Revolution 2.1 | The Year of Accountability: 2012 in 10 Music Videos
Egyptian hip hop trio Arabian Knightz. Photo courtesy of the artists.
If 2011 was the year of euphoria, 2012 was the year of accountability. This is the cycle of revolution. As the struggle continues throughout Arab countries in the Middle East, it’s important to remember that democracy is not a quick-fix pill, and a revolution doesn’t fail by process but by abandonment from every citizen. If the following ten music videos, all produced this past year, are any indication, the spirit of the Arab uprisings is loud and clear in its quest to reclaim political and national identity, reframe the Middle East narrative to tell the story of the citizens not the despot, and remind that a revolution is only as good as the people who hold each other accountable to see it through.
“Kelmti Horra” by Emel Mathlouthi
One of the most iconic images to come out of the Tunisian protests was of a young woman, dressed in a red coat, returning from exile in France, singing a cappella in a crowd of chanting protesters. The video went viral, and two years later, Emel Mathlouthi (one of Aslan Media’s five music artists to watch in 2012) celebrates her country’s revolution with her 2007 signature song, which became an unofficial anthem for the uprisings that took place after the self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in December 2010. Calm, confident, sensual, and determined, her tight and almost operatic vocal harmonies both compliment and contrast the song’s simultaneous mournful nostalgia and firm declaration for dignity, human rights and individual freedom.
“Ana Mawgood” by City Band
One of the most innovative Arabic music videos to come out of 2012, City Band’s “Ana Mawgood,” released on the first anniversary of Egypt’s January25 uprisings, is simultaneously a confrontation of the brutal violence carried out by the military against protesters, a tribute to youth who have been killed, and a declaration of solidarity to make sure the continuing revolution does not lose momentum. Think Kiss-meets German Expressionism-meets Arabic flair.
Revolution 2.1 | Talkin’ ‘Bout My Revolution
Photo credit: Rowan El Shimi via Flickr.
Arabic metaphor took on a whole new meaning in December, 2010, when a young Tunisian vendor so enraged with the confiscation of his cart set himself on fire to protest the economic conditions that drove him to choose death over silence. Exactly one month later, an Egyptian restaurant in Cairo chose the same fate. But these weren’t cut-and-dried suicides. In a world where language is lyrical, filled with innuendo, the self-immolations of Mohamed Bouazizi and Abdou Abdel-Monaam Hamadah came as rude awakening calls. The message? Poetic-speak of the past isn’t going to get you out of unemployment or even the artistic underground. Serious reform needed a new language altogether – blunt, concise, unforgiving, obstinate. To the establishment: Leave, period. The very material that protest slogans are made of.
“When they were shouting ‘People Demand the Overthrow of the Regime,’” wrote Iranian cultural scholar and Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi, “they did not mean just the political regime; they meant also the régime du savoir and the language with which we understand and criticize things… This is the language of revolt in the Arab world. In the making of that revolt, language is everything, for language is where worlds reside: the one in which we live, and the ones awaiting emergence that have already spoken… It is also the language that makes them familiar to us.”
Revolution 2.1 | The Dictator Will Be Tagged: Power, Revolution Graffiti and the Deconstructed Superhero
Graffiti on Tank in Tahrir Square. Photo courtesy Rowan El Shimi, via Flickr.
“The words of the prophets were written on the subway walls and the tenement halls.”
- “Sounds of Silence,” Simon and Garfunkel
Amidst all the other messages spray-painted around Tahrir Square, calls to action and demands for ousted President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation last year, one military tank stuck out. “The revolution is in Tahrir,” it read, “no sleeping in bed.”
It was a common consensus amongst protesters, who rallied, and continue to speak out, to replace government corruption with reform, and despite sugar-coated concessions that underestimated a country’s intelligence by treating amendments like band-aids, that one thing was clear: the energy of the people refuses to wane. Instead, it continues to ceaselessly evolve as revolutionaries and reformers persistently provoke themselves and each other as creativity splinters through the cracks of worn-out censorship. In this sense, art fueled the revolution by giving the disenfranchised–the outsiders, the rebels, the refugees, the critics–a second draft to rewrite their country’s cultural memory.
Graffiti depiction of Gaddafi, Libya. Photo courtesy of Aslan Media via Flickr.
Before the Arab Spring, authorities used public art as a means of propaganda, a projection of autocratic state power as status quo. Massive canvases depicting faces of the regime hung from buildings all throughout cities, staring down like Big Brother, like constant surveillance on any form of dissident activity. “This history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions,” wrote Susan Sontag. “Traditional art invites a look. Art that is silent engenders a stare.” Most of the time, these faces were accompanied by background images invoking nationalism or even Islam, suggesting what Joseph Campbell called “clues to the spiritual potentials of the human life.”
Revolution 2.12: The Revolution Will Not Be Veiled
Wall at Central Square, Cambridge, 2008. Photo credit: Wayne Marshall.
The veil is an item of clothing dramatically overburdened with competing symbolism… For women who wear it and artists who represent it, the veil is a garment whose meaning cannot be contained. It is a garment fought over by adherents and opponents, many of whom claim that their understanding of the veil’s significance is the one and true meaning.
