Abstract
Yasser al-Manawahly is an Egyptian musician and song writer whose debut was in the wake of the January 2011 uprising. Although many of these ‘voices of the new revolution’ have become silent since the 2013 coup, some are still actively trying to maintain the revolution’s goals. In 2014, al-Manawahly released a music video, ‘Ahy Rig’it Rima’ critiquing the coup, which went viral at a time when freedoms were severely curtailed. ‘Rima’ was followed by a long hiatus until the release of ‘Tili’t ouffa’ in 2016. Through analysing this and another video, ‘Khayyif’, released shortly after, and through interviewing al-Manawahly, this article explores the shift in the country’s political conditions and the artist’s political consciousness that underlie his move from satirizing regimes or policies to a satirical self-critique. Al-Manawahly is among millions of Egyptians who, dissatisfied with Morsi’s 2012–13 presidency, fell easy prey to the machinations of the counter-revolution. Can songs become a ‘podium’ for correcting the course of the Egyptian revolution? The article investigates al-Manawahly’s means to that end.
In 2014, an article in Popular Music and Society noted that ‘music and performance have been at the heart of the ongoing Egyptian revolution’ and argued that ‘popular protest music in particular has helped to shape and articulate emerging desires and aspirations as well as participating in criticisms and grievances at the site of political change’ (Valassopoulos and Mostafa, 2014: 638). Indeed, it was true that music and performances prominently featured at every turn of a long chain of events that have unfolded since January 2011. First, during the initial 18-day sit-in from 25 January until President Mubarak stepped down and the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) took over the transition government, Tahrir Square was teeming with performances. Many of those were impromptu group singing of older songs of political protest, while others were new songs and skits composed on the spot by artists who were as yet unknown to the general public. Among the latter, Ramy Essam gained immediate popularity and was dubbed the ‘singer of the revolution’. Additional songs and performances were inspired by the square but born outside, and disseminated on social media. Here again, the majority of those performers were either a completely new or nascent generation who ‘emerged as voices of the new revolution’ (Valassopoulos and Mostafa, 2014: 641). As they continued to compose and perform songs tied to the fast paced political and social developments during the next three years, their fame and popularity grew. Many appeared on television through the privately owned channels (never on the basic channels owned by the Egyptian government), but social media remained their main venue. This was at once the result and, as Valassopoulos and Mostafa (2014: 639) argue, the proof that the 2011 revolution was still ‘unfinished’, ‘incomplete’ and ‘fluid’. Even while Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi 1 was being groomed for a landslide victory in a controversial presidential election, the authors could still claim that ‘the voice of the 2011 revolution is still alive and well’ (2014: 640). Whether this claim was indeed correct then or is still correct now is a very interesting question and invites a lot of debate and qualification. I will pick up on that question near the end of this article but for now I will only note the fact that the authors sought evidence to support this claim in the continued output – albeit diminished – of pro-revolution songs and performances. This meagre output included new videos by Cairokee, a band who attracted the public eye in the wake of the uprisings of 2011, and the continuation of Bassem Youssef’s highly critical satire show, al-Bernameg, an Egyptian variation on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. It also included a YouTube video by Yasser al-Manawahly, ‘Ahy Rig’it Rima’ (Here returns Rima), which satirizes both the governance of ousted President Morsi and the subsequent takeover by the military. Al-Manawahly is a self-taught guitarist who, as he has mentioned in several televised interviews, never thought of himself as a professional, but in January 2011 wanted to use his music as a podium to express the views of an average citizen. He has since recorded more than twenty songs, ‘a chronicle of the uprising’s watersheds’ (Howeidy, 2014). Except for ‘Rima,’ and ‘Ayh el-gedid’ (‘What’s new?’), whose lyrics were written by Mohamed al-Sayyid, al-Manawahly writes the music and lyrics for his songs, and usually accompanies his singing by playing an acoustic guitar. 2 His introduction to the public was initially through a YouTube video that circulated widely on social media. The video showed him playing his guitar and singing in a small recording studio setting. The popularity of the video attracted the attention of several television talk show hosts who hosted him on several shows which introduced him to a larger audience. It is noteworthy, however, that al-Manawahly’s television appearances have only been on non-governmental cable stations, and only during the relatively freer period between February 2011 and July 2013. After that, al-Manawahly returned to reaching his audience through YouTube and social media. His 2011 debut song, ‘Qilla Mundassa’ (‘Infiltrator Minority’), was a satire against the Egyptian mainstream media that maligned the Tahrir protesters as an ‘infiltrator minority’. Satire has continued to be a common mode of his songs since then. His video, ‘Ahy Rig’it Rima’, ‘went viral’ almost immediately after its release in February 2014 (Howeidy, 2014).
