Essay: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
On Revolution and Risk
December 2011. Photograph: Dan Callister for the Guardian
One of my favourite poems is Vera Pavlova’s If There is something to desire. It’s about love. I read it as about revolution too. Are they not the same: desire, risk, regret, memories, on repeat. What are you willing to risk!
If there is something to desire, Vera Pavlova
I desire freedom and I know it will not come without risk, and with risk there will be consequence. Is that what regret is?
There is a titanium plate in my left arm that is a totem of consequence, a reminder of risk, and a gift of the Revolution. It ensures I will always remember the cost to my body of my desire for freedom. And because I will always remember that night in November 2011 when Egyptian riot police assaulted me during a protest on Mohamed Mahmoud Street and broke that forearm that is now ensconced in titanium, there was nothing to regret. Titanium is unbreakable.
By breaking my arms, they made me unbreakable. By assaulting me during a protest in which police and soldiers killed at least 40 of my fellow Egyptians and wounded at least 300 others, they ensured an unbreakable bond between us.
When the Revolution asks me “What did you risk,” I want to look it in the eye and answer, “Everything.” And still, my desire for freedom is as thirsty as ever.
I wonder sometimes how thirsty people are to hold onto freedom in the U.S., where the many who are apolitical and ahistorical do not grasp the magnitude of the moment and do not hear the Revolution ask “Where are you?”, and where those who have political and historical knowledge enough to understand the magnitude of the moment, overestimate the magnitude of their “protest.”
I am talking about the three professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism who have left the U.S. to take up positions at the University of Toronto. When I first heard about their decision to leave, I thought “Wow, it’s that bad that these experts on authoritarianism are leaving.” And then I saw the video they recorded for the New York Times on the reasons they’re leaving and my new thought was “Wow, if the most privileged are leaving that quickly, what chance does this country have?”
When the Revolution asks me “What did you risk,” I want to look it in the eye and answer, “Everything.” And still, my desire for freedom is as thirsty as ever.
Risk–its costs, its consequences, its regrets–is highly subjective. I cannot risk for you nor fashion a one-size fits all blueprint into which we all must squeeze ourselves. And there are many ways to protest. But I wonder what the Revolution would say when the most privileged leave one cushy position for another while maintaining, as one of them told the New York Times, that their departure is “an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties.”
It is telling that all three professors and experts in authoritarianism who are leaving one cushy position for another are white. While the majority of those snatched, disappeared, and abducted and held as political prisoners for opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and those extraordinarily rendered to a concentration camp in El Salvador are Black and people of colour.
I wonder what the Revolution would say when another of those professors and experts in authoritarianism tells the Times that “the lesson of 1933 is that you get out sooner rather than later.”
As
wrote in his essay “Do We Fight Fascism or Do We Flee?” the example set by those professors is a reminder of “one of the limits of much of academia.”“There is an incentive structure that rewards observation, even seemingly radical observations, but not radical action. There is a moderating effect that often comes with being in these massive institutions where you need grants to fund your work and are appealing to the government and major non-profit sources for that money,” he writes.
How is it that those with the most to lose and whose vulnerability to fascist violence is especially pronounced–Green card holders, students on visas–are the ones risking the most in the U.S.?
The more privileged you are, the more obliged you are to fight is a dictum I have tried my best to live up to.
In September 2012, less than a year after Egyptian police beat me and detained me, police in New York City arrested me and jailed me overnight after I defaced a pro-Israel advertisement in the New York subway. Unlike others who were arrested for defacing the ad and were given desk appearance tickets, I was jailed overnight, charged and arraigned the next morning because—according to the lead detective in the precinct I was kept—then district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. was angry that the media video of my arrest had gone viral. I was in and out of court for two years until a judge dropped the charges in the interests of justice. I will forever be grateful to attorney Stanley Cohen for representing me pro bono.
At the time, it was popular on social media to post what people described as alternative ads to the racist, anti-Palestianian and Islamophobic ad that was paid for by what the Southern Poverty Law Centre has classified as a hate group.
