Essay: You Have Power
Image by Dmitri Posudin from Pixabay
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.
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.
“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.
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?
Living under a dictatorship–especially as a journalist–is to be pancaked between dystopia and farce. The regime assigned to me a state security officer. His nom de guerre was Omar Sharif, but looked more like Groucho Marx than the film star, alas, and the hilarity of this disparity was equalled by the threat he posed to my life. He showed me, strewn across his desk, what he said were files full of reports culled from tapping my phone and following me. And I found that anarchism, especially of the spirit, was my way out of the middle of these pancakes.
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.”
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.
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.
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 I was a journalist in Egypt, presidential elections were held once every five years and consisted of the question “Mubarak: Yes. No.” And Mubarak was always a yes in the high 90s.
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.
When you are not under the delusion that you are free, you figure out other ways to be “so absolutely free” that you become that threat that sounds like power. We journalists developed our own sources who could give us the news and information that the regime lied about or hid.
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.
When you are not under the delusion that you are free, you figure out other ways to be “so absolutely free” that you become that threat that sounds like power.
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.”
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.
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.
Turn that kaleidoscope and be dazzled. Make your heart too rebellious for the patriarchy’s attempts to plant itself within you. Turn that kaleidoscope and feel dizzily audacious.. Make your mind too free for fascism to chain your imagination.
There is beauty in knowing that you deserve to be free.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Across the World. 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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Yes. ❤️ you for this.
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