Shahi al-Ḥuriya: Militant optimism and freedom tea

Abstract

This essay traces utopian impulses, following Ernst Bloch and José Esteban Muñoz, in three musical performances of 2011 Libya. It contends that these performances illustrate the militant optimism that characterized this historical moment in Libya, and that reading them closely enables a nuanced engagement with Blochian theorizations of utopia as they are relevant to the quotidian both in seemingly unremarkable and in extraordinary times.

If, one day, the people wanted life

Destiny would have to answer

[…]

And where is the life for which I wait?.

I have thirsted for the light above the branches!

I have thirsted for the shade under the trees!

I have thirsted for the well spring in the meadows

singing and dancing over the flowers!

I have thirsted for the melodies of the birds

the whisper of the breeze and the song of the rain

I have thirsted for the cosmos! Where is being?

When will I see the anticipated world?

—Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, “The Melody of Life.”

Revolutions realize the oldest hopes of mankind: for this every reason they imply, demand the ever more precise concretion of what is intended as the realm of freedom and of the unfinished journey toward it. Only if a being like utopia itself (consequently, the still completely outstanding kind of reality: successfulness) were to seize the driving content of the Here and Now, would be the basic state of mind of this driving: hope, also be totally included in the successfulness of reality. Until this possible fulfillment, the intention waking-dream-world is in progress; no part payment allows it to be forgotten.

—Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope

I have chosen to translate the first two lines of Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi’s The Melody of Life differently than most often appears elsewhere. ¹ If I have been excessively authorial, I confess to have intended to render the prospect of revolution implied in al-Shabbi’s opening declaration unlikely. Indeed, a primary contention of this article is that utopia is not easy. Rather than fantasy that allows for a disengagement from the political, the understanding of utopianism that I employ here is inextricable from a critique of the material constraints of the present. This is “a critical investment in utopia, which is nothing like naïve but, instead, profoundly resistant to the stultifying temporal logic of a broken-down present” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 12). Following José Esteban Muñoz’s seminal deployment of hope as “both a critical affect and a methodology” (p. 4), in what follows I trace utopian impulses in three musical performances of the 2011 Libyan revolution. These performances provide generative sites at which to investigate the conjunction of revolutionary hopeful impulses and material change. They compel us to take pause to resist the prevailing tendency to jump past the revolution to its aftermath (evident in the question that began to dominate some discussions almost immediately: Was it worth it?). I propose that close readings of the revolution’s aesthetic performances can provide a methodology for coming closer to taking the revolution on its own terms. This, in turn, helps to better illuminate the critical potentialities of which the revolutionaries were themselves conscious.

While the circumstances and politics of the three examples I take up differ, they each illustrate what Ernst Bloch calls “militant optimism.” This phrasing provides a particularly visceral avenue for comprehending the kind of grounded utopianism that undergirds a project that follows Muñoz and Bloch. In his multivolume masterwork, The Principle of Hope, Bloch (1986 [1954]) defines his concept of militant optimism as “materially comprehended hope,” the grounded process of “changing the world” in the work of revolution (pp. 199–200). Militant optimism, for Bloch, is conscious; it requires knowledge that is not contemplative but rather “goes with process” and thus “thoroughly mobilizes the subjects of conscious production itself” (p. 198). The (militant) mobilization with which Bloch is concerned is, I contend, affective, embodied and fundamentally performative. It draws our attention to a performative conception of the public sphere, in which the Habermasian “all-affected principle” of public formation might more usefully suggest the necessity of attending to feeling than a method for drawing boundaries of political inclusion and in which contention takes place through performances that not only argue but also make. ²

The performances examined below illustrate different facets of militant optimism. The first, a March 2011 performance of shahi al-ḥuriya, “Tea of Freedom,” provides an improvised remake of a Gaddafi-era song that enables audience members to collectively reimagine the current moment through the shared memory of a political past. The second, an English-language studio recording that translates Omar Mukhtar to produce the title and chorus, “We Will Not Surrender (We Win or We Die),” narrates the revolution to Anglophone listeners in and outside Libya, while it generates multifarious meanings and affect in its local and transnational circulations. The third, Adel Mshiti’s sawfa nabqa huna, “We Will Stay Here,” articulates national resistance in language that travels and in its circulation acquires localized significances that affectively link the varied political struggles of Arabic speakers.

