The Ghosts That Haunt Egypt

I have had a ritual since 2013: on the eve of each anniversary of the revolution, I take out my copy of Egyptian poet Mostafa Ibrahim’s poetry collection, Manifesto, and recite it from cover to cover. Published in the wake of the 2011 revolution, Manifesto has become a kind of literary scripture for many of the politically engaged members of my generation. Ibrahim moves through the splintered dreams, among comrades who once shared a square, a sidewalk blanket, and a barricade. In the quiet of the night, I let its lyricism hold me, and I mourn. I always return to one iconic poem about Tahrir Square, “So-and-So.”

So-and-so: I never learned

his name, so I called him

The anonymous “so-and-so’s” continue until the end of the poem, and I cannot stop thinking about how, at the time of writing that poem, each was flesh and blood: a face we could summon from memory, a stranger turned friend whose number sat in our phones. Now, it has become a poem of ghosts that calls forth immense pain.