the applause

 

What man contemplates in this scheme is the activity that has been stolen to him, it is his own essence, torn away from him, turned foreign to him, hostile to him, making for a collective world whose reality is nothing but man's own dispossession.

Jacques Rancière. The emancipated spectator.

 

 

Abu Qir street, seven in the afternoon, six lanes road. A man standing in the brick row that distinguishes the incoming from the outgoing cars. He has left a couple of plastic bags on the floor and he has rolled up his sleeves. He locates his sight on a relatively undetermined spot on the other side of the street and he applauds. Clap clap clap clap clap.

About three minutes of applause. Pause. He stretches his right arm, then his left arm, rolls his shoulders and resumes. Clap clap clap clap. On the left the faculty of engineering, on the right a hospital, on both sides cars motorbikes passersby traffic police bicycles. And a standing man who claps to a rhythm  he only knowns, lunatic metronome.

The scene repeats almost every day, almost in the same place, almost at the same time.

Almost everyone has seen him once. Even those who think they haven’t ever seen him, when asked they vaguely remember his shabby clapping profile. And when asked, almost everyone has a different story to explain his quartered ovations. A clapping man is an open question mark in the middle of the city. As in the old songs, some say his son was killed in the university. Some say he lost his job in the hospital. Some say he’s with the islamists. Some say he’s with the socialists. Some say he’s with the military. Some say he’s crazy. Some say he’s not.  What’s there left for a middle aged man to celebrate in the country of uncertainties? Where people disappear twenty by twenty and the enemies are killed thousand by thousand?

What the fuck is the clapping man clapping at? The question crumbles in the void of his palms. Clap clap clap clap.

https://soundcloud.com/marta-vallejo-herrando/clapping-man

Drinking beers with A I tell him about the applause in Abu Qir and about how it makes my day when i see the clapping man splitting normality in the traffic jam.  A switches on the warning lights bristling his eyebrows. He tells me that when Bouazizi set himself on fire in the public square back in 2010 there where voices who devoted time and words to theorize his immolation in terms of performance. Ladies and gentlemen we’ve discovered total art in times of dictatorship, with footnotes and arab springs. He adjusts his glasses and asks my opinion on the matter. Performance or what? I take a sip of beer to buy time. Well, i don’t know, i guess he’s just a clapping man but we should go more often to check how he does it.

There are poets in jail in this city. Censored movies. Shut down galleries. Charged publishers. Disappeared journalists. Tortured students. Ditched nobodies. Every time we think of doing something to give shape to what we feel, we update the bookkeeping of risks, counting interrogations as production costs. It almost never happens, but it happens. And we do less and less and it happens more and more. However a man carries his own reasons in the middle of the street for a standing ovation to this void and nobody dares to stop him.

I’m on my way back from the supermarket, I step off the bike and listen to the clapping man. I observe his gestures, tired arms, constant pace. When his applause is faces me I look at him in the eye but he doesn’t shrink. He sees me, but he doesn’t care. And i check the cars passing by, they don’t look at him but  they see him. Not a metaphor not a performance not madness. Then what? A asks. I don’t know: a parenthesis. And i clap.

Clap clap clap clap.

self portrait of wednesday

i'm afraid of my grandma dying
pigeons flying above the rooftops makes me smile
i have the ability of being deeply sad
and i have lived in many cities
the horizon is important to me, so is my bike
sometimes i'm scared of scared people around
and i'm proud of my living room as a shelter for friends
i don't know what will come next
my brother rarely smiles and it worries me
i love writing, but i can't dance

to be us

Contextualizing is not always a matter of figures and letters, contextualizing is also about filling in the gap between the letters and the headlines. Context is following the thread of those who sustain the headlines being the main characters of news that are not in the news.

Those who are not Nobody's à la Galeano, because they are I's discussing about the difficulties of living with the Other, about being People alongside other nobodies who despise each other.

What follows is a Saturday conversation about the difficulties of being Us in Egypt, when what is shared is the victory, the guilt, the defeat and the struggle.