Distinct in their production, distribution, audience, and language, each of the performances I examine here includes an element of bravado. One could locate this performance of bravado in the very grammar of these songs’ texts: a simple future, spoken as a collective—we will—or an imperative. I argue, however, that while the performance of bravado in this music is certainly among its most important affective dimensions, it is not an expression of confidence. Seemingly self-assured, these singers perform not certainty but insistence. This kind of bravado produces a tactical affect and a performative threat that renders the popular uprising a force to be reckoned with. This is performative contention and the calling into being of a (temporary) public through which to struggle. The appearance of confidence belies the unfavorable odds with which this movement must contend, drawing sympathetic listeners in toward an unarticulated political project which, nonetheless, through the tone seems like it could win.

Daily tea

A group of men crowds around a large pot of steaming liquid. Most stand, while a few, closer to the camera through which this scene is recorded and then uploaded to YouTube, sit. Some hold paper or plastic cups; one man, seated and dressed in a bright yellow windbreaker, raises a water bottle that has been cut across the middle to form a cup. A man standing in the center of the group leads a call and response, moving with large gestures and rotating to direct his enthusiasm to each part of the circle. Occasionally, he glances into the camera, but mostly he seems focused on directing his attention at the people around him. Their movements are, generally, more muted, but they smile if they do not always sing, and they look as though they are just as amused by the Tea Man Aiman’s delight as by the song itself.

Aiman grins and sings, “ya shahi al-ḥuriya! Oh tea of freedom!” The chorus surrounding him responds in wordless melody, “ya la la la laa lee!” Aiman: “ya ghali ‘aliyya! Oh you who is so dear to me!” Chorus: “ya la la la laa lee!” This is Benghazi, March 2011, a few weeks after the Battle of the Katiba resulted in the evacuation of the city by Muammar Gaddafi’s forces near the end of February. ³ In the background of the video, street lamps are visible, though unlit as it is day, and two tall buildings lay far behind the group. A wall closer to the foreground is covered in orange cloth behind black and white photographs of faces. I am still not sure of the scene’s exact location, but the wall looks like ones that were set up outside of Benghazi’s courthouse at that time: impromptu collective mourning sites where families placed images of the dead and disappeared. The walls I saw when I visited months later ⁴ were somehow simultaneously two and three-dimensional: flat in the fadedness and somber tone of the photographs, and in the absences they implied, yet also overflowing in the sheer number of images squeezed next to and stacked on top of each other. Many retained thick frames that suggested they had not long before occupied a central position in someone’s living room.

As Aiman sings, the other men catch on and sing the lines with him. They all know the song or they almost do. It has been cleverly adapted from an older ode to Gaddafi called “Leader of Our Revolution.” In Arabic, the names of the original and revised songs rhyme; the rhythm and melody are unchanged in the ode to tea to make the parody clear. “Leader of Our Revolution” praises Gaddafi and his Green Book, the manifesto he claimed as the philosophical basis for his rule since its publication in 1975. The mixed male and female chorus sings that they (or we—it is ambiguous in Arabic) are living freedom through the popular voice and assures the Leader that the hearts of millions love him. The rhythm and melody of the song are in popular Libyan style, making it incongruously danceable despite its obvious propaganda.

The main punch of the song is changed dramatically in the revision through the replacement of only two words. In the original, the chorus sings,

ya qa’id thawritna/‘ala derbak towalli

Oh, leader of our revolution/[We are] with you all the way!

The word derb, path, becomes gabr, grave, in “Tea of Freedom.” This renders a refrain with equal urgency:

ya kha’in thawritna/‘ala gabrek towalli

Oh, traitor of our revolution/To your grave directly!

It is noteworthy that the performers maintain the first half of the line—ya qa’id/kha’in thawritna—nearly unchanged, in that this offers a place in which to point to the layers of reference at play in this song and in discourse during and about this revolution more broadly. After the 1969 coup in which Gaddafi and about 70 other “Free Officers” ousted King Idris, Libya’s first post-independence leader, Gaddafi fashioned himself the “Guide” of a continuous revolution. Thus, “the leader of our revolution” still signifies as Gaddafi more than four decades later. Significantly, “Tea of Freedom” does not characterize or speak to the new revolution. Anything “revolutionary” in 2011 Libya rings with the multiple valences of a push for change alongside the institutional, likewise described. Furthermore, by moving from “leader of our revolution” to “traitor of our revolution,” the new song claims some ownership over the 1969 revolution / coup, which enjoyed greater popular support in its early years. It moves from an “our revolution” that renders “us” “his” to one which implicitly disrupts the persistent elision that has tended to merge “Libya” into “Gaddafi.”

