was clear that the image became an iconic symbol of a famous incident, but of interest was the variation in how the memory of the incident was reconstructed when triggered by the image.
Soha, who took part in the 2011 protests immediately recalled the incident saying: “yes this is for set el banat (the most honorable of girls),” using the label activists commonly used in reference to the girl in Figure 1 who preferred to stay anonymous. While Gihan who is against the revolution said: “yes this is the girl who was dragged and her clothes ripped off in the square,” a passive sentence with no mention of an actor, when asked who dragged her, she said: “the army, but they apologized.” While Lara who does not have a strong interest in politics said the photo reminded her of belly dancing costumes sold at Khan Elkhalili market and recalled that she might have seen similar signs in that market. These answers highlighted how each of the participants interpreted the meaning of the symbol and recalled its story based on their present political and social position.
In contrast to the above example, the army had another narrative to present in city space: the army as the protector of the revolution and Egyptians. The army since 2011 has been very active in introducing their own images into the city space, more so since they removed Morsi and El Sisi took office. They not only use the walls of army and official buildings, but also publicize their images and slogans on public busses and billboards all over Egypt. The most famous of their campaigns is the image in Figure 4. It was the only image that was seen by all interview participants all around the city. The image triggered much sarcasm in the interviews for the discrepancy between the image and the text underneath it, while the text reads: “the army and the people are one hand,” the image represented the people as a toddler carried by the army man.
Photo by author.
One interviewee was critical of the naivety of the campaign, even though he supports the government and its campaigns, when asked if this is effect promotion of the government, he said “Not for me or you, this is silly PR [public relations], but it works with the general public, they need to feel protected by the army now.” For another participant who identified herself as apolitical, this image was of significance as it triggered her re-interpretation of it over time. When Lobna saw the image in 2011, she was touched by it and felt it was a true representation of how when the army tanks went to Tahrir Square everyone was celebrating their support and gave them their children to take pictures with them. As events unfolded, she felt this image is not as idealistic as she had thought and now when she comes across the image it reminds her of the disappointment she experienced as those same tanks started killing protestors. The image’s subjective meaning for the viewer here changed as the context changed, triggering reflexivity and a dialogical process in interpretation.
This image was later reproduced by Egyptian graffiti painter Ammar using the same composition to communicate a counter meaning in Fusion Festival in Germany (Figure 5). This, as well as the critical views from the interviews, highlights how once an image is introduced into the city space, it takes a social life span of its own, out of the control and original meaning of the creator. The sarcasm and reproduction of this image highlights Bartlett’s argument about political propaganda (1940): the public do not simply perceive and believe whatever the regime presents to them, but transform the messages according to their own ideas.
Photo credit: Don Stone.
Part of the social life of images is their destruction; in many instances the reproduction of a graffiti image was triggered by authorities erasing of a previous one. The fresh coat of paint presented a new canvas and also an opportunity for dialogue and sarcasm, with artists spraying statements such as “congratulations on the new coat of paint.” The erasing in itself gives significance to the image and a sense of power to the graffiti, as graffiti artist Keizer expressed in a previous interview. While graffiti artist the Mozza sees “this effort to erase as indicative of something more than just cleaning a wall (…) this is very symbolic for what the government is doing with people’s consciousness and memory.” Erasing also is as much a symbol as introducing one; this is manifested most in the selective erasing by different social actors. Erasing one part of an image may turn a message from a curse of the authority to a campaign for it (see El Sisi stencil in Awad et al., 2017). This erasing could be seen as a “creative destruction, in which a secondary image of defacement or annihilation is created at the same moment that the target image is attacked” (Mitchell, 2005, p. 18).
When looking at the city space in 2016, without the knowledge of the history of the images and their erasing, one sees it predominantly occupied by official images. Most of the revolution graffiti was short lived because of the continuous erasing as well as the declining effort of some graffiti artists interviewed who felt they would rather stay away from the political scene for a while due to the tightened security situation as well as their disappointment in how the revolution has developed. The social life of images, however, does not stop there, but images of graffiti paintings continue to circulate and get reconstructed on the Internet and new graffiti paintings emerge in other parts of the city.
Verbal symbols
Historically, slogans have been used to hint at power relations in city space. For example, as a mark of symbolic power, King Farouk in 1944 changed the army emblem from “god, country, and king” to “god, king, and country” (Kandil, 2012), and during Mubarak’s regime the police slogan was changed from “The police in the service of people” to “The police and the people are in service of the nation,” reflecting how the police was the main arm of the regime securing it against the people.