Satire and politics in Egypt
In ‘Qilla Mundassa’, al-Manawahly rebuts the accusation that the protesters in Tahrir were foreign agents rather than Egyptians of true and authentic local aspirations by noting that they were playing music on the oud and singing the songs of the late singer and musician Imam Issa, more commonly known as Shaykh Imam. Through this gesture, the song indirectly situates itself within a tradition of resistance songs, many of which were highly satirical. Indeed, in Egypt, satire has been a popular tool for protest and mobilization against rulers and policies that are deemed autocratic or unjust throughout the country’s history, both modern and pre-modern alike. One could also argue that it has been an effective tool, or at the very least that it was viewed as a threat by the government, which has often harassed and persecuted its practitioners. Yet little scholarship takes it as its subject and relatively little is known about it among non-Arabs. This is the result of a long-standing disregard of both written and oral compositions that use the spoken register of the language as their medium within a culture that has always sustained a diglossia, a distinction between the language of speech and the language of writing and literary arts. Many are the highly original, creative and complex works in both poetry and prose that have gone unstudied or even unrecorded, primarily because of their colloquial register.
Shaykh Imam (1918–95) may indeed be the closest forefather of al-Manawahly in a lineage that extends back over several centuries. Imam composed music for and sang the verse of the late poet Ahmad Fua’d Najm (1929–2013). The duo, Najm and Imam, have been present at every political protest event in Egypt since the late 1960s, in spirit if not in person. For even while the poet and musician were still alive, they were often jailed or otherwise barred from openly performing in public venues. However, their songs, which were often recorded by friends and fans and clandestinely circulated on cassette tapes, were known to numerous activists, who sang them to voice their grievances and fuel their enthusiasm for dissent. The sit-in in Tahrir in 2011 was no exception, and group singing of songs mocking the regime, the wealthy elite and the repressive state policies proliferated, even among youth too young to have known the duo during their days of live ‘performances’. 3
In an earlier generation, it was the verse compositions known as zajals of Abdallah al-Nadim (1844–96), Ya’qub Sannu’(1839–1912) and Bayram al-Tunisi (1893–1961) that abounded in satire and fuelled the protests against the corrupt monarchy and the colonial government. Such compositions were mostly circulated through a ‘nonofficial press’, a platform that emerged in the 19th century and enjoyed enormous popularity.
‘The Egyptians are particularly prone to satire; and often display considerable wit in their jeers and jests,’ observed British orientalist Edward William Lane as early as 1830. ‘Their language,’ he added, ‘affords them great facility for punning and for ambiguous conversation in which they frequently indulge. The lower orders sometimes lampoon their rulers in songs, and ridicule those enactments of the government by which they themselves most suffer’ (Lane, 1908: 314). As an example, Lane recalls a song that was popular among the people of the southern town, Aswan, which called upon the plague to rid them of their tyrannical governor and his clerk. It is undoubtedly true that such songs abounded at the time of Lane and even earlier, and that most of this rich legacy of songs of creative dissent was, unfortunately, lost. However, and as Ziad Fahmy (2014) meticulously documents, by the middle of the 19th century, writers of satire in general and of zajals in particular had transformed these arts into an important part of a new ‘national media’, and an emergent Egyptian mass culture: ‘The most important of these media, owing to their increased accessibility and popularity with the Egyptian public, were the colloquial press and the burgeoning comedic and musical theater’ (Fahmy, 2014: 39).
