100 Days of Creative Resistance

Published by 100 Days of Creative Resistance, Marc 1, 2025

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Mona Eltahawy in A Time for Giants

When fascism flexes its muscles, supersize your feminism and become a giant.

Close your eyes and recall your origin story. Every superhero has an origin story. Often, it is from a time when they almost succumbed to an antagonist, a force of evil, a nemesis who brought them to their knees.

And then they snapped.

That snap is the sound of the giant within you being born.

Is it scary? Fuck yeah, it’s scary. Coming into your power is a thing of wonder. To give birth to that giant you are meant to be is marvellous.

I moved from Egypt to the United States in 2000. With the return to the White House of Donald J. Trump, who calls Egypt’s current authoritarian-in-charge Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi “my favourite dictator,” it feels like I’ve spent the past quarter of a century watching the United States turn into Egypt.

I had been a journalist in Egypt, under the regime of then-authoritarian-in-charge Hosni Mubarak, who was propped up by five different U.S. presidents, Republican and Democrat. Mubarak’s security services tapped my phone and followed me, threatened to imprison me for exposing the human rights violations of the regime, and eventually made good on their threats by breaking my arms, sexually assaulting me, and holding me incommunicado for 12 hours.

That was when I snapped and became a giant.

I survived. I reported under a dictatorship and survived. What I learned during my years as a reporter in Egypt about power–the regime’s, mine, ours–was like looking through a kaleidoscope: an opportunity to reimagine. It is beautiful, dazzling, and quite often dizzying. And it sounds like freedom.

When the regime and its institutions do not work at the service of the people, when you know that the regime and its institutions consider journalists and media as enemies of the state to be curbed and controlled, when you know that the regime and its institutions use the criminal justice system not to protect you but to protect themselves from accountability and from you, then you throw all those things into a kaleidoscope and you turn it and you begin to see other ways to do, to be, and to survive.

This essay is a kaleidoscope that I gift you.

Let’s start with the basics: you are alive. Is your heartbeat the metronome you need for rebellion? Does it keep time for you or are you recalibrating it with an adrenaline jolt of independence?

And your mind? Make your mind too free for fascism to chain your imagination.

I refuse. Do you see the fuse that is the molotov cocktail in the belly of sedition?

Do you remember the first time you threw that molotov cocktail? What colour was the air?

When was the last time you were ungovernable? What was the taste of defiance?

Cerulean and watermelon.

Your answer will not be the same but make it delicious.

What do you hear when you refuse? Make it the soundtrack of your joy

.

I refuse to surrender to misery. What we fight for must be better.

“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”: a quote frequently attributed to anarchist Emma Goldman, never actually appears in any of her work, but is a paraphrase of a longer paragraph from Goldman’s autobiography Living My Life:

“At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement,” Emma Goldman writes.

What is refusal if not reckless abandon!

“My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it,” she added.

Anarchism is often misunderstood as inciting violence. I understand anarchism as inciting liberation. Do you see cerulean? Because I taste watermelon.

Feminism took me to anarchism and said “You should know each other.” And the union made of me a giant.

Dance to the beat of your own revolution. Sprinkle with rhinestones and glitter your noncompliance.

Remember to hear a rainbow when you refuse injustice, cruelty, and power of the fascist’s pulpit. “Reckless abandon” is not an accusation. It is powerful to keep time with Emma Goldman’s release and freedom.

Your heart needs cerulean (or whatever colour races your heart to the oasis of freedom). Your courage longs to taste watermelon (or whatever flavour is the gift of that beautiful ideal of anarchism).

Keep a journal of the ways refusal innervates your senses. Remember that misery enervates your refusal.

Do not confuse innervate for enervate. It is a mistake as common as thinking refusal is miserable or that agitators shouldn’t dance.

Refuse. Dance. Rejoice.

Revolution.

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her 1974 anarchist utopian science-fiction novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia.

It is in the interest of the regime to make you believe you have no power. It is in the interest of the regime to make you believe that power is for them–and them only–to wield against you.

Because Albert Camus was right: “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

But what is power and how do we reimagine it?

Power is not just showing up at the voting booth once every four years. The power that you give the State via your vote is not the only power you have. It is but one line in the Table of Ways You Can Change The World.

When the regime is invested in disempowering you, it is time to flex your imagination, and win.

“Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.” Preach, June Jordan. Preach!

“Here in the United States you do get weary, after a while; you could spend your best energies forever writing letters to the New York Times. But you know, in your gut, that writing back is not the same as fighting back,” Jordan wrote in On Call: Political Essays, 1985.

To believe you have power when the regime is doing its best to convince you otherwise is to defy their attempts at handcuffing your imagination, to disobey the diktats of a dictator, and to disrupt the circuit of fascism that targets for pain the most vulnerable and lulls too many of the most comfortable into silence.

“Civil disobedience … was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy,” the author and activist Howard Zinn wrote in “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times.”

“The greatest danger … was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public’s acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it.”

We reimagine through feminism, always keeping patriarchy in the crosshairs and disarming with beauty–the beauty of purpose and a determination to dismantle all that keeps you from being free. We refuse when we accept anarchism’s invitation to dance.

Make your heart too rebellious for the patriarchy’s attempts to plant itself within you. Make your mind too free for fascism to chain your imagination.

There is a fuse nestled in the heart of refusal. There is rage that dovetails with courage.

There is beauty in knowing that you deserve to be free.

Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editor of the anthology Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World, due March 5, 2025. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide.

Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she is founder and editor-in-chief of the newsletter FEMINIST GIANT.

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