I Say My Words Out Loud

Ahmed Fouad Negm

Prince Claus Fund Contents

Poems

Poems translated by Mona Anis My Country First 4 5 Mother Egypt 8 9 This is My Handwriting 12 13 Light a Candle 14 15 Pablo Neruda 18 19 Your Wondrous Sea, Oh Alexandria 24 25 Message Number 1 from Tura Prison 28 29 The Prison Ward 32 33 The Consolations of Poetry 38 39 Alone 42 43

Essays

Ahmed Fouad Negm: ‘Speaking Truth to Power’ by Hala Halim 44

Exploding into the Seventies: Ahmed Fouad Negm, Sheikh Imam, and the Aesthetics of a New Youth Politics by Marilyn Booth 54

Acknowledgements 79 MY COUNTRY FIRST (1967)

My country first, My country second, My country third.

My country first, I’m improvising before singing my mawwal.1 My country second, I say my words out loud. My country third, It’s my treasure, my wealth, and my pride.

My country first, I’m improvising before singing my mawwal According to what has been prescribed. My country second, I say my words out loud And without any punning. My country third, It’s my treasure, my wealth, and my pride, And it’s esteemed by all.

My country first, I’m improvising before singing my mawwal According to what has been prescribed for the sick. My country second, I say my words out loud, Without punning and to the bull’s eye.

4 5 My country third, It’s my treasure, my wealth, and my pride. It’s esteemed by all, and it’s time, My country, that you drew a line Between truth and lies, Time you raised your banner high, A proof of your strength.

My country first, My country second, My country third.

6 7 1 Mawwal, is a traditional form of vocal music that is usually presented before the actual song begins MOTHER EGYPT (1969)

Let our words be preceded by our greetings to all who are listening, Little sparrow chirping rhymed words full of meaning About a dark land, a moon, A river, a boat and a shore, And fellow travellers on a hard journey And an image of a huge gathering And processions Reflected in the eyes of a beautiful young woman, Who is the reason for my words and meanings.

Beautiful Mother Egypt Wearing a tarha and a long robe, Time’s grown old, and you’re still young, It’s now departing, and you’re still coming, Coming after a hundred and one nights, Treading on hardship, Smiling as always, As strong as ever. When you laugh, morning appears After dark and dusk, And the sun rises above you, A young, playful and beautiful woman.

Islands of night Are swept by the sea, And dawn’s a high torch Undrowned by the waves, And the shore is looming Near sunlit cities. Come, give us a hand, Help us; No matter how rough the waves may be, Together, with resolution And perseverance, We will make the crossing. 8 9 Mother Egypt, you’re like a ship; No matter how rough the sea may be, Your peasants are your sailors; They will harness the winds. The helmsman is a worker And the oarsman, an Arab knight, And the one up on the mast Can see all that has passed And all that is to come. Two knots, and a third for luck, You ride on the crest of a strong wave To reach the shore safely, Young, playful and beautiful.

And our sweet words carried by our greetings Hover above the gathering once more, Like a sparrow singing its merriment, Dropping songs as if they were seeds Kissing the land which receives them with joy. They blossom, They grow, Become songs again, Singing: He who built Egypt Was a sweet maker.

10 11 THIS IS MY HANDWRITING (1970)

This is my handwriting, And these are my words. Cover the paper with tears, Oh my eyes, For the olive groves are mine, And this land is an Arab land. Its breeze is my breath, And its dust is of my people, And it would not forget me If I tried to forget. This is my handwriting, And these are my words.

I shall write, Oh my eyes, You are forbidden sleep. And I shall dim my eyesight with tears all day, Until I pay my debt That is as sacred As prayer and fasting. For debt to the free man Is bitter agony, disgrace, And worries towing hidden grief. This is my handwriting, And these are my words.

I shall write on my hand, With my blood as ink, Oh my resolve, don’t fail me, Oh my people, do join in. And when we fulfill our promise We shall rejoice in the names Of those who died young In shelled houses and schools, And those workers buried Under the factory’s rubble. 12 13 This is my handwriting, And these are my words. LIGHT A CANDLE (1970)

Light a candle, loved ones, Lead my steps. Two eyelashes Are bidding me follow: One course leads to blame, The other to regret; Two courses, each one risky, Tell me, people, where to go, Light a candle, Lead my steps.

Two piercing eyelashes On magical eyes. They raise my heartbeat, Promising me love; Promises like raw fruit Growing on the other bank, Flirting with me, Calling to me From afar, saying I am yours. I wish I could, I want to cross, But premonitions slow me down. One course leads to blame, The other to regret; Two courses, each one risky, Tell me, people, where to go, Light a candle, Lead my steps.

Light a candle, young maids, Lead my steps, allay my fears. A sea separates me from my love With waves like my premonitions, Each wave carrying its own load: 14 15 A night’s dream, A night’s worry. Count the waves of the sea, you Who have seen me, And tell my loved one I wish I could, I want to cross, But premonitions slow me down. One course leads to blame, The other to regret; Two courses, each one risky, Tell me, people, where to go, Light a candle, Lead my steps.

Why, my heart, has love crossed our path? Why be blamed by those not in love? Love has come, bringing anguish, Disturbing our sleep at night. From dusk to dawn We are awake when others sleep. Wounds are our destiny, But one day the wounded shall be cured. Oh my heart, all this anguish? Calm yourself and follow reason: One course leads to blame, The other to regret; Two courses, each one risky, Tell me, people, where to go, Light a candle, Lead my steps.

16 17 PABLO NERUDA (1973)

Shoulder your gun And consign your promises And excuses To the dustbin. They massacred the roses On the cheeks of the girls And the greenery In their hearts. There can be no peace, Oh fabricators of the age of prosperity, With the ogres all around.

Wounds are still fresh; They, History, And memories Have not been forgotten: Imam Hussein, Spartacus, Allende, Lorca, Abdel-Rehim,1 A peasant from our country Who was burnt before Doomsday In the hell of betrayed Sinai, Constantly betrayed. Ernesto Guevara The great, Khamis and Baqari,2 Shafie,3 Adham4 With his old mawwal, And Qotb, the pivot of religion himself,5 Punished for reciting the Qur’an. A garnet necklace, beaded with martyrs 18 19 From the time of Socrates. Today, a diamond has been added: Neruda, the morning piper, The pipe of the breeze.

In the morning beautiful Santiago Drinks milk from your songs. Scared, the sparrows Scattered When the owl cried The portents of your death. You, a martyr, Whose presence fills the space, A surgeon visiting the wounded, Examining their wounds. They rise, Reach for their guns, And with all the might of the afflicted They stab at what has plagued them, Putting an end to the plague.

The sun rises in the morning, Bidding good morning To all those Carrying guns and wounds in one hand And flutes in the other. And the sun rises in the morning Above every palace And every wilderness, And the sun falls At dusk As Pablo Neruda is martyred.

Oh earth, Mother of boys, Rotating, counting the years. Oh earth, Mother of girls, 20 21 Rotating, counting the past: Hardships, Wars, Peoples’ ordeals, Dogs, Agony, Fog, Sunsets, Lightning, Thunder, Sunrise, Uprisings, Struggles, Just duels, Unjust ones. And justice was And remains At all times The cause And the gamble. And the land will always remain A stage for the knights in the arena: Imam Hussein, Spartacus, Guevara, Lorca, Abdel-Rehim, Neruda, the morning piper, Neruda, The pipe of the breeze.

1 an Egyptian soldier killed in the Arab-Israeli 1967 War 2 two workers hanged in Egypt in 1952 22 23 3 leader of the Sudanese Communist Party hanged in 1971 4 an Arab folk hero who sided with the poor 5 muslim Brotherhood leader Sayed Qotb hanged in 1966 YOUR WONDROUS SEA, OH ALEXANDRIA (1976)

Oh Alexandria, Grant me some of your love, Let your wondrous sea Toss me from the arms of one wave to another While it’s rough and the fishing is plenty. Let me wash my clothes and hang up my worries, With the sun rising above me and me rising with it, As if I were a peasant in Urabi’s army1 Who died guarding the fortress And was swept away by your sea; As if I were a breeze atop the hills Coming from the sea to drown in your magic; As if I were words from the mind of Beiram,2 A song straight from Sayed’s heart;3 As if I were a student who In the heart of a demonstration Chanting your name died rejoicing. As if I were the voice of Nadim by night4 Waking up your people To help you back onto your feet; As if I were a brick in a house in an alleyway; As if I were a tear in a sleepless eye; As if I were a star over the lighthouse Guiding wanderers When there is no moon.

Oh Alexandria, you who are Egyptian, Your smile heralding laughter, The sea is a window made of lattice work, And you are a princess watching the world go by. Oh Alexandria, I am in love, I want to rest in your embrace, My tender words a dowry For intimate talk between us. Oh Alexandria, you 24 25 Where the poor spend sleepless nights In search of bread, Where morning comes, and night returns, And the poor suffer without respite. Pity those worn out by time, All their efforts unrewarded; Their nets have been cast on a rough sea But have come out empty. Oh Alexandria, there are wolves among your people And beasts above the people. And there are also passionate lovers Who will not betray you in treacherous times. And among your people There is an olive-skinned woman Before whom I stand defenceless, Compelled to sing, Each time I see her.

1 Ahmed Urabi, commander of the Egyptian army at the time of the British bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 2 Poet Beiram al-Tounsi (Bayram al-Tunisi) 26 27 3 Alexandrian composer Sayed Darwish 4 Abdullah al-Nadim, an Alexandrian writer and nationalist leader at the time of the British occupation of Egypt MESSAGE NUMBER 1 FROM TURA PRISON (1977)

With every harbinger Of January’s arrival Light enters the prison cells, Driving away fear And darkness. Go prison breeze, Give your greetings to the trees, For the blossoms are flowering And the doves are nesting in the cells. My voice comes From the silence of the prison. It’s my heartbeat, Pulsing from the coffin, Addressing you, my loved one, Asking you to convey my words From deep inside the whale.

Give my love, sweetheart, To all those I love. Give each a share Of my greetings. Embrace the world With your eyes, And send me That look of yours, So I can see those I love And quench my heart’s thirst. And ask All the learned men in our country, Ask every tower and every minaret, Ask every friend, And every child, If any of them had seen The signs of resurrection Before the good tidings 28 29 Of 18 January1 When Egypt rose up, Cursing hunger, humiliation, Injustice and its rulers, After it had been believed To have been dead.

Give my love To the dark-skinned boys In the alleyways. Give my love to The girls, promised from birth To concubines’ beds. And ask Each reader of the book With a reproach, Whether they would have believed, With all the ignorance And the deaths, That the instincts of the people Would precede any voice? This is great Egypt, My love, This is Egypt, For whose sake you preferred Our humble nest Over all the palaces. This is Egypt, Azza.

30 31 1 there was a popular uprising in Egypt dubbed the Bread Riots on 18 January 1977, during which the poet was arrested for a few months THE PRISON WARD (1978)

Prison ward, listen in: I’ve shaken the dice many times, And gambled with everything on the big prize and lost, And bitter though prison is, I’ve never once wanted to repent. Having bid the night guards good evening, Every single one of them, The bringi The kingi And the shingi,1 I say we’re wicked inmates all, Though the storeroom clerk Has given us different uniforms. My first words are for the Prophet; My second, for Job; The third are for my estrangement; The fourth, for my destiny; My fifth, I will say that he who oppresses others Will himself be defeated one day.

First, hail to the Prophet who freed mankind, Cured the afflicted, and rescued the poor; You honoured man above the animals, Raised the sword of righteousness high above oppression, And declared to your people If one day injustice should prevail, And right be trodden down, No rain will there be, no greenery, no civilisation, Just snakes and crows Wreaking havoc on the mountains and valleys, No moon or light in the skies, Only blindness, sorrow, And fear of the jailer’s cruelty; Thus, people become scared of each other, And they scare the Sultan. 32 33 Second, I say I’m Job; When Job was afflicted And suffered for a couple of days, Stories were told about him, and he was given two names, Called both a prophet and a saint. But what about me, here in prison, twice patient? Patient after I was kidnapped from my people, And patient with what has been dealt out to me? The rascals rule, and their reign is one of shame. It’s the law of animals over people. I swear by the grave of the Prophet That one day the scales of justice will be twice upheld, And I shall be satisfied, seeing justice twice applied.

