Of Ants and Men: Sovereignty and Masculinity in Yusuf Idris and Other Stories

The postcolony, it is said, is the site of great violence. Power is customarily exerted in the service of death, not life; bodies, not minds, are the central objects of its operations. Life is qualitatively different, worse: the absurd trumps the rational, phantasmagoria and spectacle reign, the body is in constant pain, life is wretched, and freedom is ephemeral. It is said. In his article "Necropolitics," and in an attempt to trace a new genealogy of state power, Achille Mbembe (2003) observes the continued operation of necropolitics in the contemporary postcolony, against the claim (Foucauldian but not necessarily held by Foucault) that sovereign power has receded in modernity. Necropolitics, here, describes the generalized instrumentalization and material destruction of human bodies in the global South. It fosters death-worlds in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life that essentially confer upon them the status of "living dead." The principal instrument of this necropolitical power is the "commandment." For Mbembe, the commandment is the ultimate expression of postcolonial power through the requisitioning of bodies for an economy of death. It lays claim to its subjects through coercion and violence characterized by public displays of grandeur, which themselves indicate a lack of limits and any sense of proportion. While the commandment is concerned with enacting power on material bodies, it is also discursive and dramaturgical. It propagates a "cannot" language, implausible yet locally intelligible, blasphemous yet somehow pseudoreligious. At once sacred and sacrilegious. It is fundamentally connected to play and the carnivalesque; sumptuous and stylish, it combines sexual subordination and anxious virility. Crucially, the commandment seeks to achieve legitimation and hegemony in the form of the fetish. Enter the circus:

Say you are a woman!¹          Lick the floor!²          Open your mouth!³          Get down on all fours!⁴          Now, bark like a dog!⁵          Stand on one foot!⁶          Now, dance like Samia Gamal!⁷          Take your trousers off and bend over!⁸          Now, cough!          Now, lift one leg and spin on the other as you're bent over with your mouth open!⁹          Lie on your back and lift and open your legs!          Still think you're a man?          Divorce your wife!          Squat on your tiptoes! Now, crawl!¹⁰          Are you still a communist?¹¹          Say there is no god but Mubarak!¹²          If you want to get out, you must dance. Dance, khawalat, dance!¹³

These are samples of real commandments issued by police, military, and prison officers—collectively, violence workers—during the twentieth century. They serve as the primary textual evidence of a palpable imbroglio of sovereignty and masculinity in Egypt. Wherein, the power of the postcolonial state to confine and kill the subject à la Mbembe is, in fact, not enough to enact its legitimacy or to undermine the subject's political agency, linked as they both were—are—to a manhood that only seemed to entrench as more pressure was applied to dissident men's bodies. Especially breathtaking is the accuracy with which Mbembe's commandment has been rendered in Egyptian literature and film. Consider Yusuf Idris's short story "On the Man and the Ant," republished in the 1980 collection I Am the Master of the Law of Existence and set in Sijn Misr (Cairo Prison), where Idris himself was imprisoned for several months in 1954.¹⁴

The protagonist of the story is not the narrator but rather an unnamed incoming inmate who has the comportment of a futuwwa—mustache, huge frame, headwrap, and galabiya—and peculiarly introduces himself as a communist ʿumda, or village headman. As the unnamed man whimpers in the corner of the cell, an inmate named Hamza and the narrator try to cajole him into telling them what happened. But his response repeatedly comes as "the worst thing on the face of the earth." This goes on for hours, and the whimpers become sniffles, then muted cries. When the narrator eventually gets frustrated, he rejoins with a smirk: "What, you think you're the only one who's been tortured? We've all passed through the military prison...