apples and oranges?

Esther Adorno, a Beirut-based journalist who has travelled and lived in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt for the last year or five, just spent five days in Cairo. She went there a couple of days after Tahrir Square got re-occupied, from November 30 to December 4.

Esther has a very good understanding of the Middle East, she loves its people, but is also very generous with her criticism of human weakness everywhere – especially if it’s about inequality and injustice, lack of courage and hypocrisy.

Last summer she was one of the very few undercover reporters in Syria. She wrote a compelling account on the situation on the ground in Homs that got published by Harper’s, I highly recommend it (especially since the issues it touches are still at the foundation of all the problems that we see in Syria today: sectarianism, security apparatus, the immobilizing claw of a second-generation murderous regime).

Esther has many friends in Syria. Brotherly and sisterly friends. I have shared the apprehension and despair when news of this or that friend stopped coming in, or when someone got killed. This is nothing new for reporters from conflict zones. It is tragic and frustrating, but it is part of what makes a witness insightful. And that is why we need to be grateful for the risks Esther and other frontliners take. Blogging from Brooklyn is not enough. It Never will. Grazie.

So Esther went to Tahrir. For the second time this year. She went to see a friend that had been shot in the eye by the SCAF, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. She promised to write me a letter and she wrote it. Grazie.

Here is most of her letter,

posted with her permission.

Dear Alessandro,

It’s hard to organize thoughts right now. It’s all overwhelming. I spent a night at the sit-in at the Parliament listening to people playing music, drawing graffitis, drinking wine and writing poetry. It’s like witnessing the birth of a new society, an Egypt getting together and getting to know itself. the party is definitely over – the days of movie-like scenes of protests and heroism we still remember from January – and the easy hopes are gone too. It was easy to get together and kick out a dictator, it’s a quite different thing now to get together and build a new Egypt going against the majority of your people who just want stability and peace of mind and a bit of morality restored, and who for that will accept anything, even a military junta (a junta which is starving Egypt to death, retaining state money) and a muslim brotherhood or, even worse, a salafi majority in parliament. People in the square and in the street know that this “second revolution” (that’s how they call it) it’s going to be a long destructive game of a minority against a majority. they expect the next clash to be in january, once an elected parliament with a substantive muslim brotherhood majority will come to clean up the streets in order to catch that power they’ve been hunting for years. they expect that fight, they will remain in these chilly streets waiting for it, and they know they will loose that battle. but they remain there.

Most of my friends are heavily injured. I’m glad to announce that Omar, who was with me during the worst moments of the previous revolution and saved my life more than once, was finally operated and will recover his eyesight. we spent the night recovering memories from January and February, episodes i buried in my head and almost lost, as i was totally unable to recall what was mine and what was absorbed by memories of others. you loose concience of your ownself once you’re in the middle of a square that functions only on the basis of trust. so now, after 10 months, i’m getting back those memories from days in which i forgot i existed as a single being. Does this make sense?

Anyway, as for Omar (who originally is an IBM programmer and who left everything to sit day and night in the square) he’s still half blind, always chocking because of the teargas, always sitting in the streets. Every now and then he spots another eye-patched kid and they hug each other. This horrible decision from the army to blind its own youth, sending snipers to shoot in the eyes, became a new trend in the local pop culture as you will see from some of the graffitis i’m sending you. kids write poetry abut eyes, people draws eyes all over walls, new songs are being written. the creativity you breathe here is hard to describe. It’s this same creativity that sends people like me or you (it’s a lower, middle, and upper class you see mingling here, from street kids to a philanthropic elite I used to see only in certain intellectual circles before) to sing songs but also to go down the streets facing death.

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This is something xxxxxxx, yyyyyyyyyy, and our beloved friends from Damascus would hate me for saying, but I’ll be brutally honest with you: my friends who are actors, directors, documentarists, businessmen, writers, they’re all alive by pure chance after these last days of fighting. They gambled everything down these streets. this is something I haven’t seen in syria, this forgetting yourself and fighting for those 30 cm of street where you’re keeping your feet no matter what. The feeling that the future of the society where you were born is more important than your very own skin, is something I see here but not in Syria. Most of the people I know there are still not going to protests, because a lot of considerations on personal safety and warnings against arrests come first. Here, faces I used to see in February are not here anymore because they have been killed. Everybody has lost a friend, a girlfriend, a boyfriend or a brother.

This feeling that my fate is your fate, even adfter 12 thousand arrests and hundreds and hundreds of deaths and an electoral defeat, is something that I see in Egypt but not in Syria, where at the end of the day everybody wants to come back safe at home and post his considerations on Facebook so they decide to simply not go. It’s a legitimate feeling, and i’m glad they don’t go to protests cause I don’t want my beloved ones to be hurt; but I also know there is no such thing as a change for free in this part of the planet. you have to be ready to pay a price. This is why I breathe a sense of hope here, even if everybody warns me that they expect another ten years of fights before achieving what they started asking for during the January revolution.

Everybody is sick before of the teargas…. the little dog of Merit (a socialist library/rebelsHQ near Tahrir) is still sitting in a corner of the library chocking and crying after 4 days. the junta spread the voice that this tearghases give impotence, hoping to scare people. They also sent prostitutes (I swear!!!) to lure kids away from the square. it’s a constant game you see going on in Tahrir.

It’s conquering a public space and using it as a mean to talk, talk, talk, talk, socialize, create, gain confidence, meet, that made the egyptian case unique and affected political behavior. This is a special model. People can’t live anymore without Tahyrir, what they get there is unique, so they keep on reclaiming the square, and the struggle goes on. Funny eh?

It’s not by chance that this time they decided there shall be no stages and microphones in the square. “people has to talk. we have to speak to each other. we have to exchange ideas. we can’t have a stage, there are no leaders”, they tell me.

Journalists who come here and say “oh but it’s not the same thing as in January, they are less and they will be fucked” don’t understand that under the present circumstances, those few thousand people are a miracle. And they know they are. And they know they shall not achieve anything in the short term, so they are ready to continue.

I hope I did not bore you with all my chatting. I better run to the square now. tonight I promised to cook pasta for some of the kids in the parliament sit-in, in exchange for some arab flamenco music they will play.

Lots of love. I’ve been looking for a souvenir gasmask to bring you, but they are nowhere to be found!

I am full of gratitude for the letter. But TAMASHI is about Syria, and Esther’s comments on the Syrian protesters cannot pass unnoticed. Is it true that the Syrians – certain Syrians: the middle class, the urban youth of Aleppo and Damascus – are finding too many excuses for not entering their revolution? Is that the reason why there is not yet real hope in the air in Syria?

Today was another Friday of protest in Syria. Between twenty and thirty killed. The military against the people, the people against the military.

Apples and oranges?

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