Other themes float between “Leader of Our Revolution” and “Tea of Freedom” in ways that demonstrate the very different politics that the two perform. One of these is value: both songs characterize that which they praise as ghali, which translates literally as “valuable” or “expensive,” depending on the context. A less literal translation more apt for poetry or romantic lyrics would be “dear.” In the original, the Leader and his people are valorized:

ya amin al-qawmia/ghali wa sha‘abek ghali

Oh safe-guarder of the nation/You are valuable and your people are valuable

In the more obvious reading, “your people” should be understood here to refer reflexively to we, the singers who devote ourselves to the Leader, who trust him to safeguard our nation, our revolution. This is praise that underscores the total devotion that it is predicated upon. Looking back to these words through the context of the 2011 revolution, “your people” also echoes the international state and media political discourse of that year that justified North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO’s) military intervention in Libya on the grounds that Gaddafi was willing to kill “his own people” to suppress dissent. But an alternate reading of this line might foreshadow the critique that comes in the appropriated song. “You are valuable/expensive and your people are valuable/expensive” might also call to mind the way in which Gaddafi’s family and close associates amassed Libya’s oil wealth into personal coffers, while non-politically connected workers earned wages that could not support their families. A billboard in central Benghazi was painted over in 2011; not an advertisement for any company or political group, it simply read: “Libya does not belong to Gaddafi and his children.”

In “Tea of Freedom,” it is the tea that is valorized and, by extension, the ritual through which it is shared, a social performance predicated on a much less hierarchical kind of relationality than that celebrated in the original song. Aiman, the Tea Man, appears to nearly burn himself, throwing his entire body toward the steaming metal pot as if to embrace it when he sings:

ya shahi al-ḥuriya/ya ghali ‘aliyya

Oh tea of freedom/Oh you who is valuable to me

These performers rejoice in the act of sharing tea, humorous in its apparent triviality. It is a quotidian sharing that takes on profoundly different affective registers in the newly liberated Benghazi. In this context, it is possible to criticize Gaddafi in sounds louder than whispers. The song does this in the variety of ways it addresses him, alternately through specific policy critique and personal insult:

ya muasakh sum‘itna

Oh you who soiled our reputation

ya wajh al-gambali

Oh you with the rubber boot face

ya mkhelli raitna ma yegbalha wali

Oh you who made it so that no government accepts our flag

yegatil fi ‘aweilitna

Oh you who’s killing our families

bit-ḥakim fi ḥajitna

Oh you who’s controlling our things

ya muweza‘ tharwitna bein itchad wu mali

Oh you who spreads our wealth between Chad and Mali

‘ala gabrek towalli

To your grave directly!

Besides the “rubber boot face,” which causes audible laughter in the video of this performance and continues to provoke chuckles when I ask Libyans about it 3 years later, the accusations in these lyrics are serious. Related to the question of value and expense discussed above, “you who’s controlling our things” expresses the perception that what could be the collective wealth of the nation was kept unjustly sequestered by the country’s small elite. The line about Chad and Mali connects this complaint to Gaddafi’s regional foreign policy, which included the institution of mandatory military service in 1978, a year before Libya began to deploy troops into various parts of the African continent, including Uganda in support of Idi Amin in 1979, Chad in a conflict over border land between 1978–1987, and Liberia in support of Charles Taylor in 1990, among others (El-Kikhia, 1997, p. 116).

It is significant that the lines that are not about economic and military policy are about violence against the civilian population, relations between states, and reputation. I contend that a primary element of the affect circulating in Libya in 2011 was related to a sense of how Libyans believed they were viewed from outside. This was intimately related to feelings about what was possible during that time, at levels at once individual and collective. I have briefly referenced above a process through which Gaddafi and Libya have been frequently collapsed into a set of interchangeable terms, thereby eclipsing a category of “Libyans” that was legible to people within Libya as they understood themselves to be seen globally. This dynamic, like much else during the 2011 revolution, also included an intensely personal conflict between Libyans and Gaddafi individually. In his (in)famous 22 February 2011 speech, given from the grounds of the central compound of Bab Al-Aziziya to prove his continued presence in Tripoli, Gaddafi demanded of those wishing to overthrow his government, “Men antum?! Who are you?!” This call was one of outrage: how could anyone dare to threaten his regime (after so many had already been executed for coup attempts in the past ⁵ )? Many took this challenge seriously, ready to prove to Gaddafi—and themselves—that this time state repression would not force the populace back into acquiescence. The phrase lan nesteslim/nantasir aw namout—“We will not surrender/We will win or we will die”—which I return to in the following section, became a trope of oral culture that year, written into street art and repeated in videos made by young men on the frontlines. ⁶

