Volume 28 · Number 4 · Summer 2011
Women, and the power of the spoken word
Poetry and women played prominent roles in the protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo, according to Arabic and comparative literature scholar Noha Radwan.
"For 18 long days and even longer cold nights, music and poetry occupied center stage, entertaining the protesters, fueling their spirits, and providing new material for those who wish to study the poetics of revolutions," she wrote in a March 18 article for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Poems from the '50s, '60s and '70s found a new voice among Egyptian youth who were too young to have heard or read them when first penned, she said. The bloodshed resulting from the assaults on the protesters inspired yet another powerful chant: "Ask the silent, why the silence? After blood, how can it get worse?"
That chant, Radwan wrote, "spread like wildfire, yelled out by one, repeated by thousands, and echoing throughout the square in a matter of minutes." Another one, "Masr ya umm, wiladik ahum" ("Egypt, O Mother, here are your sons"), was likewise powerful.
The female presence, she later wrote in an article for Jadaliyya, an online Arabic studies magazine, was ubiquitous.
"Women physicians volunteered in the makeshift clinic on a side street. Women lawyers gave speeches on the square's makeshift radio. Women were part of the security team searching incomers to the square to identify and exclude saboteurs carrying weapons. Women sat in front of the tanks to prevent their movement. We felt strong, empowered and united, aligned with each other and with the male protesters."
Suad Joseph, founding director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies program, said that women have been politically active in the Arab world for a century. She noted that women even joined combat in Algeria's 1954–62 war for independence from France.
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