In 2011, Egypt’s Tahrir Square became center stage for a revolution that swept away the thirty-year presidency of Hosni Mubarak. It was a moment when besieged bodies and chants against corruption and cops could be heard all around Cairo.
In Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution, Egyptian writer and editor Yasmin El-Rifae traces the resistance of women inside the circles that formed in that square. She writes an intimate account of a feminist resistance inside the uprising that lays bare both the dangers of staying and the pain of leaving.
In a narrative that moves alongside the men and women who formed Opantish—a group formed to protect women from mass sexual attacks—El-Rifae skillfully takes the reader from apartment control rooms to the street, trauma wards to elite cocktail parties, life in exile and the disorientation of return. She does not attempt to reconcile the inevitable tensions, but only aims to sketch the contours of a disparate self, splitting across space and time.
In this conversation with Adi publisher Nimmi Gowrinathan, she considers: the rise and fall of intense political energies; escapes from mobs and a homeland by bartering survival for loss; geometries of predatory advances and safe spaces; what the gendered body remembers; and where the dissenting mind lingers.
Nimmi Gowrinathan (NG): Adi’s current issue tackles some of the hauntings of past political lives that carry into new spaces and new roles. In your book Radius: A Story of a Feminist Revolution, you offer some insight into your struggles having relocated multiple times. Could you expand on these difficulties and the unexpected spectral presence of your former political life when you go abroad?
Yasmin El-Rifae (YE): I left Cairo for New York during Obama’s second term, and I remember it was very difficult to adjust to life without immediate politics or immediate collectivity. I loved the city and felt comfortable in its chaos and grit, but I had no idea how to connect to it politically. Feminism in America seemed to exist inside a denial or unwillingness to reckon with the involvement of the United States in the spiral of oppression and violence in our region. I was carrying this massive suitcase of unprocessed grief and violence from the 2011 revolution, especially from my experience with Opantish [Operation Anti Sexual Harassment and Assault, also known by its Arabic name قوة ضد التحرش, was a group that organized volunteer intervention teams to pull women out of mass sexual attacks in Tahrir Square during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Led by a group of feminist women, it identified itself as part of the revolutionary movement, and at its peak it deployed hundreds of volunteers and a sophisticated ground operation].
I returned to Cairo often. It is an intense place that has always brought up intense feelings for me: love and hate, belonging and alienation, transcendence and embodied freedom in the revolutionary years that felt like whiplash after decades of life under a police state.
NG: One moment that encapsulated the tension between leaving and return stayed with me when you describe running into one of your co-conspirators from 2011. In your book you write, “On a long visit back to Cairo I think I can slip back into my life here, but I find that life is gone. I see Nahya at a gathering the night after I arrive. She greets me with perfunctory kisses before going on to talk to someone else, as though we were just acquaintances. I am hurt but decide not to show it. Distance sets in. It will be a long time before I figure out that what is going on between us is simple. She is angry because I left. I am angry because she thinks leaving is easy.” What was most jarring in your return to the place that held so much political energy in 2011, not just for Egyptian activists but dissenters around the world?
YE: That specific scene took place just a year and a half after the military coup in Egypt, and we were all still trying to figure out how to live while all of the spaces, groups, activities where we had done our organizing and political work were being shut down, and more and more people were being jailed. When I moved back to Cairo in 2017, I was pregnant with my first kid, writing Radius still, and I remember feeling curious about what I could find in a different moment in this city.
Alongside the extreme political repression, there were changes to the city that outpaced what I could have imagined. A violent remapping, massive evictions and displacements, hundreds of new bridges and state projects, all in service of a deeply extractive economy. It’s hard to overstate how alienating this is, physically and psychologically. People in Cairo often talk about waking up one day and finding the main road in their neighborhood suddenly blocked, or a bridge being built outside their window, or about getting lost while driving because the routes we all know are literally gone.