Booth (1992) notes that the colloquial language, political themes and satirical mode were the reasons why the outreach of this nascent indigenous press far exceeded its paid circulation or its readers – strictly speaking, since it was often shared in oral, communal settings with an audience that was barely literate. Fahmy concurs and also notes the addition of a visual component –cartoons – and confirms that, as such, these satires, did have a strong impact on Egyptian politics.
The combination of biting vernacular humor and satire, geared for oral (re)transmission, and new visually stimulating cartoons greatly enhanced the popularity and political effectiveness of these journals. Their novelty, entertainment value, and accessibility to the masses greatly contributed to the delegitimization of the ruling regime and helped to focus Egyptian anger on foreign interference and economic inequity. (2014: 51–2)
Arguably, this emergent culture of political satire, which continued to play a role in Egyptian mass uprisings during the 19th and 20th centuries, provides both an inspiration and a model for political mobilization and resistance to authoritarian regimes through humour. 4 However, and perhaps not surprisingly, most of the satirists whose works appeared in the press, including Sannu’, al-Nadim and al-Tunisi had to spend long periods hiding from the Egyptian state authorities and, when caught, were forced to spend years in exile. And, unfortunately, such repressive measures remain as eminent a danger today as they were in the past. Al-Manawahly’s song, ‘Ahy Rig’it Rima’ opens on a reference to these measures.
Rima
Rima has returned after the change to an old story that we have seen often; a raised whip and forbidden speech while people are dying of bullets and hunger. Rima has returned. Why has she returned?
Rima, in the song’s title and its refrain, is a thinly veiled reference to the pre-revolution regime and an allusion to an old Arab proverb, Rig’it Rima li-‘aditha al-‘dima (Rima has returned to her old ways). After opening with the above question, the rest of the song is a satirical narrative of the developments that led to the coup of 2013: Because the ill-fated one had a lantern and brave youth whom he left to rot. He could not drive without running over [people]. He crashed into a stake especially erected for him. Rima saw him and overturned him. Rima has returned to ask why Pharaoh has become a tyrant.
Drawing on another proverb, ‘the ill-fated one will always be ill-fated even if they [people] hang a lantern over his head’, an aphorism usually implying that the person in question will always do badly regardless of the resources or opportunities made available to him, the lyrics satirize President Morsi and criticize him for marginalizing activists and politicians who did not belong to his own Muslim Brothers group. However, using driving as a metaphor for governing allows for the use of the verb ‘it’alabit’ (colloquial usage of inqalabit) which shares the same root as the word inqilab, Arabic for coup d’état. Such a choice of words already constitutes a position against the coup, since the term was disfavored by its supporters who preferred to refer to it as a ‘revolution,’ the ‘revolution of 30 June’. Last but not least, there is the reference to Pharaoh, which is a synonym for tyrant in mainstream Egyptian parlance. The question that the song poses refers to a proverb in which the Pharaoh is asked, ‘Oh Pharaoh, who made you such a Pharaoh/tyrant?’ and he responds: ‘I did not find anyone to stop me.’
The rest of the lyrics continue to mock al-Sisi and his supporters who presumably turned him into Pharaoh; the media that glammed him up as a super-hero, the business magnates who were ready to bankroll support campaigns, and the religious figures and celebrities who stood behind the coup. In the end, the song bashes ‘Rima’ for being a sham, a counter-revolution in progressive clothing: Rima has returned with old slogans and here, boys, comes the movie’s hero; he is of the military and a surefire, and although he is tender, he can be a Samson and level mountains. Together with a few drummers, a few capitals, sanctioned fatwas and cinema folk, Rima has returned. Rima has returned wearing new masks covering up a crime with a game of hide and seek. Your games are not fooling us, sneaky. We have seen much and it all proved a hoax. Screw Rima!