Similarly, after 2011 different statements have been appropriated and spread by different groups. Previously common nationalistic statements have been used in El Sisi government campaigning, so that statements such as tahiya masr (viva Egypt) or fi hob masr (in the love of Egypt) became synonymous with pro-government sentiments. In pedestrian interviews, when participants were shown signs with such statements, all participants readily identified them as created by the government, army, or their supporters, even when the image did not have any explicit indication of this.
The revolutionary graffiti also repeated certain iconic statements from the revolution, such as “people demand the fall of the regime” and “the revolution continues.” Those statements also went through serial reproduction in response to the changing powers; for example, “down with the regime” was reproduced to “down with the Army” and then “down with the Muslim Brotherhood” and finally “Down with all who betrayed; military, old regime, and Muslim Brotherhood.”
Muslim brotherhood supporters also had their own repeated statements in the street that emerged after the violent dispersal of their protest in Rab’a square and other areas following the coup. It is distinguished by a much wider distribution than all other graffiti, and involves mainly spraying a consistent message all over the country that includes, “Sisi is a killer,” “Sisi is a traitor,” “against the coup,” and “Morsi is my president.” Unlike other graffiti that is centered around main squares and streets, this spraying can be found in countless small streets in different cities, which made it harder for authority to erase. These statements were also coupled with an iconic image of a hand gesture of number four, in reference to Rab’a square, which was used to express solidarity with those killed in the square during dispersal. Twenty-one out of the 25 participants identified seeing the spraying before in the street. While none of the participants belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood group, three participants sympathized with the spraying seeing it as the only outlet for a prosecuted group to express themselves. Most of the other participants criticized the lack of aesthetics in their expression in comparison to revolution graffiti and the images seemed to trigger their negative opinions about the group.
Under the category of text, I also look at the change of the names of certain streets, metro stations and squares. Place names are more than markers of space; they are powerful reminders of certain incidents—as in the earlier mentioned example of the renaming of Tahrir Square area after the fall of the monarchy. Place names act as the mnemonics of a moral geography, where the mere mention of a place name triggers the memory of a certain narrative (Connerton, 2009). For example, graffiti painters have created signs in Mohamed Mahmoud Street to rename it to “Eyes of freedom” in honor of the protestors who lost their eyes by security’s intentional targeting in 2012. However, the street’s official name remains unchanged. Name changes by authorities are more permanent. For example, Rab’a square has been renamed after “Prosecutor General Hesham Barakat” after he lost his life in a terrorist attack in 2015. This name change created a strong shift for the memory of the place; from a space of grieving and solidarity with the Muslim Brotherhood, to a space honoring the general prosecutor who was behind many of the death sentences given to the group’s members. In this instance, the place name conceals part of the history of that place, in which the authorities’ narrative of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group who killed the prosecutor is remembered, and the people who lost their lives in the square during the crackdown are forgotten. Since the name change was recent, most participants were not aware of the change, and some suggested the old name will remain to be the one used in spite of the official change. Overall, the name change as well as other renovations in this square was perceived by three participants as a cover up by authority of their crackdown on protestors.
Structures
In this category, I look at the symbolic meaning of monuments, statues, and buildings, as well as the destruction of these structures. The connection between space and memory is powerfully manifested in monuments as they are intentionally constructed to stimulate people to remember. “Conversely, their destruction transforms a group’s relation to the past, and has often been deliberately used to reconstruct a group’s history” (Wagoner, 2015).
The center of Tahrir Square witnessed an experimentation with the question of what memorial can represent the revolution and who should decide. By the end of 2013, after the removal of Morsi, the interim government inaugurated a memorial base to be dedicated to demonstrators who lost their lives in the revolution. On that same night protestors vandalized the base, rejecting the right of the authorities to honor the dead, as they were also their killers. Protestors set a mock coffin on top of the destructed base and sprayed “Down with all who betrayed; Military, old regime, and Muslim Brotherhood.” By the beginning of 2015, in the same spot a huge pole was inaugurated with the Egyptian flag (Figure 6). A symbol that may represent a unifying nationalistic vision for the future as participants who support the government perceived it, or as an appropriation of the national flag as the symbol of the new regime, so whoever dares to destroy it would be destroying the nation’s biggest symbol, as perceived by most participants who are against the government. Participants who perceived it negatively saw that it represents the new nationalistic meanings of the flag that they do not agree with. According to one participant, the lengthy unreachable pole reminded him of one of the government statements: “Egypt is above all,” which he interprets as the entity of Egypt in abstract terms is more important than the lives and freedoms of its citizens.
Photo by author in May 2015.