Ezz and I live in Alexandria and we love to talk. We bridge one hour after the other, we link the words jumping from one topic to the next because there is something that Ezz is very good at: listening and answering back with an endless dwell of questions. Today we have decided to try an experiment: we'll meet in the morning to talk about our stuff, but this time we'll record it, as if it was an interview in disguise. The thing begins when Ezz rings at my door and waits for me in his wonder car downstairs. A car that has the ability to spit the right music at the right time. And the ability to be checked at every check point: wrong license, rear light broken, suspicious driver.

 

To be Myself:

M: tell me, where are we going?

E: we're going to the highway heading to Borgh el Arab. There's a big lake, lake Mariout. There's few people around and we can talk in peace, naturally.

Talking naturally is something that sometimes you have to plan in Alexandria, but it's hard to explain the reasons of this crippled spontaneity without becoming a paranoid. Being oneself implies building the spaces to be easygoing, because you feel often the eyes of others licking your neck as if they were only gossiping, as if they were controlling. So Ezz proposes to talk while he drives randomly on the way that goes from Alexandria to the lake. And ideas keep rolling as we drive up and down the road. Ezz says that he prefers to do so because if we were sitting in the city, the sight of others would stick to our words.

Ezz is young, his hair is very long and curly, he's growing his beard and wears tshirts with slogans written in many languages which are not arabic. There are plenty of guys with beards in the city and many of them have afro hair. Some of them wear challenging tshirts and, just like Ezz, rebuilt their identity around 2011 by becoming political subjects. Despite of their youth, Ezz's generation tells the story of their previous 5 years with a biographer's precision. Because, to a great extent, they are and they have become an I that walks in the streets of Alexandria.

I ask him how do the others see him and he says:

E: According to their definition I am a concept. Not a person. And you can see it in their eyes, in the way they look at you. They focus on what you wear, your way of speaking, the way you smoke, even your way of walking, the way you look at things they are not used to see. And they think you are weird because the eyes with which you look around are not like theirs.

 

To be Him:

Being oneself looks suspicious in the streets of a city where uniformity is invisible but stalks you in every corner. When you go out to the public, exposing your skin to the sunlight and to others, you cannot avoid looking for the traces that will help you distinguish who's the imaginary Other, to anticipate what he likes and what he dislikes, knowing that he's observing.

M: who is He?

E: he carries two packs of cigarettes in his hand. One pack of Marlboro and one of LM. In the other hand he carries two self-phones. A small one for business and a bigger one for his adventures, for Facebook and WhatsApp to share a lot of stuff about how strong and handsome Sisi is and about his ability to run the country. He's 30 or 35. He has a son or he's about to have one. He's married to a girl he found to be his wife after having had some relationships with other girls he now considers to be whores. But he wanted a pure woman, because he deserves a proper wife. He spends a lot of time in those cafés in Miami or Sidi Bishr, this kind of tasteless coffee shops, with no identity, merely commercial, touristic spots. Cafés that have the taste of tasteless things. He lives in a building of old Alexandria, in Mansheya for instance. He has a little tummy, grease in his hair and he has never considered doing things in a way that differs from what he has been told. He's convinced that there is an enemy, but he doesn't realize that the enemy of this society is society itself. He thinks that the enemy is always beyond. And the enemy always tries to persuade him that in order to save society you have to kill others.

 

To be the People:

But Him, this paradigmatic him, is part of the people who live among us in the same way as we mingle with the People. Although we never fully manage to be unnoticed: Him and his greasy hair, Ezz and his beard, they happen among the people knowing that you have to pay attention, because the People knows the enemy is hidden among us. This is why He is staring around trying to identify it, for the sake of our security. But being an enemy or a victim depends on the shade of the glasses through which the disperse authority sees us.

M: Who is the victim?

E: It's those people who for some reason believe that there might be a small possibility for change in society. In one way or another: to be more islamist or to be more radical. Or it might even be those who don't expect any change but who complain about the rise of the prices. They will be victims. Those who support and cheer the indiscriminate repression and the blood could be victims, any given day they can be the victims. Because in this society everyone is a victim. Everyone is a victim but we don't realize it.

When it comes to be a victim there are many shades of gray, despite of the fact that being guilty is a matter of black and white. And everybody knows it, when they stay home or when they go out to the street. When they speak about the weather, or about a TV show, or about the family. To be People is in fact to be constantly making choices and negotiating to what extent one can be oneself among others.