Third, my estrangement in a world of rascals, Where they are protected, And free people are endangered. When the mean climb, they hire sycophants, Thugs, crooks, thieves, hypocrites, (Praise be to the Prophet); Naked tarts dance vigorously for no reason, Strangling words, Drowning out the sound of music And the poetry in the mawwal, Smothering the meaning of songs And the ringing of bells.

One, the One and the Only; Two, the grandfather of Hussein;2 Three, it’s ugly to gloat; Four, the ink of the press; Five, my strong resolve; Six, the coming tomorrow; Seven, my heart in love; Eight, the longing of my fellow inmates; Nine, the wide world; Ten, damnation to all the traitors. 34 35 Let it be known by all That prisons are only walls, That ideas are like light, That light can jump over a thousand walls, And that walls never hold back the spirit. And let it be known by all That injustice has grown old, That the gates of the prison are weak, That the handles of the gates have disappeared, And that soon all this will just be memories, And that these promises will be fulfilled tomorrow, And that all your days, and ours, will be filled with light.

36 37 1 Turkish military ranks given to the guards, meaning first, second and third 2 Prophet Muhammad is the grandfather of Imam Hussein THE CONSOLATIONS OF POETRY (1979)

How consoling poetry And singing are At times of hardship. How consoling words and love are In troubled times. We have wandered far from each other, And we were dispersed, Now we are together, In prison.

Oh comrades, What maze is it When the moon is strangled by long nights, When friends tread in darkness, Stumbling over friends, And when a two-step road Takes a whole year to tread. Look where we are today And how many of us there are. How many will there be tomorrow, And where we will be after tomorrow? What is our situation now, And what will happen to us the morning after? Where have we been, And where did we end? We visit a new place every day, And our number increases every day. We open doors every day, And every day we remove obstacles. A building goes up every day, And every day another comes down. Every day we are pregnant with new songs, And every day we give birth to new hopes. Whether we are inside a prison, Or outside a prison, 38 39 This is how we should be. How consoling poetry And singing are At times of hardship. How consoling a green branch is Amid desolation. We have wandered far from each other, But now we’re together, Writing the first words of our book: Damned be he who bows down Before oppression By a cowardly ruler; Damned be the word That bends in the throat Or escapes before it’s uttered; Damned be an hour of one’s life That’s consumed by subjugation; Damned be bread eaten with humiliation; Damned be the cowards.

Oh comrades, You who taught the stones strength, I am calling out against Monotony, Depression, And boredom. You who can speed up the light of dawn And its advent, Listen attentively To a singer’s cry Emanating from the bottom of nothingness: Unite, Unite.

40 41 ALONE (1987)

You’re alone, And I’m alone, Crying for hours Over the long journey And darkness. Oh, how lonely I am, Alone.

It’s a desert, and I’m a camel man, Alone. There’s a heavy load, and I’m the carrier, Alone. And there’s a story I have to narrate, Alone. Oh, it’s lonely being alone.

And you, the whisper of the breeze, The touch of music’s strings; You, with winter cheeks, And eyes like rivers. You spend autumn Between fire and nostalgia, Colouring dreams, And making the blossoms open.

As for me, my autumn is fruitless, Spent alone Between thirst and fasting; Alone, Unable to sleep, Or spend the night awake, Alone.