In Rab’a square, a new monument was also inaugurated in October 2013 only three months after the crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood protestors there. The monument structure (Figure 7) is of two hands representing the military and police, enclosing a white orb representing the people (Gribbon, 2014). Interestingly, 12 of the participants interviewed did not notice the monument at all, even though 5 of them lived in the same neighborhood of the monument. Only one participant knew its meaning from a newspaper. When participants were asked what it might mean, six participants mentioned concepts of protection and guardianship. While two participants related it to meanings in their own lives, like a mother who interpreted it as two kids playing with a ball, and a scientist who interpreted it as a planet rotating around its axis. Three participants saw it as part of the “cover up” after the brutal dispersal of the Muslim Brotherhood sit-in. From a political point of view this monument also has another meaning in relation to power dynamics, where the hand of the army is an upper hand over the arm of the police. This monument symbolizes the military taking back its position of upper power, the position they had since 1950s but was disrupted by Mubarak’s transition of the country from a military state to a police state (Kandil, 2012).
Photo by author in October 2015.
The last example I will use here is that of destruction of structures. Mid 2015, the government decided to demolish the building that hosted Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP). The location of this building holds a strong history of power successions. Its land was used to house Egyptian Army troops but during colonization it was used for British troops’ barracks. Upon the troops departure, King Farouk ordered the demolition of the structure in a move to prove his anti-occupation position. Then after 1952 revolution, the land was used to construct a government building to be the symbol of the new Egypt, hosting Nasser’s socialist union. Later during Mubarak’s time, part of the building hosted his National Democratic Party and the rest of the building hosted other government offices and councils (Cairo Observer, 2011). During the protests in 2011, fire was set to the building—it is not known who set the fire—and the burned structure became a symbol of the revolution’s victory over the regime.
Visually the aesthetic value of the building (Figure 8) became as controversial as graffiti. It is a burned building, but to some interview participants who were part of the revolution “it was the only physical icon remaining of the revolution, the only monument representing how the revolts won over authority.” While supporters of government saw its destruction as a progressive move to get rid of an ugly building to build something more useful. The destruction signifies how certain structures can be powerful objectifications of particular events, which must be destroyed if one wants to change their meaning in the present (Wagoner, 2015). As I conducted interviews in January 2016, the building was all on the ground, yet 12 of the participants did not notice it was gone even though they mentioned visiting the downtown area frequently.
Photo by author in May 2015 before destruction.
Discussion
Looking back at the research questions of how are symbols in public space intentionally produced and modified to communicate a certain narrative and regulate a community’s collective memory, and how are those symbols perceived and remembered by pedestrians. I would like to focus here on four main points for discussion: exposure, social life of symbols, perception, and the overall effect on pedestrian experience.
In terms of exposure, army posters had the most visibility overall; all participants have seen at least one of the army symbols compared to only 11 out of the 25 participants who have previously seen at least one of the graffiti symbols in the street. The expected power discrepancy between one narrative over the other was evident, the authority’s narratives are communicated through widespread billboards, material monuments, and official place name changes, while the alternative narratives’ traces remain in small side street walls and erased murals. The authority’s intentional erasing and destruction in parallel to production of a coherent dominant narrative was clear from fieldwork as well as from interviews. Generally, the control of authority over the production and consumption of the narrative of the past is unmatched by any other collective (Wertsch, 2008). How effective this control is in shaping collective memory depends however on an understanding of the particular audience and how they perceive the symbols, as well as on other mediums they are exposed to such as online outlets.
The serial reproduction of symbols highlighted the agency of all social actors and the dynamic social life of symbols in public sphere. In contrast to Bartlett's experiments when participants serially reproduced foreign images that they had no access to, transforming them into something familiar (Wagoner, 2017b), in the current case, transformation was not about forgetting the original symbol or making a foreign object familiar, but about social actors actively appropriating symbols to represent the past the way they make sense of it (see transformation of Figure 1 to Figure 2 then Figure 3, and Figure 4 to Figure 5).
The perception of symbols was analyzed in terms of what participants remembered as well as how they remembered. Both the government and graffiti symbols were effective triggers for remembering certain recent incidents (e.g., Figure 3 triggered the attack and Figure 4 triggered the army’s intervention in 2011). However, how participants remembered those incidents challenged the potential of those symbols in changing people’s relationship to the collective past. This puts the pedestrians as agentic recipients of symbols: they perceive them, reconstruct their meaning, and create their own counter symbols in response (Awad et al., 2017). Examples from data highlighted how participants negotiated their interpretations and assigned meanings to the symbols (e.g., the different ways the attack was narrated from the blue bra image). These findings support Bartlett’s (1932) social approach to remembering, highlighting how individuals’ remembering is influenced by their present social context, feelings, interests, and social group membership.
However, this limitation in the symbols’ potential for reflexivity could be attributed to the fact that the memories are still recent and the political atmosphere is still very polarized in the aftermath of the revolution. There is higher potential for a symbol to trigger perspective taking or change of view for those who are more distant from politics (such as Lobna’s reinterpretation of the army photo) or for coming generations who have not witnessed the events themselves.