An ad on the walls of the subway needs action in real life. Racists must know that there is a consequence to their racism. What some described as my vandalism, I insisted was civil disobedience. Racism, like fascism, must be met with resistance in the real world, not just in the virtual one.
I had just received my U.S. passport when the ads began appearing. I could more than afford to protest those hateful ads in the real world.
What is revolution without risk? And what is risk without consequence?
How could I ask anyone to risk if I don't risk? How can I be a revolutionary if I don't act, if I don't do? After the risk, after the action, after the doing, I can write. And what is revolution without risk? And what is risk without consequence?
Soon after my surgery in 2011, my parents called to see how I was doing. When I suddenly went quiet on social media that night of the riot police’s assault on my body in November 2011, my family thought I had died. Until I was able to tweet surreptitiously during detention at the Interior Ministry, no one knew where I was.
Police held me at the Interior Ministry for six hours and then military police took me to their headquarters for another six hours, where I would be blindfolded and interrogated. I was denied repeated requests for medical help for my fractured limbs.
"You don't have to be on the streets. Leave the streets to younger people. Your role now is to lead with your writing and your ideas," my dad said.
My dad and I spent almost an hour talking about words versus action, observing versus doing, words versus action, observing versus doing, and on and on and on. I understood where my dad was coming from. Soon after my assault, he started a Twitter account so that he could follow my tweets and know I was still alive. And he too understood why I needed that lesson in consequence.
My journalism in Egypt had run headlong into consequence before riot police broke my arms and sexually assaulted me.
The night of my assault in 2011 was not the first time I was taken to the Interior Ministry for interrogation. I even had my very own State Security officer whose alias was Omar Sharif even though he looked nothing like the actor. He had once shown me, during an interrogation, files on his desk which he claimed were the results of all the calls from my phone calls the authorities tapped and all the times they had me followed.
“You see how much trouble you are?” he laughed.
But what happened to me on Mohamed Mahmoud Street was the first time I felt consequence so harshly on my body. This was putting my body on the (front)line. This was understanding it deep in my bones. This was all those cliches but for real.
How could I ask anyone to risk if I don't risk? How can I be a revolutionary if I don't act, if I don't do? After the risk, after the action, after the doing, I can write.
And what is revolution without risk? And what is risk without consequence?
Living in the US has radicalised me. Over the past 25 years my rage at the state-sponsored patriarchy in both of my countries has injected anarchism into my feminism. Anarcho-feminist conveys the “don’t fuck with me” level of rage I’m at.
I joined the protest to honor the courage of those already there. Snipers on the rooftops surrounding the protest were deliberately aiming for protestors’ eyes. There were reports that boys as young as 12 were protesting with their mother’s phone numbers written on their forearms so that if they died, at the morgue they would know who to call.
Twelve year-old boys were ready to die.
What was I willing to risk?
A month after the surgery to fix my broken bone, my heart still broken, my arms both still in a cast, I went back to Egypt to join a protest to mark the first anniversary of the January 25, 2011 revolution. It was my way to say “Fuck you, I survived,” to the regime that sent its police to break me. I went back to Egypt so many times that year that I decided to move back in 2013. I stayed until 2017, when I returned to New York City.
Living in the US has radicalised me. Over the past 25 years my rage at the state-sponsored patriarchy in both of my countries has injected anarchism into my feminism. Anarcho-feminist conveys the “don’t fuck with me” level of rage I’m at.
And unless (perhaps until) the Trump regime targets naturalised citizens, NYC will remain my home. Without risk, freedom is fleeting, and with risk there will be consequence.
What are you ready to risk?
I began and shall end with The Clash:
“When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun?”
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her new book, an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World, will be published 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. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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Awesome post-- and indeed, as a lifelong academic in the US who has promoted Palestinian right to self determination and taught Palestinian literature and history in my classes for almost 40 years as well as taken public stands against Zionist hasbara--I know from personal experience the risks involved in being true to one's political beliefs if these are arent popular ones and that challenge the status quo. And decamping when the going gets rough, when your voice and presence matters most-- excuse me, but that is cowardice in the service of the self.