Narrating the revolution: Towards slow memory in Egyptian fiction

Abstract

The narrative of the 2011 Egyptian revolution has been construed as event-oriented and has often emphasised the participation of certain segments of society, while overlooking the diversity of individual experiences and glossing over violence and other uncomfortable realities that had a crucial impact on how the period is remembered. This article explores literature as a vehicle for fostering slow memory, encouraging slow remembrance through its resistance to (fast) interpretation. The article argues that Egyptian fiction serves as the opposite to oversimplifying portrayals of the events which shape collective memory, using various narrative techniques and approaches to go beyond the event and to subvert the dominant narrative. The article will analyse three contemporary Egyptian novels and show how the use of polyphonic voices, silence and the focus on the everyday aspects of people’s lives may contribute to understanding the recently conceptualised notion of slow memory in literary studies.

From its very beginning, the dominant narrative of the January 25 Revolution (Ṯawrat 25 Yanāyir) which broke out in Egypt in 2011 has been constructed in a way that emphasised the participation of the middle class, educated, secular and often also tech-savvy Egyptian youth. Despite the diversity of the protesters who included members of the working class, the subaltern, middle-aged people and religious people (Rennick, 2013; Šabasevičiūtė, 2016; Wessel, 2021), these categories were often incorporated into the narrative only to stress the nation-wide scale of the demonstrations, thereby supporting the legitimacy of their objective. At the same time, the dominant narrative sidelined, for example, the role of workers’ strikes (El Mahdi, 2012), and glossed over violence and other uncomfortable realities. The narrative promoting the image of peaceful protests has been created mostly as a part of a strategy to win the support of the local and international general public (Khosrokhavar, 2014; Šabasevičiūtė, 2016), especially those among the local upper-middle class audience (El-Mahdi, 2011).

However, by clinging to this constructed image of the revolution, various media channels engaged in a rhetoric of othering, excluding individuals and groups that did not align with the narrative they aimed to promote. While the pro-regime media depicted activists as unemployed thugs and foreign agents spreading violence and chaos, the pro-revolutionary press tried to counter the image, defending the morals, education and peaceful conduct of the revolutionary youth. The competing narratives fomented a battle over who had the right not only to participate in demonstrations but also to ‘represent Egypt’, with the voices of the working class, urban poor and often even religious groups being relegated to the margins (Šabasevičiūtė, 2016). With the coming to power of the Muslim Brotherhood following both parliamentary and presidential elections, social polarisation within the country intensified (see e.g. Matthies-Boon, 2023). As Malak (2014) and Soliman (2014) have shown, in their efforts to legitimise their existence and consolidate their power, both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Military engaged in tactics of othering and demonisation, singling out specific segments of society as threats which further deepened the rift in the society. At the same time, this ‘us vs them’ narrative created an illusion that there were only two available options from which to choose. Most significantly, the period witnessed widespread civilian and state violence, reaching its peak during the Nahḍa and Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawīya massacres which targeted supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the years that followed, the memory of the revolution was in flux, its goals reinterpreted and its meaning contested and manipulated by competing groups, adapting the narrative to enhance their legitimacy and consolidate power.

These antagonistic versions of the narrative, which included various omissions and distortions, not only exacerbated polarisation within the society, but significantly influenced how the period is remembered. The uprising in 2011 has often been portrayed as ‘a conspiracy’ or ‘a mistake’ by pro-regime media (Barakat, 2019). More importantly, the military regime managed to skilfully exploit these gaps and contradictions to manipulate the narrative and create a propagandist, conspiratorial version of events, disseminating this version through different channels and institutions, in tune with what Abdou (2017: 79, 89) called the country’s ‘schematic narrative template’, which involves the ‘emphasis on the role of the army as the saviour of the people’s will and revolution, while simultaneously accentuating the foreign danger, embodied in the MB and alleged young activists’ foreign connections and conspiracies against Egypt’s unity and sovereignty’. Therefore, both the memory and the interpretation of the revolutionary period greatly impact the present-day situation in the country, not only in the political context but also in the people’s everyday lives, including their personal and political choices, thereby influencing both the lived reality and the future of the entire population.

Revolution beyond the event – towards slow memory

The image of the January Revolution as a historic event has dominated not only journalistic articles and public debates but also to a certain degree scholarly discourse (e.g. Badiou, 2012). The story of the Egyptian uprising has been set firmly in time and space, focusing on the Taḥrīr Square in Cairo during the period between January 25 and February 11, with individual incidents told in chronological order. I argue that the way the revolutionary narrative has been construed, with media playing a crucial role in shaping its image through numerous reports, video footages, and photographs, as well as the overfocus on its eventfulness, promotes the creation of what can be considered ‘fast’ memories. Therefore, I suggest examining the revolution through the recently conceptualised framework of slow memory, coined by Wüstenberg (2023), to acknowledge the diverse experiences of individuals, the impact the revolution had on their lives, and the subtler societal changes that preceded or followed it.

