In this piece for the January issue of Guernica Magazine (which Jina Moore Ngarambe commissioned and edited with incredible passion and generosity), I wrote about how Gaza made me rethink my personhood. I’m grateful for its warm reception, particularly because it’s going to be the frame for my very long-in-the-coming memoir-in-essays, Postmuslim. Of which “Losing My Religion: A Nineties Mixtape” will appear in Joyland Magazine on February 15. Meanwhile, Capote, boxing, horror, and grief proceed apace. In honor of January 28, on the other hand, here is a photo story from 2018:
Revolution’s Residue
I had my camera when I went out to demonstrate on Friday, January 28, the climax of the Egyptian revolution of 2011. That day I was on the streets for over twelve hours but I took only two pictures; they were to sit for years on my hard drive, unedited and undisplayed. Unlike many, whether then or later, I felt I couldn’t photograph and protest at the same time—that taking pictures would render my presence insincere. Yet the figures and the faces that I saw in and around the protests still imprinted themselves on my mind. Later, while the aftermath of regime change made developments look more like an affliction than a triumph, I reencountered those images on the semi-reflective surfaces that had witnessed and survived events: the metal of the elevators in government establishments, the polished wood of office doors behind which young people were interrogated, the puddles in which people stepped, and the windows through which they looked—the surface of a parked car or a television screen. And so I captured them, desaturated and abstracted, on my iPhone screen.
*The quote, describing the narrator’s experience on January 28, 2011, comes from Paragraph #157 of The Crocodiles.