Kraidy is neither naïve nor wicked to synthesize
the Arab uprisings as a quest for voyeurism. His premise, however, hinges on
the idea that the social uprisings can be approximated as a creative insurgency
that is infatuated with, even fixated on, the body. The body has been the most
salient trope that marks the creative insurgency, otherwise known as the Arab
Spring. To illustrate his point, Kraidy distinguishes between three varieties
of artworks, each deploying the body to serve its message. First, there are
those incendiary works such as Bouazizi's suicidal self-inflammation, an act that
had a domino effect as it deposed several dictators. Second, there are those
sarcastic works with scornful references to dictators. Kraidy brings to
evidence Omar Abulmaged's April 2, 2014, court sentence in consequence of the
latter calling his donkey Sisi and adorning its head with a military cap. The
case underlines a situation stretching decades before wherein Egyptians used to
deride President Hosni Mubarek as the laughing cow, imitating the famous French
cheese commercial brand, La vache qui rit. The third trope combines the
serious and the sarcastic through nude art and is spearheaded by the young
blogger Alaa El-Mahdy in her 2011 A Rebel's Diary.
It is not farfetched to conclude that the early
two trope variations pave the way for the third, assumedly the most enigmatic
and puzzling. Thus, The Naked Blogger of Cairo "explores the
mixture of activism and artistry characteristic of revolutionary expression and
tracks the social transformation of activism into Art and ensuring
controversies." (p. 5) Towards this end, Kraidy finds that creative
insurgency cannot be restricted as an instantiation of one artistic expression
or another. A fair analysis of that creative insurgency's emergence must
grapple with the one it finds confusing. Interestingly, El-Mahdy's nude photo
is compared with other creative expressions from the mother of all revolutions,
the French one, zooming on Eugène Delacroix's La liberté guidant le Peuple
(1830).
With the human body as the governing principle
for a creative insurgency, The Naked Blogger of Cairo lies in four
sections with an introduction and conclusion. The introduction "In the
Name of the People" highlights a problem: Why is the body so fundamental
to the Arab uprisings? Furthermore, "How does the rise of digital culture
complicate our understanding of the body in revolutionary times?" (p. 12) Standing
in awe of the naked blogger, Kraidy develops: "by inviting both moral
opprobrium and threats of physical oblivion, al-Mahdy's digital nude selfie had
immediate rhetorical and physical consequences." (p. 18) Understandably,
the sky is the limit for the readers' expectations to find all those rhetorical
and physical consequences.
Section One: "Burning Man" zooms into
the visible and invisible dimensions of radical militancy, mostly in Tunisia,
namely Bouazizi's act of self-inflammation. Kraidy finds the act has been less
directed toward the dictator's stifling renditions of the country and more
against his countrymen's approach to that stifling as a fait accomplait.
Section Two: "Laughing Cow" invests in the opposite direction of
section one. The gradual mode of activism, namely the sarcastic laugher, and mostly
in Egypt. Like radical militancy, sarcasm too hinges on the body politics, and
Kraidy finds that armed with only sarcasm and laughter, ordinary Egyptians have
defied megalomaniacs ever since pharaonic times.
Section Three: "Puppets and Masters"
explains how the human body is often at ease with both moods of expression: the
radical and the sarcastic. As a result, revolutionary or creative insurgency chooses
to mix the extreme with the gradual, using examples from Tunisia, Egypt, global
activism, and the French Revolution. Understandably, the chapter prepares
readers to register the content of the following section. With Section Four: "Virgins
and Vixens", comes Kraidy's opportune time to sell readers the presumed
seriousness of bodily undressing. Through a rhetorical phraseology, the author
succeeds in affecting an aura of seriousness by what political scientists
qualify as the blind spot of the king's two bodies. The blind spot—understood
to be the king's male organ since it is only this organ that puts him on the
same bar with other humans—facilitates the acceptance, even the balancing, of
naked activism with all political, aesthetic, and ethical militancy.