These kinds of changes happen everywhere all the time, but what I’m describing is an accelerated level of state-driven demolition and construction in which people have no say whatsoever. Alongside the economic drivers are the egoistic projections of people in power, who see themselves as remaking Egyptian civilization. These moves are also aimed at preventing another uprising, blocking interconnected communities from flowing naturally from different neighborhoods into mass demonstrations, as happened in 2011 and 2012.
There is no space for political nostalgia if you live in a city like Cairo today. You are reckoning, constantly, with the persistence of the past as it is actively being destroyed, this strange temporal struggle within minds and bodies that remember what is being denied. The “old” city’s buildings, streets, bridges carry its histories, but can a ghost haunt a giant cement highway built by the military on top of an old neighborhood? I don’t think so. I think specters need feet on the street. They only exist when we see them, with our own haunted psychologies, and recognize or remember the past. The state has destroyed so many of the places that enable that.
NG: Sandie Hanna, a Palestinian activist and writer, recently shared her poem “The Myth of Collective Revolution” on encountering the “ally” with a group of young feminists (excerpted here). She writes:
We are one you said
In the face of the beast Obliterating
our ancestry Our love to live and be Plundering
the abundance of our soil
Shackles around the soul
My comrade, my ally you always promised to be
Don’t stare into the eyes of your reflection
Bring your gaze back towards what lies before you
How does some of the disappointment, and perhaps distrust, in this text mirror some of what you’ve felt across different activist planes both inside the struggle—the literal and figurative battles with masculinity in the movement that you’ve mapped out in Radius—and outside, such as your engagements with the West?
YE: It’s complicated terrain. You want people in your movement to understand that the systems that are killing us are killing them, too, but you also want to work from another starting point than their own experience—often of privilege. You wish that our experience, our struggle—as brown people, as women—were enough, that we are human and valid enough in these systems. But the systems are all built on our devaluation and the outright denial of our humanity.
I want to speak in acknowledgement of the inevitability of the disconnect described in the poem, but with an eye to pragmatism and politics. Do you need your allies to have the same relationship to the cause as yourself? Do they need to share the same stakes that you do? Do they need to have the same understanding or nuance? Mostly, when we’re talking about political action, the answer is no. A lot of those questions fall away, what matters is the act itself, and how to best carry it out.
In the realm of expression of solidarity—as distinct from the enaction of solidarity and I think the two often get blurred, especially on Palestine—I think these questions tend to take on a kind of elongated space. There are a lot of performative and self-serving expressions of solidarity, and there always have been for every cause.
NG: In a recent book festival in Mexico City, young women fighting sexual violence asked about the need to engage men in this work. For me, the answer seemed to lie in the “critical engagement” strategic approach to white allies, something Sandie is also grappling with. What have you learned about where to allocate your own efforts?
YE: One of the things most instructive about Opantish for me was that some of us didn’t want to spend a lot of time explaining things to men. Some of the men involved were hugely changed in terms of their understanding of gender and feminism by their experiences with the group, others weren’t, and some even kept their misogynistic attitudes. For me that just wasn’t that important in the context of what we were doing, or its impact. We’d laid out some basic ground rules about what kind of feminist group Opantish was and people could stick around happily, grumble through it, or they could leave.
My main reflection, for myself and others, is not to spend too much time with people you can’t change. Don’t let them take up too much space in your head. There is too much to be done, and there are too many other people who really want to do it, and who one might have a more constructive time working with. I want to be clear, though, that I mean this in a different, almost opposite sense to the strategy of cancelling people for not having politics that perfectly align with our own or our group’s. I’m a fan of the idea of everyone coming along for as long as they’re useful to the cause, for as long as there’s common ground.
NG: Most feminist theorizing is unable to fully grapple with the role of violence in resistance. In Radius you refer to the activists in Cairo as adopting a “militant feminism.” Outside of participation in an organized militant movement, how would you define this term as it was understood by folks on the ground in Cairo?
YE: I think of militant feminism as encompassing the option of violence, whether assertively or in direct self-defense, although it’s not often a clear binary. For example, women using weapons to storm the buildings of a government that has criminalized their rights to reproductive justice might not immediately be described as acting in defense of their bodies, but of course they would be.
