Essay: Write Dangerously, Heal Slowly
Photographs: Dan Callister for the Guardian; Robert E. Rutledge
First published Nov. 28, 2021
TW: sexual assault, regime and police violence
I am writing this ten years after I died.
I am able to write this because the Mona I used to be died ten years ago so that the Mona I had to become could survive.
During five days of protests this week in November 2011 on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, near Tahrir Square, Egyptian soldiers and police killed at least 40 people and injured more than 300, including me.
After they beat me and broke my arms, Egyptian riot police sexually assaulted me—my breasts, in between my legs, I was pulling their hands out of my trousers. The fury of their assault pushed me to the ground where I was eye level with their boots.
A voice told me “If you don’t get up now, they will kill you.” And with two broken arms I somehow got up.
Whose was that voice?
I was detained by the Interior Ministry for six hours and then for another six hours by military intelligence who blindfolded and interrogated me.
Of all the thoughts going through my mind that night ten years ago—will they disappear me, will they imprison me for “espionage,” will I get out, etc etc—the whole time I was thinking about the article I would write about what they’d done to me. Just you fuckers wait, was what I was thinking.
I believe in the power of words.
“Create dangerously for people who read dangerously,” Edwidge Danticat writes in Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. “This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.”
“There are many possible interpretations of what it means to create dangerously, and Albert Camus… suggests that it is creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive,” she writes.
The title of Danticat’s book comes partially from Camus’ 1957 lecture “Create Dangerously,” his last.
“To create today means to create dangerously. Every publication is a deliberate act, and that act makes us vulnerable to the passions of a century that forgives nothing,” Camus said in words ever resonant.
When she was finally released, the Mona I used to be bequeathed me a new life and the things she could not say; the silences that for too long she had swallowed with a seasoning of shame and fear. She wanted me to live so that we could spit out that poisonous silence; so that I can be known.
And she said “Write, dangerously.” DANGEROUSLY!
It was her voice, I know now, that said “If you don’t get up, you will die.” She understood that the most dangerous writing is that through which we are known because to insist on being known--especially as a woman--is the ultimate disobedience to the directive that we must be modest, shrink to fit ourselves to patriarchy’s measurements, compliant to its dictates.
Why else are we alive but to be known as the ultimate act of revolt against silence? Is that not freedom: to spit out our silences and in the doing to slay shame and fear?
I have spent the past ten years determined to be known. It is that drive to be known that saves us and protects us. No one is coming to save us: we are the ones we have been waiting for.
Why else are we alive but to be known as the ultimate act of revolt against silence? Is that not freedom: to spit out our silences and in the doing to slay shame and fear?
I was in Morocco when the protest on Mohamed Mahmoud street started. We don’t always have such clear before and after moments: that night that I joined it was mine.
Following it on social media, the first horror to emerge was the snipers on the rooftops who 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.
From Morocco, I was supposed to go to Brussels to speak at the European Parliament about women in revolution. The more I read about the Mohamed Mahmoud protest, the more I understood I had to join it—to honor the courage of those already there. I didn’t want to talk about women in revolution. I canceled my trip and went to Cairo to be a woman in revolution.
And what is revolution without risk? And what is risk without consequence?
One of my favourite poems is Vera Pavlova’s If there is something to desire, which is about romantic desire but which beautifully adapts to the desire for freedom. I desire both!
I desire freedom and I know it will not come without risk, and with risk there will be consequence.
There is a titanium plate in my left arm that is a totem of consequence. An orthopedic surgeon put it there to ensure the bone that Egyptian riot police broke in 2011 would straighten as it healed.
After the procedure, Vicodine was my best friend. And what a deceiving fucker. It made me feel invincible at a time when I was the most helpless. Both arms in a cast meant I could not do the most basic things for myself - have you tried brushing your teeth with both your arms in a cast? Unbuckling a belt or zipping up your trousers? Washing your hair? Unscrewing a bottle? Just eating?
Soon after my surgery, my parents called to see how I was doing.
"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. When I suddenly went quiet on social media that night of my assault, my family thought I had died. I understood where my dad was coming from 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 ten years ago 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.
When she was finally released, the Mona I used to be bequeathed me a new life and the things she could not say; the silences that for too long she had swallowed with a seasoning of shame and fear. She wanted me to live so that we could spit out that poisonous silence; so that I can be known.
But what happened to me on Mohamed Mahmoud was the first time I felt consequence so harshly on my body—I wrote this about it with one finger on the touchpad because I could not use all ten fingers as I usually do when I type. 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.
To write dangerously is also to reckon with power. Titanium is unbreakable. By breaking my arms, they made me unbreakable. I have a more acute understanding of consequence because I have conversed with fear.
Just before riot police ran towards us at the frontline of the protest ten years ago, they shot at us from across a no-man’s land that separated us. I stood on a rock to take pictures and the voice of Mona who would soon die so that I could live told me, as the bullets headed towards us and I wondered if they were live ammunition or rubber-coated bullets, "It's probably a good time to leave." But I stayed and they came.
She died and I lived.
I am the daughter of the taboos and silences from which I fought to free myself. I am the sister of every woman struggling against the oppressive forces that have suffocated us at home and on the streets and which find their power reflected back to them by the state.
What does it mean to write dangerously? Why is writing important? I laugh, sometimes, at the thought that, while blindfolded and being interrogated by military intelligence as I was, I actually had the wherewithal to think about writing.
The whole time I thought about the article I would write. “Just you fuckers wait.”
It was writing--its power--that was the reason I was in a blindfold and being interrogated by military intelligence. If I joined the Mohamed Mahmoud protests to honour the courage of those already there and because I wanted to be a woman in revolution, not just a woman who talks about revolution, what do I owe the Mona who died and bequeathed me life and her silences? I have spent the past decade since she died so that I could survive, writing/creating “as a revolt against silence.” That too is revolution.
I am the daughter of the taboos and silences from which I fought to free myself. I am the sister of every woman struggling against the oppressive forces that have suffocated us at home and on the streets and which find their power reflected back to them by the state. That trifecta of patriarchy: state, street, and home. I am the best friend of the woman who marches in protest against the political despots outside and continues that protest against the personal despots inside.
Words are important--to fight silence, shame, fear and the violence that that trifecta exacts on us. Words are flags planted on the planets of our beings, they say this is mine, I have fought for it and despite your best attempts, I am still here.
Just as important, words help us find each other and overcome the isolation that threatens to overwhelm and to break us.
Words say we are here. Listen to Audre Lorde.
“I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes — everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!” Audre Lorde wrote in a series of diary entries included in A Burst of Light and Other Essays.
I survived you, fuckers.
I survived, you fuckers.
I am writing!
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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, has just been published. 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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Preach!