Blue Lorries

by Radwa Ashour

  I would spend the whole day in the hall, but as a concession to my father’s insistent wishes I left the university at nine or ten o’clock in the evening. Shazli would escort me to the door, saying to me repeatedly, ‘Your father is a reactionary, Nada. I don’t see how he can forbid you to spend the night at the sit-in, and I don’t see why you obey him!’ Then we would bid each other good night. He would go back to the hall, while I turned toward the house. In this way, all week long, the discussions were repeated, until all of the participants in the sit-in were arrested at dawn, and my father sent me to my mother for fear that otherwise I would be arrested, too.

  Was it a mistake to acquiesce in my father’s decision? He couldn’t stuff me into a suitcase, but he packed me off to France against my own wishes. He made the decision, but I accepted it. My self-doubt would trouble me for years. ‘Fifteen hundred of your comrades are in prison – what are you doing here?’ This question kept me awake nights, resounding in my brain until it became fixed there like information memorised in childhood. Feelings of guilt were etched deep in my consciousness, to be reinforced later by Shazli’s words, half in jest, half serious: ‘You went larking off to Paris for rest and relaxation, leaving the rest of us in our cells!’ Contrary to my nature, I was tongue-tied, and shifty-eyed like a guilty child. I didn’t recount to Shazli the details of the three weeks I spent with my mother in Paris. I only said, ‘I learned to cook.’ He raised his eyebrows in surprise, then burst out laughing.

  Chapter nine

  ‘We need you for an hour or two’

  There was no relaxation or peace of mind, despite my mother’s solicitude and her wish to put me at ease. I had no access whatsoever to news of my comrades. It was not the era of satellite and the Internet. There was virtually no word about the students who’d been detained, no news. When I rang my father, he avoided any discussion of the topic, presumably out of a concern for security. Why did I go along with his decision?

  In the morning, my mother would go to work, and I would take up a book. I would switch on the television, put a cassette in the tape-player. I would go out and stand on the balcony, return to my book, then leave it again to pace around the house. Back to the balcony. I would look at the clock, then look at it again. I didn’t know anyone in the entire city. Gérard was studying at some university far away from Paris. I didn’t know how to contact the girls and boys to whom he had introduced me; I couldn’t even remember their names. The sky was always cloudy, and usually it rained. I would go down to the street, then go back up to the flat after five minutes. I waited. I waited until I heard the key turn in the lock, and then I would leap up to greet my mother with a hug, and after that we would fix dinner together, and sit down to eat it and talk. I would draw out the conversation, putting off going to bed, dreading the desolation that lay in wait for me the following morning.

  On my first trip to Paris, Gérard and his engaging conversation had taken me from my mother, but Shazli, this time, had no chance of taking me far away from her; it’s more likely, in fact, that he brought me closer to her, not because I wasn’t thinking about him (I thought about him constantly, even as I slept under warm blankets, ate nourishing food, and enjoyed the feeling of hot water on my head and body in a warm bath, knowing all such amenities were out of the question for him now). My uneasy thoughts weighed heavily on me, so I ran to my mother – fleeing to her, as I see it now. I wanted to hear what she had to say, get to know her better, be closer to her, and I clung to her, seeking a safe haven.

  ‘Mama, how did you meet Papa?’

  ‘Mama, when did Papa tell you he loved you and wanted to marry you? What did he say?’

  ‘Mama, was it hard for you to go and live in Cairo?’

  ‘Mama, why did you and Papa separate? It’s not possible that a room full of smoke or those hundred pounds he gave his cousin could be a reason to get divorced!’

  ‘Mama, could we take a trip to Yvoire? I don’t remember anything about my trip there with the two of you – was I two years old, or younger?’

  ‘Mama, tell me about your father.’

  ‘Mama, what was his relationship to my grandmother like? What did she do when he died?’

  ‘Mama, do you still have family in the village?’

  ‘Mama . . .’

  She talked, and I listened to her, both drawn to and puzzled by the rhythm of her speech, the shade of her honey-coloured eyes. The sudden slight upward movements of her head that emphasised the meaning of her words reassured me and filled me with something as good as serenity.

  The second week I decided to treat my mother to a hot meal she would find waiting for her when she got home from work. I referred to a cookbook I found in her library. The game delighted me, so I repeated it. Thus I discovered that the preparation of meals has its own requirements and rituals. I would select from the book the dish I meant to prepare, study the ingredients, and go out to a nearby shop to buy them. Then my mother called my attention to the big market. So I started taking the Metro and going there, not just to buy things, but also for the simple pleasure of going there: the other Paris, the one that escapes the post cards, the fashion shows, and the perfume advertisements. Women unconcerned about their full figures (unapologetically, insouciantly oversized), men in whom was combined the roughness of everyday life with smiles so sweet they took me by surprise with their, ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle!’ I would smile, make my purchases, and chat with vendors and with other customers. I would return home laden with vegetables, herbs, and two portions of meat or chicken, sometimes also flowers to surprise my mother the moment she opened the door and entered the flat.