In her seminal article, Jenny Wüstenberg (2023: 60, 67) defined slow memory studies as one that “aims to study slow moving change and how it is or can be remembered, to consider how remembrance practices can slow down and reject “fast” memory, by “shifting attention from eventful and sited pasts to those that are slow moving”. While Wüstenberg places the focus mostly on slow, not immediately noticeable processes and transformations like climate change and slow violence (Nixon, 2011), as Fridman and Pavlaković (2023) point out, referencing Rigney, different paces of slowness may be considered within the concept of slow memory. As their working paper suggests, more spatially and temporally rooted developments, such as conflicts and other difficult historical periods, can also be studied from the perspective of slow memory, emphasising their processual nature and moving the focus beyond the events to less visible phenomena and transformations (Fridman and Pavlaković, 2023).

McQuaid (2023) also advocated the need to ‘go beyond the pull of immediate events [. . .] into considerations of conjunctures and structures’, particularly as many occurrences categorised as events, such as conflicts, may actually span years or even decades. Overfocus on specific events might then ‘obscure additional and at times deeper meanings and transformations’ (Fridman and Pavlaković, 2023). However, the intention to move ‘beyond the event’ does not necessarily mean focusing solely on processes as opposed to events, as Teichler (2023) suggested; rather it may instead involve examining events through a different lens. Unlike much of the scholarship on the theory of events which interprets events in terms of ruptures that transform structures and break with time (e.g. Badiou, 2012; Sewell, 1996; Wagner-Pacifici, 2017), she suggests turning our attention away from ruptures to ‘competing and intersecting temporalities’. In her proposed typology of eventfulness, Teichler (2023) ¹ defines fleeting events-as-interventions that, while not necessarily causing ruptures in ‘dominant frameworks’, help uncover ‘longer-durée structures’. These structures, sometimes referred to as ‘hegemonic narratives’, operate on a deeper level, influencing not only how social hierarchies and identities are formed and sustained but also how the past is remembered and reconstructed through these events-as-structures in retrospect. To ‘remember slowly’, then, involves uncovering, disentangling, and deconstructing these ‘structures’ and ‘conjunctures’ to reveal memories that develop and accumulate gradually, offering a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between memory and the past.

Without delving into the debate about the exact definition and results of the January Revolution – whether it brought about (deeper) changes in social structures and can therefore be called a revolution (or uprising, revolt, or riot) remains a topic of endless academic discussion – the fact that it has also been viewed as a process (Chrestich et al., 2020; Ouaissa et al., 2021; Rennick, 2013), or at least studied from the perspective of the longue durée (al-Khalili et al., 2023: 5), reflects an ambition to move beyond the narrowly defined spatio-temporal frame of the revolution as represented and disseminated by the media. The same tendency can be observed within Egyptian literary production, as will be discussed later in the article. To limit the perception of a revolution solely to what is understood as an historical event, or event-as-intervention, in Teichler’s (2023) terms, carries the risk of narrowing the focus of what happened at a certain time and place, thus overlooking the underlying individual subjectivities of those who participated in or experienced it, as well as the deeper structures which influence the way revolution is remembered. The superficial, simplistic interpretation of the revolution then runs the risk of being exploited by power-seeking entities, fomenting antagonism and violent polarisation, and even cementing authoritarianism. Therefore, I propose viewing the revolution through the concept of slow memory, which entails looking beyond the immediate moment of rupture to consider slow-moving processes, less visible transformations, and the various temporalities, structures, and conjunctures of the event.

Literature and slow memory

To study slow memory, Wüstenberg (2023: 64) proposed the employment of the concept of daylighting, whose objective would be to derail the fast flow of memories and reveal ‘valuable mnemonic pathways’ to uncover ‘forgotten, marginalised and silenced practices’, but also stories and archives (COST Association, 2021: 4). Building upon Nixon’s (2011: 5–6) approach, which considers literature a means to bring to light media-marginalised issues resulting from slow violence, I suggest that literary works have the potential to expose and emphasise other slow-moving changes or realities that tend to be overlooked in dominant forms of representation, such as mass media, or for some reason are omitted from hegemonic narratives within collective memory. In other words, fiction has the capacity not only to reflect on what happened but also to reveal how it is remembered and potentially question why it is remembered that way.

Fiction has the potential to serve as a vessel for slow memory, resisting straightforward interpretations of the past, as P. Crowley ² observed. It functions not only in the Proustian sense – by shifting the focus of the present to memories of the past and thereby slowing our perception of time (Bilmes, 2023: 29–30; Van Campen, 2014: 41) – but it also urges both authors and readers to reconsider and forge new connections between the past and the present. In many ways, the act of writing shares many similarities with that of remembering in that it serves not only as recollection of the past but also its ‘new interpretation’ (Lachmann, 2008: 301).

