This is an account of how I experienced the political turmoil of Friday, January 28th, 2011, aka the “Friday of Wrath.” I apologize to my readers for not accompanying my writing with any images. Though I had originally intended to photograph the protests, I decided against it. The acts I witnessed were so unconscionable that I felt it would be unethical to capture them and slap them all over Facebook. The media does a good enough job of that. And they get paid for it. I don’t.
Friday of Wrath
It was 1 pm when I woke up from the previous night’s sleep. As I laid in bed, my thoughts drifted to the Memphis, the Nile Cruise on which I was contracted to dance. My musicians and I were scheduled for three sails across the Nile starting that afternoon, totaling six 45-minute performances. I wondered if they would happen—the country was scheduled to erupt into massive anti-government protests, and I couldn’t imagine business running as usual.
Not knowing whether the silence of my 13th floor bedroom meant that the demonstrations were off, I picked up my tiny Nokia phone to call my manager. After several attempts, I couldn’t get through. I didn’t yet know it, but the Egyptian government cut all lines of communication, including cell phones and land phones and the Internet. It was a last-ditch attempt to prevent protestors from mobilizing in Tahrir Square. When I finally figured this out, a pang of panic bolted through my stomach as I thought to myself, the government controls the Internet?!
The last time I experienced a total communication blackout was ten years prior on 9/11 in Brooklyn. Thus, to say that I was triggered would have been a gross understatement. I was freaking out. This time around, I was completely alone in a foreign country with a broken television set. I had no access to information of any kind.
Alas, the anticipated drone of chanting protestors passing by the main street in front of my apartment building interrupted my thoughts. I ran to the living room and poked my head out the window to see hundreds of protestors. Unfortunately, I was too high up to hear what they were saying. By the look of things, however, I reasoned that work would be cancelled. Who would traverse the great Cairo metropolis under these circumstances just to watch a belly dance show? Or to belly dance, for that matter. That was logical. Then again, this is Cairo, so I prepared myself for work. Truth be told, I had no desire to dance. I was too distracted by the more important political events underway. What I really wanted was to be with others and have access to a functioning television. I could only accomplish that by going to the boat.
Not knowing how events would unfold or whether I would be able to return home later that evening, I decided to take my baladi puppy with me. With my puppy, purse, and dance bag in my arms, I left my building and hailed a cab. The route that I normally took to work was unusually empty that day—Egyptian military officers armed with transparent body-length shields replaced the usual congestion in front of the Giza Zoo. As we passed the zoo and made our way onto the Ring Road, however, the officers turned into angry protesters. Thousands of them. They were holding anti-Mubarak signs and chanting anti-regime slogans. In all my years of traveling the world, I had never seen such thorough organization… let alone in Cairo, the chaos capital of the world.
The cab pulled up in front of the Memphis docking area. As I was opening my purse to pay the driver, the Memphis was approaching the dock after its lunchtime sail. I could see the staff workers on the bottom deck frantically rushing some of their tourist passengers off the boat. That changed, however, when the staff screamed for the boat’s captain to sail away with whoever was on board. A mob of violent protesters began hurling Molotov cocktails at the boat and tried to invade it, so the only thing to do was seek refuge in the waters of the Nile. To make matters worse, there were only five feet separating me and that all-male mob. I thus ran for safety in the direction of the boat, but the captain had already pulled away from the dock. My only option was to jump three feet from the dock onto the boat. Puppy, bags, and all.
Once aboard the Memphis, I climbed the spiral staircase up to the sundeck where the rest of the staff had congregated. Form the safety of the Nile, I looked for my band, but only my singer, my keyboardist, and one percussionist were there. The rest of the band did not show up. In utter silence, we fixed our eyes on the Cairo skyline, devoured by smoke and flames. Wherever we looked, we saw those ubiquitous outdoor military cubbyholes on fire. We saw burning, overturned cars, and swarms of protesters pouring into the streets from every direction. The smell of smoke permeated the air, as did the sound of sirens. It truly was the Friday of Wrath, and more of a riot than a protest.
We drifted on the Nile for about an hour, after which the protestors cleared out of the area and the traffic started to flow. The smell of burnt tires lingered in the air. As the sun began to set, I went down to the office to watch the news with the boat management. No sooner had the manager turned on the television than the government announced it was imposing a 6 pm curfew. Whoever was out past curfew would be at the mercy of the Egyptian Security Forces.
With only fifteen minutes left to curfew, it was time to resume panicking. Though there were more than thirty workers on board, only one of them went to work that day in his car. Being the only woman (and foreigner), the manager decided the owner of the car should drive me home while the others would stay on the boat overnight.
There was fire as far as the eye could see, and I didn’t think it was possible (or safe) to get home in fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, I was correct. The ride home took four hours and was a scene
straight out of a horror movie. I honestly didn’t know whether I’d live to see another day.
****
I rushed off the boat to get into the car with the driver, my keyboard player, and another staff member. I sat in the passenger seat with my puppy on my lap. We crawled through the Cairo traffic as drivers weaved their way out of the traffic, each one contributing to the cacophony of incessant horn-honking. Curfew had begun. Everywhere we looked, something was on fire. Young men roamed the streets with bloodied faces. I assumed they had clashed with security forces. And there we stood, at a grid-locked intersection, wondering how we would get me back to my Doqqi apartment amidst the violence and chaos.
