Tahrir is Not a Square
If you live near Tahrir, your imagination will start to soar. Then again, anything that soars too high up above the ground is flighty – either in the meaning of, say, a bird, or spiritually or mentally, psychotic, or inept. Tahrir is not a drug. Liberation is not ecstasy. Although ecstasy on certain occasions might be confused with psychosis, with madness or in-sanity. Increased sanity in this case. The “in” stands for more. In Tahrir. We stood, even though we no longer stand at the heart of the matter but in its margins. What are the margins of a square? Four straight lines. Not four fingers, for the digits of one hand are five. Hi Five. To live is to be “hayy”[1]. Which at once recalls “hi” in the meaning of “hello,” and “welcome,” but also in its phonetic similarity to “high.” We are high. In imagination we soar. The dip is inevitable, as every high evokes a low. And we are not depressed, we are simply standing aside while the treachery of events takes up new causes; new causes that are edited and stripped of imagination. There is no time. For imagination. Conformity is cheaper than drawing or writing with the other hand. For a start, writing with the other hand is imagining. As drawing with the lesser control that the left (or other) hand has tends to be more difficult. What do we do in a crisis of imagination? We salute the sun, and bask in it. We imagine structures that feign pleasures of freedom and of justice. We, too, have the right to bread. We bake, we cook. We live. If you live near a square you form circles, the tangents of which touch the boundaries of limitation of two-dimensional space. You spin around yourself, and you generate a sphere. The square is not a square. It is a circle and a roundabout. But it behaves like a square, on which the creation of self-generating circles that become spheres takes place. These spheres are like soap: slippery, and forming bubbles that take to the sky and defy gravity. Tahrir is misunderstood and over-celebrated. It is circular and far from being square.
Text: Sarah Rifky
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About the author Sarah Rifky is a writer based in Cairo. She is founding director of CIRCA (Cairo International Resource Center for Art) and co-director of Beirut, a new art initiative and exhibition space in Cairo that considers institution building as a curatorial act. www.beirutbeirut.org _______________________________________ Note Photo © Sarah Rifky [1] The Arabic word hayy is used in the Quran to signify the opposite of “dead” and can thus be translated as “living” or “alive.” It is also one of the 99 names of Allah, and in this sense can also mean “immortal.”