42 43 Ahmed Fouad Negm: That the poetry of Ahmed Fouad Negm (b. 1929) resonated in the 2011 ‘Speaking Truth to Power’ Revolution in Egypt and in subsequent protests is hardly unexpected. It is a testament to a magnificent corpus that speaks directly to the causes codified by Hala Halim in the revolution’s slogan, “bread, freedom, and social justice”. Negm’s corpus belongs to a canon of modern Egyptian poetry composed in the colloquial rather than the classical language, often deriving its forms from dexterously reworked folk traditions, and committed to the themes of social equality and political justice. Over and above the accessibility of his poems’ register and the fact of many of them having been set to music, his poetry is secured in Arab memory by virtue of its association with movements of protest and with historical junctures in Egypt and the Arab world for more than half a century. “Al-Fagumi”: Negm glosses his epithet for himself that serves as the title of his memoir as “impulsively outspoken”. The folktale with which he illustrates the archetypal fagumi – an indigent scholar-sheikh at the Azhar University who refuses to bow to the conquering sultan seeking to turn the religious establishment into his mouthpiece and rejects the sovereign’s gift – is a precise illustration of Edward Said’s adage about the intellectual’s role as “speaking truth to power”.1 Negm has always been firmly situated within the populist left. Having joined forces in 1962 with Sheikh Imam ‘Isa (1918–1995), the singer, composer and lute-player who set his poems to music, the duo’s performances – whether live or, more often, in view of the state’s clampdown on them, recorded non-commercially on cassette tapes – were the main channel through which the lyrics reached a wide audience. Imprisoned under Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, Negm’s formation was eclectic. This “ambassador of the poor” and the oppressed acquired his politicisation through direct exposure to injustice in rural and then underprivileged urban contexts, activism and mixing with leftist milieus.2 Spending his childhood on the family estate in the hamlet of al-‘Abbasa in Sharqiyya province where he received traditional Qur’anic schooling, Negm lost his father, a police officer, at the age of six. The family fell on hard times and Negm lived for nine years in an orphanage, after which he returned to the village and worked the land for some years. What is striking about his glowing recollections of this formative period is the formidable repertoire of oral traditions it put at his disposal: his unlettered, eloquent mother’s songs and proverbs – “the heritage of fools whom I believe Christ, peace be upon him, called ‘the salt of the earth’”, as he puts it – the village lore and the mawawil (folk ballads; singular mawwal).3 The years that followed, from the mid-1940s until the early 1960s, saw Negm move between Cairo and the Suez Canal zone, then back to the capital where he settled definitively. 44 45 Those were the years of Negm’s incipient initiation into political activism: his participation in strikes against the British in whose military bases he was employed led to his first encounter with the left when a communist lent practitioners, he continued, simultaneously, to dialogue with both the pre- him Maxim Gorky’s Mother. A three-year stint in prison was a turning point: 1950s colloquial poetry and the oral traditions of his childhood. Increasingly it put him in closer contact with leftist intellectuals who were fellow-inmates; sought after by the Cairene milieu of literati in the ‘60s, Negm was to he reconsidered his cultural affiliations; and wrote his first collection of find himself – gradually, and more so towards the end of that decade – poems which, thanks to the prison authorities’ personal encouragement, disenchanted with the Nasser regime, in particular with the gap between won a state-sponsored first book manuscript competition on the eve of his its professed socialism and the reality of persistent social inequality, release. In hindsight, Negm asserts that he “discovered [in himself in prison] as reflected in his poems.10 the poet whose name was to be on everyone’s lips from the Gulf to the It would be misleading to suggest that Negm’s corpus is entirely inscribed Ocean and in any town or village on earth where Arabic is spoken”.4 within committed poetry; his poems also treated private themes, albeit Years after his first collection was published, Negm was to dedicate his later often interwoven with collective concerns. The 1973 poem ‘Nawwara’ 1998 diwan of “Complete Works” (a curious title given his in-flux corpus) – named for his infant daughter, now an esteemed activist and journalist – “to Ahmad bin ‘Arus, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and Mahmud Bayram al-Tunisi… opens with invocations of blessing for the child and for the Egypt of her immortal poets of the people”.5 Superimposed here, over his childhood’s future, followed by tenderly humorous tableaus of the infant, then a medi­­­ folklore and colloquial songs, is a genealogy of Egyptian poets who composed tation on how her generation would regard his generation’s struggle, closing in the spoken language and with whom his own poetry was to enter into with his own unvanquished optimism. The beloved, at times a specific woman dialogue increasingly since the first collection. Negm attributes to that first as in the 1977 ‘Ughniyya Hizar’ (‘Playful Song’), is at other times Egypt, and period in prison his “awakening” to an earlier poetic and musical corpus at yet other times both. ‘Baladi wa Habibati’ (‘My Homeland and My Beloved’; that he, who had acquired a preference for Egyptian cultural production written in prison in 1972) opens with a deeply nostalgic address to the beloved, that “bore a whiff of Europe”, used to shun as “folksy” (“baladi”).6 True, it reminiscent of the amatory prelude in classical Arabic poetry, before the was while incarcerated that he first became acquainted with the colloquial speaker is rudely awakened from his dream by a police search campaign. poetry of his Marxist contemporary Fu’ad Haddad (1927–1985), and that When “one of the layabouts / looked me in the eye” in hopes of “spotting he harked back to the colloquial poetry of Mahmud Bayram al-Tunisi the slightest trace of fear / […] and which of us is the coward / which the (1893–1961), the anti-colonial writer whose texts evince deep concern traitor”, he trembles and sputters gibberish when the speaker returns his with social issues. But Negm’s staking a claim to colloquial poetic forebears gaze: “because he saw two beautiful images / in my kindly eyes / Egypt in who were part of the nationalist movement, such as ‘Abdallah al-Nadim the left eye / and you in the right”.11 Negm’s ‘Bahiyya’, arguably one of his (1845[?]–1896) – journalist, writer and orator of the 1882 ‘Urabi uprising – most well-known poems, was repeatedly recalled since the beginning of the and al-Tunisi, also had much to do with the socio-political and cultural 2011 Revolution. In appealing to Bahiyya (the name also signifying beautiful currents of his own time. or radiant), the trope of a feminised Egypt, Egypt as the peasant woman In the 1960s, that decade of socialism, pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism, addressed here as “mother”, the poem extols her youth, vitality and for­­­ when Negm had a clerical job in the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity bearance that will shine through when the night has given way to a new Organization, he moved in the circles of journalists, artists and intellectuals dawn. Written in prison in 1969, two years after the defeat in the June 1967 whom he credits with greater exposure to cultural debates and trends.7 War with Israel, the poem then depicts Mother Egypt as a ship on a storm- The Arabic term for colloquial poetry “was coined in 1961 by a group tossed sea, steered by its peasant-sailors over mighty waves to the safe of young poets… The group named itself ‘Jamˉa‘it Ibn ‘Arus’ˉ [whose name haven. The lyric, as set to music and sung by Sheikh Imam, was to reach a appears in Negm’s dedication cited above], after the Egyptian poet… wider audience through the film by Youssef Chahine (1926-2008), al-‘Usfur (b. 1780) who wrote in colloquial Arabic… In coining the term… the new (The Sparrow, 1972), which thematises the conditions that led to the defeat. colloquial poets were putting an end to the centuries-old Arabic tradition Sung at the opening of the film, stanzas of the lyric are voiced over again of restricting the term shi‘r to poetry written in the canonical literary at the close after Bahiyya, the woman protagonist whose household is the language,” as Noha Radwan has argued.8 It was a trend that was concurrent meeting place of diverse characters, rushes out into the street right after and shared affinities with the experimentation, not least on the level of Nasser’s speech announcing the defeat, shouting, “No, we will fight.”12 diction, in “modernist Arabic poetry” written in the classical language.9 46 47 The 1967 War launched Negm into committed writing, his first response If Negm found sanction and enrichment in this trend and some of its to the defeat, ‘Risala’ (‘Letter’), having been written on 8 June as the first news of what had actually taken place was barely breaking. Written in the against visible and evil oppressors.”17 The opening verses – “Good morning locutions and accent of an Upper Egyptian, the poem is a message from to the flowers that have blossomed / in the gardens of Egypt” – it should a father, Hasan Muharib (his surname also denoting fighter) who works as a be added, echoed in the 2011 Revolution after they were used as a headline guard in a village, to his son fighting on the border. Bearing tender greetings for a newspaper spread, while the events were unfolding, on the young martyrs and messages from kith and kin, and news of relatives’ volunteer work in of the protests against the Mubarak regime. Subsequently reproduced on the war effort, the father’s letter strengthens his son’s resolve to fight, calling placards and banners, the verses allusively underscored this revolution’s on him to avenge his brother who was martyred. While the pathos of the continuity with earlier revolts against authoritarianism and corruption, poem enhances the bitterness of the reader, privy to what has transpired in via Negm’s poetry.18 the war, Negm’s choice not to alter it, save for a few words, was undoubtedly Negm and Sheikh Imam were to become involved in protests, mainly intended to motivate resistance. By contrast, ‘Baqarit Haha’ (‘Haha’s Cow’), by university students, who appealed to the duo and with whom they were a poem written in the wake of the defeat, is a poignant lamentation of in solidarity. The protests took place first, under Nasser, demanding an what has befallen the country, represented here as a “dark butting cow” investigation into the causes of the defeat in 1967, and then under Sadat in (reminiscent, one is tempted to suggest, of the goddess Hathor) full of 1972 – on different university campuses but also involving a sit-in in Tahrir bounty and fertility. The lament squarely lays the blame on the authorities Square which Negm joined – primarily in response to the president’s for the defeat: the cow’s abundance is plundered by the people of the repeated deferral of action to liberate the Egyptian territories occupied by household and when the day comes when “foreigners” break in and steal Israel in 1967. Other demonstrations, and not only by students, would take its milk, “the guards escape” while the people of the house are fast asleep, place after the 1973 War, protesting against the regime’s rapprochement heedless of the creature’s crushed calls. The power of the poem derives from with the West and the government’s decision to cut subsidies on basic its simple diction and elemental imagery, and the bullet-like short verses, foodstuffs.19 Perceived by the authorities as the poet who “disrupts public punctuated by the refrain of a single two-syllable word, “Haha”. The lyric thus peace”, Negm’s repeated imprisonment would inspire several poems; in lent itself to a call-and-response format in public performances by Sheikh addition to recording the date of composition of these texts, per his usual Imam.13 This was one of the poems that constituted the “red line” in public practice, he would also add the name of the prison.20 His 1972 poem performances that the authorities, post-1967, allowed Negm and Sheikh ‘Waraqa min Malaff al-Qadiyya’ (‘A Page from the Dossier of the Court Imam to hold in the belief that “containment within the regime’s official Case’) mimics the interrogation format in a dramatised counter-document media would guarantee their moderation” – except that the duo “crossed that puts his positions (concerning the veering away from socialism, the that line”.14 stalling on war, the students’ movement) on public record and questions I would note that Negm adapted some of the poem’s elements from the state’s claim to representing the people: “-First, may I ask who I’m talking a folk song that begins with “Uha, Haha’s cow” that he overheard the to? / -The State Security Prosecutor / -Whose state? / -The State of Egypt / village children singing as he was being taken to the orphanage many years -Egypt the shack / or Egypt the palace?”21 With the suspect repeatedly earlier.15 In the course of discussing Negm’s poetics, Kamal Abdel-Malek outwitting him, the interrogator, at the close of the poem, avers that a good dwells on his use of “folkloric forms” in the service of his “identification beating will change his mind. The poem’s ending, rather than indicate that with the causes” of the people, such as the mawwal, children’s songs, riddles “[a]ny victory that could have been gained by the preceding witty repartee (in this case lampooning public figures and establishment intellectuals and is thus lost”, underscores that the authoritarian state can wield nothing artists), wedding songs, cries of peddlers, proverbs, and the “subu‘ songs” more than brute force in the face of legitimate demands and protest.22 chanted at the traditional celebration held on the seventh day after a child Negm’s criticism of Sadat’s Open Door Policy and rapprochement with is born.16 Indeed, Negm’s poem ‘Sabah al-Khayr’ (‘Good Morning’) appro­­­ the West was effected in his poems by resorting to a whole gamut of satirical priates imagery, such as “the sprinkling of salt”, from the subu‘ ceremony exploits. The 1976 ‘Bayan Hamm’ (‘An Important Announcement’) is a to greet and welcome secondary school pupils arrested in protests and devastating parody of a broadcast of a speech by Sadat; the 1974 ‘Mawwal brought to the Citadel Prison where he himself was incarcerated in 1973. al-Ful wa’l-Lahma’ (‘Mawwal of Fava Beans and Meat’) mocks an announce­­­ The “zaffa (procession) here… is not the communal act of celebrating the ment by “a so-called responsible source” extolling the virtues of eating newborn and of striving to ward off the invisible evil spirits. Rather it is the 48 49 fava beans over the potentially venomous results of consuming meat; and revolutionary zaffa of the newly born participants in the national struggle ‘Boutikat’ (‘Boutiques’), written while Negm was in prison at the end of the Sadat period in 1981, adapts idioms from the folk lingo of magic and the – “a pearl, revolutionaries” – and the triumph over American imperialism vernacular calls of souk hawkers to send up the advertising hype surrounding in the Vietnam War.26 Three separate poems can be considered a triptych on the consumerism at the expense of “the poor and their problems”.23 One icons of the left that bespeaks Negm’s internationalism: while ‘Allende’ is an of his most celebrated poems of the period is ‘Nixon’, written in 1974 on elegy for “Salvador, the kind-hearted” who misread the signs, both ‘Ho Chi the occasion of the American president’s visit to the country. The poem Minh’ and ‘Sarkhit Guevara’ (‘Guevara’s Scream’) eulogise the principles mockingly derives its diction and imagery from phrases of excessive welcome that the two figures stood for.27 Thus, the speaker in ‘Ho Chi Minh’ urges and celebratory occasions in a mordant critique of Sadat and other Arab one Ragab to witness the story of “heroism” and proceeds to extol the rulers playing their countries into the hands of American policy. In “what dead “ruler” who became “an ascetic” and “renounced power”, a “Christ” came to be known as ‘the Nixon Baba Case’”, Negm was arrested, together whose legacy constitutes signs that provide sound guidance to be followed with Sheikh Imam, and a motley group of guests who were spending the unswervingly.28 In the second poem, Guevara “the ideal freedom fighter is evening at their place (the latter soon released). At the interrogation by the dead”, the speaker proceeding to taunt phony, dandy “latter-day freedom state security prosecutor, Negm reiterated his opposition to Nixon’s visit fighters / on the houseboats” with the manner of his death that “embodies “while the blood of our sons spilled in the [1973] October War specifically his struggle”. But the speaker then exhorts workers, “the deprived” and all by Nixon’s bullets has not yet dried” and his disapproval of certain journalists’ those who are “shackled” to heed “Guevara’s scream” for “there is no cheering for American aid.24 alternative” in “any homeland, any place” but to “prepare an army for In a memorable scene in her first novel, In The Eye of the Sun, Ahdaf salvation”.29 Soueif has her protagonist Asya grapple with explicating the complexities In the years leading up to Egypt’s 2011 Revolution, Negm recited his of ‘Nixon’ while translating it to a roomful of people at a social gathering poems at protests, and was vocal against the Mubarak regime’s corruption in England as they listen to a smuggled tape recording of Sheikh Imam and the president’s plans to transfer power to his son. Revered as a leftist performing it. When “the Sheikh’s harsh, rasping voice comes on: ‘Sharraft whose life and corpus straddle so many signal moments in the region’s history, ya Nixon Baba, / Ya bta‘ el-Watergate’,” Asya explains that, “he says, ‘You’ve Negm, by virtue of his masterly vernacular poetry, remains incomparable. honoured us, Nixon Baba – ‘Baba’ means ‘father’ but it’s also used, as it is The poems will speak to newly “blossoming flowers” through the vicissitudes used here, as a title of mock respect – as in ‘Ali Baba’, for example… you that lie ahead for the region “from the Gulf to the Ocean” in completing could also address a child as ‘Baba’ as an endearment – a sort of inversion: the work begun in 2011; and beyond that, the poems will speak to anyone like calling him Big Chief because he’s so little – and so when it’s used who cares about the integrity of the word and the craft of poetry. aggressively… it carries a diminutivising, belittling signification.” Of the second verse, she adds that “the structure ‘bita‘ el-whatever’ (el- is just the definite article…) posits a close but not necessarily defined relationship between” Ahmed Fouad Negm is also transliterated as Ahmad Fu'ad Nijm two nouns. Hence, she continues, “‘bita‘ el-vegetables’… would be someone who sold vegetables… So Nixon is ‘Bita‘ el-Watergate’, which suggests him selling the idea of Watergate to someone – selling his version of Watergate to the public – and pursuing a Watergate type of policy, but all in a very non-pompous, street vernacular, jokingly abusive kind of way.”25 But Negm’s poems on socio-political themes are far from exclusively dedicated to Egyptian issues: his pan-Arabism, opposition to colonialism and neo-colonialism, and commitment to socialist struggles elsewhere are woven into his poetry. Palestine is at the centre of his pan-Arab orientation: ‘Ya Filisitinyya’ (‘O Palestinian’), written two years after the 1967 War, strengthens Palestinians’ resolve to resist and spells hope that they will overcome, while ‘Mawwal Filistini Masri’ (‘A Palestinian-Egyptian Mawwal’) resounds with Palestinian mourning and yearning for an Egypt that is the 50 51 cure. ‘Saigon’ is a joyful lyric that celebrates the liberation of that city Works Cited and Further Reading Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, 8 radwan, Egyptian Colloquial Poetry in the Modern 19 See Abdalla, The Student Movement and National Ahmed Fouad Negm award citation: http://www. Arabic Canon, 37. See also ibid., 53–61 on the Politics in Egypt 1923–1973, Hirst and Beeson, ‘Abd al-Fattah, Ibrahim. ‘Safir al-Fuqara’. Akhbar al-Adab, princeclausfund.org/en/programmes/awards. “subject matter and themes” of these poets. On Sadat, and ‘Isa, Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am. 15 September 2013. Bayram al-Tunisi, see Booth, Bayram al-Tunisi’s Egypt. Radwan, Noha. Egyptian Colloquial Poetry in the Modern 20 the quoted phrase is a rough translation of Abdalla, Ahmed. The Student Movement and National Arabic Canon: New Readings of Shi‘r al-‘aˉmmiyya. New 9 radwan, Egyptian Colloquial Poetry in the Modern the title of ‘Isa’s book, Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am, Politics in Egypt 1923–1973. London: Al Saqi, 1985. York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Arabic Canon, 39; see also 40–48. which researches legal documents pertaining to interrogations of the poet and his imprisonment. Abdel-Malek, Kamal. A Study on the Vernacular Poetry of Said, Edward W. Representations of the Intellectual. 10 See Negm, al-Fagumi, 195–240, 293 and, on reading Ah.mad Fu’aˉd Nigm. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. the complete works of Bayram al-Tunisi, 301–03. 21 Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 144–155; quotation On Negm’s becoming acquainted with Fu’ad from 144. ______. Al-Tariq ila Thawrat 25 Yanayir fi Shi‘r Soueif, Ahdaf. In the Eye of the Sun. London: Haddad’s poetry while in prison, see ibid., 179. Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm. Cairo: General Egyptian Book Bloomsbury, 1992. 22 Quotation from Abou-bakr, ‘The Political Prisoner Organization, 2012. 11 Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 382–84; this and other as Antihero: The Prison Poetry of Wole Soyinka quotations from Negm’s poems are my translation. and ’Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm’, 283. Abou-bakr’s article Abou-bakr, Randa. ‘The Political Prisoner as Antihero: For ‘Nawwara’, see ibid., 98-108 and for ‘Ughniyya provides a rich discussion of Negm’s prison poetry. The Prison Poetry of Wole Soyinka and ’Ahmad Fu’ad Notes Hizar’, 404–405. Abdel-Malek, A Study on the Nigm’. Comparative Literature Studies 46.2 (2009): Vernacular Poetry of Ah.mad Fu’aˉd Nigm, 17, observes 23 See, respectively, Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 83–97, 261–286. 