Opantish tried to articulate nonviolence for pragmatic purposes; it was easier and faster to extricate ourselves and the people we were trying to help if we didn’t get caught up in protracted fighting. The idea was that we were prepared to use violence if necessary but we were committed to not escalating. For example, we didn’t walk around the square carrying sticks, anyone carrying weapons or tools would conceal them. Most people I spoke with agreed that the most useful tools that people carried were actually the flares, which allowed us to disperse crowds even temporarily.
In many cases the violence was unavoidable, and of course there was always tension between the ways the group said it wanted to use violence and then what would happen sometimes on the ground. It’s one thing to reach an agreement based on ethical and political conversations you’re having in someone’s living room and another to be on the ground inside the unpredictability of a mob.
NG: Some of my recent work has been on narrative captivity and I have been thinking recently about the limits of language as a descriptive tool. As we are all “waiting for some language to step into” as Dionne Brand says, I noted many of us in this work are drawn to geometries. Concentric circles that I have used in my own work to map the captivity of Tamil women inside marriage, community, culture, and the state. You use the radius as a metaphor to offer outsiders a lens into the feminist line of control inside the circles—which Saidiya Hartman uses to map a “predatory formation” where, even in the worst circumstances, there is still “making and relation.” As an analytical device how does thinking in lines and shapes make visible the complexity of this particular historical moment in Egypt?
YE: The mobs were circular, concentric circles of chaos arranged around a woman or a group of women. Opantish eventually developed a formation for the intervention teams, in which people would create pathways, what in war terms you would call a safe corridor, out of the circular mob. This move of finding an organized way out was crucial.
The ways that different people related to each other and behaved inside the mobs revealed a lot about our ability to act, in the Arendtian sense of acting unpredictably, politically, with others as part of a public. In this case, it was in the face of some of the most disturbing and threatening human behavior. Who recognized or misrecognized whom, what it took for people to trust one another or change behaviors, how strangers reacted to the work we were doing, these experiences and observations both articulate something and problematize notions of power, gender, fear, bravery, and collective work.
This geometry that started on the ground became a metaphor, a useful way of organizing what I was trying to explore and achieve in that book. I wanted to examine what was happening inside the circles: the violence and what was created in response to it, the mess of relations that was Opantish itself. I also wanted to break out of them, and to open the story—the circle—to the world outside of it. Outside immediate violence, outside the midan [the square]. Although Tahrir Square is not a geographic square in how it functions or how people move through it, but is a circle.
In the end these are bodies and psyches that move across the city, that travel and live beyond the historical moment that Opantish worked within. Opantish also complicated a lot of people’s relationships to and with the revolutionary process itself.
I was interested in how the afterlife of this experience manifested, radiated, and what that could open up about the experience of survival analytically. Not only of sexual violence but of historical trauma as a whole. The loss and the crushing of the revolution itself with the coup, the massacre at Raba’a al Adawiya, and the counter-revolutionary order that we still live in today.
NG: I was recently with some of the militant Tamil women in Sri Lanka whose active participation in resistance ended in 2009. A senior member of the movement spoke about her time in the struggle and her current role in an administrative day job. She remarked, “My body is here, but my mind is there.” Many of us can relate to this sense of a dislocated self, anchored in a moment animated by pure political energy—how does this manifest for you?
YE: I think the process over time for me has been about bringing the mind and the body closer in alignment vis-à-vis what happened in 2011-2013. Not just Opantish but the experience of collectivity, of power, and of violence too. For a very long time I had abstracted all of this. I thought I could just move my body along in time and space and away from those experiences, or that even the transformation of my body into a maternal one wouldn’t carry along with it those traces or that knowledge. Maybe I guessed it, intellectually, but I didn’t really understand what it would feel like.
It’s not so much that my mind is still there; it’s that I am still trying to learn from the ways in which this history is a part of how I will always be in relation to others without letting it overbear. Not everything has to sit in the long shadow of the past, even a moment in the past as profound and important as the 2011 revolution. But the past is with us. What can we do but occasionally try to understand it while allowing ourselves to move?