  This is when I started to develop cooking skills. I threw myself into it the way I did with anything new, but my absorption this time, in contrast to other obsessions, didn’t fade away. It grew over the years into a serious hobby, one I both loved and was good at – I considered myself an authority on the subject. Every cloud has a silver lining: from despair combined with feelings of disconnection, anxiety, and remorse a ‘super chef’ was born. (I smile as I write these words, but nevertheless the description is apt!)

  The secondary, and more desirable, effect of this new hobby was that it eased relations between my father’s wife and me. Since the subject is cooking, I should say that it ‘oiled’ the hinges of the door that was closed between us, so that it began to open without the squeak that sets the teeth on edge. The first Friday after I got back, I announced, ‘I’ll make lunch for you.’ My father was surprised and so was Hamdiya (if only her family had chosen a different name for her, things would have been a little easier!); I think she regarded it as a well-intentioned move to help her – she thanked me profusely, and praised extravagantly the food I prepared. Then we began to compare notes and exchange advice. I taught her recipes I had pored over in books, and she taught me what she had learned from her mother and grandmother.

  Boring courses, intense activism, arrests, a journey, a return, and then activism once more. The result: failing grades in eight out of ten subjects (the two subjects in which I passed my examinations were unrelated to the field in which I had chosen to specialise); the other result was less ruinous – or, let us say, more useful: my having taken refuge in cooking gave me a skill that, if worse came to worst, might qualify me for work as a cook, and in fact for better pay than that of an engineer just starting out on a career!

  My father was angry about my failure and upbraided me severely. Hamdiya came to my defence: ‘Let her alone, for heaven’s sake – what a rough year she’s had! Those arrests, the anxiety, the fear, a trip she hadn’t expected or prepared for – what is she, made of stone?’ She patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘God willing, you’ll pass with distinction next year.’

  But that ‘next year’ in which my father’s wife looked forward to my distinguished performance came with its own surprises and distractions. I switched to the College of Humanities, and my studies in the French Department, in which I had enrolled, seemed easy, since I was
fluent in French and loved literature, finishing in two or three nights reading assignments that it took some of my classmates weeks to understand. But I didn’t pass with distinction – in fact, most of my subjects I barely passed at all; two of them I actually failed, and had to repeat them the following term.

  It was a year replete with interesting developments, starting with the appearance of three students from the College of Medicine before the disciplinary board on charges of having written for the wall newspapers, of contacting other groups of students, and of causing unrest. Then fifty-two students were taken into custody. So we began concerted action in seeking an appeal and the students’ release, as well as an assurance that further roundups wouldn’t prevent us from continuing to voice our demands. We held meetings, issued statements, contacted the unions, and staged another sit-in at Cairo University’s Central Celebration Hall. Classmates of ours from the College of Engineering and the College of Medicine at Ain Shams University held sit-ins as well. Then they moved the sit-in to the Za‘faran Palace, the seat of Ain Shams University’s administration. There was another roundup.

  This time I didn’t go to France.

  The knock on the door at dawn.

  My father woke me up. He whispered, ‘Do you have any papers here?’ I gave him the papers. He took them, folded them, leapt lightly and calmly on to a chair, and hid some of them in the wooden frame around the glass of the door to the balcony, while others he concealed in the window frame, in the slight crack into which the pane of glass was inserted. Then he whispered in my ear as he turned to open the door, ‘Deny everything, even things you think don’t matter, and refuse to talk unless a lawyer is present.’

  He opened the door. Two men in civilian clothes entered (later it became clear that they were officers), followed by three soldiers or informants. Three men in police uniforms stayed by the door, holding rifles at the ready. They searched the house, but found nothing. One of the officers said, ‘We’ll take her for just an hour or two.’

  My father went quickly into my bedroom and returned with a small suitcase into which he had put a few everyday items for me.

  As I was getting ready to leave, I said, ‘I won’t need the case, since I won’t be staying with them more than an hour or two.’

  ‘Take the case!’

  I didn’t notice Hamdiya there until she placed her own coat around my shoulders, with a large woollen shawl over it. She said, ‘Look after yourself.’ Her face was red, and wet with tears.

  My father escorted me to the door of the building, where two police cars were waiting. They put me into one of them.

  I hadn’t been afraid when they were coming into the house and searching it, nor did the appearance of the two armed security officers standing by the door of the flat frighten me, nor the three armed men I found unexpectedly at the bottom of the stairs near the entrance of the building. But when I was sitting between the two officers who had taken me in, watching the dark, deserted streets, I was engulfed all at once by a feeling that I was suffocating. I asked the one sitting to my right to open the car window. I didn’t tell him that I needed air in order to breathe, but this was in fact the case, no exaggeration.

