Q&A: Joshua Hersh on his days in Cairo
For nearly two weeks, Joshua Hersh reported from inside Egypt’s revolution. He wrote about a small clinic that became a haven for hurt protesters; a makeshift interrogation room; young men ready to fight pro-Mubarak forces, and much more. Now that Hersh is back in New York, I asked him to reflect on his time in Cairo.
Can you paint a picture of what your two weeks were like?
The two weeks were very different. The second week, which was much calmer, we were simply watching the scene, going down to Tahrir Square, talking to people everyday and getting a sense of how their moods were changing. We were watching the political developments — waiting to see what Mubarak would do, and if he would resign. You had to reach for stories, and extract them. We were dissecting the mood of Tahrir.
The first week was a totally different situation: We were constantly reacting to the events around us. You had the feeling it could be a war zone any minute. I arrived on Tuesday at noon — a day that was supposed to have a million-person turnout. It was a huge mob scene, and everyone was very friendly, it seemed like the entire middle class of Cairo was there. Our hotel was completely boarded up, because they had already had a couple days of violence, and they were more alert to what could potentially happen. All the lights were off on the ground floor, trying to give the impression they were out of business. You had to show your passport and reservation; no guests were allowed in at all. That was our first sign it was not a normal situation. And of course, over the next couple of days the situation became very violent and unstable again.
What was it like inside Tahrir Square?
Tahrir was a totally unique environment in Cairo, like a cloud of otherness, a whole other world where people from all sections of society coexisted in ways they ordinarily would not have. The best part was the humor. Egyptians are hilarious, for one thing, and they’re always making jokes about Mubarak. When Mubarak fell that night, there was an SMS battle where everyone was trying to one-up each other with texts and jokes:
Mubarak’s son went to visit him and asked, ‘Are you going to say goodbye to the people’? And Mubarak says, ‘Why, where are they going?’
Mubarak issued his first set of reforms, and the first is that he’s going to replace all of the Egyptian people with new people.
They loved this stuff. It’s what they thrived on. They were deadly serious about what they were doing, but they handled it lightly.
What else did they joke about?
State TV, among the many rumors they spread, claimed that the protestors were all dining on KFC in the Square. This is considered kind of a luxury food. State TV claimed that the protesters were all eating KFC — they call it “Kentucky” in Egypt — that they were a bunch of elites who didn’t care about the problems of the rest of Egypt. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth. So when people in Tahrir Square would come around with the food they actually did eat — cookies or plain bread — they’d always say, ‘Kentucky, Kentucky?’ And someone would ask, ‘Oh do you have spicy?’ ‘Oh yes, right here,’ and hand over a piece of plain bread. It was really funny, and also kind of impressive. In the face of a regime where these half-truths have always been a tool of repression, they decided to not react resentfully but to make light of it. The ability to make jokes about it showed how far they’d come past the place of being repressed by the state.
One of the many stories you wrote was about a young man named Snoopy. How did you meet him?
I first met him in the clinic I wrote about the second day. It was the middle of a massive attack by pro-Mubarak thugs, and was a pretty scary situation and we didn’t know what the hell was going on, and at some point we just had to get back to the hotel. Not speaking Arabic fluently, we couldn’t figure out what would be a safe route to get back. So I saw this guy who looked like he’d speak English, and he did, and I asked him how to get back to the hotel. He was totally casual about it. He walked us there, making small talk the whole time, as if nothing so unusual was going on. Later I learned that he’d been in the midst of the clashes with security forced a few days earlier and been hit with buckshot in the arm — so this was all old hat to him by now.
And then you saw him several more times over the next couple of weeks?
Almost every day. And on the last day I was there, I was hanging out with him and his family during this amazing scene when everyone in Cairo, it seemed, was out cleaning the streets. We found ourselves standing outside the clinic once again — it was 11 days later, and a totally surreal scene. It was very emotional for me to be with this guy who I literally saw almost every day during the revolution, and to be back at this place, with his family, watching them taking ownership of their city, right next to the place where we met in a horrible, chaotic moment, at a time when we had no idea what would happen.
By Abigail Jones
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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