Arab Subcultures

Transformations in Theory and Practice

Tarik Sabry, Layal Ftouni

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786720429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

What is 'Arab' about Arab subcultures? This is the first book to set out to delineate different ways of studying and theorising Arab subcultural groups and practices, including film, graffiti, music, live art performances, Arab techies and youth cultures. Contributors tackle a number of questions including: How is the study of Arab subcultures to be theorised? How are we to analyse such creative processes in a new worldliness characterised by trans-temporality and trans-subjectivity? Arab Subcultures effectively opens up a critical and interdisciplinary dialogue about Arab subcultures with different fields of enquiry, including anthropology, philosophy, art criticism and cultural studies, at the heart of which lies the key intellectual task of re-imagining the uneasy relation between aesthetics and politics in the age of revolutions.

1

Hatha al-shibl min dhak al-Asad

Would-be Arab Youth Studies and the Revival of ‘Subculture’

Ramy Aly

In aesthetic terms, Cairo’s contemporary urban landscape is a mix of dystopia and brutalism. Among the most common things that one encounters in this decidedly modern landscape are the countless miles of concrete and red brick walls encircling empty plots of land, military compounds, syndicate social clubs, embassies, gated communities, state buildings and government facilities.

In recent years, the taste for walls as the corporeal means through which hierarchies of access are regulated and signified has made its way into the dilapidated streets of downtown Cairo. The waves of protest that have gripped the centre of the city since 2011 have spawned a maze of concrete block walls which now criss-cross Garden City and Qasr al-Aini to protect the parliament, the Ministry of the Interior and the British and American embassies. The walls are reminiscent of the coastal defences that purport to thwart the sea’s relentless attempts to consume and redefine the terra firma that provides us with ontological certainty. Like the sea, Egyptian protestors of all shades have shown little deference towards these attempts to regulate and control change.

On 18 November 2011, the military police and central security forces evicted protestors from Tahrir Square using disproportionate force, leading to a number of deaths and hundreds of injuries. On 19 November, 42 young Egyptians lost their lives, tens of others lost their eyes, and hundreds more were injured as protestors confronted the security forces on Mohammed Mahmud Street. The first wall in Egypt’s very own ‘Green Zone’ was erected on Mohammed Mahmud Street to protect the hated Ministry of the Interior headquarters.¹ The following month, just metres away from Tahrir Square and Mohammed Mahmud Street, a peaceful sit-in outside the Cabinet Office was forcibly cleared, with scores of protesters beaten and arrested (16 December 2011).² Once again, young people refused to accept state-sanctioned violence and there were deaths and injuries, as military police officers hurled broken floor tiles and furniture from the roof of the ten-storey Cabinet Office building onto protesters on the ground, cracking countless skulls and revelling in their impunity by urinating onto protestors on the ground below. Three people were killed on the first day, the clashes around the parliament building and the Cabinet Office led to the construction of two more walls at the intersection of El Sheikh Rihan Street and Qasr al-Aini, but not before four more people had lost their lives and up to 2,000 were seriously injured.³

Within hours of the fighting subsiding around the concrete walls, street artists had painted one of the walls with a yellow and black smiley face, the iconic image of the late 1980s acid house and rave scenes in London and New York.⁴

Figure 1The ‘smiley face’ on the zoning wall at the intersection of El Sheikh Rihan Street and Qasr al-Aini, downtown Cairo, December 2011

Source: Photograph by the author

What was this sign doing in Cairo at this time, and in that place? Could the authorial intentions and designs of the street artists who adorned the wall with this sign do anything to control the multiple meanings, places, people and references with which the smiley face is encrypted? Chris Sullivan, one of London’s acid house pioneers, recalls that:

The first version of the Smiley face we now know was designed by the freelance artist Harvey Ball (who earned $45 for the job) in 1963. He created it for the State Life Assurance Company, who used it as a badge to boost the morale of their workforce. By 1971, more than 50 million Smiley badges had been sold in the US, while in the UK it was adopted by the Windsor Free Rock Festival in 1972 […] the first person I saw with a Smiley t-shirt was Barnzley Armitage, now co-designer of ‘A Child Of The Jago’ label with Vivienne Westwood’s son, Joe Corré, who wore it as an ironic nod to the Summer of Love in ’67. ⁵

From the brief semiotic genealogy offered by Sullivan, we see the smiley beginning its life as a charm for white-collar human resource management, moving its way through the mainstream, counterculture, subculture and club culture scenes, through music, fashion and lifestyle, to appear in Cairo in the throes of revolt, carrying a similar but different message under quite different existential circumstances. To quote the late Stuart Hall: ‘Its signification is rich and richly ambiguous: certainly unstable.’⁶

