The City Always Wins: A Novel by Omar Robert Hamilton (review)

Omar Robert Hamilton's debut novel The City Always Wins is a testimony to the Tahrir uprisings, taking the reader through unspeakable acts of police and army brutality, following political turmoil, and describing how the uprising was experienced by the insurgents, including those who lost family and friends. The story revolves around a group of activists, who broadcast breaking news, organize on the ground, and provide assistance to victims of violence. The narrative opens in a morgue in October 2011. Mariam, one of the main protagonists, is counting the dead bodies and trying to convince a group of parents to postpone burying their children. "'There will be no swift burial of bodies and truths,' Mariam thinks. 'There will be evidence. There will be justice'" (p. 8). Outside the hospital, people are gathering and joining their voices: "Yes. Yes. We must fight. We will have justice." Inside, the parents are in despair: "There can never be justice, don't talk to me of justice, don't insult me with words. […] There can never be justice. […] Forget about justice. Forget about autopsies. We must bury our children" (pp. 6–7). From the start to the end, the novel is a reckoning with a dialectics of hope and despair.

As much as the novel credits "the wisdom of the naïve" (p. 3) for relentlessly seeking justice, it tells a story of disappointment. The accelerated forces of change fueled by the resistance are absorbed by other powers. For the revolutionaries, the polarization between Morsi of the Brotherhood and Shafiq of the military does not offer anything new. Our protagonists cannot not help but think and imagine an alternative to the way things turned out. Only if Maspero was taken when armed forces attacked the peaceful protest against the demolition of Aswan Church, or only if Hamdeen and Aboul Fotouh agreed to maintain a coalition against Morsi during the elections of June 2012. Only if those men put their egos aside and brought seven million revolutionaries together, Rania thinks. But none of that happened. Khalil, the second main protagonist who is also Mariam's lover, ruminates over Hobsbawm's assessment of a recurring pattern in bourgeois revolutions. He reads out loud a quote from The Age of Revolution to Mariam: "mass mobilization—shift to the left—split-among-and-shift-to-the-right—until either of the bulk of the middle class passed into the henceforth conservative camp or was defeated by social revolution" (p. 171). Moderate middle class reformists mobilize the masses against the counter revolution, but they split into conservative and leftist camps when the revolutionaries insist demanding further political change. This is a depressing depiction of revolutions, but Khalil refutes the applicability of this pattern to their context. "There are no Islamists in Hobsbawm's universe. We're not liberals versus conservatives here. We have the Brotherhood and the army: two extreme rights. And us" (p. 171). The City Always Wins is the story of a failed revolution, but it is as much a literary experiment for imagining a way out of this vicious cycle of failed revolutions.

In its form and content, there are three modes by which the novel invites us to imagine a way out. To begin with, the text assumes the form of testimony, archiving the minutiae of how the revolution eventually faded out. Secondly, it contemplates on the politics of representation. Finally, it brings in a gender angle, which permeates the novel and speaks to a missing piece in Hobsbawm's assessment. The novel's testimonial form is informed by Hamilton's personal experience as well as archival work and actual social media feeds. But this form also derives its power from the literary possibilities of prose fiction. The book's in-between form, mixing documentary and fiction carves out a space for insightful reflection on the meaning and ethics of representation. How can one tell the story of Tahrir without betraying what actually happened there? Who are...