Besides its capacity to stir readers’ emotions and narrate the past in an engaging and memorable way (Rigney, 2008: 347-8), the significance of fiction in relation to (collective and cultural) memory lies in its potential to address the indeterminacies and inconsistencies in the dominant narrative. As Rigney (2001, 2008) pointed out, fictional accounts of the past often employ various strategies that draw attention to the imperfections of our knowledge of history, the limitations and biases of our perspective as well as the failures and deceptions of our memory, thereby fostering slower remembering. Through multiperspectivity, fiction can offer diverse interpretations of the past arising from various circumstances and experiences, challenging the preconceptions of reality ingrained in our memory. In doing so, it complicates our understanding of both the past and the present. Last but not least, by giving voice to the marginalised, writers may create an ‘oppositional memory’ (Rigney, 2008: 348), thus ‘challenging the hegemonic memory culture and questioning the socially established boundary between remembering and forgetting’ (Neumann, 2008: 338–339). This article presents three different examples of how slower remembering of the (post-)revolutionary period is encouraged in contemporary Egyptian novels, through which these works counter reductionist and often antagonistic media accounts, as well as official memory narratives of the revolution, while also creating space for diverse memories, possibly leading to a better understanding of the past.

Egyptian literature after the revolution

The early portrayal of the revolutionary period in Egyptian literary production found its outlet in the form of testimonial literature, primarily diaries (yawmīyāt) and memoirs (muḏakkirāt), with novels (riwāyāt) centring on revolution emerging only later. Egyptian novels taking place during the (post-)revolutionary period vary in their approaches: some are written in the form of semi-autobiographical or auto-fictional writing, others resort to satire, noir fiction or dystopias. In fact, for some writers, the revolution was so overwhelming that they faced a crisis of representation. They were caught in the dilemma of whether ‘the big event’ (al-ḥadaṯ al-kabīr) could be represented at all, and if so, in what way, or whether it could be avoided altogether. This was particularly challenging since the literary works of the so-called ‘generation of the 90s’ avoided ‘big issues’ (qaḍāyā kubrā) and focused more on the psychology and interior life of the individual, shunning the grand nationalist narratives of their predecessors, steering away from politics and instead concentrating on their alienated, isolated, and often disempowered selves (Linthicum, 2017). However, at the same time, the revolution turned their everyday life upside down and the turmoil that affected the political and social spheres was very difficult to ignore. As discussed by the writer Aḥmad Wāʾil (2019), literary narratives on the ‘big events’, be they wars or revolutions, ‘have a tendency to fail’ among their readership because they tend to be viewed as authentic, firsthand testimonies and the readers expect to be provided with an informative account of what happened, pondering over whether their writers participated in the event themselves and whether they can possibly ‘know the whole truth’. A similar observation has been made by Ortner et al. (2022: 11), though in the context of Bosnian war fiction. In fact, both fiction and testimonial writing, along with other forms of narrative, can be viewed in Erll’s (2009a) terms as different modes of remembering. Whereas testimonials are driven by immediacy to capture the moment, fiction often aims to dissect, subvert, sideline or circumvent the event. As the Egyptian writer Nāʾil al-Ṭūkhī (2019) observed, although it is impossible to entirely overlook the revolution, given its impact on everyday reality, he emphasises the importance of maintaining the focus on what truly matters: what makes us human.

According to Kendall (2015: 211), most revolutionary writing centres around Taḥrīr Square and other sites of protest, somewhat mimicking ‘the heavy and telescopic focus of media and scholars’. She observes that many of these works seem to revert to the same patterns that existed before the revolution, with a revival of the committed style of writing. While this may be true for some of the earlier works of fiction, I argue that many authors of later novels decentre their writing both spatially and narrative-wise. I agree with Pardey (2021: 247, 256–257), who observed, in relation to post-revolutionary Tunisian fiction, a rise in novels that ‘relegate the uprising to the sidelines’, focusing instead on private life and ‘family drama’, while also questioning historical memory. Similarly, Egyptian novels attempt to move beyond the event, either by centring on the lives and perspectives of individual characters or by subverting and problematising simplified, polarising accounts, such as ‘for or against the revolution’ and ‘us vs them’ narratives. All of the novels discussed in this article are preoccupied with the memory of the past, on a collective or individual level (or both), and explore the relationship between the present and the past, a point also noted by Guth (2019) in his study of post-revolutionary International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) novels. I argue that this shift in fiction towards what Guth (2019: 26, 50) called ‘holistic’ representation, reflected in multiple layers and perspectives, and the attempt at so-called ‘re-humanisation’, aligns with the concept of slow memory. By countering polarising, simplistic media narratives and the propagandist, formulaic regime-promoted interpretation of the past, slow memory shifts the focus to less obvious, everyday, overlooked, slow-moving, and otherwise invisible aspects and developments, challenging established hegemonic modes of remembering and seeks to uncover fresh connections between the present and the past. Thus, this article explores three ways in which contemporary Egyptian novels promote a slower recollection of the (post-)revolutionary period and subvert the dominant portrayal of the revolution, through polyphony, silence, and the portrayal of everyday life.

