This is an account of how I
experienced the political turmoil of Friday, January 28^th, 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 13^th 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 6^th 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.