E: Each one has a compromise, a choice. And sometimes people choses to see an alternative, even if you pay the price with your life. This kind of commitment is the main reason why people dies attending any event. It's the only compromise that people can make, because in this country it is very difficult to say something without being hit. There is a stick for every word and a bullet for every chant. And to them, this kind of sounds have a value: if you speak during a couple of minutes, we will hit you; if you speak for more than ten minutes, you will get a life sentence. And if you speak during four years, we might kill you. It's a scale of values that people tries to understand. And when they understand it, they decide to speak out for as long as possible. And this is how they end up dead.

Being People means making noise, honking in the street jam or chanting. And in the risk of such noise raises the identity of the martyr, who is at the same time a very specific somebody and a nobody among many others.

When I ask Ezz how to make this journey that goes from the death of an “I”, that could be anyone, to the celebration of a martyr, he tells me:

E: The fact that you have been killed tells a lot about yourself. It tells us a lot because you have been murdered, and it might be a stereotype, but if the police has killed you is maybe because you had found for a moment a space against this regime, I don't know. And celebrating the martyrs can be a way to celebrate this moment. Because in this society there are gaps. A gap between two groups: a group that controls everything and the other who is always against. And the other way to prove that there is a gap, that it exists, is these people being assassinated whose corpses fall in the void.

 

To be Us:

However, everyone wanders through this void dodging authority and fear and its effect on a crowd you belong to without much of a choice. The greasy Him and my friend Ezz are the same People when they meet in the bakery shop and in the electoral census, despite of their looking at things from different corners.

E: they are affected by the situation, we share the same reality, this is a fact. We might share the same sacrifices, we share a lot of things without knowing it.

They share the calendar and despite of it, since 2011 the dates don't mean the same for everyone. Transitioning is to announce an Us that contains the People without counting on the I's that conform it. A majuscule Us from which the authority claims the victories and the threats, a majestic Us staring at the fire where the well-sounding words are burning: revolution, democracy, people. Us, nobody, acting for the sake of common good.

M: who is Us? Us is the winners?

E: We could say so. But the winners of what? The winners of, how to say it...I don't know, the winners of the louder voice. The winners of the microphone. Yes, I could not put it in other words. Winners who know that in this society their voice is louder than the voice of others. Although I’m not sure if they have ever won anything. Because if they had won, they wouldn't be so scared all the  time, so intimidated.

M: But having a loud collective voice, isn't it what happened during the 18 days? That was a victory, wasn’t it?

E: I wouldn’t say that the victory happened because at some point we had a louder voice. But because there was a moment when we decided to take the microphone, even if the rules of the game didn't foresee such situation. The victory is that at some point the microphone passed through our hands. This is winning, not because we were louder (…) their voice will always be louder, systematically, but it is not planned that one day we could be able to take the microphone. This is the winning position of the regime. And this is what they lost and they still cannot recover it no matter how loud they scream. Even if they use thousands of speakers and televisions. Because this cannot change the fact that we have already heard our voices while we were screaming at the microphone.

M: and you, what do you celebrate?

E: I don't know, maybe at this point there is nothing to celebrate. Maybe the only the thing that we can celebrate is the blood of the people who once was with us. This is what we celebrate. Because we are still alive and we still have noise to make, and maybe these people, the martyrs, liked to make noises. So we celebrate them by making noise around them when they are going to be buried. Maybe this is a way to give the final commemoration, making sounds around their dead bodies because they cannot make noise with us. Maybe, I'm not sure. It's still strange for me the way in which we still celebrate blood. It's strange that we are still celebrating 2011. Myself, I still celebrate 2011. Why? Because many died. Why? I don't know, a lot of people died and nothing has changed. But no, something changed. I have changed. And this is why I celebrate. I celebrate for the blood. Because the blood has changed me.

 

To be Staying:

We have been driving for one hour and a half, being a tiny spot that moves through the roads of google maps, the windows open the ashtray full. As we speak a police pick-up drives next to our car. One of the officers looks at us, looks at Ezz, looks at me. Ezz keeps driving and smoking and I draw a smile and keep asking while the pick-up drives away. Nothing important, to be honest, but after a while I ask Ezz if he has noticed it and what is his reaction.

E: Yes, first I've seen that you were hiding the microphone and I have seen the police. I haven't done anything special, in this kind of circumstances I believe that the eyes are a good answer: to look at the eyes of the solider or the police officer. Because I'm convinced that through our life there are micro-fights and that you can fight them with an eye contact.

