Giving to God by Mittermaier Amira;

Author:Mittermaier, Amira;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520300828
Publisher: University of California Press

DEATH AS A JOKE

Amal is one of the millions of Egyptians at the receiving end, and her story illustrates the messy social and material worlds that pierce through, and run alongside, the idea of giving to God. She is all too familiar with the widespread mistrust and cynicism that stands in tension to a Quranically ordained share for the poor. But while she knows that most times her performances won’t work, she feels that she has no choice but to keep trying.

Amal performs her suffering ceaselessly. She performs it in government offices and at NGOs, to me and to herself. She tells her story so often that even her children complain, rolling their eyes, “Mama, you talk too much!” She cries. She points to her youngest daughter’s word choices: “yā ʿaynī! [Poor thing!] Looks how she talks! That’s from growing up in the streets!” And when her oldest daughter refuses to be woken up close to midnight to eat kusharī (cheap street food consisting of lentils, rice, and pasta), she says: “yā ʿaynī! She’s grown used to hunger!” Her body, her words, the many moments that make up each day, and those of her children—all are overflowing with signs of Amal’s suffering.

But there is one performance that tops all others. One day, only a few weeks before I met her, Amal sat down on her kitchen floor and poured a container of gas over her clothes. Her plan was to set herself on fire. The lighter was sitting next to her. In a different version she tells, she poured gas over herself and her children, intending to set the entire family on fire. The telling of the story, in its various versions, is a performance too, and Amal is aware of the performativity of both acts—of death and its telling. She also knows that if she wants to perform the telling, the performance of death needs to be interrupted before it’s too late. That day, her neighbors intervened.

I have no way of knowing what exactly happened that day and whether Amal really intended to commit suicide, or whether she counted on the interruption.14 Regardless, after that day, death became a joke of sorts. Friends advised Amal to repeat what she had done but this time at Tahrir Square, which at the time was still a crowded protest space: “Do exactly the same: pour gas over yourself, take a lighter; we’ll be right there to rescue you!” Telling me about the plan, Amal laughed: “They better be!” At that point she no longer wanted to die, or maybe she had never wanted to die in the first place. But she knows death can work; it can move people—neighbors, strangers, and also someone like me, whether I’m in Egypt or halfway around the world.

Amal knows about widely publicized deaths—cases in which death was not interrupted. In those deaths, claims for symbolic importance were made, or they were retroactively infused with meaning. She knows about Mohammad Bouazizi and Khaled Said, the two men whose deaths were credited with having set into motion the Tunisian and the Egyptian uprisings.

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