Multiperspectivity and agonistic memory: The Republic of False Truths

In 2018, the Egyptian dissident writer, ʿAlāʾ al-Aswānī ³ published his novel Jumhūrīya Kaʾan (The So-Called Republic, translated into English as The Republic of False Truths) which explores the ups and downs of the revolutionary period from the perspectives of diverse characters from different socioeconomic and religious backgrounds. Moreover, many of the events depicted mirror real historical occurrences and several characters have clearly been loosely inspired by real-life Egyptian personalities. ⁴ To enhance the authenticity of the narrative, the author also incorporates various materials, including eyewitness and victim testimonies, TV clips, letters, and email correspondences.

The revolution plays a central role by providing the setting for the novel, which in turn serves as a means of exploring its meaning and impact. Nevertheless, the novel shifts attention from its epicentre to its margins, focusing on the smaller, everyday battles the characters engage in at their homes, workplaces, schools, factories, and even in prisons, all depicted as part of the larger struggle for democracy. The effect the uprising had on the lives of the people was somewhat paradoxical: while its outbreak was a reaction to the people’s discontent, as reflected in the revolutionary slogans ‘bread, freedom, dignity, social justice’, it also turned too much attention to the historical event, relegating the problems of individuals to the background or putting their difficulties on hold. This is why al-Aswānī’s attempt to bring the focus back to individuals and diverse aspects of the human condition constitutes a shift in the dominant narrative that emphasised the outbreak and development of the historical event. Most importantly, the author breaks with the prevailing mode of representation that foregrounded the single point of view of the writer-as-a-witness. Instead, the novel uses a kaleidoscopic mode of narration, employing multiple perspectives to address how the revolution impacted the lives of individual characters and how their lived experiences shaped their attitudes towards the turbulent socio-political changes.

Hartner (2012) has defined multiperspectivity as a literary technique that ‘highlight[s] the (. . .) restricted nature of individual perspectives and/or draw[s] attention to various kinds of differences and similarities between the points of view’. Al-Aswānī’s novel is populated by a wide range of characters, including students, activists, factory workers, army officers, a teacher, a driver, a housemaid and others. In addition, there are members of the Islamic clergy, media personalities, and entrepreneurs, representing diverse backgrounds such as Muslims, Coptic Christians, and secular-oriented individuals. Each character holds a unique, sometimes changing, position towards the revolution, and the author endeavours to present the narrative from their respective perspectives. As Stein et al. (1997) have shown, an individual’s perspective has significant influence on how a certain (emotional) event is remembered. In the novel, some of the characters are enthusiastic about the revolution (Asmāʾ, Khālid, Māzin) or come to view it in a positive light (Ashraf, Ikrām), but there are also characters who avoid it or fear it (Madanī, ʿIṣām, Dāniya), openly despise it (Shaykh Shāmil), try to suppress it (Aḥmad ʿAlwānī) or exploit its changing dynamics (Nūrhān, Shanwānī). Major General ʿAlwānī considers rebellions ‘foreign to the nature of the Egyptians. [. . .]’, deeming those protesting as having ‘something deviant in their mentality’, even calling the revolution the ‘January Conspiracy’ (Muʾāmarat Yanāyir) (al-Aswānī, 2018: 176, 416). Similarly, the director of the cement factory, ‘Iṣām, struggles to comprehend how Egyptians, whom he had always believed to be non-rebellious, are suddenly protesting across the country, including within his own factory. In a conversation with Māzin he asserts, ‘The Egyptian people love a dictatorial hero and feel safe when they submit to autocratic rule’, blaming the pharaonic system and even Islamic culture for fostering this mentality. Māzin disagrees, countering that his claim is false, as ‘Islam was, from the very beginning, a foundation for revolution against tyranny’ (al-Aswānī, 2018: 129). On the other hand, Māzin’s conversation with one of the factory workers reveals a different perspective. Despite initially joining the protests, the worker expresses indifference towards the revolution, stating ‘We don’t really care about the revolution and all that talk. All we want is to eat bread and raise our children’ (al-Aswānī, 2018: 357).

According to Neumann (2008: 338), narrative perspective plays an especially significant role in novels representing the collective past, since it ‘allows for the negotiation of collective memories, identities, and value hierarchies’. By presenting their clashing views and motivations, the author aims to create a polyphonic text, weaving together a tapestry of diverse narratives. Hartner (2012) views multiperspectivity as a literary phenomenon related to Bakhtin’s (1999: 7) notion of polyphony defined as ‘a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses’.

It must be said that despite al-Aswānī’s employment of multiperspectivity, he does not always succeed in creating a true plurality of independent voices, as he sometimes lapses into negative stereotyping and a biased perspective structure, which Erll (2009a) identified as techniques promoting antagonistic, rather than agonistic modes of literary narration. One such example is the portrayal of the members of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose perspective is generally absent from the whole picture, despite the fact that many of them are known to have participated in the uprising. Moreover, they are always presented as part of a group, acting in unison and in collusion with the army against the revolutionary forces, an approach he has been criticised for by Faruqi (2023), al-Ṭayyib (2018) and others. In a similar fashion, the author’s portrayal of the Islamic clergy, depicted as morally corrupt and hypocritical to the point of caricature, reveals the intensity of the author’s aversion to the use of religion as a kind of a ‘social corset’ (Mechaï, 2018) and its exploitation as a means of securing political and/or economic power.

