{"id":16085,"date":"2012-02-27T11:34:38","date_gmt":"2012-02-27T07:34:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=16085"},"modified":"2012-02-27T11:36:57","modified_gmt":"2012-02-27T07:36:57","slug":"cairo-my-city-our-revolution-leader-in-18-genre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-society\/cairo-my-city-our-revolution-leader-in-18-genre\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Cairo, My City, Our Revolution’: Leader in ’18 Day’ Genre"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Why I think Ahdaf Soueif\u2019s structural choices in\u00a0Cairo: My City, Our Revolution\u00a0<\/em>were simple but brilliant (from the\u00a0Egypt Independent<\/em>):<\/p>\n

Ahdaf Soueif\u2019s \u201cCairo: My City, Our Revolution\u201d is an addition to the blossoming genre of \u201crevolution diary\u201d literature. It is also a challenge to the genre, a scuffling of it.<\/p>\n

Part of what Soueif does in \u201cCairo: My City\u201d is take us deep into the center of the 18 days. She does this as not just any diarist: She is an acclaimed novelist, a working journalist and the aunt of prominent activists\u00a0Alaa Abd El Fattah<\/a>\u00a0and Mona Seif, the mother of activist filmmaker Omar Robert Hamilton, and the sister-in-law of Hisham Mubarak Legal Center co-founder Ahmed Seif al-Islam. So while Soueif can often only guess at the thoughts of regime figures, she has lived at one of the centers of the revolutionary movement.<\/p>\n

Much of \u201cCairo: My City\u201d is a chronicle of these experiences: a beautiful, if sometimes hastily detailed, description of her life and the 18 days. But it is also a challenge to the 18-day genre in that it refuses to run chronologically and refuses climax on 11 February. It is a way of charming the forces of darkness by spinning stories within stories, of staving off death.<\/p>\n

There is a hunger for 18-day narratives: At the subdued\u00a02012 Cairo International Book Fair<\/a>, publishers noted that, if anything, readers were on the prowl for new revolution stories. Reading these 18-day diaries is like paging through a family album of some important moment that you\u2019re still chewing over. As you read what Soueif was doing on 28 January, it tugs at the memory of what\u00a0you<\/em>\u00a0were doing on that day. It becomes a composition of her memory and yours, perhaps lifting your memory, adding a new dimension.<\/p>\n

\u201cCairo: My City\u201d derives its considerable charm from the small details of Soueif\u2019s life \u2014 a mountain of laundry at the Zamalek flat, visits to her mother\u2019s orchard \u2014 but she never intended it as a memoir. The book, Soueif writes in the introduction, is \u201can intervention, rather than just a record[.]\u201d It\u2019s an attempt to keep the threatened revolution alive.\u00a0Well, go on; keep reading.<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

M. LYNX-QUALEY: There’s a new genre in Arabic literature and not surprisingly Ahdaf Soueif is showing the way. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":16086,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154,124,235,482,5],"tags":[378,18300,18291,4385],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16085"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}