The pedestrian experience analyzed from the interviews showed that even though participants were not attentive to changes in their surroundings, they had a strong overall feel of certain places after the change. It is interesting how even though the research deals with very recent events, some participants were already not noticing the disappearance of the building in Figure 8 or the new monument in Figure 7, in spite of these being in areas they recorded passing by frequently. Participants’ responses trigger one to ask how many of the changes in our surroundings do we notice, and how does the continuous transformation in modern cities generate what Connerton (2009) refers to as cultural amnesia. In spite of the lack of attentiveness of most participants, they shared strong opinions as to what they would like to see in their city. As one would expect, the participants who were attached to the graffiti and the remains of the revolution were keen on the symbols remaining. “It is the remaining trace of resistance” (Mostafa) and a source of “reassurance that someone still remembers and does not believe what the media is saying” (Eman). While other participants who were neutral or supportive to current regime saw the revolution as a rupture that they need to move on from and preferred the clean new look of Cairo, something that represents “opening a new page” (Ahmed) and “working on a new Egypt” (Noha). Furthermore, they shared an overall feeling of certain places due to the changes. Among participants who are against the government, feelings of exclusion were associated with the nationalist campaigns’ billboards and the flag in Figure 6, and feelings of domination and power were associated with the numerous army posters on highways and bridges, “signs confirming that everything now is owned and controlled by them” (Ehab). Also, with regards to Tahrir and Rab’a squares’ renovations, while many of the details of the changes were not noticed, an overall feeling of those places varied depending on participants’ orientation, for supporters it was a “clean up,” while for opposition it was a “cover up.”
These findings put the agency of the perceiver and the deliberate transformation of the city space as two forces influencing what is remembered and transferred in the society. These two forces are mediated by the social and dialogical nature of memory, where as one’s memory is triggered by a certain symbol, an interpretation is re-constructed, borrowing from certain chosen narratives that were authored collaboratively in society such as the label set el banat that was used in one of the participants’ recall of the story behind Figure 1.
Conclusion
The discussion of memory and city space in this article is as much about the past as it is about the present and the future. The transformations of symbols as well as the transformations in people’s perceptions and memories are all indexes of changing times.
It is too early to predict the effect of the authority’s deliberate use of symbols to regulate the community’s collective memory. The government’s reconstruction of the past to build a “new stable Egypt” is distorting the most significant nationalistic moment for the millions who went to the streets in 2011. The effect of this exclusion goes beyond pedestrians’ experience in the public space to their overall distancing from their role as agents for change in their country, as it is not only concealing their past but also the future the revolutionaries have imagined (Figure 9).
“Do you remember the tomorrow that never came?” Graffiti and Photo by Keizer.
This paper has attempted to analyze the competing narratives of recent history as they unfold in public space, highlighting the power of a symbol in the form of an image, a statement, or a structure in shaping representations of the past. Even though we are agents to a great extent to what and how we remember, the urban environment around us enforce certain memories and promote the forgetting of others. This urban space manifests unequal power dynamics between the different social actors, where the authorities have the upper hand on what narratives get to stay in the public space. These dominant narratives have their limitations however: historically every regime has attempted to overwrite history, but alternative narratives have endured through art, storytelling, and different forms of documentation. In current times, this can be seen in activists’ resistance to forgetting by finding other outlets in social media and through creating online archives of the revolution such as “Wiki-thawra”—the slogan of which is “so we don’t forget.” Also, the temporary interventions of graffiti will continue to establish a presence in public space that demands recognition and the more vigorously the authorities try to erase it, the clearer it becomes that they have not yet succeeded in establishing the official narrative (Tripp, 2013).
Everyday practices in public space will also continue to open dialogue between the different narratives presented in this paper. Ordinary practices of walking around the city and exchanging stories of “here used to be…,” these acts express everyday forms of resistance, attributing different meanings to the public space than those enforced upon the society by the existing order, and providing the infrastructure for dialogue about the past, promoting heterogeneous interpretations of it (De Certeau, 1984). Through street interventions, online resources, and everyday practices, the less powerful narratives may continue as a rupture that disturbs the taken for granted dominant narratives, triggering questioning and reflection.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Brady Wagoner for his constructive suggestions and ideas that helped shape this article. I would also like to thank Ilka Eichof, Constance de Saint-Laurent, Seamus Power, Sherif Aboelhadid, and Vlad Glaveanu for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper. I am also very grateful for the participants’ trust and valuable opinions. The statements made and the views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Part of the fieldwork for this article was supported by a grant from the Niels Bohr Professorship Centre fundee by Danske Grundforskningsfond.