Despite these limitations, the novel succeeds in presenting the ambivalent viewpoint of several complex characters who are difficult to categorise through the dichotomy of positive vs negative. For instance, the director of the cement factory, ʿIṣām Shaʿlān, is harsh towards his employees and supports the status quo, yet he is sympathetic towards Māzin and his activism. Delving into his past memories, it is revealed that ʿIṣām is a former communist who, as a young man, was imprisoned, tortured, and humiliated for his beliefs. He was then forced to collaborate with the regime he both loathes and fears, leaving him alienated, cynical, and bitter, seeking solace in drinking. Another example of an equivocal character is Nūrhān, an attractive TV presenter, who acts like a pious Muslim and devoted wife, yet she manages to climb the social ladder through the chain of advantageous marriages. She actively helps spreading anti-revolutionary propaganda, yet she goes to great lengths to make sure that her action never contradicts religious norms and obligations. According to Faruqi (2023), her character represents one of the pillars of counterrevolutionary strategy: corrupt journalism and lack of integrity (as a medium to spread state propaganda and conspiracy theories). I would argue that it is not entirely clear whether she is being manipulated due to her naivety and superficial understanding of religion or whether she is, in fact, the one manipulating others for material gain and personal ambition, making her an ambiguous character.

The novel also manages to capture conflicted or evolving perspectives of characters towards the revolution, as represented by Asmāʾ’s disillusionment with the futility of her activism. In the end, she asserts that they ‘carried out a revolution no one needed or wanted’ while also describing Egypt as a ‘so-called republic’ (jumhūrīya kaʾan) (al-Aswānī, 2018: 509–510). Finally, she decides to emigrate, declaring that she ‘would rather be a human abroad than ‘nothing’ [wa-lā ḥāja] in [her] own country’ (al-Aswānī, 2018: 511). Another similar example involves the driver Madanī’s turn from servility to violence in pursuit of justice and revenge for his son’s death in the protests. In a similar fashion, most of the characters do not remain confined within their social and ideological bubbles; instead they form relationships and alliances across class and religious divides. ʿAlwānī’s daughter, Dāniya, befriends her classmate Khālid, who comes from a poor background and challenges her simplistic view of reality, leading her to join the revolution as a member of its medical staff, tending to injured protesters despite her father’s orders. Similarly, after meeting the young Muslim activist Asmāʾ, the elderly Coptic Christian Ashraf reassesses his views on the revolution. He not only decides to join the revolutionary movement but also opens up his flat near Taḥrīr Square to young protesters and activists. Moreover, he finds solace in an affair with his maid, Ikrām, who is both poor and Muslim, and together they participate in demonstrations.

To a certain extent, the concept of slow memory has been influenced by that of agonistic memory, as it is aimed at ‘bring[ing] different experiences and interpretations of the past together for continuing contestation in a shared symbolic space’ (COST Association, 2021: 13–14). In their definition of agonistic memory, Bull and Hansen (2015: 10–12) also emphasise the significance of a Bakhtinian dialogic approach grounded in the multiplicity of perspectives, one which moves away from viewing conflicts and violent pasts through the binary lens of ‘good vs evil’, focusing instead on gaining critical insight into the historical context and underlying conditions, while acknowledging the complexity of human experience and promoting empathy. In the case of al-Aswānī’s novel, the use of multiple points of view emphasises the existence of numerous, simultaneous memories of the past, each infused with diverse possible meanings and interpretations, an approach which in turn challenges the idea of a singular hegemonic narrative that is constructed and gradually entrenched in the collective memory.

The whole novel concludes on a somewhat pessimistic note, marking a shift in the revolutionary narrative from idealistic and romanticised, as presented in revolutionary diaries, to a more sceptical view, hinting at rising violence and social polarisation. Last but not least, the novel manages to address some of the gaps in the collective memory of the revolution by including a storyline about labour protests, which played a decisive role in the uprising, though their contribution has often been marginalised (El Mahdi, 2012). The author’s decision to foreground this topic can be seen as an attempt to expand the representation of the segments of society involved in and affected by the uprisings (Bešková, 2020: 176), thereby breaking away from the conventional revolutionary narrative, which often centred on the participation of middle-class, educated youth, with a focus on events at Taḥrīr Square, Internet activism, and social networks.