‘Ahy Rig’it Rima’ has continued to be one of al-Manawahly’s most popular and widely viewed videos to date, an addition to the satires for which he had become known since the release of ‘Qilla Mundassa’ (the song that introduced him to the public in 2011) but also a deviation from them in a way that will become more perceivable in his subsequent videos released in the eyars 2015–17. Before I can elaborate on the nature of this deviation, a detour to some of the theoretical investigations into the nature and poetics of satire is necessary.
Satire: its targets and ‘butts’
In his Glossary of Literary Terms, M.H. Abrams (1999) defines satire is as: Literary art of diminishing or denigrating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking towards it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire derides, that is it uses laughter as a weapon and against a butt … (1999: 275)
According to this definition, satire is a literary art, yet the focus is not on its artistry but on its end result, that it denigrates and derides. Laughter is among its essential results, which must be used ‘as a weapon’. This militancy of satire may be the only overlap between Abrams’ definition and Frye’s (1957) older and equally acclaimed one: The chief distinction between irony and satire is that satire is militant irony: its moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured. Sheer invective or name calling (‘flyting’) is satire in which there is relatively little irony: on the other hand, whenever a reader is not sure what the author’s attitude is or what his is supposed to be, we have irony with relatively little satire. (1957: 223)
While Abrams does not mention irony as an essential feature of satire, Frye defines satire as a subset of the ironic mode within the comic. Frye does not claim that either irony or satire must produce laughter, for even while he states that ‘satire is irony which is structurally close to the comic’ and that ‘wit or humor’ are as essential to satire as ‘an object of attack’ (1957: 223). He also notes that satire can leave its audience with a bitter aftertaste: Once we have finished with it, deserts of futility open up on all sides, and we have, in spite of the humor, a sense of nightmare and a close proximity to something demonic. (1957: 226)
In other words, Frye does not claim that a successful satire must necessarily humiliate its adversaries, ‘so that they would be laughed, hopefully into extinction’ (Bloom and Bloom, 1979: 16), although satirists and those who see eye to eye with them can always hope. Instead, he situates the ‘militancy’ of satire in its ability to highlight the discrepancy between the morally acceptable and the grotesque or absurd. This is an important divergence, whereby one seeks the impact of the satire not in its adversaries’ denigration, but in its ability to allow the audience to partake of the satirist’s perspective on the adversary. The divergence is reiterated by later critics writing on satire: What we suggest rather is the capacity of some satire to effect a gradual moral awakening, a reaffirmation of positive social and individual values. This renewed awareness – probably beyond the grasp anyway of the culprit or eiron under fire– is intended for a general mankind capable of moral perception. (Bloom and Bloom, 1979: 16–17)
I have argued elsewhere (Radwan, 2019) that al-Manawahly’s satires since 2011 have demonstrated a move from satires that aim at a direct attack on their ‘butts’ with the purpose of shaming them into amending their ways to satires that mock their ‘butts’ with the purpose of alerting their target audience to the flaws of the ‘butts’ without an expectation that the latter be part of the former. ‘Qilla Mundassa’ is an example of the first kind of satire. In this song, the butt and hopefully part of the target audience is the Egyptian mainstream media that the song characterizes as shameful and deceitful, ‘a spokesman for the regime’. An example of the second kind is ‘Sandu’al-Na’d’ (‘The [International] Monetary Fund’), where the song, recorded as a music video in 2012, mocks the IMF’s policies, but targets an audience among the Egyptian poor, rather than among any officials who are directly affiliated with the IMF itself. I have also argued that ‘Ahy Rig’it Rima’ represents yet another shift in the poetics of al-Manawahly’s satire. The video combines lyrics that critique and mock the regime of President Morsi as well as the military and the counter-revolution with visuals that underscore the manipulation of the victims – the Egyptian public at large. The video shows al-Manawahly at a table making a marionette, while a bunch of other marionettes in traditional Egyptian clothes are dancing behind his back. Henri Bergson (1921) argues that to ‘fancy that our seeming freedom conceals the strings of a dancing-jack [marionette]’ transforms what is serious in life into a laughable matter. The video thus transforms the Egyptian public, its very own target audience, into a ‘laughable matter’, to lament that the counter-revolution has manipulated them as marionettes on strings. It is a laughable irony but it indirectly militates against its own targets by deploying poetics similar to those referenced in Bergson’s article: ‘At first the laugher’, he writes, ‘looks upon another’s personality as a marionette’, but soon the merriment dissipates when ‘the laugher more closely analyses his laughter’ (1921: 199). ‘Ahy Rig’it Rima’ therefore allows its audience to laugh, but more importantly, in the moments of relaxation that laughter affords, it also offers them a vantage point and the space to re-think their role(s) in the country’s recent political developments and the setbacks of the 2011 revolutionary movement.