In the same speech, and others like it in the first months of 2011, Gaddafi gave his own interpretations of who the protesters were: “rats,” al-Qaida, drugged Libyans under the influence of Egyptian and Tunisian “terrorists.” The degree to which many Libyans took these accusations to heart is reflected in the frequent repetition of these themes in art related to the 2011 revolution, especially in the most widely visible and audible forms—on street walls and in popular songs. More than one mural in Tripoli depicted Muammar with the body of a rat, on the verge of being devoured by a snake; one of the most widely memorized songs of the year, sung for Misrata by an artist from Benghazi, likewise reverses the degradation, hoping that “God will make us victorious over the dictator, his children and the rats who are with him.” ⁷

The word “freedom” is only used in the tea song in the refrain. In “Leader of Our Revolution,” however, it is used more descriptively. The chorus sings,

‘aisheen fil-ḥuriya/fi sulta al-sha‘abia

We’re living in freedom/Through the rule of the people.

This line defines freedom in reference to Gaddafi’s philosophy of rule by direct authority of the people. It was through this philosophy that he maintained no official governmental position, an irony through which he argued in 2011 that he could not be overthrown like the leaders of neighboring Tunisia and Egypt. How would he “step down” if he was not in charge of anything? The people were already governing themselves through the absence of representation ⁸ and political parties. ⁹

The notion of freedom in the context of Gaddafi-era discursive practice is, thus, deeply ironic, cynical in its farce. Part of what I find so compelling about the “Tea of Freedom” appropriation is precisely that it does not engage in prescriptive gestures about the revolution or what might come after it, nor does it attempt to define or describe freedom beyond asserting that it includes tea. While a few different video clips of a Benghazi performance of shahi al-ḥuriya exist on YouTube, ¹⁰ one has circulated the most widely. This performance video circulated via YouTube, and also in the way that much other archival evidence of the revolution did during 2011 when the internet within Libya was cut and phone lines worked sparsely: passed individual to individual via USB drive. The video was exchanged like the tea was: without payment or any apparent structure of ownership. The movement was so extensive that by June 2011, shahi al-ḥuriya was well known throughout Libya and rumors circulated that the Tea Man had been assassinated by the regime. ¹¹

Shahi al-ḥuriya’s widespread circulation among Libyans in 2011, and the investment in the performance evident in the alarm that many expressed at the idea that the Tea Man had been assassinated, suggests the significant power that can be read in it. The performance did not celebrate the realization of any particular goal—besides perhaps sharing tea. It was rather forward-looking but without prescription. It signaled a push toward a movement that rearticulated the past and could thereby reconfigure potential futures. It was open, insistently so. In that sense, it was hopeful, as Bloch (1999) describes hope as openness that is kept open (p. 341). Offering no definition for the freedom it celebrated, and no clear plans other than the demise of the Brother Leader, it left room. Precisely in not imagining a specific future, shahi al-ḥuriya was utopian. Muñoz (2009) writes, “Utopia can never be prescriptive and is always destined to fail” (p. 173).

Shahi al-ḥuriya expressed a militant optimism, both in its insistent refrain, praising the quotidian symbol of tea, and in its violence, the delight the performers took in the play on words that would send Gaddafi to his grave. The utopian function, through which hope becomes conscious of itself, as Bloch (1988) writes, “knows about explosive powers since the utopian function itself is a condensed form of them: the utopian function is the unimpaired reason ¹² of a militant optimism” (p. 107). Despite failures, and grappling with real material conditions, militant optimism persists. It is “[p]recisely the defeated man [who] must try the outside world again” (Bloch, 1986, p. 198). Hope is not confidence. In order to be hope, it must be disappointable. The joy expressed by the performers of shahi al-ḥuriya should not be mistaken for confidence. There is, as I have argued above, a certain performance of bravado that one might locate in this and other performances that circulated during the 2011 Libyan revolution. But this is not the swagger of certainty; quite conversely, it is something closer to insistence. The phrase that keeps returning—“We will not surrender/We will win or we will die”—also performs this bravado. But it is self-conscious. The chance of disappointment is so pervasive as to be almost comical. All around are those who have already died trying. How can we possibly think that we will not? This is explosive power. This brand of optimism is militant in literal terms.