Exit from the Gutter: from the big event to the everyday

Published in 2018, Nāʾil al-Ṭūkhī’s ⁵ novel al-Khurūj min al-Balāʿa (Exit from the Gutter) presents a perspective of a revolutionary period, but the author’s approach is quite different from that of al-Aswānī. Rather than providing readers with multiple points of view, al-Ṭūkhī opted for a single, yet unusual perspective. The novel tells the story of Ḥūrīya, nicknamed Ḥarankash, a widowed teacher of Nubian origin and the mother of a son on the autism spectrum, as she navigates the ups and downs of her life during the revolutionary period. After the death of her first husband, Ḥūrīya tries to balance her job with the care of her 6-year-old son, Maḥmūd. When she meets Kamāl, a widowed dentist, her life takes an unexpected turn. What begins as a love story turns into a nightmare when Kamāl suffers a psychotic attack, leading him to gruesomely kill Ḥūrīya’s son and then commit suicide by jumping off a balcony. Having witnessed this shocking act of violence, Ḥūrīya succumbs to a spiral of depression and possibly psychosis to the point that she is haunted by hallucinations of her late son and imagines that she possesses killing superpowers. In the novel, this state of total isolation, alienation and deep dejection is referred to as being fī al-balāʿa, or in the gutter, getting out of it becomes one of her quests throughout the novel.

The tragic incident coincides with the sudden outbreak of the revolution. Nevertheless, throughout the novel, the revolution is portrayed as happening just around the corner, with only glimpses and chaotic fragments of it provided to the reader. Instead of focusing on the spectacle of the ‘big event’, the novel centres the reader’s attention on the personal problems of the protagonist and her everyday life. It portrays not only Ḥūrīya’s inner world, memories, relationships and personal struggles, but it captures her everyday activities such as wandering the streets, engaging in casual conversations, posting Facebook updates, cleaning the house, and other seemingly mundane tasks like swatting flies and using the bathroom. Often invisible and associated with the uneventful, habitual and insignificant, in Lefebverian terms, quotidian life represents the ‘essential ground of human existence’ (Sheringham, 2013: 134). Moreover, eventfulness in fiction is a relative concept, dependent not only on the context(s) but also on the point of reference, as Hühn (2008) suggests. While the death of the protagonist’s son is undeniably significant from her perspective, it may not be regarded as especially eventful from the viewpoints of other characters, the reader, or on a broader scale – especially given the daily loss of life during a time of national revolutionary struggle. As the protagonist comments, ‘The revolution is a big event. The event that concerns the country. And affairs of the country make us forget our personal affairs’ (al-Ṭūkhī, 2018: 107).

By shifting the focus from the revolution to everyday life, the author moves beyond the historic event itself, uncovering deep societal issues embedded beneath the surface. The society that is uncovered in al-Ṭūkhī’s novel is populated by individuals who suffer from severe alienation and depression, living unfulfilling lives full of extreme violence, each positioned in their own ‘balāʿa’, either killing each other or committing suicide. The society depicted in the novel is one in which alienation, violence and death are part of everyday life, not only as a result of ongoing protests but also as symptoms of long-term suffering and slow, structural violence inflicted upon the population by the authoritarian regime, neoliberal and crony capitalist policies, and the lingering effects of the colonial legacy. However, rather than focusing on ideological divisions that would inevitably be part of a truthful portrayal of the revolution, particularly in its later stages, the author resists ‘stereotypical ideas and formulaic statements’ (al-Wardānī, 2018). Instead, the novel foregrounds the everyday as a shared space where common experiences emerge, such as the challenges of parenthood, coping with loss, and the search for love, acknowledgement, and companionship amid the turmoil of the revolution and against a backdrop of violence. In her delineation of the concept of slow memory, Wüstenberg (2023: 67) emphasises the importance of honouring also ‘uneventful and quotidian experiences’ as a means of exploring and valuing different and often neglected mnemonic pathways. The everyday, defined by its indeterminacy (Sheringham, 2013: 18), also has the potential to subvert prefabricated, stereotypical narrative schemes and ‘fast’ memories, thereby challenging and complicating dominant ways of remembering the past.

In the novel, the portrayal of the revolution is limited by Ḥūrīya’s perspective. She does not believe in the revolution and associates it with the darkest period of her life, as the tragic death of her son coincided with its outbreak. This affliction shapes her stance towards the revolutionary movement, even though her aversion to revolution stems from other factors too, such as her family background or her inability to walk the streets of Cairo freely. Paradoxically, even though she finds herself in the middle of a crowd of revolutionaries, she is overlooked and feels invisible. Instead of receiving feelings of solidarity and support from the community, Ḥūrīya experiences extreme isolation and exclusion, her pain unacknowledged. Astonishingly, rather than receiving condolences, she is congratulated since it turns out to be the moment of Mubarak’s resignation. It seems the revolution has eclipsed everything else, including personal tragedies. While the revolution indeed influenced the daily lives of many Egyptians, it did not change certain deep-seated structural issues and, as the novel shows, for some segments of the population, such as Ḥūrīya, it might have had an even deeper alienating effect.

