In early 2011, as she watched the removal of the graffiti that had been scrawled around Tahrir Square in the heady days of the popular uprising, followed by a “cleansing” of that space of revolt, Dina Heshmat realized she was witnessing the deliberate rewriting of history, a deletion of the people’s spontaneous discourse, to be replaced by a more elitist narrative.
Guided by this awareness, Heshmat sets out, in
Egypt 1919: The Revolution in Literature and Film, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) to re-examine the Egyptian revolution of the previous century, looking into the country’s archives to find unpublished novels and out-of-print articles that reflect the people’s mood during what she argues was the early 20th century’s equivalent of Egypt’s Arab Spring: a popular uprising against an oppressive regime by society’s poorest and most downtrodden classes, that was later claimed by the nationalist bourgeoisie.
2021 reading list: 20 anticipated books to look out for this year
The search for voice and identity as well as social and climate issues rule in this list of reads My First and Only Love by Sahar Khalifeh; translated by Aida Bamia. Published by Hoopoe. Courtesy American University in Cairo Press Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri. Courtesy Bloomsbury Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic. Courtesy Bloomsbury The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer: Arthur Conan Doyle, George Edalji and the Case of the Foreigner in the English Village by Shrabani Basu. Courtesy Bloomsbury A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. Courtesy Bloomsbury