History Workshops in Egypt: An Experiment in History Telling

IHKY YA TARIKH'Iktib ya tarikh matsibsh kebir wala hatta sighir'Iktib ya tarikh, dal kul kibir wakbar biktir'Iktib 'ala satr we sib el tany nadifwelsatr el enta tesibuh ana ba'a hamlih!'Iktib ya tarikh.

Ibrahim Al Mursi, 1973Write, history; Leave no one out, neither big norsmall,Write, for no one is ever too small, none at allWrite on one page, and leave the other blankFor tis those blanks my songs will fill!Write, history.

This verse by Ibrahim Al Mursi, a poet and mechanic from Port Said, launched the call for participants in the first History Workshops in Egypt. Entitled Ihky ya tarikh (Speak, History), the series aimed to explore the popular politics of communities largely marginalized in the writing of Egyptian histories. This poem expressed the stories the workshops were concerned with – alternative histories and oppositional memories that challenged official discourse in various ways : in their accounts of political events and their timelines; in the politics that precipitated these events; and in the nature of the events themselves.

Behind the creation of the workshop lay several concerns. The first was a very personal anxiety that the research conducted for my doctoral thesis on counter-histories of the 1950s in Egypt might never reach the very people who shaped the project – the Upper Egyptian workers, resistance fighters from the canal area and displaced Nubian communities with whom I had conducted my ethnographical research.¹ The workshop was an attempt to explore the popular histories of these communities collectively and share these historical accounts in the places they originated, rather than in academic journals and publications which are unlikely ever to reach these communities.

A further concern that prompted these workshops was the speed with which histories of recent revolutions are being rewritten by the military regime in Egypt. Since the military coup of 2013, the 1952 coup which brought Gamel Abdel Nasser to power is constantly presented as the model for military 'revolutions' and a means of meeting the country's needs, while the 'Arab Spring' revolution of 2011 has been relegated to the margins as a model of chaos and ineffective change. This emerging narrative emphasizes the moments of chaos and destruction in the events of 2011 while depicting Nasser's takeover through such modernist projects as the High Dam built during the 1960s across the Nile at Aswan.

Our aim was to create a space for reflection on these invisible histories. We sought to provide a forum in which the participants could learn to excavate events that have been buried in silence whether by absence or censorship or violence and so could interrogate the politics that had rendered them invisible. Exploring those histories means practising the art of speaking and writing with 'words soaked in silence',² of assessing the past with an eye for complexity and ambiguity, looking for the hidden paths and forgotten byways rather than the straight lines.

Since the initiation of the project in January 2015, three workshops have been held in communities away from Cairo along with two smaller workshops in historic neighbourhoods in the capital. Each workshop was based on a theme and a community. The first, in Aswan, excavated silenced histories of Upper Egypt, from insurgencies by fishermen and workers in the late nineteenth century to the forced migration of displaced Nubian communities during the building of the High Dam. In March 2015, a workshop in Al Ghuriyya, a medieval neighbourhood of Cairo, examined different ways of reading the locality's subaltern histories after centuries of neglect. A few months later, a workshop in the Al Khalifa area in Cairo explored creative ways of re-telling Ottoman histories while also training teachers and developing a curriculum. The fourth workshop, held in Port Said in January 2016, explored how emblematic events in the city's history (the digging of the Suez canal in 1859, the 'Suez War' in 1956, the free-trade zone in the age of Egyptian liberalism in the 1970s) could be reinterpreted with an eye to popular resistance and oppositional voices drowned out in official accounts...