1 See Negm, Ya Ahli ya Hubbi ya Hitta min Qalbi, that: “From 1967 onward, Egypt would loom large 479–481 and 464–466; quotation from 465. 85–88. In invoking the adage “speaking truth to in the poet’s consciousness, now replacing the Booth, Marilyn. Bayram al-Tunisi’s Egypt: Social Criticism power” I adduce Said, Representations of the woman as a beloved, now subsuming her.” 24 ‘Isa, Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am, 62, 64. and Narrative Strategies. Exeter: Ithaca Press (St. Intellectual, 85–102, and echo the Prince Claus Antony’s Middle East Monographs no. 22), 1990. Award citation for Negm: http://www. 12 For ‘Bahiyya’, see Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 24–27. 25 Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun, 496–497; Asya's princeclausfund.org/en/programmes/awards. For a recording of Sheikh Imam singing ‘Bahiyya’, see: commentary continues until 499. For ‘Nixon’, Cachia, Pierre. Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern Egypt. Abdel-Malek, A Study on the Vernacular Poetry of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKlE8GSUEOQ; see Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 510–513. For Sheikh Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Ah.mad Fu’aˉd Nigm, attributes Negm’s poetry’s for a clip of the closing sequences of Youssef Imam’s performance of this song, see: http://www. “appeal to widely diverse segments of the society” Chahine’s Al ‘Usfur (The Sparrow) with verses youtube.com/watch?v=9p2jauOUBUk. Chahine, Youssef, dir. Al-‘Usfur (clip). Misr International to the use of “colloquial and… various folk forms”, from the same lyric voiced over, see: http://www. Films and l’Oncic, 1972. http://www.youtube.com/ that “it is protest poetry”, and “it is highly youtube.com/watch?v=jFAHrAaixfY; for a recent 26 Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila,122. watch?v=jFAHrAaixfY. melodious and thus easy to memorize”. performance of this lyric by a young band, Quotations from ibid., 105. Iskindirilla, see: http://www.youtube.com/ 27 Ibid., 485. Al-Hadi, ‘Umar. ‘Shuhada’ Thawrat 25 Yanayir… watch?v=7loyzu3OI6k. al-Ward illi Fattah fi Ganayin Masr’. Al-Misri al-Yawm, 2 “Ambassador of the poor” is the Arabic title of 28 Ibid., 586, 588, 589. 6 February 2011. ‘Abd al-Fattah’s tribute to Negm, “Safir al-Fuqara’.” 13 Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 569–572; quotations from For biographical information on Sheikh Imam, see 570, 572. For a recording of a performance of 29 Ibid., 590, 591, 593, 594. For Sheikh Imam’s Hirst, David and Irene Beeson. Sadat. London: ‘Isa, Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am, 19–20. For the first ‘Baqarit Haha’ by Sheikh Imam, see: http://www. performance of this song, see: http://www.youtube. Faber and Faber, 1981. encounter between the poet and Sheikh Imam, see youtube.com/watch?v=7Y7URCj6rFI. For ‘Risala’, com/watch?v=tqnyhP7N0rs. Negm, al-Fagumi, 188–192. see Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 344–347; the date of ‘Isa, Imam (Sheikh), musical composition and composition of this poem, given in the volume as 9 performance. ‘Bahiyya’. http://www.youtube.com/ 3 Negm, al-Fagumi, 26. On the mawwal genre, June 1967, seems to be a typo. The date cited watch?v=CKlE8GSUEOQ. see Cachia, Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern above, 8 June, is as given in Negm, al-Fagumi, 336. Egypt. On Negm’s use of the mawwal genre, see ______. ‘Baqarit Haha’. http://www.youtube. Abdel-Malek, A Study on the Vernacular Poetry 14 Quotations from ‘Isa, Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am, com/watch?v=7Y7URCj6rFI. of Ah.mad Fu’aˉd Nigm, 89–94. Negm’s resonance 27, 28. See also ibid., 25–28 on the poems of this in Egypt’s 2011 Revolution is suggested in period. ______. ‘Guevara Mat’. http://www.youtube. Abdel-Malek’s al-Tariq ila Thawrat 25 Yanayir fi Shi‘r com/watch?v=tqnyhP7N0rs. Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm (The Road to the 25 January 15 the song is reproduced in Negm, al-Fagumi, 97–98. Revolution in Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm’s Poetry), which ______. ‘Nixon’. http://www.youtube.com/ is essentially a translation of his Study on the 16 Abdel-Malek, A Study on the Vernacular Poetry of watch?v=9p2jauOUBUk. Vernacular Poetry of Ah.mad Fu’aˉd Nigm with a Ah.mad Fu’aˉd Nigm, 89–104, quotation from 89. different appendix, containing a 2009 poem by I reproduce here Abdel-Malek’s terms for the ‘Isa, Salah. Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am. Cairo: Negm protesting against the then President different categories he discusses under the subtitle Dar al-Shuruq, 2007. Mubarak, on which see ibid., 197–199; Radwan, “folkloric forms”. in Egyptian Colloquial Poetry in the Modern Arabic Iskindirilla band performance. ‘Bahiyya’. http://www. Canon, addresses how “Egyptian Colloquial Poetry 17 Ibid., 98-99. For this poem, see Negm, al-A‘mal youtube.com/watch?v=7loyzu3OI6k. Blooms in the Arab Spring”, the subtitle of her al-Kamila, 339–341. I quote the opening verses “Postscript”, 205–211. from ibid., 339. Negm, Ahmed Fouad [Nigm, Ahmad Fu’ad]. Al-A‘mal al-Kamila. Cairo: Dar al-Ahmadi, 1998. 4 Quotation from Negm, al-Fagumi, 149. I rely here 18 Quotation from Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 339. See on ibid., 125–185. al-Hadi, ‘Shuhada’ Thawrat 25 Yanayir… al-Ward illi ______. Blog: http://elfagoomy.blogspot.com. Fattah fi Ganayin Masr’. On the circumstances 5 Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, n.p. surrounding the composition of ‘Sabah al-Khayr’, ______. Al-Fagumi: al-Sira al-Dhatiyya al-Kamila. see ‘Isa, Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am, 44. Cairo: Maktabat Jazirat al-Wurud, 2009. 6 Negm, al-Fagumi, 154. ______. Ya Ahli ya Hubbi ya Hitta min Qalbi. 7 See Negm, al-Fagumi, 173–319. Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2008. 52 53 Exploding into the Seventies: The power of artistic creation in performance to express collective political Ahmed Fouad Negm, Sheikh Imam, sentiments and to galvanise mass oppositional action has rarely been so and the Aesthetics of a New clearly demonstrated as it was in the months after June 1967. All across the Youth Politics Arab world, citizens and subjects had witnessed the spectacular mismatch of official discourse and government action following Israel’s defeat of Arab by Marilyn Booth forces and occupation of Arab territories. Stunned silence soon turned to anguished questioning and angry grieving on the part of millions. In Egypt, would disillusionment have metamorphosed into a broad, loud and student- led critique of the Nasser regime had it not been for the force of a symbiotic artistic partnership? A ragged-looking poet and a slightly built composer- singer with a wicked grin became the performative beacon of a movement that challenged the final years of the Nasser regime and beyond, bringing together students, workers and other activists through an aesthetic presence that remains symbolically potent even now. If cultural work is always crucial to articulating shared sentiments as political discourse, only sometimes does such work sustain public political action. Ahmed Fouad Negm (b. 1929) wandered from a village childhood in the Egyptian Delta province of Sharqiyya, to an orphanage after his father’s early death, to farm work and employment in British occupation army camps near Suez. And then, on he went to prison on a forgery charge. With a prison officer’s encouragement, he submitted his colloquial Arabic poetry for a state prize and won, ironically foreshadowing the fact that many of his later poems would be composed from prison. Sheikh Imam ‘Isa (1918–95) went blind a few months after birth, moved at age 13 to Cairo to be trained as a Qur’an reciter, and found himself ejected from a religious institute because he haunted cafés and listened to tunes. From the mid 1940s until the early 1960s, he scratched out a living by hiring himself out to sing at weddings and other occasions while studying the secular musical compositions of Sayyid Darwish, Zakariyya Ahmad and others.1 It was May 1962 when the duo first encountered each other, shortly after Negm left prison. They met in Sheikh Imam’s one-room dwelling atop an old residence in medieval Cairo in May 1962 – in Khosh Qadam alley in al-Ghuriyya, later a true secular mecca for Egyptian and other Arab intellectuals. They exploded onto the public scene soon after the June 1967 War, first in print with Negm’s immediate poetic commentary on the defeat and then in song. Their synergistic inseparability soon earned them the name “Negm- Imam”. Their songs, performed to the accompaniment of Sheikh Imam’s ‘ud (lute), portrayed, chided and celebrated the student- and worker-led movement of resistance to practices of the Nasser regime, and then, after Nasser’s death in 1970, to his successor Anwar al-Sadat’s turn toward 54 55 openness to Euro/American financial, commercial and political interests, including support of the Israeli state. To explore this duet’s aesthetic-political power vis-à-vis the crystallising to journalist and activist Farida al-Naqqash in the late 1970s.4 It is worth alliance between university students and factory workers from the late 1960s listening to Negm’s memory of how the meeting shaped his subsequent art: into the early 1970s, I focus on a few poems in a very large and temporally “I followed my friend along the crowded way into Ghuriyya. From the window extended corpus – poems from the dawn of Negm-Imam’s fame. A longer of a small house I heard his voice and his lute. At that time, he was singing study would carry the story on as far as the Bread Riots of January 1977 the tunes of Sheikh Zachariyya Ahmad and Abd al-Wahhab. Even though he when Egyptians choked the streets of Cairo and other cities in protest of had not yet attempted his own compositions, I felt immediately that I was the government’s lifting of basic food subsidies under pressure from inter­­­­­­ standing before a truly creative artist. I knew by heart the original songs national lending institutions. Tracing this sung poetry in the context of the he was singing, but every time I heard him singing them I felt that he was student-worker movement, I argue that Negm-Imam’s lyrics and music adding his own original elements to them. With the passage of time, I became fashioned a particularly effective political aesthetics for the moment, one convinced that Abd al-Wahhab was the imitation and Sheik Imam was the that was extraordinarily powerful in a movement that by necessity com­­­ original.”5 municated mostly through word of mouth.2 It was not just the message but Negm said that: “It was a summer night in 1962, the most important rather the particular coherence of language, sound images, performance night of my life.”6 Indeed, the impact of this meeting on Negm appears to techniques and contextual performance elements – a performative enactment have been nearly immediate and absolutely decisive (at least in the retro­­ of the messages they were singing – that underlay the fast rise to fame and spective vision of memory). He told al-Naqqash: “The musicality of my the political efficacy of this amazing and unique pair of artists, neither of poetry grew as I listened to the Sheikh, and my use of anecdotes and jokes, whom is likely to have achieved such a powerful voice on his own. and of caricatures, grew and crystallised to become a fundamental element these songs circulated through underground tapes and concerts, often in poems I wrote afterward. When he began to set my words to music, my impromptu, hastily arranged, or private and advertised only by word of sense of responsibility increased sharply, for the melody and the rendition, mouth (including one in my home in Cairo in 1980).3 They drew on oral especially for a man who carries in his very depths all this heritage, place storytelling, traditions of song and vernacular Arabic poetry, popular proverbs the poet squarely in front of the masses, directly and immediately.”7 and other deeply-rooted expressive forms to couch a political voice that the pair began to perform for a few friends, at neighbourhood weddings enacted a collectivity of those who felt disempowered but were not voiceless and in cafés. Down and out in Khosh Qadam, they were a couple of adept and refused to accept that status. To this day, these songs circulate in the tricksters, cadging a kilo of kebab from a would-be songster.8 (Later on, memories of 1960s activists and onlookers, emotionally charged aesthetic providing that kilo of kebab was de rigueur for anyone wanting to host echoes that strongly helped to shape a powerful set of political moments. Negm-Imam.) At the same time, Negm was exploring the world of Cairo I know that I am not alone in declaring that I cannot read or recite these journalism and songwriting,9 and artists were beginning to show up in poems without singing them or at least hearing Sheikh Imam’s voice and Sheikh Imam’s room – “in the first tourist visit to this remote spot in the oud in my head. As a literary critic, I can appreciate and dissect the poems. bowels of the republic of the lowest of the low, on the margins of the But I found, returning to these poems years after I first knew them, and farflung city of Cairo of the 60s.”10 before I started listening to my old tapes, that I could not simply read them. In his memoirs, Negm provides a taste of the collaborative work that I had to sing them: the music was there in my mind. So perfect is the fusion went on, “a workshop night and day”. Negm might have been a powerful of song, articulation and lyrics that these works must have coalesced in poet no matter what; and Imam was an able and creative artist. But the a process of collective composition. Or perhaps it is simply vital that the absolute synergy and match between words and song and performance listener believes this. I listen carefully to the fact that I cannot think or which are a key to the power of Negm-Imam’s works began to gel then, feel these poems without thinking and feeling their performance as songs. in those rooms in Khosh Qadam. While political events from 1967 to the end of the 1970s produced A Meeting of Minds and Voices Negm-Imam’s most lauded works and performances, it would be misleading to disconnect that decade from anything that came before. Although Salah In their respective memoirs and in interviews, Ahmed Fouad Negm and ‘Isa argues that Negm “had no connection to politics or matters of govern­­ Sheikh Imam ‘Isa have recalled their first meeting. Negm was taken to Imam 56 57 ment and did not write about them in his poetry before 5 June 1967,”11 by a mutual friend. Negm described the moment in almost epiphanal terms an embryonic populist and oppositional political identity is visible in Negm’s much earlier poems, including poems written before he met Sheikh Imam. Imam had been trying to garner local audiences through appearances in That identity-in-poetry is shaped through nationalist and anti-imperialist cafés; crashing the music hall circuit, Negm recalled, “we were laughed off sentiments that crystallised during his time working in the Canal Zone. the stage.”18 In sum, a close reading of their songs but also of the duo’s Negm was among the 80,000 workers who deserted British occupation memoirs and of others’ memories of them suggests that the fairly traditional army bases in 1951 in a boycott organised in response to the Wafd govern­­ compositions that each was producing gave way through the synergy of ment’s urging. In his memoirs, he recalls the Canal Zone as the crucible of encounter to newer and bolder art. It was a convergence already happening popular resistance. Drawing on a familiar trope, the nation as fecund woman when the 1967 defeat demanded new voices. (an image which surfaces in his poems), Negm recalls the atmosphere As for so many other Egyptians, though, the 1967 war did mark an in 1951: “In those days Egypt was pregnant with something. Perhaps the emotional and political milestone, a devastating indication that the regime features were not clear, but the pregnancy was certain, real, and obvious; was not only repressive but also weak. Negm “disappeared into his room everyone, of all [political] directions and rungs of the social ladder were for days, and came out having written ‘Al-Balagh Ruqm 1’ [‘Manifesto No. 1’, waiting, as if they had an appointment with the moment of birth.”12 also known as ‘al-Hamdu lillah’] … a clear indictment of the military Nor was this the young man’s first presence in the political melee. As bureaucracy.”19 Negm calls it “the first war dispatch from the operations a teenager, he witnessed the 1946 student upheavals while selling stationery room at Khosh Qadam”, saying that when it was published “it spread like to tram riders; he traces the marching students from al-Azhar along the flame across kindling because this was my first direct scuffle with the tramway route.13 His earlier poems show a sense of class grievance and authorities and first forthright attack on Nasser personally”.20 Workers polarisation, intensified, it seems likely, by his experience in prison (1959–62) circulated it on the factory floor and people flocked to the alley. where he also got to know a number of Egyptian communists. Likewise, And, by the time the students were ready to erupt, Negm-Imam Imam had not been isolated from politics, according to his own narrative: were ready, artistically, to join them. “I participated among al-Azhar University students in demonstrations against the king and the English [before 1952]”; anger at oppression A Poem, a Manifesto “was rooted in me from childhood.”14 It was in the early 1960s, too, that Negm first read the poems of If the sun were to drown Bayram al-Tunisi, the great vernacular poet of an earlier generation, In the sea of sad clouds banished from Egypt in 1919 for having allegedly insulted the royal family in If the earth were engulfed verse.15 Bayram’s voice had a strong impact on Negm’s poetic formation and By a wave of dark shrouds his move toward a political voice constructed on the popular oral heritages And sight died away of the Egyptian countryside and urban quarter. Indeed, Negm attributes his From all eyes and all minds political-aesthetic awakening (and specifically, the concept of the union of And the pathway went missing politics and poetry) to reading Bayram’s poetry.16 The zajals (strophic poetry Amidst circles and lines based on colloquial oral speech and set rhythmic and rhyme patterns) in You might get around his 1964 collection Suwar min al-hayat wa’l-sijn (Images from/of Life and (You think you’re so wise!) Prison) are strong poems in the critical social tradition of Bayram al-Tunisi Yet you haven’t a guide and others. They exhibit a thoroughgoing social conscience and a slightly But the words’ very eyes21 rebellious identity, resisting patriarchal familial control. In one, a peasant addresses a feudalist, as Bayram al-Tunisi’s poems had done.17 Yet they do This short poem’s final line is open to more than one meaning, as we shall not point in the direction that Negm’s poems would later take. see. It is no surprise that this poem opens Negm’s first post-1967 collection Among others, Muhammad Baghdadi, at the time a student from the by the same name, ‘Uyun il-kalam (The Eyes of Words, 1976).22 Nor is it provinces newly in Cairo, suggests that the period 1962-67, when Negm sur­­­­­­­prising that his poem ‘The Eyes of Words’ (1970?) opened many of the and Imam were performing together but as yet had a meager and very pair’s performances.23 The poem is a manifesto, a challenge to the unnamed localised following, was a space of gradual political maturation for Negm’s 58 59 reader/auditor, a reminder that in a world fogged over by politicians’ lies poetic vision, honed by the continuing hardship of daily life. Negm and and silences – metaphorically, a world veiled in clouds that are, as the word ghamam suggests, perhaps grieved by their obfuscating role – the only guiding Mute voiceless quiet mute light remains “words”. Darkness, zalam, echoes zulm, oppression or tyranny, All words have died away persistent wrong visited on others. In such murky conditions, sight, perception And walls of a thousand houses and judgment are impossible, and one loses one’s way amongst the hazy Swap shushed-up words with me evasions of politics (“circles and lines”; the latter also connotes plans). The binding image of the poem and the collection, ‘uyun il-kalam, is a powerful Mute voiceless quiet mute one: the words’ very eyes – words that see, that penetrate, that reveal the But our silence is a sense truth – but also, perhaps, echoing another sense, ‘ayn as essence: the very More eloquent than words essences of words (although ‘ayn is only used in the singular in this sense, And everyone who’s heard us and so this can only be an echo). Furthermore, we may read ‘ayn as a well Knows exactly what we say or life source: the underground sources of sustenance that well up to create He who brought us together new life. Finally, ‘uyun il-kalam might also intimate the holes between words, Must utter words today the spaces, the silences, the things not-said, the things not permitted to Must say, Silence has died be said, things buried in the “dark shrouds” of political repression and the Must scream into the hush “circles and lines” of political rhetoric that spins and eludes; that refuses Mute voiceless quiet mute24 to be held accountable. here we have a manifesto of simple images but profound echoes, The poem, composed in 1968, takes aim at the regime’s lack of self-critique a song-poem that draws on apocalyptic natural processes to allegorise after June 1967. Constituting a direct challenge to the Nasserist leadership apocalyptic politics. But, contrary to natural processes, the man-made that it voices for and speaks to Egyptians as audience and as comrades, processes of politics can be met and resisted if words in their profundity, the poem also insists that the regime allow speech, for a repressive hush the essences of words, not the shallow words of the political centre, truly – a void in the centre of the public space – has pervaded the nation. receive a hearing; if words, as well as the silences between them, are trusted. ‘Is-Samt’ is contemporary with the rebirth of Egypt’s student movement. the movement from apocalyptic natural images and inexorable move­­­ Among students and other intellectuals, unease at Nasserist practices at ment on a grand scale, to