The political developments that led Egypt to rebound from a revolution that ousted President Mubarak (1981–2011) in 2011 to a mass movement that groomed and then instituted his former chief of military intelligence, Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, as president undoubtedly comprise a laughable irony. The humour in ‘Rima’ is partially a result of this irony, and it may indeed produce laughter, but it’s not laughter that is directed at the others. It is also laughter that produces its ‘corrective’ effect, to borrow Bergson’s (1921) term, through its immediate aftermath, when the laughers become aware of the fact that they have been manipulated into ushering in the counter-revolution. One could argue that this ‘corrective’ humour resonates particularly well with its Egyptian audience, rather than alienating or offending it, because of a dominant image that Egyptians have of themselves as a people who even laugh at times of hardships and crisis. ‘Hamm yidahak wa hamm yibbaki’ (‘A woe that brings laughter and a woe that brings weeping’) is a common proverb that is often iterated after people with heavy hearts have allowed themselves a laugh or two without trivializing their affliction. It is a proverb reminiscent of a famous line by the poet, al-Mutanabbi (
Rima is back. Now what?
It was not until last winter that I finally met Yasser al-Manawahly in person. We decided on an interview in December 2017 for the purpose of writing this article. By then most of the other ‘voices of the revolution’ had become silent. Some, like Ramy Essam and Bassem Youssef, had left the country following multiple incidents of persecution, and were living abroad. Cairokee, had just released an online album, but were forced to cancel several live performances that had been scheduled at al-Sawy cultural wheel, a small but popular venue in Cairo. In 2016, six young amateurish theatre performers who had formed a troupe they called Atfal al-Shawari’ (Street Kids) were jailed from May to September after being charged with ‘incitement to violence and the overthrow of the regime’, a charge that the court found to have no merit. The troupe had been using a cellular phone camera to video record short skits they performed on Cairo streets satirizing some of the government’s policies. The videos were uploaded to YouTube and disseminated via social media. To my knowledge, they have not uploaded new videos following their release. 5 Al-Manawahly had just released a new song whose opening lyrics are: ‘I am a scared citizen, and I no more see [a way out] except to leave or to live frivolously.’
‘Are you a scared citizen?’ was, therefore, one of my first questions.
‘I am, but I am also trying not to give in to my fear,’ he replied and then volunteered an anecdote about his return to Cairo in 2016 at the end of a personal trip that had kept him abroad for almost a year: I was apprehensive that I would get arrested at the airport. I had even contacted one family member who is a low-level state security official and asked if he could be there for me in the airport when I arrive. Upon arrival, I anxiously presented my passport to the officer at passport control. He got up from his seat, left the booth and moved closer to me. I was certain that the handcuffs would be in his back pocket. He asked me if I was the Yasser al-Manawahly who sang ‘Rima’ but before my heart could stop, he broke into a smile, and whispered to me that he was an admirer. He said that my songs were ‘very good’ and that I should ‘keep singing’.