If I decide not to look straight at their eyes I will be accepting their position. I will be confirming that he is someone powerful. And staring at the eyes can be a way to say that we are equal. That we have the same power and that the fact that they are on the side of those who speak loud, the fact that they have many bullets doesn't make them powerful. Because power is not something material, is something at our reach. Something we have inside and we can feel it.

  

* Text originally published in Spanish in Diagonal Newspaper the 19/05/2015.

the rain

And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Bob Dylan based on a true story

It's this time of the day when certitudes are liquefying and the back pain progressively evaporates on the mattress. In bed, an open book, a sleeping phone and a hibernating computer. In bed, myself turned into a sleeping puddle, transitioning from the solid to the gaseous state. On the other side of the window spider legs spinning ice, bird steps on the frost, cat nails on the floor, stilettos on the asphalt, lead feet tap dancing. A storm against the glass that sounds like a plastic bubble symphony, like popcorn in the frying pan.

Next morning, a combined back taste of wet cardboard and coffee smell pull your eye lids. Stretching the numb muscles to the corners of your bed, rolling from east to west, looking for the north you've lost through the night, looking for the pole star in the window. But it's day time, the clouds hurry past the blinds and the rain drops sneak over the glass surface.

With the strength of all the mythologic giants, uncovering the bedsheets feels like an exfoliation, you lean the legs on the bed edge and with the eyes closed, you jump the cliff that separates dream and vigil. You step your feet over the day and feel the cold in the soles. Water in the bedroom. In the corridor, in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bath room. Water in vertical flow by the window and stagnant water on the floor of the floor.

In the kitchen D prepares breakfast, turning the toasts, pouring coffee, with or without milk she asks with her pajama rolled over her knees. With milk. And yogurt with honey and staring through the windows. Water flowing above the level of the sea and below the poverty line. At bird sight, honorable citizens looking like ants on their way to work jumping from car to car while the police orchestrates the traffic of people on top of their vehicles.

In the street, water up to your knees, looking for the way to the office depending of flows of this expanded sea, mixture of mediterranean, nile and dirt. In the corner of the desert road, a fishermen's boat covers the ride downtown and citizens wait in line standing on the ceiling of a tramway station. As if nothing ever happened everything keeps happening.

Wind keeps blowing through the window leaks and through the chamfers of this accidental venice. Electric cables dance an acrobatic swing from pole to pole, left right loop jump and fall. Electric sprawl on the urban river, electrocuted passersby like fish farm corpses. Overflowing tunnels, sandy skyscrapers. You give up and resume the way back home, urban salmon.

The army has entered into action and they patrol the main alleys by boat. The sand bags stacked in front of strategic buildings have become castaway islands without palm tree. Dry soldiers keeping guard on the tip of the iceberg. In his dark wooden thick curtained bureau the president waits for on the phone for his call to be answered. I've said call the responsible. We have no records of responsibility, your excellency. I've said call someone, anyone. He will change the direction of the catastrophe with a shift of the ruddle.

First measure: dismissing the governor, who collects the mug of the american university where he graduated and picks the snorkeling glasses from the drawer. A defeated wall street wolf passing on the command to the a sea wolf marshal, from now on the boss of this dirty water archipelago. Second measure: declaring the state of emergency. Your predecessor already declared it three years ago, your excellency. Declaring the state of urgency. You rubricated it before the elections, your honor. Declaring the state of siege. You imposed it over the whole territory to protect the national borders, mister president. Declaring the drought. Third measure: with immediate effects.

All land lines have been taken by ephemeral inflows cascading from the balconies of every house. The new military governor executes the orders with an iron fist. The avenues are covered with the presidential order printed in plastic canvas, streets are covered with waterproof flags and the leaks are covered with the remaining electoral banners of the last vote. And the rain persists in its raining over a flooded and plasticized city.

The lack of results and the saltpeter are undermining the authority and before the iron fist starts rusting, the arrests begin. The drought has been declared, says the presidential order, thus any expression of support to the liquid enemy will be prosecuted and punished. Umbrellas, raincoats, swimming suits, water wings and any other weapon contributing to the social alarm is forbidden. The orders are executed with the usual diligence and police stations, jails and waiting rooms are progressively flooded with detainees.