  Chapter ten

  The Panopticon

  It is fitting for me to open this chapter by explaining the title, which may seem cryptic and elusive, as well as hard to pronounce. Pan/opticon is Greek, actually a compound word the first of whose two components means ‘all’ or ‘the whole of’, while the second means ‘vision’ or ‘observation’. The expression is a term used by the English thinker Jeremy Bentham, in a report on prison reform which he published at the end of the eighteenth century. Bentham suggested that prisons be constructed so as to allow segregation of the prisoners, and surveillance of all of them by one or several guards. It was an economic project that would ensure through architectural methods a reduction in the cost of consolidating power whose hold on a large number of individuals requires dealing with them collectively.

  The proposed prison would have a circular building consisting of several levels. On each level would be a number of adjacent individual cells, and at its centre would be a guard tower assuring continuous surveillance of all the prisoners, for each cell would extend lengthwise to the innermost portion of the building, from the façade looking toward the core housing the tower, to the outside wall of the prison. Each cell would have two openings, the first an iron-barred aperture looking on to the tower, and the second a window in the opposite wall to allow light to penetrate the cell so that the prisoner would be visible throughout the day to the guard on duty in the tower. Bentham suggested that the windows of the tower, in contrast to the cell windows, be enclosed with wooden screens, enabling the guards to see without being seen. He likewise proposed a design that would lay out the tower rooms in something much like a small labyrinth, preventing the prisoners from knowing by either sight or sound the position of the guard or in which direction he was looking. Thus it was all the same whether the guard was present or absent, whether he was conducting surveillance or not, for the presence of the guard would be a reality that the prisoners would internalise – it would be foremost in their consciousness and govern their conduct over the course of each day.

  Bentham was well aware of the psychological and economic value of his invention, which he described as ‘a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example’.

  Bentham’s idea was regarded as a clear model for reform and was implemented in the construction of prisons, hospitals, schools, and factories; I encountered it in the course of reading another book sent to me by my mother when I was in the fourth year at university – Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

  From Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’, Foucault borrowed a metaphorical representation of the relationship between power and the citizens in modern society, and how power permeates their lives, to the point where it becomes a part of their very being, ruling them from within as well as from without.

  Foucault begins his book with pictures of torture from a period prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: flaying, burning, severing of limbs – mortification of the flesh before and after execution, always in front of a crowd of spectators. Then he proceeds to the new reform that conferred absolute control upon those in power without its having to resort to exhibiting horrific scenes of torture, and thus without the need for punishment to be publicly witnessed. Foucault elaborates on his explanation of this political mechanism, advanced by power, in order to command the bodies of the people and thus bring them into compliance and submissiveness so as to make use of their energy: a political economy whose sphere of operations is the body of the citizen, its instrument a set of methods that have been studied, calculated, and well-organised – capable, without manifest violence or perceptible terrorism, of carrying out its mission with increased precision and reduced expense. For among the advantages of this technology was the difficulty of tracing it to any single aspect of power, or any precise apparatus or specific organisation within the overall matrix, for it would permeate the social texture, distributing itself throughout and penetrating so deeply into its soil that it would become one of soci­ety’s ongoing systemic functions.

  Because in Foucault’s view modern society is a thing of shackling and punishment, the Panopticon is a metaphor for this society and its various agencies. Foucault says, ‘Why should we be surprised that a prison resembles the factories, schools, military barracks, and hospitals – which all resemble prisons?’

  I was drawn into the book, even though I didn’t understand everything it had to say. In later years I would reread it more than once. Then I sought out Bentham’s book, so as to acquaint myself with his project directly, and this, too, I would read and reread. Each time, I picked up on something I hadn’t absorbed with previous readings, pausing at a paragraph in one book or the other, and lifting it out of its context as if it were a picture intended specially for me
that I had clipped from a newspaper or magazine and saved along with my other personal pictures.

  This is not the place to discuss Foucault’s book or Bentham’s, to reiterate what they said, or to try to draw a connection between them and my situation. What I wanted to point to is that the concept of the Panopticon opened a door for me, inviting me to contemplate – obsessively at times, at others less so – the relationship between us and power, the role of authority in either subjugating dissenters, or destroying them whether wholly or in part, and the possibilities for escape from its grip through some form of resistance.

  Setting aside Foucault and Bentham for the moment, I focus my attention on the suicide of two of my comrades and the untimely deaths of dozens more. I mean death, literally, fate and divine decree, as when a person becomes ill, his condition worsens and deteriorates, and so he dies; or he’s not ill, nor does he show any sign of infirmity, until suddenly, without warning, his heart stops and he dies without knowing what hit him. I mean also the other death, metaphorical death, in which the body and spirit dissolve. The common element between the two is its premature occurrence, before the time when it would be normal and expected, before the person reaches an advanced age – say, sixty or seventy or eighty years.