Al-Manawahly’s airport anecdote is noteworthy for several reasons in addition to the fact that it reflects a common fear that Egyptians who speak against the regime commonly have and also indicates that holding a position of serving the state in Egypt does not always mean a genuine allegiance to the ruling regime or to its policies. First, there is the fact that he told it as a humorous narrative, where the humour is based on irony, the incongruity of the officer’s action and common expectations. Second, that the comic figure in the anecdote is the speaker himself who, in rendering his fear laughable, invites others to re-examine their own similar fears.
Both ‘Tili’t ouffa’ and ‘Khayyif’ deploy similar poetics. ‘Tili’t ouffa’, which literally translates into ‘I turned out to be a straw handbasket’, is how Egyptians may colloquially and laughingly say that someone was fooled or duped. The lyrics are a first-person narrative of how the speaker was fooled into participating in something he did not understand, a not so subtle reference to the mass mobilization against President Morsi on 30 June 2013. 6
I was duped by a charming gesture, made to partake of festivities next to a cemetery
This rather macabre mood, is lightened by a cheery tune played on an accordion, but the lyrics continue to mention the bloodshed against the supporters of President Morsi following his ouster and how it was overlooked by the liberals in the name of patriotism. The song parodies an exchange between a concerned citizen who questions the unfolding events and another who orders him to drop the inquiry and salute the flag. Here, the music briefly acquires a slightly militaristic tone through loud and repetitive guitar strumming. The exchange ends with the inquirer asking how he can chant ‘long live Egypt’ while he is actually dying: We were fooled under the flag. Salute the flag! Hey, there is blood. Salute the flag! There are people in distress. Salute the flag! How can it ‘long live’ while I am dying here? Better to lower the flag and wrap it around a coffin.
The music then returns to its ‘French bistro’ quality as the speaker goes back to describing how he was fooled by those who posited themselves as the intellectual elite. They promised a ‘rosy’ future, goes the song, and claimed that they could take advantage of a military coup for the moment and ‘shoo’ the military back to its barracks to re-institute a liberal government later. In the end, the singer uses lengthened syllables as if moaning or wailing the question: Where did your shoos go? Where was my head?
Al-Manawahly was among the participants in the mobilization against President Morsi on 30 June 2013, as he said in a television interview in 2014 and reiterated when we met, but came to regret it as it became clear that the mobilization did not aim at a reorientation towards the goals of 2011 but at a counter-revolution that would restore the powers of the old regime and the military. ‘Tili’t ouffa’ is as much a confession and an apology as it is a critique, he said.
Production matters
In terms of its production, ‘Tili’t ouffa’ is unique among al-Manawahly’s repertoire in that it is the only song or video clip that was not recorded/produced at the artist’s expense. His earlier video clips, ‘Sandu’al-Na’ad’ and ‘Rima’ were produced out of pocket at the cost of more than 10,000 Egyptian dinars (pounds) each, while his songs have been for the most part recorded in a modestly equipped studio owned by friends. ‘Tili’t ouffa’, on the other hand, was produced by Al-‘Araby TV, a non-governmental privately owned television network based in London, and was filmed in Jordan. Al-Manawahly has mixed feelings about this move. On the one hand, he is glad that the video is out. It has been broadcast in a number of Arab cities. It has also garnered more than half a million views on YouTube, the primary venue through which al-Manawahly reaches his audience, with numerous positive comments. Yet, al-Manawahly still feels uneasy about the offshore production. He was concerned about being accused, by his audience and followers as well as his detractors, of speaking up against the counter-revolution and the current regime only from a safe distance. He insisted that the video not be broadcast until he was back in the country in the summer of 2016, where he had stayed till the writing of this article. Repression, in the form of arrest, detention and even torture and assassination is not a far-fetched expectation for him, but equally important is the fact that it had become nearly impossible for him to produce a video like ‘Sandu’ al-Na’d’ or ‘Tili’t ouffa’, both of which involved casting actors and filming outside of the studio. Even recording studios are becoming difficult to secure, because the owners are afraid of punitive repercussions. Securing a permit for a live performance has become out of the question, and so has the possibility of being hosted on any television station.