Utopia might always be destined to fail, but this does not signal a closing down. On the contrary, Muñoz (2009) argues, “Within failure we can locate a kernel of potentiality” (p. 173). This kernel has something to do with the quotidian, with the pointing outside of now that utopia does. Muñoz (2009) draws on Roland Barthes to argue that the utopian is marked by the quotidian and that thus “the utopian is an impulse that we see in everyday life” (p. 22). Shahi al-ḥuriya offers this impulse in its pedestrian aesthetics, its vernacular language, and in the way its central tea ritual might be something like Marx’s idea of co-operative.

Talking to you

Around the same time, and also in Benghazi, a group of friends got together in Jasmin “Dado” Ikanovic’s home studio to record a new song. This collective had been making music together for years in several combinations and under various group names. One of these iterations that gained notoriety with the revolution was Guys UnderGround (GUG), famous within Libya and outside for songs like, “Libya My Love” and “Revolution.” ¹³ These varied collaborations spanned genres like rock, hip hop, and a multiplicity of Libyan popular styles and frequently included lyrics in English and Arabic. The impulses to sing in English and to play genres like rock and hip hop were heavily policed under Gaddafi’s government; these musicians report that in the years leading up to 2011 local authorities often denied event permits to these concerts, and that planned concerts for which permission had been granted were frequently canceled at the last minute. ¹⁴ In these conditions, the choice to record in English already had politically rebellious valences. The late February/early March recording at Ikanovic’s studio not only used English but did so to speak directly to Gaddafi without naming him. The song title and chorus translate Libyan resistance hero Omar Mukhtar’s famous anticolonial declaration, “We will not surrender. We (will) win or we (will) die,” therein drawing a genealogical line to maintain a continuous “we” that resists domination, here transposed from the Italian occupiers to the contemporary dictatorship.

The lyrics are few and narrate a liberation struggle in terms both particular and universalizable. I read this as a choice that is telling of the song’s intended audiences, both local and transnational. A range of meanings can be drawn from the text by listeners with greater and lesser familiarity with the context in which the song was produced. There are only two verses, the second half the length of the first and both short. Both narrate a struggle between an avowedly unified “we” and a personal while unspecified “you.” The first verse sets a scene in which the ongoing revolution is visible and witnessed:

The world outside is watching/We’re all drowning here

And the river of blood that you did/We will fight to the end

There’s nothing [that] can divide us/We’ll always stand as one.

From the desert to the desert/All of us one heart.

The semblance of certainty in these lyrics differs from that of shahi al-ḥuriya. Here, there is a certitude almost consistently balanced between the two halves of each line: on one side there is a sureness about the unity of the revolutionaries or the conviction with which they will fight, while just an instant away the singer describes a “river of blood” in which those same revolutionaries (elided here into the entirety of Libya save for the Gaddafi family) are “drowning.” This juxtaposition creates a dissonance that indicates the terrible odds against which the musicians vow to fight. It highlights the unsung “despite.”

Similar tensions are woven into the other elements of the recording. The track comes in rich and full, a masculine voice in unison with a child’s, ¹⁵ no instrumentation save for a vibrant hum harmonizing with the main line. A subtle reverb makes the higher pitch of the child’s voice extend out past the others, so that within the first 10 seconds of the song a long moment passes in which we hear the child’s voice linger alone on the word “die.” This moment is immediately countered by the chorus’ second line: “Our flag won’t fall down/It will wave up high forever.” By the time the chorus comes around a second time, the child has been left behind, and it feels as though the man is now on the war’s frontline, supported by the encouraging rhythm of a chopping guitar and the heavy, rising strokes of a violin. The child’s voice returns toward the song’s end, only to be overwhelmed by the combination of sounds that have now reached their culmination: voices, underscored by rhythm guitar, compete with the violin, palpable in its volume and fullness, and everything is punctuated by a drum track that emphasizes the percussive strike of a tambourine. At this point, the song is at its affective peak, sonically and emotionally overwhelming. The child’s voice is exceeded in its soaring timbre by the interjection of an almost outrageous falsetto, which is excessive even in the way it enters the fold, joining the other voices mid-word after the chorus has already begun to repeat without end to finally reach us with “ … rrender!” ¹⁶ As the chorus continues on loop, that falsetto interjects, offering its own narrative in words that cannot quite be deciphered, save for occasional punctuations of “we die!”