"Requiem for a Revolution" or the
conclusion asks whether simply women's bodies are engaged in men's political
tussles less to liberate women and more to galvanize the populace around what
is ultimately men's fixation on power. Women's bodies become tools whereby
women are ultimately emptied of subjectivity and the capacity for free thinking
and decision-making.
In order to make space for the voyeuristic and
the sensational, Kraidy has to beat about the bush and lecture readers about
the uses and abuses of body politics so that his rendering of the Arab
uprisings may sound plausible. To buy his idea is to embrace an insult and
participate in the still unfolding counterrevolution. There is simply no way
whereby one may even begin to compare the conscious and principled acts of either
Bouazizi, Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, or the Kurdish Women of Kobani fighting ISIS with
the nude selfies of El-Mahdy and her several pretenders. Kraidy does not want
to acknowledge that the counterrevolution aims to cast the class struggle as a gender,
race, or faith struggle. The further to stay away from the class struggle, the
safest the counterrevolution remains. To equate Bouazizi's act with El-Mahdy's
is to participate in distortion as perpetuated by the false omnipresent and to
ensure that the narrative of the revolutionaries of Tahrir and elsewhere will stay
forever tarnished and uninviting.
Quite the contrary, the revolution precipitates
a world order that does not call for spectacles and where bodies are loved,
caressed, and cared for in dignity and mutual love. Only love is revolutionary
and triumphant orders presiding over the false omnipresent always seek to
divert attention from true and mutual love. What does El-Mahdy in her diary
preach? In a nutshell, she communicates men-hating as if the world is short of
hatred. Other than seeking to destroy the pillar of the nonetheless corrupt values
of society, her method is hatred. Let us all recall how revolutionary couples
married and committed to sacral (not sacred) vows and principled living in
Tahrir. Their revolutionary friends congratulated them and savoured the delight
of simply witnessing the promise of social love (not just harmony) and larger
emancipations come true. Had Kraidy bothered to read El-Mahdy's A Rebel's
Diary, he would find ages-old litanies and ill-articulated cliches
regarding the alleged oppressive practices of the Orient.
Again, had Kraidy bothered, he would have found
the right parallel to El-Mahdy's selfie, Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger dans
leur appartement (1834), and certainly not La Liberté guidant le peuple
(1830). It is not rocket science to note that with the latter, the bare-chested
woman is a participant in the arduous struggle and an active one, for that
matter, against forces of regression. Perhaps, she was among the group of women
protestors whom Louis XVI famously ordered croissants au beurre when they
were dying for lack of bread, showcasing the sovereign's divorce from reality
which ultimately sealed his fate for good. With Femmes
d'Alger, one traces a process that eventually propagated into El-Mahdy's
selfie: the fetishizing principle, the need for a mysterious form of freedom, and
freedom in Capital as slavery since both Algerian or Egyptian men do not know
how to handle/to man their women. Hence, the reason why these women are slowly
rotting in the harem. Only Capital—the logic in the selfie and the classical painting—is
savvy and reliable when extracting value from these oriental women. What is most
painful is the self-Orientalizing act that academics and serious academic
publishing such as Harvard UP deem liberating and introduce it to the world as
such.
But since the neoliberal order glamorizes
El-Mahdy's daring act, Kraidy could see no alternative but to give his final
assault and insult "… most revolutionary martyrs-at-large were dead and
clothed men, whereas the emergence of women as icons in the Arab uprisings
tended to result from their disrobement." (p. 13) How else to read this statement
other than a reproduction of the patriarchal mindset that Tahrir
revolutionaries brazenly fought against? Besides the insult, disrobement is
glamorized because it is the only way to ensure the restructuring of capital
forces and the valuation of surplus value. Every rebel-à-la-El-Mahdy labour is
further devalued, literally prostituting workers, even those who never heard of
El-Mahdy. How else to afford the imagined independence of one's place except
through increasingly lower wages?
Fouad Mami
Université d’Adrar
(Algeria)
ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