‘Scared’
In May 2017, al-Manawahly returned to YouTube, this time recording at his own home. He recorded a video which he announced as part of a series named ‘fadfada’, literally offloading or chitchat. He said that a friend, to whom he gave the pseudonym ‘Ankab, has advised him to return to his ‘one-man show’ and to release some of his yet unreleased songs this way. Al-Manawahly added that the hope is that the ‘fadfada’ episodes, which are seven to ten minutes long, would be broadcast bimonthly, and that this would create a venue for him to directly communicate with his audience. ‘Tomorrow, I will spend the day responding to your comments,’ he added before he turned to singing and guitar playing. To date, he has produced only three episodes, but he has not given up on the possibility of producing more. It is to the third one, released in the summer of 2017, that I now turn.
The video opens on him seated in front of a microphone with an acoustic guitar on his lap (Figure 1). Silently, he starts to go through a stack of 9 × 12-inch placards. The placards, which look like they have been torn out of a sketch pad, say ‘Tiran and Sanafir are Egyptian’,
7
‘Historically Egyptian’, ‘Geographically Egyptian’, and ‘Egyptian, and will be retrieved’. The last two are blank and al-Manawahly points at his mouth, gesturing that he is not speaking but that there is a lot to say. A few seconds later, he begins to play the guitar and to sing: I am a scared citizen and I no longer see [a way out] except to leave or to live frivolously. My resources are wasted, my security is endangered and I am living hesitantly thanks to my ‘false consciousness’.
Screen shot of ‘Scared’. The Arabic reads ‘Tiran and Sanafir are Egyptian’.
The lyrics then turn to satirical references to some of the statements that President Sisi has made in his speeches, including a speech in which he spoke about how poor the country is and how that makes it difficult for the government to provide even the basic needs of the citizens: I heard him say that we were poor, going from a rock to a hard place. His words reduce the people to bums [while] I see wealth as far as the eye can see and I want to scream but fear stops me. With a ‘boo’, I freak out and with a ‘shush’ I stop before he claws me or jails me or frames me or squishes me or messes me up although I actually pay him to protect me.
Near the end of the song, the singer assumes the voice of the regime, before the refrain, ‘I am a scared citizen, and I no longer see …’ brings the song to a close.
Swear you will never chant and say freedom and forget about democracy. What is wrong with Fascism? Authoritarianism? A ‘security state’ is also good and even more so a repressive one.
Conclusion: to laugh together is to stand together
It is quite clear that both videos are a scathing critique of the regime of President al-Sisi, and its advocates. The earlier video focuses on the deceptive discourse that the media and some widely known liberal intellectuals used – knowingly at times and inadvertently at others – to mobilize the public and rally support for the counter-revolution, which ultimately led to the election of al-Sisi as president. The focus of the second video is the state of fear that the regime has created during the past four years to silence all opposition and to normalize ‘authoritarianism’. My contention, however, is that the poetics of satire in these two videos transcend this manifest critique. Their significance does not lie in shaming the regime, or even in drawing attention to its atrocities, but in their potential as means of recuperating the popular movement that was crystallized in the outbreak of the protests of 2011. By making the satirist the ‘butt’ of his own satire, both videos allow the audience a moment of reprieve in which they laugh at this comic figure, ‘ the sucker’ who was fooled into joining festivities while others are dying, or the ‘scared citizen’ who is freaked out by a ‘boo!’ and silenced by a ‘shush!’ Then, it is in the following moments when ‘the laugher more closely analyses his laughter’ that the videos realize their full potential, when the audience from among the rank and file of the 2011 movement re-examine the mistakes they made, and may be continuing to make, in lending support to this regime. In other words, the humour and playfulness of the videos, coupled with the satirist’s self-deprecating poetics, soften the audience and incline them towards a much needed and honest self-critique and a re-evaluation of their positions and behaviour during and after the summer of 2013.