the quiet power of words and silences happens home had begun to turn into a broader and more pointed critique of post- not only through Negm’s lyrics but also through Imam’s performance. The monarchical Egypt, although most critics shared the ideological direction declarative tone of the first lines, sermon-like and solemn, gives way to a of the regime. Concomitantly, Negm-Imam’s songs shifted from mourning more joyful and less pronounced evocation of words, following the swirl the defeat – albeit with caustic criticism of the leadership’s self-serving of “circles and lines”. deceptions and willingness to sacrifice the populace – to a more compre­­ If the necessity and urgency of words are a leitmotif for this duo, hensive attack on the practices of those associated with the regime and the the death of speech – with its necessary, and always political, revival, as an overarching climate of “muteness”, of the disfranchising and silencing of citizens. ultimate challenge to the authorities – forms a constant thematic rhythm in Negm-Imam’s compositions. In the 1968 poem ‘Is-Samt’ (‘Silence’), The Student Movement, the Left, and the Expressive Politics of Opposition Negm excoriates those who do not speak; here, he pinpoints the holes between words. A near-synonym to samt composes the first three lines Nasser and his associates had managed to suppress organised opposition and the second section’s intensified first line: near but not exact, suggesting as they consolidated control, not only by outright banning of organisations not absolute silence but the act of muting oneself. but also by co-opting elements of the population – not least by having garnered genuine enthusiasm for the 1952 revolution, and then offering Voiceless quiet entitlements to key constituencies, notably university-bound youth. Voiceless In his definitive study of the student movement in Egypt, the late Mute Ahmed Abdalla shows how Nasser drew students into the regime’s fold Tales behind that hush 60 61 through tactics of socio-economic levelling that promised to enact Nasser’s So full of speech yet I am dumb socialist principles. The regime increased the education budget hugely, Am dumb from mute surrounds expanded secondary and university education, reduced and then eliminated student fees, and gave students special privileges. From 1964, graduates had been handed overly lenient sentences for their role in the military defeat. were guaranteed civil service jobs, originally a temporary measure that the After clashes with the police, the unrest spread. February 21 happened to state could not retract even as the burden on the public sector became be Students’ Day, an annual commemoration of the 1946 student uprising. untenable. The combined impact of these policies meant that, in Carrie Workers were joined by students, who organised discussion forums at which Rosefsky Wickham’s words, “From 1954 to 1967, Egypt’s educated strata they grilled officials. Only after that did students leave campus, marching ceased to function as the country’s leading source of opposition activism.”25 through the Cairo and Alexandria streets in the thousands. Having been yet widened access to state institutions and social mobility, growing assured by Parliament Speaker Anwar al-Sadat that they could safely present expectations and new horizons, were not matched by state capabilities. student demands to parliament, a group of engineering students did so and Moreover, with economic stagnation in the 1960s, graduates’ earning power then were promptly arrested, resulting in a mass three-day sit-in beginning was sinking.26 With socialist revolution emerging as less than revolutionary on 25 February. A compromise was reached by allowing a roster of student and less than successful, co-optation on a broad scale was no longer so demands to be presented more formally to parliament. Central were demands effective. for democracy and abolishing the police state.32 “The uprising of February What had been a ready constituency for Nasser’s Third-Worldist 1968 marked the students’ initial reaction to the defeat and the beginning socialism found the political structure they had espoused sagging.27 Yet, of their confrontation with the regime,” concludes Abdalla. “It reflected the youth activism was not simply a product of disappointed hopes and failure of the official youth organisations … to contain their movement. Its thwarted trajectories; it was also an outcome of a yearning for participation intensity was attributable to the scale of the military defeat itself as much and freedom to speak and act, particularly since many students did support as to the constraints on self-expression among students and intellectuals the regime’s stated goals and wanted a critical hand in steering the gleaming long before the defeat.”33 In 1968, says Wickham, “student activists were new revolutionary ship of state. Within their own world, growing unease self conscious about their position as the country’s only vocal opponents before June 1967 and then active opposition afterward, also responded to of the regime’s policy.”34 Negm and Imam were placed to channel this the regime’s controlling hand on campuses. As summarised by Wickham, potential vocality through their megaphone, yet this aesthetic-political synergy “Soon after consolidating power, Nasser reorganised the universities, is all the more stunning for not having been a matter of conscious planning. banning independent student unions, purging faculty and administration, For, meanwhile, back in Ghuriyya, if intellectuals and workers were and posting security police units on campus.”28 coming to Khosh Qadam, students en masse had not yet found the pair. there were no independent outlets for students’ political ambitions.29 But a single song changed that. ‘Jifara mat’ (‘Guevara has died’), composed Harsh repression and university closures quieted student unrest, but ultimately­­ in late 1967, immediately caught the political and emotional imaginations contributed to its eruption. Pervasive surveillance and co-optation of of restless students. “This was our way to the hearts of the students,” Negm university staff and students as eyes of the regime, notes Ahmed Abdalla, said a decade later.35 Said Imam, “This was the song that put my name and demoralised campus populations increasingly; there was lessened respect Negm’s on every tongue… My name became ‘the Sheikh Imam who does from students toward teachers constrained not to answer questions or Guevara’.”36 And when recording executives from Cuba showed up at the foster independent thinking. In sum, says Ahmed: “Students welcomed the pair’s door, Egypt’s intelligentsia began to take note. But what made social and economic achievements of the Revolution and responded to the the song particularly powerful was that through evoking a world hero, euphoria and sense of national pride inspired by Nasser’s leadership. They Negm-Imam addressed local issues. also responded to the government’s offer of wider educational opportunities the Argentinian-born revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, active and guaranteed employment… Only after the massive national defeat of with Castro’s revolutionaries and then a senior official in Cuba’s government 1967, and the slowing down of the regime’s social programme due to the after Batista’s overthrow, and later a revolutionary theorist, was killed in burden of military expenditure, did an eventual split between the regime Bolivia while training guerilla troops, on 9 October 1967. Che became and its student body become a real possibility.”30 an instant martyr-hero for leftist activists across the globe. For Egyptians, If June 1967 yielded stunned disbelief nationwide, it was only in wounded by June 1967 and witnessing the fervour of growing student unrest, February 1968 that a significant popular disturbance challenged the regime.31 this solemn memorial to Guevara’s ultimate sacrifice in the cause of mass The events of February 1968 began when munitions workers in Helwan 62 63 resistance to tyranny struck strong chords. It would continue to do so, demonstrated, on 21 February, to protest their sense that military officers often ending Negm-Imam’s concerts through the years. As one participant reminisced, “Sheikh Imam moved our emotions strongly… especially with The short, stark language of news announcements – Jifara mat – contrasts those songs expressing the reality of poverty and suppression that we with the invoked fullness of the popular response, everywhere, as the news suffered then. An evening performance would usually end with the song echoes from the radios to the streets, bringing people of different identities ‘Guevara has died’… that song still has such a powerful impact on me together. This also has the effect of reminding listeners that just as Guevara that I all but cry when I hear it even now. Perhaps it is a longing for is not alone in his death, the Egyptian people are not alone in their struggle. those days…” the poet turns from reportage to direct address, a pluralised interlocutor, those who must be held accountable, whether for Egypt’s defeat or the Guevara has died Bolivian rebels’ or others around the world. Guevara has died Late-breaking news, all the radios cried And what think YOU (your wealth and might live long!), You antique and twisted gnomes? A stark announcement, a sort of campus wall magazine declaration made Your bodies oozing, fed so well aural, a piece of counter-news contesting the preoccupations of the official On tasty morsels with the trappings news, the poem implicitly enacts a broad solidarity as it eulogises the Cuban You, sitting comfy, cozily warm hero in Arabic terms that construct the mythological afterlife of traditional Though firing up your heaters still Egyptian and Arab heroes even as it gestures to the role of modern mass Garish, showy dopes you are! media in making such solidarities possible. Guevara is a gada’, and women’s With your polished nodding pates… mourning rhetoric for a young, strong, protective son embraces him: ya miit khusara, “O a hundred losses”. Moreover, the poet praises Guevara for Like his “teacher”, Bayram al-Tunisi, Negm is a brilliant punner, exploiting eschewing the crown of public heroism, for not seeking the limelight, the double meanings of colloquial terms, sometimes the gap between standard juxtaposed critically in the poem with the contrasting practices of others, and slang meanings. Ya antiikat (“You antique ones”) he addresses the regime’s implicitly ‘unheroic’ local politicians and military leaders. leaders and supporters, also defining them as an older generation, “O you antique [or ancient] ones”, hinting at their strong affinities with pre- And in the churches revolutionary politicians. Simultaneously, this term signifies funny-looking or And the mosques grotesque. It also exploits the old (and cross-cultural) practice of suggesting In the alleys that a person’s morals and personality are written vividly across the face; And the streets that surface reveals depth. Even in this powerful funeral dirge, the bitterly In cafés and in the bars: caricatured portrait of those who should have been Guevara’s – and the Guevara has died students’ – supporters, but have instead become their nemesis, invades the Guevara has died mourning with sharp reality. Finally, it counters Nasser’s Third World politics Voices ply endless ropes of speech… of solidarity by suggesting that a Third World hero (Guevara) represents the opposite of Nasser as Third World ideal. Paragon of fighters, now dead and gone While Negm is pun-master, Imam, in his composition and performance, Aah, sigh a hundred for the loss of men! draws out and complicates double meanings through intonation, accent and In thickets deep the young swain perished emphasis. Imam’s music – and the duo’s performance – of this poem-song Still atop his firing gun are crucial to its force. A funeral dirge, the tonal line descending, backed by Dead, he gives body to his fight mournful “ahat” (the opposite of many of the crescendos to which Imam’s He’s done it all in silence songs reach), the song is also punctuated by a march beat, the sound of No drummers explode in ragged sound collective footfalls en marche; the sound, perhaps, not only of a march to No communiqué goes sailing round the grave but of an inexorable forward march in the wake of this world 64 65 hero’s death. The music and Imam’s singing are simultaneously funereal and upbeat. Midway, a short series of raps might echo the nailing down of the coffin members]… control potential sites of mobilisation, [by] tolerat[ing] (of Third World strategic hopes?). It moves the song into a different the existence of an opposition group but… limit[ing] its access to the mass intensity and a higher and faster tone, as if to suggest that Guevara’s death public… co-opt the targets of mobilisation and ‘inoculate’ them against the is not an end but a continuation and a beginning. In the second direct opposition group’s appeal” while buying support by distributing resources.38 address, the poet turns from the antiikat to the rest of the populace – “O As students found their voices, Negm-Imam worked against – resisted – workers, O deprived” who, in contrast, are “bound in chains/feet and head”. this co-optation by constantly reminding listeners of its dangers. They worked From a funeral dirge, the poem becomes a call to arms to follow in Guevara’s against the regime’s attempt to “control… sites of mobilisation” by showing path, a declaration that only armed struggle can allow the powerless any up for impromptu concerts – literally, attacking the stage – and offering participation or hope. Performed in the heat of the first serious popular encouragement to those who would try to retake those sites through challenge to the Nasser regime, “The word goes to [those who have] fire demonstrations, university sit-ins, occupation of university buildings, and and iron”, recognition of present power inequalities and simultaneously unofficial, unlicensed, unsanctioned publications. Negm-Imam were themselves a hint of what might come. an unsanctioned text, a living text in dramatic performance, whose words refrains – Jifara mat Jifara mat – and the tearful, intimate and motherly remained in people’s minds and on their tongues. Using such forms as children’s interjection ‘ayni ‘alayh (“my eye is upon him”; that is, “poor dear”) – sound songs, work songs and pseudo-security interviews, their compositions invoked a dirge for hopes invested in Egypt’s revolutionary but tarnished hero. The communal culture in use and insisted on participation. It is no wonder that, people are the martyr. Rather than military personnel shirking responsibility as Kamal Abdel-Malek says, “In almost every manifestation of mass unrest, for defeat, Guevara has stayed – and died – at his gun, on his own, in the whether by students, workers or both, from 1968 onward, both Negm and forest. If Egyptians cannot seek “the fighter’s ideal” in their own army or Sheikh Imam were implicated and consequently arrested and locked up in leaders, they can seek “local heroes”, gada‘s, in a trans-struggle solidarity prison for ‘disturbing the public peace’.”39 that celebrates and learns from other people’s experiences. And so Guevara It is also important that Negm and Imam refused to co-operate with appears the antithesis – having “died the death of men” – of the Egyptian the communications channels of the state from the start, though they did leadership post-1967. Negm-Imam punched the leadership in the gut by briefly flirt with the radio and TV authorities. When I interviewed Sheikh also suggesting their lack of socially sanctioned masculinity, with the values Imam in London in 1985, for Index on Censorship, I asked him whether he of bravery, honour and chivalry this implies. In the performance, with its would ever reconsider that refusal, since after all, such a venue would give complex repetitions and overlain choruses, Guevara’s shadow hovers closely him a broader audience. “I would still refuse unequivocally,” he said, “because over recent Egyptian history. Movingly linking a shattering world event, the state would still be the one to decide which songs to record. And I don’t another liberation struggle and Egypt, the poem localises world history want that. After all, the mass media – the radio and television headquarters and makes the link explicit through its powerful strategy of direct address. – can be hit and disabled any time. The Israelis did so in 1967. My mass Negm’s clever reworkings of the regime’s bywords and his poem’s satiric media are the masses.”40 echoes of names and slogans, plus Imam’s extraordinary ability to create Following the February 1968 events, Nasser announced his 30 March musical parody in his use of tonal lines and mimicry of easily recognisable programme to liberalise the political system; yet the proclamation was not public voices, gave to the political song in Egypt a performative punch. Negm’s matched by events on the ground. As Ahmed comments, “After a few months semantic puns combined with Imam’s voice puns – or, unexpected words of liberal deeds and declarations the trend was reversed and Egyptian politics and incongruous voices – exploded open the closed social categories that reverted to its authoritarian mould.”41 Student activism had a role in this; the revolutionary regime had not been able, or willing, to disable.37 after February there was space for liberal notions, but when another student the internal structure of these songs and their unorthodox use of eruption followed the announcement of the new Education Bill in late language find their correlates in the contexts of performance. Contextual November 1968, centered in Mansura and Alexandria, this was used contingencies of Negm-Imam’s combined persona and presence are important by hardline elements in the regime to retract any such possibility. to historicise their role in Egypt’s history of oppositional movements. By that time Negm and Imam were in jail, but their aesthetic and Wickham characterises three modes by which authoritarian regimes political contributions to the opposition continued apace. Their work itself attempt to stop the emergence of opposition activism before it starts: 66 67 constitutes a dialectical dance with imprisonment: poems written outside “disable potential agents of mobilisation [e.g., by imprisoning group prison might cause the duo’s detention, and yet those written in prison found their way out to the students; and the very fact that they were No headline, no hack composed in prison added to their oppositional power.42 The pair enacted Could keep our young away rather than simply articulated the issue of political freedom and the right From the cause forever here… to dissent. Like artists before them – Bayram al-Tunisi in exile and the 19th-century poet-activist ‘Abdallah Nadim in hiding – their lives on the 20 January 1972: the poem plays cleverly on the historical moment, the run and in confinement displayed the tyranny at work which their songs “return” of students to openly challenging the regime after the post-1968 declaratively exposed. lull. But a physical political “return” to the scene is also a “return” to serious In their first and spectacular emergence onto the public scene with poems effort. It is the students who are active, subjects of the verb. In contrast, and songs critical of the defeat, Negm and Imam had been public celebrities: politicians and journalists – those of “Byzantine debates” (an idiom for a television show, public appearances arranged by artist-bureaucrats attached futile talk) – are static. to the regime, profiles in the press. But as their performances had turned And Negm and Imam were re-arrested promptly. A mere two weeks from critique of the military’s readiness to more pointed attacks on the later, Negm composed one of his most beautiful and complex poems, ‘Baladi regime itself, the leader could not abide their parodying presence. Negm had wa habibati’ (‘My Country and My Beloved’), a cry from Cairo’s Ottoman- in fact attacked Nasser in his first post-1967 poem, calling him ‘Abd al-Gabbar era fortress, now a prison in the age of independence. For Egypt’s university (servant of God/the Omnipotent, but also the Tyrant or Oppressor), and students (and many secondary students too), exposing the false promises the combination of their relentless critique and their growing popularity and premises of each regime was a primary goal. Grounding their activism earned them a life sentence decreed from the top, which turned out to was the demand for an open system permitting forthright critique and be a sentence of incarceration through the end of Nasser’s life. They spent political discussion, and in which true political participation was possible, from mid-1968 until mid-1971 in the Barrages Prison, coming out only both on campus and for the nation. after Nasser died and his successor, Anwar al-Sadat, felt securely enough Negm-Imam’s targets were often more specific. In topically charged and ensconced to let many imprisoned dissidents out of jail.43 satirically layered sung poems, the duo attacked hollow policies and hypocrisy they were released into the ferment of renewed student activism. Sadat’s among high bureaucrats, politicians and a commercial bourgeoisie that spoke proclaimed “year of decision” had produced no victories, and students the pious language of nationalism while running after personal enrichment. were impatient. According to Ahmed Abdalla, questions of self-expression Orality was matched by visuality, in sharply drawn verbal caricatures that were basic to the activism of 1972-73 “and this time its meaning broadened were the correlate of political cartoonist (and Negm’s mentor) Higazi’s to include the ultimate freedom of ideological choice”.44 visual ones: in the “summer [of 1967], as stiflingly under wraps as theful “We went to Mansura, Minufiyya, Ayn Shams and elsewhere,” Imam in a narrow-necked ful-pot”, Higazi was drawing the regime’s men as “full- recalled. “We participated in the demonstrations organised by the students bellied, wearing black suits, in dark glasses, and riding in late-model black in Liberation Square in 1972” demanding both war to recover territories cars as they smoked Havana cigars”.46 Negm’s portraits in verse were just captured by Israel and an end to the strong security presence on campuses.45 as sharp: playing on the Nasserist rhetoric of “an alliance of forces”, he Negm-Imam performed ‘The Students Are Back’ to the gathered crowd satirically portrayed social categories that had benefited from the regime in Liberation Square. and were implicated in self-interested pursuits.