This semi-incomprehensible narrative colludes with its surroundings to produce an affective overload in excess of what can be communicated in language. I suggest that this is why, responding both to elements of the production of “We Will Not Surrender” and to its lyrical content, some have described the song as “cheesy.” ¹⁷ “Cheesiness” often functions in conversation as a way of dismissing an aesthetic object, discourse, or performance. The implication is generally that the thing lacks depth and is, thus, not worthy of being considered seriously. “Cheesy” objects or performances often contain clichés or expressions of feeling (verbal and otherwise) that seem to have been emptied of sincerity through commercialization or overdetermination. But in addition to an aversion to cliché, the impulse toward dismissal can indicate the kind of aversion that stems from sensory overload. Cheesy songs, especially, are overwhelming. They affect the body in ways that threaten to “stick,” in Sara Ahmed’s (2004) terms. Unwelcome songs can, seemingly of their own volition, “get stuck in your head.” Even when not actively listened to, they cannot be completely tuned out.

But in addition to threatening the listener, this quality of affective overload also provides a methodology for grappling with overwhelming upheaval beyond the song. Listening to cheesy music, thus, becomes a way for people living through dramatic social change to process the affective extremes these ongoing changes have wrought. The affective excesses in “We Will Not Surrender” offer the listener a pedagogy for feeling the simultaneous great hopes and deep losses that became quotidian in Libya in 2011 for those participating in the revolution. Allowing oneself to be carried away by overly emotional music mirrors the sense of being swept up on a swelling wave that is an affective experience of revolution. In revolution, staggering grief is paired with Bloch’s anticipatory illumination. The force of the wave that propels the revolutionaries up and away can just as quickly drown them—and does, with frequency and repetition.

The second verse of “We Will Not Surrender” continues to perform the militant insistence necessary to undertake revolution, while evoking imagery of the necropolitical landscape that Achille Mbembe (2003) argues is characteristic of the (post)colony:

you can burn all the bodies/you can bury them into the ground

but they will rise up from their ashes/just to bring you down

This revolution is an uprising of zombies, those who are already dead and yet continue to struggle. This struggle then can proceed through what Mbembe calls the “logic of martyrdom,” which he differentiates from a logic of survival. He explains,

As Elias Canetti reminds us, the survivor is the one who, having stood in the path of death, knowing of many deaths and standing in the midst of the fallen, is still alive. Or, more precisely, the survivor is the one who has taken on a whole pack of enemies and managed not only to escape alive, but to kill his or her attackers. This is why, to a large extent, the lowest form of survival is killing. Canetti points out that in the logic of survival, “each man is the enemy of every other.” Even more radically, in the logic of survival one’s horror at the sight of death turns into satisfaction that it is someone else who is dead. It is the death of the other, his or her physical presence as a corpse, that makes the survivor feel unique. And each enemy killed makes the survivor feel more secure. (Mbembe, 2003, p. 36) ¹⁸

In the logic of martyrdom, conversely, “my death goes hand in hand with the death of the Other. Homicide and suicide are accomplished in the same act. And to a large extent, resistance and self-destruction are synonymous” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 36).

For listeners in Benghazi during the 2011 revolution, one of the first martyr figures to come to mind would be Mehdi Ziu, a middle-aged oil company employee whose suicide attack on the government barracks (locally called the Katiba, ¹⁹ as I mentioned in the previous section) on 20 February was a decisive factor in the liberation of the city. Having spent days in the first 2 weeks of the revolution helping to carry “the bodies of teenage boys from outside a security base in the center of the city where Khadafy’s militiamen fired on young protesters” to be buried, Ziu loaded his car with gas canisters and gunpowder before driving directly into the front gate of the military compound (Fadel, 2011). The bullets shot by the military officers stationed there only increased the size of the explosion, which blasted open a hole through which protestors and defected soldiers streamed. It was hours before they had taken control of the base and freed prisoners held inside.

Ziu’s attack was lauded in Benghazi as heroic. The heroism of the martyr, as Mbembe (2003) notes, is antithetical to the classical understanding of heroism, which is linked to the logic of survival, wherein the aim is “execute others while holding one’s own death at a distance” (p. 37). The martyr, whose heroism lies at once in her having killed others and in her own death, embraces and, thus, overcomes her mortality. Rather than holding her (eventual) death “at a distance,” the martyr performs her death in the now, drawing it close. She thus “can be seen as laboring under the sign of the future. In other words, in death the future is collapsed into the present” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 37). The martyr is, thus, a thoroughly utopian performer, articulating her absolute investment in the not-yet through a violent critique of the constraints of the present. Where Mbembe (2003) posits a desire to “bring eternal life into being” through a suicide attack (p. 37), I suggest that the martyr’s motivation might also be understood as utopian desire. Insofar as, in cases like that of Mehdi Ziu, the martyr is committed to creating through his action grounded political change that he will not live to experience, the suicide attacker illustrates a commitment to a not-yet that for it to be meaningful must arrive to the living and finite world. This kind of desire is neither separate from nor limited to the theological valences of “eternity.”