The period between the ouster of Mubarak in 2011 and the election of President Sisi has been characterized, among other things, by heightened divisive identity politics, and a pervasive discourse that created a house of mirrors, whereby the supporters of the counter-revolution could pose as the true patriots and accuse those who spoke up against the military government of having ‘a false consciousness’ at best. At worst, the accusations ranged from opponents being unpatriotic to downright treacherous. Some of this antagonism may, however, be dying down as people who were enthusiastic about al-Sisi’s regime in 2013 become less so in 2017–18.
‘I admit, I’m one of those people who were fooled,’ al-Manawahly had said in an interview for the weekly digital English-language paper al-Ahram online, in February 2014, in the wake of ‘Rima’s’ release. He reiterated that statement in a television interview a month later and again when we met in 2017. At this latter meeting he also added that many of those who denounced his critique of the counter-revolution at the time have since then voiced some frustration with the current regime, and many have also implied that they ‘understand now what they did not understand then’. ‘But it is hard to admit that you were wrong, that you made a bad choice, especially a choice with such hefty consequences,’ he added. Findings of political psychology research confirm al-Manawahly’s anecdotally supported and intuitive reading of the historical moment and the public sentiment: People are motivated to justify, defend, and support the status quo. Sometimes existing states are the result of our own choices. People rationalize these decisions, upgrading what was chosen and downgrading what was not. (Brehm, 1956, cited in Eidelman and Crandall, 2012)
This bias obviously complicates the potential process of recuperating the popular movement of 2011. It makes it imperative upon those who wish to see another revolutionary movement against the current regime to note this complexity as an impediment that needs to be tackled delicately. Direct confrontation often backfires, and the obvious failings of the status quo are not enough to inspire protest, as Eidelman and Crandall argue: This support for the status quo increases in response to manipulations designed to motivate its defense. When the social system is threatened … justification of the social system increases …. These findings provide strong evidence that some forms of a status quo bias stem from motivation to see the existing state of affairs as good, right, and fair. (2012: ??)
Al-Manawahly finds his means to that recuperation in laughter. His post-coup satires allow his audience, potential future allies in bringing back the 2011 popular movement, to laugh at the comic figure, the ‘butt’ of the satire, before compelling them to re-think their own political arguments and positions. Furthermore, it appears that the use of social media, with its ability to create a platform for the performer to directly communicate with his audience, has enhanced the potential for the songs and videoclips to engender the communication necessary for recuperation. Although ‘fadfada’ did not deliver more than three ‘episodes’, it did indeed create a platform for exchanging views not only between al-Manawahly and his audience, who left thousands of comments both on the YouTube page and on Facebook, but also between the commentators themselves. Going through the comments, it could be seen that they constitute a spectrum, including some who belong to the Muslim Brotherhood and others who supported or even still support Morsi’s ouster.
‘There are a lot of good people [in my audience] with whom I have a difference of political opinion,’ al-Manawahly said. ‘I want to critique, but not alienate, them. I want us to stand together to continue what was started in January 2011.’ He is not too concerned about the anonymity that social media offers some of his commentators, who may be using avatars and pseudonyms, but insists on keeping slurs and dirty language out of every thread. When such language does appear, he deletes the comment and occasionally blocks ‘repeat offenders’. Looking at the continuous and rising popularity of al-Manawahly’s satires on social media, as well as the ‘discussions’ they have generated, I am inclined to agree with Valassopoulos and Mostafa (2014), that the revolution of 2011 remains alive, even if it is momentarily not well.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.