The students are back My countryfolk live (Look, Uncle Jack!) And among them there ain’t To serious attack Know-how allowing the alliance to live. Egypt, you’re forever here Every group breathes alone Pick of all hopes Afraid of other folks Football – no use! And curtains come down over goblets and smokes Nor fraudulent excuse! But in every mulid No Byzantine debates over nothin’ 68 69 O my people, O Khalid,47 We come together as buddies The Old and the Bold And we call out, “Long live!!” May my countryfolk live One can see Negm-Imam’s lyrics and music fashioning a political aesthetics Ya’eesh! Ya’eesh! that is new, even as it summons a long tradition of vernacular resistance poetry. Yet, to isolate exactly what that ‘new’ consists of is not easy. For one The thinker resides at the Café Riche central element is a sustained evocation of familiar poetic structure and Ya’eesh! Ya’eesh! diction, and musical form, associated with popular oral performance and Preening and pompous, glib, slick and loquacious: collective life (from mawwals to orally performed heroic epics to children’s Never goes to the demos – games). The pair’s compositions and performances combined such familiar Crowds? never, good gracious! popular elements with a bold, indeed unafraid and utterly unapologetic political With a few empty words vocality that had been largely missing in public discourse, and further, laced And some wide turns of phrase this powerful mix with a deep and wry satirical humour. Furthermore, these He whips up solutions for every bad case songs, performed, countered the “naïve folkism” that Nasserist rhetoric The thinker lives, may he live long, live, live! – including publications for the populace in the form of poems, songs and Live on, my countryfolk, live on, ya’eeesh!48 studies of “folk life” – incorporated.51 The combined effect of familiar expres­­­ sive modes and “outrageous” critique, or of the old and the bold, produced No wonder Nasser was blaming the caricaturists for his woes.49 Such a unique sphere of articulation. And surely there was a synergy at work: images would not only be inescapably clear to a broad audience but also were not the students as fundamental to Negm-Imam’s art and the ways familiar, as they drew from the popular lexicon exploited by earlier poets it developed as the pair were to that particular and breathtaking moment – notably, Bayram al-Tunisi – to make similar political points. of popular articulation and resistance in Egypt? When united to the collective yet the topical cadences produced a broad and thoroughgoing critique emotions and sense of possibility that propelled the student movement and of the Egyptian state’s post-1952 trajectory. Moreover, Negm’s pointed gave it broad public support, the result was politically explosive – a fact that verbal imagery and Imam’s suggestive use of musical and spoken tonalities was not lost on the security forces at the time, for when seduction and performed notions of outspokenness and democracy even as they employed co-optation proved ineffective, Negm and Imam were repeatedly sent parody to expose official rhetorics of populism as anything but democratic. to prison.52 to truly trace the role of Negm-Imam in sustaining the student move­­­ moreover, the evocation of popular oral forms and older traditions of ment and giving it a sense of itself – as well as to consider how that movement vernacular poetry was extraordinarily potent in a movement that by necessity shaped the phenomenon of Negm-Imam – would require extensive work communicated mostly through word of mouth and printed ephemera, most on the ground, eliciting memories of activists. A reception-focused study famously the wall-magazines of the seventies campus landscape. Not only could elucidate the particular effects of this performative presence at discrete that, oral culture was still strong. That Negm-Imam both communicated moments, the galvanising power of certain songs, the significance of collective orally and based their aesthetic on an oral poetic tradition and a range of moments in concerts on campuses ringed by security personnel; in sum, popular music traditions, delivered a double dose of the oral expressive the resonances of these often spontaneous – or at least unannounced – traditional culture in which so many Egyptians were rooted by upbringing performances in a context of flowing energies and a sense of possibility and social context. Sheikh Imam’s voice and music drew on both secular among Egypt’s educated young. As one participant in that movement, who song traditions and the Qur’an chanting and religious compositions in was neither an organiser nor a member of a political group, recalled, “Negm’s which he had been trained.53 Negm’s poetry voiced and reshaped the images, and Sheikh Imam’s mere presence at the university would signify, and invocations and spoken rhythms of colloquial poetic tradition. This was produce, a demonstration. I attended one of these meetings in 1973 or 1974… crucial for the movement of which they were a part. Saad Zahran, veteran an evening in which Imam sang and Negm recited some poems. It all led to opposition activist, explains it thus: “The Egyptian left was fundamentally a a large number of students going out in the streets and holding massive movement of intellectuals. Although discrete groups from among the popular demonstrations.”50 70 71 classes interacted with it, the movement’s stances, outlooks and leaders were mostly intellectuals. But what propelled the popular spirit (al-ruh Foundational to this aesthetics of the interactive, the parodic and the al-sha’biyya) was not documents and learned culture, not only because the incitatory is a political truth claim and a refusal to be silenced, which of majority of people did not read and write, as is well known, but because course the poems enact and re-enact endlessly. The political truth claim, oral culture remained strongly influential and effective, even among the by announcing the will to speak and a first-person rejection of “the lie”, educated. The popular spirit made its impact and was roused and stimulated sets up a community of trust that explicitly counters and resists authorities as a result of the ever present and still deeply moving oral culture: in the who claim the nation’s allegiance but are shown up as authors of double- era we are now in, this is represented in Islamic sermons delivered in mosques speak, thus, perfect targets of parody. Circling through these poems are the and through media channels, which have an impact on people orally for the poet’s and singer’s experiences, as poem after poem is dated and situated: most part, without requiring a resort to a real or further cultural authority. “written in Tura prison”, “written in detention”, “written in the Sijn al-isti’naf”. Imam and Negm were the oral facet of the leftist movement, and therefore No less than the students whose work on behalf of the nation Negm-Imam their impact was huge. This influence extended to the university students celebrates and encourages and documents, in the very spaces and times because oral culture still powerfully shapes the people’s emotional and of their performances the two are subject to the repressive consequences spiritual identities and outlooks even if they are educated. So Imam and of their outspokenness, thereby demonstrating (or allowing the authorities Negm had the ability to spark demonstrations and strikes and oppositional to demonstrate) the power of poetry and song as an aesthetic of incitement assemblages. They were able to move the masses when, without them, the and collective action. leftists could not do so, except within the narrowest circles.”54 If the students were the beating heart and active nerves of a political Negm was not the only vernacular poet in the 1960s and 1970s who opposition in formation, Negm and Imam seemed to offer a voice that was fashioning a new aesthetic for colloquial poetry, leaving behind the articulated broad concerns on which many, many Egyptians could agree, tradition of zajal while building on the breakthroughs in poetic form and if quietly. Recalling her political formation into principles guiding her life sensibility achieved by the great poets Salah Jahin and Fu’ad Haddad from and career, actress Fardous Abdel-Hamid remembers her father, a factory the 1950s on.55 Indeed, another innovative colloquial poet, Fu’ad Qa’ud, owner, “clos[ing] the door to listen to secret tapes which I was to find out worked with Negm and Imam for a time; Imam set to music and performed [later] were the lyrics and songs of Ahmed Fouad Negm and Sheikh Imam”.58 some of his poems. But as Dalia Sa’id Mustafa argues convincingly, while In another resonant example, a judge, in the position of having to pronounce Negm learned from and worked with innovations in poetic voice crafted by a jail sentence for Negm-Imam, asked them first to perform a song.59 Rather the brilliant new colloquial poets of the era – Haddad, Jahin, ‘Abd al-Rahman than speaking for, or from, one particular political agenda, Negm-Imam al-Abnudi and others – he was not at the forefront of what was truly a seemed to breathe in and then sing out the mass disappointments and the revolution in ‘ammiyya poetry.56 Yet, among the new colloquial poets of the broad demands of those across a range of broadly leftist – and even some 1960s, it was Negm – or rather, Negm-Imam – who voiced and embodied emergent Islamist – positions. As one participant put it, “Hope filled us at the desires and worries of many Egyptians, post-June 1967. that time. We were certain that the demonstrations must produce results Negm’s poetry, and therefore Sheikh Imam’s performances (for, as I that would be to the betterment and benefit of the populace… it’s enough have suggested, performance must be emphasized as much as composition, to recall that every one of us saw himself or herself as playing a role, simply of both lyrics and music), are rarely couched in the third person. Poetry by expressing opposition, and believed that going out into the streets and performance draw on the “I/eye” of the beholder of the state of things, would be an adequate means of pressure.” the things of the state. By using “I,” it invokes “you”, and direct address As the question of political freedoms became increasingly central and moves from the individual “you” to the collective, emphasised through the students grew more vocal about it, Negm-Imam rapidly garnered an audience. musical-rhetorical strategies of the refrain, repetition and dialogue. This is Their songs of this period claimed that space of political freedom and poetry not to be heard in silence, and not in the first instance to be read enacted it by blasting apart the silence, “like bullets”, as Negm himself put it. individually, but rather meant for choral response and involvement. It is In simple, understandable colloquial language whose metaphoric resonances interactive and incitatory. It means – is meant as – action. By its very form were constructed squarely on daily patterns and idioms of confrontational and mode of dissemination, this sung poetry resisted the tactics of co- speech, they articulated issues of social versus political freedom that were optation and isolation of individuals that the regime tried to propagate.57 72 73 being asked even within the closest circles of the regime. (There are some wonderful stories about how people in power, or semi-power, appreciated Works cited Kazim, Safinaz. 1992. ‘Qira’a islamiyya fi a’mal thuna’yy Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm – al-Shaykh Imam,’ al-Hayat these poems.60) Negm-Imam’s enactment of these issues had real conse­­ Abdalla, Ahmed. 1985. The Student Movement and no. 10671 (27 April 1992) 14. National Politics in Egypt 1923–1973. London: quences for the two composer-performers, for the authorities recognised Al Saqi Books. Mustafa, Dalia Sa‘id. 2001. ‘Nigm wa’l-Shaykh Imam: the power of their performances and sought first to co-opt them and then Su’ud wa uful al-ughniya al-siyasiyya fi Misr’, Alif: Journal Abdel-Malek, Kamal. 1990. A Study of the Vernacular of Comparative Poetics 21 128–57. to silence them through imprisonment, which did not work. “The eyes’ Poetry of Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm. Leiden: Brill. al-Naqqash, Farida. 1979. ‘Muqaddima: Zahirat al-sha’ir very words” could see through prison walls. Baghdadi, Muhammad. 1995. ‘Sabah al-khayr ‘ala al-ward wa’l-shaykh’. In Ahmed Fouad Negm, Baladi wa-habibati: the power Negm-Imam continued to demonstrate through the 1970s illi fitih fi ganayin Masr’, Ruz al-Yusuf no. 3497 qasa’id min al-mu’taqal. Beirut: Dar Ibn Khaldun 3–25. (19 June 1995) 43–46. is not depleted. New generations have taken up Sheikh Imam’s and Negm’s Negm, Ahmed Fouad. 1964. Suwar min al-Hayat wa’l-sijn. Beinin, Joel. 1994. ‘Writing Class: Workers and Modern Cairo: al-Majlis al-a’la li-ra’ayat al-funun wa’l-adaab performances, preserving and uploading the original songs and performing Egyptian Colloquial Poetry (Zajal)’, Poetics Today 15 (2) wa’-‘ulum al-ijtima’iyya. them anew. Groups such as Awj and al-‘Awda in Palestine, Jawqet El Sheikh 191–215. ______. 1976a. Bayan Hamm Beirut: Imam in Toronto, and Iskandarilla in Egypt draw nostalgic and still-hopeful Booth, Marilyn. 1985. ‘Shaykh Imam the Singer: An Dar Al-Farabi. Interview’. Index on Censorship 14 (3) 18–21. 60s leftists while renewing Negm-Imam’s performative political force for ______. 1976b. ‘Uyun il-kalam: Shi’r Ahmad new audiences in what many of us hope is another era of ascending activism ______. 1990. Bayram al‑Tunisi’s Egypt: Social Fu’ad Nigm. Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, n.d. [1976]. Criticism and Narrative Strategies. Exeter: Ithaca Press Ser. Ash‘ar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida. globally. In street demonstrations of a new millennium, those songs have (St. Antony’s Middle East Monographs no. 22), 1990. ______. 1979a. Baladi wa habibati: qasa’id min been audible. The dynamic duo’s political and aesthetic force retains its aura ______. 1992a. ‘Colloquial Arabic Poetry, al-mu’taqal. 2nd printing. Beirut: Dar Ibn Khaldun. and its communicative power, in a new form. As today’s young Arab singers Politics, and the Press in Modern Egypt’. International Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (3) 419–40. ______. 1979b. Ishi ya Misr. Beirut: return to the works of Negm-Imam, they locate and build an aesthetic Dar al-Kalima. ______. 1992b. ‘Poetry in the Vernacular’. In home for their own collective struggles. The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Modern Arabic ______. 1981. Ya’ish ahl baladi: Ash’ar misriyya. Literature, ed. M. M. Badawi, 463–82. Cambridge: 5th printing. Beirut: Dar Ibn Khaldun. Cambridge University Press. ______. 1992. Al-Fajumi: Mudhakkirat al-sha’ir This essay was previously published in the American University Farag, Fatemeh. 1999. ‘Fardous Abdel-Hamid: The Art Ahmad Fu’ad Nijm, Pt. I. Cairo: Dar Sfinks [Sphinx]. in Cairo Press publication Cairo Papers in Social Science, 29 nos 2–3 (2006) of Resistance’, Al-Ahram Weekly 450 (7–13 October 1999), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/450/profile. ______. 1993. Al-Fajumi: Mudhakkirat al-sha’ir htm. Ahmad Fu’ad Nijm, Pt. II. Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli al-Saghir. ‘Isa, [al-Shaykh] Imam. 2001. Mudhakkirat al-Shaykh Imam, ed. Ayman al-Hakim. Cairo: Dar al-Ahmadi al-Sarki, Ashraf. 2001. ‘Hal ahtafi bi’l-mughanni al-batal?’ lil-nashr. Reprinted in Imam ‘Isa, Mudhakkirat al-Shaykh Imam, ed. Ayman al-Hakim, 227–39. Cairo: Dar al-Ahmadi ‘Isa, Salah. 1992. ‘Salah ‘Isa yuqaddimu mudhakkirat lil-nashr. Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm! Sha’ir takdir al-amn al-‘am!’ in Ahmed Fouad Negm, Al-Fajumi: Mudhakkirat al-sha’ir Wickham, Carrie Rosefsky. 2002. Mobilizing Islam: Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm, vol. 1, 9–28. Cairo: Dar Sfinkis Religion, Activism and Political Change in Egypt. [Sphinx]. New York: Columbia University Press. Jacquemond, Richard. 2001. ‘La poésie en Egypte aujourd’hui: état des lieux d’un champ ‘en crise’,’ Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 21 182–231.

