This Is How We Survive by Ariel Gore; Mai’a Williams

Author:Ariel Gore; Mai’a Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2019-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

The World Is Yours

Around four in the morning, I shared a taxi with Hauke to downtown. As we neared Tahrir Square, soldiers, in camouflage jumpsuits with black belts and dainty helmets, stopped our taxi and said the driver couldn’t go any further. They had blocked off Tahrir Square.

Hauke, a German painter with matted blond hair, and I started on foot toward Tahrir. Every couple of blocks, soldiers stopped us. “Where are you from? Where are you going? … It’s too dangerous to walk farther. Tahrir Square is closed.”

Since January I had gotten used to dealing with Egyptian soldiers, negotiating my way passed their roving checkpoints.

“We’re just trying to get home, and the only way to go is through Tahrir,” I insisted. Honestly, we were leaving a house party trying to get back to Sadhb and Meara’s new downtown apartment, but to the soldiers I left the details vague. Sometimes we ducked out of the soldiers’ eyesight and then moved quickly before the soldiers noticed. Other times I played the sweet and innocent African mama. “Look, I’m just a mom trying to get home to my daughter.” Even though Aza and Cal were safe at home and had been sleeping for hours. Sometimes we just had to back up and pretend to acquiesce to the soldiers’ orders and then sneak around when they weren’t looking.

As we arrived at the center of Tahrir, dozens of soldiers sat on benches, their guns swaying between their legs. We took one more side alley when loud gunshots rang out. We crouched behind a parked, dusty navy Lada. Queues of soldiers marched passed us in the streets, then half a dozen trucks packed with soldiers sped by.

I pulled out a last beer can from my bag, said “fuck it,” slammed half the beer, and passed the can to Hauke. We scurried into an alleyway. I called Meara to assure our friends were safe. “Yeah. We are okay. Where is everyone?” I don’t know any other European girls who supported the revolution more than Sadhb and Meara.

Throughout the revolution, they were welcoming and helpful and opened their house to everyone: sub-Saharan Black students, Egyptian boys from the ghetto pretending they were middle-class, and upper-class Egyptian girls who lied to their parents about what they were doing at night, the kind of girls who wore hijab in the taxi until they got to the house party, Arab boys who barely spoke English, white boys who barely spoke Arabic, doormen and fisherwomen, Saudi-trained doctors, Lebanese grad students, American boys on a gap year. If you were cool and you needed a place to rest and get cigarettes, phone cards, painkillers, a glass of wine, an opiate, then they had it.

When we drank, we ran over our international English. (International English scrubbed out most of the idioms, slang. Instead, we spoke every word, every phrase, more slowly and literally.) And we argued loudly with boys who tried to tell us what was best for us. Five days a week, they were teachers at an English-language private school.

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