But it keeps raining outside and in front of the futility of being waterproof, we start liquifying little by little. Dissolving in the rain turning into drops. Turning into puddles. Turning into beaches. Turning into oceans until we start sinking. 

Text originally published in spanish in Nativa magazine

amanecer. sidi gaber.

desayunar sueño.
salir a escuchar el amanecer.
un poco de imposible o me ahogo.

sentados en una grieta que contiene todos los días de la ciudad
componemos la jornada en las costuras de lo posible.
comando secreto de mudos mirando el mar.

junto a nosotros, un hombre pesca peces minúsculos.
si tenemos suerte, a lo mejor pescamos una nube,
a lo peor pescamos el mar, que es infinito.

The fall

Kites:

When the spring arrives the wind blows in Alexandria. It’s not any kind of wind, it’s a stubborn wind that sweeps the whole city, sneaking through the leaks in the buildings, tousling the ideas, rolling-up the skirts of women and the galabiyya of men.

When the spring comes and the wind blows in Alexandria, the sky is filled with kites. Children and those who have been children go out to the streets carrying their hand-made kites. Cane structures with plastic skin and long laced tails that dance among the clouds. Sometimes they dance softly, sometimes they dance hard. Shaking their tails to the beat of the wind when spring comes to Alexandria.

When spring comes and kites dance in Alexandria, it’s the beginning of the fishing season. Hook fishing in the tramway’s cables and the balconies and the barbwire of public buildings. Because it happens that, sometimes, in the midst of the hectic dance between the plastic and the wind, kites stay suspended in the air, hooked in the pike.

And then the summer comes and the wind slows down, the sun blasts the windows and heats the asphalt. Autumn and the rain and winter and the fog. And kites remain peeled in the void, almost flying, almost dying.

Dreams:

I live in a fourteenth floor with windows as wide as walls. So wide the windows that on foggy days I live in a cloud. I sleep in a room in a fourteenth floor and sometimes vertigo sneaks into my dreams. When this happens I dream, for instance, that I fall from the window. I dream the descent through the fourteen floors between my clouds and the ground.

One could expect a disturbing and sorrowful dream from such a fall. But sometimes, when you dream from a fourteenth floor with windows like walls, falling in dreams is pleasant and healing. Because while falling you discover a kite entangled in the TV wire. And you see two neighbors gossiping in the rooftop next door. And you can mingle among the tamed flight of a pigeons flock.

To fall while dreaming in Alexandria happens to be pleasant because in the middle of the flight you realize that there’s something different. When reaching the twelfth floor you wonder why are you so calm and you find out that, against all odds, the air blows horizontally, holding you. That you don’t fall without control, on the contrary, you glide slowly like a kite. And you wake up before reaching the fifth floor and you’re happy because you’ve seen the world from the fall.

From the blog Alexandria why?

Falls:

Five years ago the calendar was torn in Egypt and the world was shacked for a while. Since then, in this city of kites and heights, the years count 364 days and a 25th of January. Although to be honest, for the last five years the years grow shorter every time as the 25th is followed by the 28th and the 18th and the 30th and the calendar is progressively stuffed with commemorations and funerals and elections and coups and victories and defeats.

A handful of people gather in Cairo on the 24th January two thousand and fifteen, last day of the year since five years ago, celebrating the fallen for the victory of a revolution that tastes like a defeat. They carry banners and flowers for the martyrs of  Tahrir. And on the way, in the middle of a street with stores and policemen and passers-by, someone kills someone. Someone, while on duty, shoots, a woman who’s mourning her dead.

In the middle of the street and in the middle of a defeat a woman starts falling while her body starts dying. As her legs and her lungs and her memory start to die, someone holds her in the middle of the fall. A man embraces a fading woman so that she doesn’t die on the ground. The last day of the year a woman falls and a man holds her.

Hugs:

It’s the twenty fifth of January in Alexandria and we’re in the street. Surrounded by people who cry and who carry the body of yesterday’s falling woman. We all fall little by little while we see our faces veiled with sadness. Rage has settled between our eyebrows ageing our faces and emptying our bellies while filling the network with mourning birds.