74 75 Notes 17 on Negm’s poetry as an outgrowth of worker 37 An academic paper cannot convey the power of 51 See for example al-Sarki 2001. This essay also poetry, see Beinin 1994. this poetry, especially the bad-boy performances exemplifies the contestation over memory and 1 on Negm’s and Imam’s early lives, see Booth 1985; of Sheikh Imam, Ahmed Fouad Negm, their stalwart over “possession” of Imam and Negm, a consistent Negm 1992; Negm 1993; ‘Isa 2001; Abdel-Malek 18 Al-Naqqash 1979 quoted in translation in Booth backup the artist Muhammad Ali, and occasionally theme in writing about them since their breakup 1990 chap. 1. All translations in this essay are 1985:19. See also Negm 1979 Baladi 12. others. I think here particularly of Imam-style in the mid-1980s. Al-Sarki accuses the Egyptian left my own. “French” in his performances of ‘Faliri Jiscar Dastan’ of celebrating “what Negm said” and isolating “what (‘Valery Giscard d’Estaing’, 1975) – Imam’s wailing Imam composed and performed” from broader 2 material drawn upon in this essay includes my own 19 ‘Isa 2001:18. “oui oui” counterposed to “aywa”; the nasal French horizons that should have been open to him; Negm collection of 27 tapes, some of which I recorded, “accent” coupled with the very colloquial diction was the dominant partner and the duo’s success as well as the published poetry collections, three 20 Negm 1993:199. of wa’s-sitt bitaa’tuh kamaan. This hilarious and slightly rested on his maintaining a high level of tension quasi-autobiographical works, my 1985 interview wicked quality of performance does not of course with the regime based on a continuous stream with Sheikh Imam, three communications (2007), 21 ‘’Uyun il-kalam’, also known by its first line, detract from the power of the political critique; of sukhriya wa-shata’im (sarcasm and insults). and journalistic and scholarly sources. “Idha ish-shams ghirqit”; Negm 1976:7. rather, it intensifies it. Imam’s brilliant parody of While I agree that there were certain “internal French in this poem points up the importance contra­­dictions” shaping the Negm-Imam 3 Negm’s poetry except for his first (1964) 22 It also opens the 1976 collection Bayan hamm of languages and of performance in the political “experience” (tajruba), I do not agree with this collection was banned in Egypt at least until 1976, published in Beirut (Negm 1976 bh 49). world. narrow assessment of the bases of the oeuvre’s according to Abdel-Malek 1990:6 citing Negm popularity. 1979:137–38. 23 It is important to consider the order in which 38 Wickham 2002:10. compositions were performed, a task beyond this 52 on this, see Booth 1985. 4 this is my translation, quoted with a few paper’s reach. Furthermore, poems composed 39 Abdel-Malek 1990:5. modifications from Booth 1985:19. before 1967 become a seamless part of the 53 Safinaz Kazim (1992) emphasises this and upon it post-1967 repertoire and are frequently republished 40 Booth 1985:21. builds an argument for an Islamic interpretation of 5 Al-Naqqash 1979:10–11, translated in and cited in Beirut in the 1970s: for example, the 1965 poem the oeuvre; yet, she ignores that Imam was deeply from Booth 1985: 19. All translations from the ‘il-Khawaga’l-amrikani’ (Negm 1976 uk 52–54). 41 Abdalla 1985:145. influenced also by secular song and, with regards Arabic in this essay are mine, whether rendered to the poetry, refuses to take religious metaphors specifically for this essay or cited from an earlier 24 the text appears in Negm 1997b:28-29 and Negm 42 Abdel- Malek (1990:9) also suggests this. as anything but literal. translation of mine. 1976a:109–10. 43 t here is disagreement on these dates of 54 communication to the author, Cairo, March 2007. 6 Negm 1992:248. With this climactic moment, the 25 Wickham 2002:31. imprison­­­ment; Abdel-Malek, for example, gives first volume of Negm’s memoirs ends. May 1969 (1990:21). Sadat was later to order 55 See Booth 1992; Jacquemond 2001. 26 Wickham 2002:31–32. Negm imprisoned after having faced trial on the 7 Al-Naqqash 1979 quoted in translation in Booth accusation of having insulted the president in his 56 mustafa 2001:135–46. 1985:19. See also Negm 1992:242–47. 27 In the mid-1960s, political scientist Malcolm Kerr poetry (1978) following the notorious satirical viewed the students at Egypt’s public institutions mimicry of Sadat in ‘Bayan hamm’ (1977). The 57 It is significant that when Negm wrote his 8 Negm 1993:97–100. as “among the most reliable enthusiasts of the substance of the public prosecutor’s case makes memoirs, he did so in an oral colloquial style; the regime” (Wickham 2002:31). clear the crucial role that performance played: fascinating rhetorical structure of this two-volume 9 Negm 1993:84ff. according to Salah ‘Isa, it was not the words of the work is beyond the scope of this essay. 28 Wickham 2002:24. poem so much as the mode of delivery that was 10 Negm 1993:113. under attack (1992:25). Negm went underground 58 Farag 1999. 29 Students had organised a Student Front that brought for three years before the police captured him. 11 ‘Isa 1992:14. together those of different political outlooks but 59 Negm 1992:320–21. they tended to back forces within the regime who 44 Abdalla 1985:148. 12 Negm 1992:173. had advocated in the 1950s for civilian rule but 60 For example in ‘Isa 1992:12–13. were unsuccessful. 45 ‘Isa 2001:66. 13 Negm 1992:152–53. 30 Abdalla 1985:137. 46 Negm 1993:147. 14 ‘Isa 2001:67 31 there had been earlier confrontations with 47 “Khalid”, a popular given name, so “everyman”, also 15 on Bayram al-Tunisi, see Booth 1990. Some have university teaching staff, in March 1954 (Abdalla means “everlasting”; but Negm applies this to his said Negm first read Bayram while in prison; Negm 1985:120). people rather than to the Nasserist state, in a sly (1993:135–36) attributes reading Bayram seriously reuse of state rhetoric. to the urging of the brilliant caricaturist Hijazi, 32 Abdalla 1985:152–53. named by Negm (1993:114–16) as a major 48 Negm 1981:71–76 [poem composed 1968], influence on him in this period. 33 Abdalla 1985:140. quote, pp. 71–72. 16 In his poem to Bayram (‘Al-Ihda’: ila Bayram’ 34 Wickham 2002:33. 49 Negm 1993:148. (1971), Negm declares the continuity of poetry’s responsibility and of his debt to Bayram: “We will 35 Booth 1985:19. 50 Communication to the author from Sahar Tawfiq, go on walking in your path / marked out by night February 2007. as people slept” and calls him ‘uyun al-shi’r, both 36 ‘Isa 2001:51. “eyes” and “wells” of poetry (Negm 1981:11), a consistent imagery in Negm’s corpus: see below.

