I lived in Paris for most of the 2000s. For much of that time my then girlfriend worked overseas, and I ended up befriending her mother: a diminutive, chatty, and sharply analytical Egyptian woman in late middle-age. We would often discuss French, British, and world current affairs from across our generational and political divides. She was mostly centre-right; I leaned social democrat. Our disagreements were generally cordial, which was more thanks to her good humour than mine. But her countenance would darken, and her natural ebullience vanish whenever talk turned to the situation in her home country. ‘There is going to be a revolution!’ she would say, and I would inwardly scoff at this. Having come of age in the UK in the nineties – a place and time about as far removed from the prospect of political overthrow as any in human history – I could barely conceive of revolution at all, let alone in a large, industrialised economy like Egypt, where autocratic rule had been the accepted norm in a five-decades long existence as a nominal republic.
Harka, directed and written by Lotfy Nathan, produced by Cinenovo and Spacemaker Productions, France/Tunisia, 2022.
My ignorance and naivety were made plain just over a year after I left Paris, in the shape of the 25 January revolution. My friend had accurately sketched its outline, with a cast of disaffected and futureless youths primed to burst onstage and an increasingly confident and expectant Muslim Brotherhood waiting in the wings, ready to swoop for power. That last element was why, when she made her pronouncements of imminent revolution, she did so with grim foreboding – my friend was Coptic. What I remember most from her doomy descriptions of Egyptian society was the unifying sense of people having had enough, brought to the brink of endurance by a self-enriching political elite and its repressive security apparatus, by the grind of ubiquitous corruption and deepening impoverishment.
In the slow-boiling build-up to the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, the concept of al hogra came to express such chronic structural oppression. As Meryem Saadi, a Moroccan former journalist and now a researcher of art history, has written, the term expresses different feelings ranging from injustice, indignation, resentment, humiliation to oppression. It was originally used in relation to daily life situations, before becoming a more political term that describes a continuing state of contempt and humiliation for the whole society.
Humiliation, of course, is prone to provoke rage that is forbidden to be expressed against its subject, and becomes pressurised and compacted until fit to explode. It is the powder-keg psychological condition.
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