Through Ḥūrīya’s story, al-Ṭūkhī managed to create a counternarrative that subverts the utopian narratives of community and solidarity at Taḥrīr Square which are expressed in many testimonials, highlighting the circumstantial context influencing one’s position. It is important to emphasise the flexibility of fiction compared to non-fictional accounts (Rigney, 2008), as the author’s imagination allows him to portray a very specific experience that it would not be possible to convey in a testimony. The likelihood of writing and publishing an account that depicts the everyday life of a person who views the revolution negatively, especially without ideological bias, is quite small. By telling the story from an unusual angle, the author highlights how the construction of a unified narrative that forms the basis for collective memory is a selective process that involves the marginalisation and/or omission of certain perspectives.

Al-Ṭūkhī employs subversive techniques, such as irony, satire, and an unreliable narrator, frequently switching from third-person to first-person narration. Moreover, the author’s strategy deliberately emphasises gaps in the memory of various characters or their total amnesia. Often, the same incident is recounted differently at different times, and even the main character acknowledges failures and lapses in her memory. This further underlines not only the unstable and volatile nature of human memory – which tends to be constructed retrospectively, reinterpreted, altered, or manipulated according to changing circumstances – but also the general ‘difficulty in appropriating the past’ (Neumann, 2008: 338). The very beginning of al-Ṭūkhī’s novel provides some insight into the author’s approach:

The facts both are and aren’t an enemy. On the one hand, people understand the importance of facts; they are aware that facts are a cornerstone in the process of remembering and interpreting one’s life. They know it is impossible to defy them or fight against them with a sword. Therefore, a person engaged in the activity of recollecting, just like a newspaper editor, dances around the facts – taking bits from their pockets here and there, tricking them, stabbing them in the back with an invisible dagger, at times embracing them and avoiding them at other times – to ultimately complete one’s control over them without ever saying so. (. . .) Facts behave just like bacteria: they are small and do not possess intelligence, but they shape the future of nations. The only difference is that one can manipulate facts, though one cannot manipulate bacteria. (al-Ṭūkhī, 2018: 5-6)

Although the reader may not necessarily share Ḥūrīya’s perspective and may at times perceive her behaviour as silly, petty, self-centred, ignorant, or delusional, her tragic experiences have the potential to evoke empathy and foster a deeper understanding of the diverse experiences of the revolutionary period, thereby reinforcing an agonistic approach. Similarly, al-Ṭūkhī (2019) acknowledged that writing from a different angle allowed him to better understand those who were hostile to the revolution. By shifting the focus from the historical event to personal tragedies and the minutiae of everyday life, and through the creation of ‘an imaginative counter-memory’ (Neumann, 2008, pp. 338–339), al-Ṭūkhī’s novel moves towards fostering slower remembrance and agonistic memory.

Chronicle of a Last Summer: silence to keep memories alive

In 2016, the Egyptian writer Yasmine El Rashidi published her novel Chronicle of a Last Summer, which portrays the life of a nameless protagonist and narrator at three different stages of her life: childhood, early adulthood, and maturity. The novel takes place in Cairo in 1984, 1998, and 2014, respectively. The narrator recounts segments of her everyday reality, offering glimpses into her life, including memories of her absent father, her strained relationship with her mother, conversations with her cousin Dido and best friend Habiba, and moments at school and university. As she moves between the privacy of her home and the space of the social everyday (Sheringham, 2013), she observes the life around her, trying to capture its elusiveness and record subtle changes in her environment. She expresses a desire to ‘speak to people on the street about their desires, and also capture this internal life, the intimate moments at home, the mundane’ (El Rashidi, 2016: 113). As the author herself noted, certain aspects of life, like silence, can only be observed and understood in the realm of the everyday (Politics and Prose, 2016).

The narrative moves from the passive reception of state propaganda on TV, through the first signs of dissent before the turn of the century, to the moment just before the revolution broke out, when signs of discontent and frustration among the population seem to have been bubbling away under the surface. The narrator focuses on describing pre-revolutionary Cairo, economic hardships, and the city’s neglected urban environment (Younas, 2023: 105–107), illustrating ‘how citizens become silent and why silence is broken unexpectedly’ (Alenezi, 2022: 106). Given the proliferation of revolutionary testimonials and the palpable tension built up throughout the novel, one might expect the author to move to the revolutionary period to reach some sort of climax or catharsis. Nevertheless, as the narrative jumps forward from 1998 to 2014, the moment when silence was broken is absent from El Rashidi’s literary account. Instead, it is referenced only through scattered fragments of memory: her exhilarated call to her estranged father in the early days of the protests, her participation in demonstrations against the Muslim Brotherhood president Mursī, and her sense of betrayal during the Muḥammad Maḥmūd clashes, where she witnessed violence and death. However, such reflections appear only sporadically, are referenced only in retrospect and usually limited to one or two sentences. El Rashidi’s approach is to a certain extent similar to that of al-Ṭūkhī, who also shifts the focus from the historical event to ordinary, everyday life. But while al-Ṭūkhī keeps the revolution present but in the background, El Rashidi’s narrator approaches the topic mostly through silence. In the novel, the revolution is occasionally mentioned but never depicted, described, or analysed. At one point, it is discussed with a Muslim Brotherhood supporter, though only in a theoretical manner within the context of other Egyptian revolutions and coups (El Rashidi, 2016: 157–8). However, the discussion does not provide details about what happened or how it affected her life or life in general.