76 77 Contributors Acknowledgements

Mona Anis is Senior Editorial Consultant with al-Shorouk Publishing House, a The Prince Claus Fund would like to acknowledge leading publisher in the Arab world. She is former Senior Culture Editor and former assistance in the production of this publication Deputy Editor-in-Chief of al-Ahram Weekly, and has served on the Board of Editors with heartfelt thanks to: of al-Ahram Weekly since its foundation in 1991. She has a Masters degree in Sociology of Literature and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Essex, UK. Salah M. Hassan, Goldwin Smith Professor Her translations from Arabic into English and vice versa include poetry by Mahmoud and Director Institute for Comparative Modernities, Darwish, Saadi Youssef, Abdel-Rahman el-Abnoundi and Ahmed Fouad Negm, and she Cornell University was research assistant and editor (in Arabic) of the late Arab American scholar Edward Said from 1991–2003. She writes in Arabic and English on topics including The Embassy of the Kingdom Middle East Politics and Arabic literature. She is a founding member of the Egyptian of the Netherlands in Egypt Committee for the Defence of National Culture and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Center for Arab and African Studies in Cairo. The American University of Cairo

Marilyn Booth holds the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh and co-directs the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW). She has written widely on Egyptian vernacular poetry as a form of political opposition and its relationship to forms of media in Egypt; her first book wasBayram al Tunisi's Egypt: Social Criticism and Narrative Strategies (1990). She is currently writing two books on early feminist writing in Egypt (1880s–1930s) including Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Women’s History through Biography in Fin-de-Siècle Egypt (forthcoming 2014). She edited Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (2010), and a special issue of Journal of Women’s The Dutch Postcode Lottery History on ‘Women’s autobiography in the Middle East and South Asia’ (2013). Her supports the Prince Claus Fund 14 literary translations comprise novels, short story collections and a memoir. She is Middle East and Europe regional editor for the Encyclopaedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (EWIC).

Hala Halim is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University. She has published on such subjects as the postcolonial redrawing of British educational policies in Egypt, the films of Youssef Chahine, E. M. Forster's Egyptian texts, and the translation and reception of Constantine P. Cavafy's poetry in Arabic. She is currently revising a manuscript entitled ‘The Alexandria Archive: An Archaeology of Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism’ which identifies and critiques a Eurocentric, quasi-colonial paradigm of cosmo­­ politanism associated with Alexandria and seeks out alternative modes of inter-ethnic and inter-religious solidarity that speak to current postcolonial Middle Eastern imperatives. She has held an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA's Humanities Consortium, and her translation of a novel by Mohamed El-Bisatie, Clamor of the Lake, received an Egyptian State Incentive Award in 2006. 78 79