Friends keep arriving and we hug not to talk. We hold while falling knowing that this fall is not a stumble. Knowing in silence that here you fall because they throw you and the bodies get trapped in the thorns of the flowers for the dead. We hug because we know how to cry but we don’t know what to say.

A friend has been mourning a widow through every hour of the night. We walk to a café to be accompanied in this parenthesis. He asks me to say something and to smile. Because like this we will smile together along the way. He tells me that he doesn’t know how to start building the plan for the next 364 days and I tell him that we can start planning the next 60 minutes. That we should plan how to win for 60 minutes every day.

A victory like a hug in the fall or like a dried kite in the sky.

Text originally published in spanish in Nativa magazine.

The body

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.

e.e. cummings

It’s been three days since I came back to Alexandria after one month in Barcelona. Bureaucrat holidays that can be summarized as a feast of pork and beers, of gossips and hugs. Before taking the plane to Barcelona, an Alexandrian friend told me that he was in love. That he had wanted to kiss her even before hearing her voice. And luckily enough, she wanted to kiss him back. By the time when he told me about it, they had already had tea in every downtown café, the had walked every kilometer of the Corniche and once they had even held hands while watching a German movie.

On August 26, a 32 years old man ate something and then stopped eating. “At 4 pm today, I celebrated with my colleagues my last meal in prison”. He stated it in a letter that was published in several newspapers and countless facebook accounts. A man 32 years old, a woman 27, a woman 20, a man 26, and thus up to 130 people in Egypt with their empty stomachs, on hunger strike.

Before being in jail they were in the streets, shoulder to shoulder. Some of them were already there before 2011, some of them arrived later to the catacombs of resisting against something thick and shapeless. They come from the teenager rooms with stickers on the walls and from the slogans scratched in virtual walls. They carry diverse reasons through dispersed jails, women and men who have considered that they haven’t any other tool left but their bodies locked in a cell. And they won’t eat until they leave it.

I’m drinking a beer with my friend. One month later he’s still in love and I ask him to update me and tell me everything about it. And he tells me that he feels very tired, with pains in his bones and his brains, he lacks strength and feels down. He’s been searching in Wikipedia for an explanation about what’s wrong with him. And internet says that depression the closest name for what he’s going through. My friend is simultaneously in love and depressed.

Following the path of Wikipedia knowledge I discover Herophilos, a Greek doctor of the days when Alexandria was the center of Greece. The internet says that many centuries before christ, he was the first one to dissect corpses to learn how to diagnose the human diseases. That he would count the pulses of his patients with a water clock and analyze their hearts to find out about their pains. And thus he established, apparently for the first time, that we think with the brains and pump with the heart,

“As of today, I am depriving my body of food (…) for the dignity of the body needs the embrace of loved ones”. On September 13 the man who signs this letter is still fasting. He’s somebody’s son, brother, husband, father and friend and yet with all this love, after much thinking, he has decided to stop eating as a strategy. Doctors say that after 15 days of fasting, you lose the sensation of thirst, you feel cold and cannot stand up. By the 35^th day you might vomit constantly and your eyes move out of control. After 40 days you might get deaf and by the 45^th day your heart can stop beating at any time.

Herophilos found out about the functions of a couple of fragile and critical organs. And by the time when he had published many treatises on how we live and how we die, he started to suspect that his patients’ pains had something to do with their dreams.

On march the 2^nd 1974 four men and a woman have dinner in a Catalan house. A cinema director has secretly gathered them to discuss the why of their experiences as political prisoners. They speak with complex words and very organized sentences. Synthesis, conjuncture, enemy, struggle. They get lost in the path of red book rhetoric and discuss tactics, techniques and strategies.

By the time of desserts, with whisky bottles and ashtrays on the table, the only woman takes the floor:

“there’s something a want to say. I believe that the revolutionary doesn’t discover enthusiasm for life when in jail. That is, one of the reasons that I find fundamental for a process of struggle (…) is nothing but this enthusiasm for life. A passion, an energy.” ¹.

Throughout the day, today, my friend in love will be hugged by his girlfriend. Throughout the day, today, a group of men and women will eat out of their previous hugs. And their pulse will accelerate. Sometimes the body gets sick. Sometimes the world gets sick. But we don’t know how to diagnose it. 

 

1El sopar, Pere Portabella. 1974.