Audiences with a personal proximity to the musicians who recorded “We Will Not Surrender” ²⁰ are confronted with an even more immediate reference to martyrdom when listening to the song. Rami El-Kaleh wrote the song’s lyrics and co-wrote the music, along with Ikanovic (in whose studio it was recorded), a week before he was shot and killed while driving through Benghazi. In its author’s almost immediate death, the song acquires a haunting quality that renders the persistent refrain, “we win or we die,” all the more tangible. The look toward utopia is made all the more materially grounded through its affective saturation in grief. It calls to mind the militantly optimistic commitment then repeated in insistent protest chants: dam al-shuhada ma yemsheesh haba! ²¹

The melody will sweeten

The last example I consider here is one that, like “We Will Not Surrender,” traveled transnationally but via rather different routes. Adel Mshiti’s sawfa nabqa huna, “We Will Stay Here,” is best known among Arabic speakers outside of Libya because the Lebanese former pop singer Fadl Shaker took it up around the same time that he publicly renounced his singing career in a gesture of renewed religiosity. While Mshiti has sometimes performed sawfa nabqa huna with instrumental backing, the piece is usually referred to in Arabic as a nasheed, a category most often used to describe religious or national anthems sung a cappella. Furthermore, the recording of the song that has most widely circulated uses echoing effects and a chorus of voices without any instrumental or percussive accompaniment. It, thus, has lent itself to embrace by more religiously conservative audiences, in addition to others. Moreover, unlike shahi al-ḥuriya and “We Will Not Surrender,” sawfa nabqa huna is sung in Modern Standard Arabic, allowing it to travel more directly between Arabic speakers with different native dialects.

Its formal Arabic and the fact that its lyrics speak in relatively general (and poetic) terms about oppression and national resistance also have allowed sawfa nabqa huna to be taken up in reference to multifarious struggles and contexts, such that a YouTube search for the song turns up titles, descriptions, and images accompanying Mshiti’s voice that allude to Syria’s ongoing revolution and civil war, the Palestinian fight against occupation, and others. One upload, illustrative of the varied associations ascribed to the song, includes an assortment of images of mostly men, guns, and religious signifiers (such as a green headband on which is written, la ilaha illa allah), some with identifiable national references (such as a photograph of Nasrallah) and others ambiguously located. The description accompanying the video, uploaded on 12 July 2012 by “MuslimGhareebah,” reads, “May Allah make the Mujahideen stronger. And May Allah be with all those Muslims who are oppressed around the world. Ameen.”

These variously performed identifications produce an affective linking of the struggles to which they refer. Yet the song, while apt to travel, nonetheless possesses a land-linked rootedness that grounds it in the kinds of national resistance movements associated with anticolonialism. Importantly, the refrain insists, “We will stay here”:

sawfa nabqa huna

We will stay here

keyezul al-alam

Until the pain goes away

sawfa naḥya huna

We will live here

sawfa yaḥlou al-nagham

The melody will become sweeter

The narrative that the lyrics construct is one of continuity. It describes an ongoing struggle, a past from which strength can be drawn and a future toward which participants can look with hope. Without recourse to particular national signifiers, the lyrics invite identification from those who feel they know the fight being described. As one listener interpellated into this performative public sphere thusly puts it in 2011, “For 42 years we didn’t have any songs about our country. All the songs were about Gad[d]afi and his supporters. This song is the story of the Libyan people” (Walker, 2011).