- Reina Lewis, Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art
A former professor asked me one time, “Do you think the veil is one of today’s last uncolonized territories?” What kind of absurd question is that? – at least that’s what I thought. Yet my instructor did have a point. You can’t even begin to address gender and female identity in Middle Eastern art without looking at the one object that encapsulates and defines the average Muslim woman to naked, unknowing Western eyes: the veil. Like the hat in English, it’s a piece of clothing that has no singular name in Arabic and no solitary motivation: job, class, ethnicity, law, religion, fashion–these are just a handful of reasons why a Middle Eastern woman may choose to wear a veil.
Hardly an Islamic innovation, it’s a head covering rooted in the historical context of Arab culture, yet its depiction is entirely in relation to its wearer and its viewer, in how we adopt or reject certain connotations we carry with our own individual perceptions of this piece of fabric. For Westerners, it’s a single-sided image of everything that’s wrong with Middle Eastern culture, a symbol of anything Arab that contradicts so-called “Western values.”
Shadi Ghadirian (Iran), "05"- Qajar Series," 2001. Photo credit: imdtja.
Veiling is legitimized by the element of choice, and it is the presence or lack of choice that creates the context of whether the hejab frees a woman or objectifies her. Yet history, in all its intersections between the Old and New World, shows that patriarchy repeatedly finds a way to sneak in and impose itself on women’s dress, all in the name of “liberation.”
Revolution 2.12, Part II: Gender in the Middle East Cause
Photo by Reza Hakimi; www.facebook.com/ahmadrezahakimi.
History has a way of finding itself in the voice of the heroes. Not so much for the heroines. Women, often the backbone of revolution, almost always find themselves relegated to the backdrop before the honeymoon of victory wears off. Equals during protest, but second-class citizens under new governments and bandaid-approach “reforms.” Empowerment does not necessarily mean equality.
That’s not to say that we’re not making progress, but it’s often uneven and stalled, and in the case of the Middle East, many times marred by either Orientalist ideas of powerless women dominated by men or self-induced inferiority amongst women in the region who suffer from internalized oppression. Both sides play into the stigmatized and negative identity that is best encapsulated by the worn out, overmedicated and clichéd image of the veiled Muslim woman, often dominated by the trifecta of male power: the state, religious institutions and husbands. Rarely is the average revolutionary woman portrayed by her standard strengths: educated, socially aware, politically active. Instead, we latch on to her modest, “traditional” appearance, assuming that if she’s veiled that means she has no voice. As if she were a passive force of internal and untapped strength, what these images really do is reduce women to the one image the West has of her, making her cheap ammunition in an already simplified debate over the complex issues that make up gender inequality in the Middle East.
Feminist debate over the status of women within democratic reforms fueled by the Arab Spring is an ongoing discourse, reinvigorated this week with the publication of Egyptian-American Mona El Tahawy’s controversial article “Why Do They Hate Us?” published in Foreign Policy. Many (including myself) looked at the title and assumed the article to be one about the state of gender rights within the totalitarian regimes that dominate the Arab world. “They,” as it turns out, refers to Arab men in general, portrayed as inherently hateful towards women, as evidenced by all the sexual violations women experience on a daily basis in the Arab world.
"Cairo: Tank Versus Bread Biker and Sad Panda," by Egyptian graffiti artist Ganzeer. Photo credit: Maya Gowally.
Amidst all the other messages spray-painted around Tahrir Square, calls to action and demands for ousted President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation last year, one military tank stuck out. “The revolution is in Tahrir,” it read, “no sleeping in bed.”
It was a common consensus amongst protesters, who rallied, and continue to rally, to replace government corruption with reform, and despite sugar-coated concessions that underestimated a country’s intelligence by treating amendments like bandaids, one thing was clear: the energy of the people has still not yet waned. Instead, it continues to ceaselessly evolve as revolutionaries and reformers persistently provoke themselves and each other as creativity splinters through the cracks of worn-out censorship. In this sense, art, music and performance fueled revolution by giving the disenfranchised – the outsiders, the rebels, the refugees, the critics – a second draft to rewrite their country’s cultural memory.
Art and politics rarely have a clean relationship. When the two ebb away from each other, you have dissonance; when they gel, propaganda. There’s a fine line as to where aesthetics lie in collective framings of events and their impacts, simply because art itself is inherently based on the individual: somebody creates it, usually in isolation, and then the rest of us evaluate the work based on our own personal tastes and interpretations.
Most artists don’t set out to create pieces that speak for an entire population, but rather attempt to bring their own awareness into imagery. The pressure on them to reflect, analyze, even re-record events that have altered their nation must be laden. To use your art for the patriotic search of national identity is limiting, because it aligns you with a particular message and gives you very little leeway to deviate and explore other possibilities or permutations. Art, essentially, becomes a society’s public psychiatrist. If a particular piece comes out “speaking for a community,” it’s because a majority of a certain demographic who saw it identified with its message.