Finally, one of the road blockages opened up. We started accelerating only to discover an eerie lack military presence despite the government’s prior threats. What we did see were large rings of flames in the middle of the upcoming intersection… most likely the work of violent protestors. The flames were intimidating… so much so that the cars in front of us turned right back around. When it was our turn to cross, however, I urged the driver to plow through the fire as fast as possible. As scary as that was, the prospect of turning back frightened me more. Besides, past experience taught me this was possible—driving through hoops of fire during the massive celebrations that erupted over Egypt’s defeat of Algeria in the 2010 African Cup turned out to be a good rehearsal for this stunt.
Luckily for all of us in the car, the driver slammed the gas pedal and got us to the other side of the intersection. We emerged from that endeavor emboldened only to then find ourselves drowning in a sea of honking cars from which there was no way out.
At this point, my stomach was in knots. The city had broken into mayhem and gunshots could be heard everywhere. Mobs of young men attacked cars, and it was only a matter of time before they attacked ours. Most conspicuously, there was not a single officer in sight. Where had all the police that normally patrolled Cairo’s streets gone? Where was the army to fight back and quell the riots?
****
Minutes turned into half hours, and the driver was growing increasingly impatient. He started nudging his way through the traffic until he led us into the neighborhood o Sayyeda Aisha, one of the poorest and most dangerous areas in all of Cairo. It was closer to home but still not exactly where we wanted to be. As the driver continued pushing forward, the car hit a massive stone and bottomed out into a pothole. He frantically tried to dislodge the vehicle from the pothole, slamming his rigid upper body into the car seat as he forcefully extended his right leg onto the gas pedal. Alas, his efforts were in vain. We were stuck. The tires spun around themselves, unable to propel us out of the ditch.
It was at this point that I was overcome with a bout of fatigue. I was slipping into an untimely slumber, abruptly awakened by the man in the backseat screaming that we had hit a patch of teargas. I looked back to see him and my keyboard player crying. The driver was crying too. I was the only one who was not (which I retrospectively attribute to the fact that I was wearing contact lenses). I was, however, about to pass out. Who knew that tear gas could shut you down like that?
As groggy as I was, I was able to reason that if the gas was affecting me this way, it was probably doing the same to everyone else. True enough, I looked at the driver and found him similarly incoherent. That’s when I began imagining the four of us lying unconscious in a ditch in the middle of Sayyida Aisha, prey to robbers, rapists, and murderers. Apparently, that thought was enough to jolt me out of my descent into unconsciousness. And it prompted me to forcefully shake the driver out of his. Once I accomplished that, I barked for him to slam on the gas pedal hard and fast. He did as I commanded, propelling us out of the ditch into (relative) safety.
I was still under the spell of the tear gas, however—the only way I could resist the urge to succumb by screaming more directives at the driver. Eventually, we hit a patch of fresh air, and I held my head out of the window to inhale deeply. Once I felt collected, I apologized to the driver for screaming at him. I then suggested we seek shelter at the nearest mosque or church, as there were no signs of the fire, tear, gas, and mobs dissipating. Instead of heeding my advice, the driver continued driving, circumventing mobs and obstacles for another three hours. We passed through many parts of Cairo, all ablaze in the Friday fires of wrath.
****
At some point, we made it onto the 6th of October Bridge, which would lead us into Doqqi. Oddly enough, there was no traffic. In fact, we were the only ones on that bridge. We found out why fifteen minutes later. We drove into a massive patch of tear gas, much worse than the last. Again, I felt myself going to sleep and panicking at the same time—a mob about fifteen strong surrounded our car, crawling onto the roof and hood and trying to break the windows. Some of them positioned themselves at the bottom of the car, trying to flip it over.
This is it. It ends here. I didn’t think we’d make it out of this one alive. What a way to go, I thought. Thousands of miles away from home, pursuing my dream to dance. Was it really going to end this way?
Not according to my adrenaline. Once again, I yanked myself out of my drowsy stupor to shake the driver into action. I commanded him to forge ahead at full speed regardless of who we would hit. The way I saw it, our lives were in peril; it was either us or them. The driver then plunged through the crowd, scattering the mob like a bowling ball hitting a bunch of pins. It was only after this that we were able to arrive at my apartment building.
What a relief to finally make it home. And alive! Still, I did not feel safe knowing that there were no police or military in the streets, and that I would be home alone. As I entered the building, the bawab (doorman) informed me that malcontents were looting the entire city of Cairo, and that many of them were armed. Hence the reason he and the other doormen in my building were walking around with metal rods and wooden sticks. I even saw men on my street chopping down trees to make wooden weapons. After assessing the situation, I reasoned it would be wise to have a man stay with me in my apartment. That man would be my keyboard player (with whom I was incidentally falling in love, but that’s another story for another time). Of course, the bawab protested the minute he saw the two of us heading toward the elevator—this was, after all, a violation of “the rules” (we have a strict “no-Egyptian-men-in-the-house-ever” rule, which is many Egyptian landlords’ way of paying lip service to Islamic values of gender segregation). We walked right past him and entered the elevator knowing that this time, he couldn’t threaten to call the police.
Magid and I stayed up for the remainder of the night. Instead of listening to the beat of the drum as we did every night during our performances, we listened to gunshots, looking down from the living room window as unknown men shot each other. All I could think of was when the army would be deployed to put an end to the shooting and looting. And, I wondered what tomorrow would bring. More of the same? A massive military crackdown? Compromise between the protesters and the regime? Perhaps a coup? Nobody knew. Heck, no one even expected this to happen in the first place.