“We Will Stay Here” was not taken up for the first time in the 2011 revolution. Mshiti recorded it in 2005, and it was played alongside some of Mshiti’s other songs during the 2006 uprising in Benghazi (Al-Maheer, 2012). Not a musician by profession, Mshiti was a medical student in Tripoli when he first came into direct conflict with the Libyan government. He was imprisoned by the Gaddafi regime in 1996 after providing medical assistance to people injured in anti-governmental protests who were refused care in the state-run hospitals. He remained in Tripoli’s infamous Bou Sleem prison until 2001. ²² While there he was subjected to solitary confinement and torture. It was during these 5 years that he began singing. In 2011, he told a news reporter, “When I sang, all the prisoners would cry, and it was one of the things that helped us cope. After we cried everybody felt better” (Walker, 2011). Listeners describe their experiences with Mshiti’s music, and sawfa nabqa huna in particular, in similar terms. One emphasized both the affective saturation he felt in the song and its move from clandestine to outward performance in listeners’ practices: “We couldn’t listen to this song in public before, but we listened to it in secret. I love the emotions when he sings” (Walker, 2011).

Like both “Tea of Freedom” and “We Will Not Surrender,” “We Will Stay Here” circulated (with increased intensity) during the revolution from cell phone to computer to cell phone and on YouTube. In its widespread and ultimately transnational adoption, it took on a quality common to much of the 2011 revolutions’ cultural production: an aura of communal ownership. Its long verses offered many entry points for those who took it up, from gratitude to one’s parents to commitment to heal others and to persist toward a dream located at the mountain’s peak. In the final verse, the lyrics begin to most strongly convey a poetic, felt utopianism similar to that expressed by Abu Al-Qasim Al-Shabbi in the epigraph that opened this essay:

farḥati wa sarkhati/takadu tusmi‘ ul-asam

My joy and my scream/Is almost audible to the deaf

ya nujoum al-sama’/ya ‘aba’iq al-nasam

Oh stars in the sky/Oh perfume in the air

ya saḥa’ib al-raja’/ya tuyur al-ḥaram

Oh fluffy clouds of hope/Oh birds of the sanctuary

ya ru‘oud al-shita’/ya jami‘ al-alam

Oh thunders of the winter/Oh all the pain

ishhadu hatha al-masa’/inani qultu al-qasam

Witness this evening/I have sworn the oath

Here, the refrain returns for the last time, confirming that the oath that has been sworn is precisely that we will stay here, we will live here.

Mshiti’s impulse toward the not-yet is palpable as he sings not just of but to the stars, the clouds, the birds, thunder, and pain. But as we have seen, this impulse must be grounded in an awareness of the insufficiency of the present. Bloch (1986) writes,

To stick to things, to sail over them, both are wrong. […] [T]he concrete correction of sailing over opens up in art […] [T]his concrete dimension does not rise from the perspective of groveling empiricism. (p. 222)

Revolutionaries who took up Mshiti’s music were equally aware of this need for a grounded forward-looking. They described a practice of listening to songs like sawfa nabqa huna not only at home, in cars, before going out to a protest or other gathering, and during these events but also at the frontline before going into battle. ²³

The front(line)

In Libya in 2011, the word jebha, “frontline,” rapidly moved from a somewhat specialized term confined to discussions of wars elsewhere to a word used constantly in daily conversations. Spatial orientations shifted as territory turned from the control of Gaddafi forces to that of the revolutionaries and back again, sometimes repeatedly. The frontline was the place from which news was awaited, to which huge stocks of food and supplies were sent, to and from which people traveled and (hopefully) returned. The term was used as if it were a steady, identifiable location rather than an ever-shifting liminal space. The frontline was at once physical and affective-conceptual terrain; what happened there changed both the conditions under which people lived and their senses of orientation in the space around them.

The frontline provided the active location for militant optimism. Bloch (1986) writes, “[T]here is no other place for militant optimism than the place which the category of Front opens up” (p. 200, emphasis in original). This place is, like the Libyan revolution’s jebha, both physical and affective-conceptual. It is the edge, where the fundamental senses can be reoriented. ²⁴ It is a forward-dawning that includes an actual fight. It is based on action. It also, I think crucially, exists neither in neatly “public” nor “private” spaces. The front(line), as the space of reorientation, always necessarily involves both the individual and the many, where change happens in relation and where we might (briefly) notice the plurality of our being (singular). The front(line) comes in glimpses and, as we have seen, can appear in an interaction with a song. ²⁵

Militant optimism is violent. It is not utopian to imagine that the Libyan revolution could have been bloodless. This was clear to the “knowledge of non-contemplation” active in the moment of the revolution and civil war. If Gaddafi’s death in October 2011 marked something, it was in my view not the barbarism that international media framed it to be. If it marked anything, it was the temporary conclusion of the kinds of utopian impulses described above, those that were particular to this revolution’s history and context. It marked, for the moment, the closing of the front.