The smiley face is a sign that has been reiterated across time, space and context. Each time it is deployed it carries with it a situated authorial intention, and yet its past meanings can never be silenced, and the unforeseen meanings that it will come to represent can never be foreclosed.⁷ Like much street art in Egypt, the smiley face staring out in the direction of Tahrir Square survived for only a few weeks: it quickly fell prey to what Mona Abaza describes as the ‘Professional Whiteners’⁸ of the local municipality, whose orders I understand in terms of ‘sous rature’ in a Heiddegerian and Derridean sense, where the act of crossing something out on a page is intended to suppress meaning by the threat of deletion, and yet it acts only to reinforce its ambivalence.⁹ The ‘true’ meaning behind the smiley face on the Qasr al-Aini wall is extraneous to some extent. It was undeniably sardonic, but encrypted with an anxiety, the tragic loss of life that had created the canvas for its own manifestation. Some may have considered it to be a blasé affront to the sanctity of human sacrifice for the sake of emancipation. More straightforwardly, others may have seen it as a monument to the victory of protesters over the security forces, who were forced to retreat behind a concrete wall. In my mind, I had made the link between the image and the tumultuous debates around subculture and post-subculture analysis: that this act of meaning-making could not be erased.

I take little comfort from that situated act of meaning-making, for it only emphasises the sometimes fanciful intellectual indulgences that we entertain. It is only in the eye of the decadent and privileged transnational subject or scholar that the smiley face on the Qasr al-Aini wall reads as the proverbial middle finger pointed by youth club culture at Thatcherism and Reaganism. Indeed, I must be careful not to forget that I have emphasised one use and interpretation of this sign at the expense of others, in part because of my own sensorium and because of a deep-seated intuition that signification and aesthetics can constitute resistance. The desire to find a coherent connection or an authentic, original meaning is, in itself, misleading. As Hall reminds us, the desire to fix meaning is the work of power and ideology,¹⁰ and lest we forget as a group of professional interpreters of culture, we are implicated in both. Sometimes we ‘trip the light fantastic’, seeking evidence for the meta-narratives of power and resistance that reflect our politics, or provide moral justification for our careers.

One wonders what the smiley face on the Qasr al-Aini wall might have meant to the underpaid and overworked souls who were ordered to paint over it, or the shopkeepers whose businesses have suffocated because of the zoning walls on which the smiley and other street art (which we valorise) have been painted. There is little doubt in my mind that the cultural references I cite here to locate this fleeting sign are not shared by my neighbours in Cairo’s Green Zone.

The transient smiley face on the Qasr al-Aini wall should be seen cartographically in relation to the other walls in its vicinity. Only 100 metres away is Mohammed Mahmud Street where, for two years, the walls were painted with the smiling faces of the revolution’s martyrs. Their renditions sat alongside those of one-eyed protester-witnesses whose eyes were gouged out by buckshot fired from police rifles, and the mangled faces of those tortured and beaten to death by Egypt’s security forces. The walls of Mohammed Mahmud were one of the few places in Cairo where the visual memory of the revolution’s fallen was publicly recognised and preserved by young artists. After numerous attempts by the authorities to literally whitewash Mohammed Mahmud’s walls, they acquiesced to the inevitability and persistence of those images of remembrance. When the images of the fallen were painted over, they were replaced only with the images of those newly-murdered and lost, layering the wall with further meanings.

The new faces were a poignant reminder of the processual nature and human cost of social and political change across the region which, in its numerous waves and manifestations, has made a mockery of the ‘Arab Spring’, ‘Islamist Winter’ and post-uprising analyses that impose the terms through which change should be framed and evaluated. Indeed, just at the moment when I (and no doubt, many others) became attached to those images of remembrance on Mohammed Mahmoud, canonising them, inserting them into grand schemes of aesthetic resistance, they were painted over by iconoclastic street artists who see these walls as public newspapers, and not as consecrated genres, renditions or spaces.

Originally I had intended my contribution to this volume to be one in which I would confidently analyse street art, football gangs and revolutionary pop music, but in truth I was not able to move beyond the implications of the smiley face on the Qasr al-Aini wall. While some will consider the account I have provided thus far to be anecdotal, I see it as allegorical in the way that it exposes the productive problems of writing about the politics of youth culture in the Arab world at a critical historical juncture.

Pseudo-presentism and the historicisation of the revolution

Across the Arab world, modes and implications of resistance, change and continuity unfold abruptly. The assertion some make that Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya and Yemen are somehow ‘post-uprising’ seems woefully short-sighted, underpinned by a kind of political normativity so powerful that it refuses to acknowledge the struggle that continues to fill the streets of Cairo, Sana’a, Tunis, Manama, Tripoli and other cities across the region, with militia, protesters, riot police and paramilitary forces – as though what young people were trying to unseat were simply the regime figureheads, and not the entirety, of the socio-economic, cultural and political regimes...