El Rashidi’s novel is preoccupied with silences, both personal and political, occurring in private and social contexts. The emphasis on silence is reinforced through the frequent use of phrases such as ‘nobody speaks about’, ‘no one would talk about it’, ‘no one says much’, ‘making us silent’, ‘feeling of being muted’, ‘she stopped talking about’ and similar expressions. Some of these silences she has absorbed from her family environment, especially from her mother, others are culturally determined, stemming from notions of taboo and fear, or they result from generational trauma inherited from the previous generation. Certain silences are caused by (political, cultural, or domestic) silencing, others have a communicative function. ⁶ Recent scholarship no longer recognises silence as the mere absence of speech (Ephratt, 2008; Schmitz, 1994) or memory, indicative of forgetting and amnesia (Stone et al., 2012; Vinitzky-Seroussi and Teeger, 2010). Silence can both prevent and foster communication, and in a similar fashion, it can either facilitate memory or promote forgetting. In both cases, the meaning and effect of silence are determined by the context as well as the intention of those exercising it (Winter, 2010: 28). I suggest that due to its semantic ambiguity and resistance to analysis (MacLure et al., 2010), El Rashidi’s use of silence slows down interpretation of the novel, thus fostering a slower remembrance of the past.

One may find the protagonist’s sudden avoidance of the revolutionary period and jumping to 2014 rather surprising. While it can be argued that her silence may reflect her profound disappointment from the outcome of the revolution and even unprocessed trauma (Felman and Laub, 1992), especially as she once calls the revolution ‘our second Naksa’ (El Rashidi, 2016: 161), the inherently ambivalent nature of silence encompasses several possible meanings, including an expression of dissent and resistance to the dominant (semi-)official narrative. I argue that it could also be interpreted as an attempt to create open space for personal remembrance and inclusion of diverse memories. According to Erll (2009b: 37), fiction has the capacity to trigger readers’ memories by generating so-called ‘retrieval cues’, which activate the process of recollection through the mere mention of a certain topic. Despite the fact that the narrative of the revolution itself is absent from the novel, this conspicuous silence draws attention to precisely that which is not being expressed. Norm-breaking silence (Schmitz, 1994) on the part of the speaker has the potential to activate the addressee to take the initiative (Ephratt, 2008: 1920). Therefore, by abstaining from speech, the author symbolically encourages readers to pause and remember their own memories. The imperative to preserve one’s memories becomes especially significant in the context of state propaganda, which, in the novel, is exemplified by video montages primarily used to cultivate nationalist, pro-regime sympathies, videos the protagonist watches on television. In the final propagandist video ‘Montages have escalated into dramatics. If it weren’t Sisi, it would be terror. They repeat this, reminding us of the past’ (El Rashidi, 2016: 177). The phrase ‘Don’t forget’ is repeated over and over, accompanied by violent images and footage. While its original intent is to spread hatred and fear, and perhaps also to justify the massacres of Muslim Brotherhood supporters, within the narrative the phrase serves as a reminder for readers to pause and recall the past as they truly remember it – beyond the manipulated images and videos – resisting the erasure or distortion of memory by propaganda.

The narrator’s silence can be interpreted as an attempt to preserve diverse personal memories that are vulnerable to manipulation and erasure, while also embracing a more agonistic mode of representation. By creating a symbolic space for polyphony and multiple perspectives, this approach seeks to acknowledge the plurality of past experiences without imposing a singular, hegemonic narrative on the readership. In doing so, it may serve as an attempt to mitigate social conflict and encourage a more inclusive understanding of history.

Conclusion

Literature can be considered as a potential vehicle for fostering slow memory; while it is deeply rooted in socio-political reality, it encourages slow remembrance through its resistance to straightforward interpretation of the past. Examining literary works through the lens of slow memory allows us to look beyond the spectacle of events and recognise everyday life as a space where less visible stories unfold and underlying issues, structures, and conjunctures can be observed, unravelled, and deconstructed. The novels analysed in this article attempt to identify and study slow forms remembrance of the January Revolution in Egyptian fiction. Through the employment of multiperspectivity and unusual angles, the novels emphasise the diversity of human experience and stimulate empathy and promote a more complex understanding of the difficult past. While the writers’ approaches differ one from one another, each of them focuses on the lives of individuals and emphasises their everyday struggles, either in a seemingly uneventful quotidian sphere or in the midst of the turmoil of the event. Through polyphony, engagement with the uneventful and finally silence, the authors draw attention to marginalised, silenced and even forgotten experiences and reflections of lived reality. By doing so, they not only subvert the dominant, often antagonistic narratives of the January Revolution, but encourage readers to ‘slow down and take time to remember well’ (COST Association, 2021).