Assem El-Kersh reminisces about a day that changed the world 1967: summer heat; the joy of a little bar of Egyptian chocolate; outings to the Nile Corniche. 1967: the humming songs calling for a wishful "greater Arab homeland"; the yellow tram ticket; "Frankly", the weekly column by Gamal Abdel-Nasser's main man in the media, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal; the queues gathering at food cooperatives; the melting ice blocks placed at the door of the flat (before refrigerators were bought through instalments); "Russian fish" -- imported from our friends the Soviets"; "the socialist garden" we were supposed to be cultivating; the taxi fare starting at six piastres; and the lines of soldiers returning from Yemen. 1967: the Cinema Metro matinee every Friday; the river bus; the Beatles, and a whole generation of footballers; the Voice of the Arabs radio; the signs oscillating from "Flats for rent" to "Meet you in Tel Aviv", the green stars of our flag; Abdel-Halim Hafez's captivating voice; a big plate of koshari costing no more than one piastre; Charleston trousers, or else the salt borrowed from the neighbours; the way my father would whistle at us every time he returned from work; another song eagerly welcoming the battles to come; the face and voice of Nasser -- Gamal Abdel-Nasser. Suddenly, without warning, at nine on the morning of Monday 5 June 1967, this whole era came to an end. It stopped, broke down, disappeared -- as if it had never happened -- and we were no longer living in the same world, but rather, through the labour pains of war and violence: a new Egypt was prematurely born, that day, one in which everything was different. The Egypt of 1967 that I remember now seems like a country of the past, no longer known to anyone: a country that bid an incredibly abrupt farewell to the prohibited (making peace with Israel) and began engaging with the impossible. In the next 40 years, indeed, friends were no longer friends; new enemies replaced old ones; alliances shifted and superpowers were made redundant. A new world came into being. All the slogans and symbols of the preceding years -- Arabism, socialism, the alliance of the powers of the people, national liberation, the public sector, the pricing policy, the battle, all of it -- became anachronisms. We signed a peace treaty with Israel with which we had gone to war four times, even though Israel would never stop expanding and acting, not only like an enemy, but a monster that no one seems capable of taming. As for America, which thought of Israel as its adopted daughter, it too let loose its worst instincts, following the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union, its conventional rival, disappeared -- and it submerged itself up to the ears in a new world war against terrorism, with which it identified Islam and some Arabs. But in 40 long and charged years, have we really changed? We have and we have not. Nasser no longer exists. All that remains of him is his name, and a picture of "the immortal leader" timidly hung up here and there. Independence has slipped out of most of the countries that had wrenched it from the imperialists, as if to confirm the theory that revolutionaries fail once they become statesmen. After 1967, for our own part, we fought again and we made peace; we retrieved the land we had lost so suddenly on that morning of 5 June, and, together with other Arabs embarked on a totally different series of battles, about pastoralism vs urbanity, moderation vs extremism, revolution vs wealth. We wasted too much time watching, in collective paralysis, the blows dealt to Arabs, one after the other, reflecting exactly the terrible imbalance of power in the occupied territories, and in Iraq and Lebanon. The notion of a welfare state that is responsible for its children from the cradle to the grave evaporated, and, along with it, was gone the role of the institution, be it the family or the school, together with dozens of commendable values, which found their place easily enough in the museum of memories. The fires of inflation, in the meantime, stretched to every corner they could reach, from prices to the population, which jumped from "30 million fidayeens " -- as the Egyptian people were referred to in yet another patriotic song, to more than double that figure in 40 years. Even the number of singers is increasing by the day; as is that of the vehicles that crowd the streets day and night, and usually for no good reason at all. Year after year, a new vocabulary insidiously invaded our life, with words and expressions like "the October Bridge", "globalisation", "Marina" (the North Coast resort town), "the peace process", "the Internet", "corruption", "the Islamic jamaat ", "malls", "Toshka", "sectarian sedition", hambaka -- this term alluding to the tendency to say much and do little, fobbing another with gestures, and then the sight of spies shamelessly looking into television cameras, Anwar El-Sadat's "open-door" policy of indiscriminate economic liberalisation and his threatening messages to dissidents: "I will mince them", satellite channels, Jihad, rewesh tahn (the current slang for "super cool"), posh coffee shops, (illegal) immigration, privately owned (and very extravagantly priced) housing, terrorism, the obsession with sexual harassment, 7-Up cans and then "Call me on my mobile", private tuition, Hizbullah, Nogoum FM radio, and normalisation, not to mention either arnab (rabbit) as a reference to LE1 million or the Lebanese singer Haifaa Wahbi's notoriously seductive song, Wawa. Let me add, too, the expression "the Greater Middle East", the constant reference to reform, the emergence of the underground metro and the never-to- be-forgotten musical statement of the urban folk star Shaaban Abdel-Rehim: "I hate Israel". The list goes on and on. Not much remains of 1967. All that is there is the memory of unbearable pain, grief, nostalgia, injured pride, heartache and dozens of exclamation marks with which to punctuate proscriptions that are no longer proscribed. Think of a middle class that has disappeared in midair, of wishes summarily unrealised, of a dream as wide as heaven which we believed and loved and wished to continue, only to wake up to the defeat of a regime and the collapse of a revolution that proved unable to protect its gains. Both homeland and the future seemed like a paper house in the wake of a hurricane. Neither did we go to Tel Aviv, nor were the promises of freedom and plenty and justice fulfilled. They turned out to be illusions, just like the illusions of total unity, green deserts, or else the marble statues built on the canal to which Salah Jahin referred in his poetry, before he fell prey to depression and died. All that remains is the echo of war cries and newspaper headlines and pictures whose faded colour points to a time long past -- a time forced violently away by the Naksa to be replaced by a new game, with its own new rules and "the necessities of adaptation" coupled with "calls for realism" -- a new set of choices which, though unconvincing to many, were presented as the only option. All those shocks and surprises that have beset since 1967 -- peace with Israel, open-door economic policies, the return of political parties and the collapse of communism and American hegemony -- have had their implications for life in Egypt. The face of this life has changed so much it is hardly even recognisable -- to an extent that no one, not even in one's wildest dreams, could have predicted, that bloody summer. And the core of the earthquake was no doubt the Naksa itself, which shook society and people more than any other thing in their history, enough to inviolably alter not only the mood of the country but equally, its orientation and priorities. Some of these changes were a direct consequence of the war, and may have happened anyway even in the presence of Nasser had he lived; others seem like an unalterable destiny imposed by the ideas, trends and transformations of a world reinventing itself willy nilly. For many years after June, we remained in a huge prison called the Naksa. At times, like the 1973 War, we managed to escape its rails; at other times we failed. But the Naksa remained a complex, a fresh wound, as if it was inflicted only yesterday, a landmark in the progress of our lives, those of us who would rather forget it and travel back in time to 4 June included. Still, self-revision is required for understanding all that happened, and why it happened. The object should never be self- flagellation, nor should we wallow in self-pity. Such a process, erring on the side of justice, should steer clear of the tendency to condemn the past, however; it should never involve blaming and shaming those of us who stand for it. Still, it will no doubt benefit us not to give in to amnesia, and instead to turn the crisis into a lesson learned to help keep us safe from further defeats, whether in politics, in the pursuit of knowledge, in the business world or on the football court. To do so, however, we must register the fact that we failed to transform all that we thought of as a renaissance and a re-awakening -- in art, in industry, in national self-awareness -- to victory. We must first admit that defeat was but a forgone conclusion to chaos and unjustified self- confidence. As soon as we concede that we deserved all that happened to us -- underestimating our enemy, we left our destiny to daydreams and the anaesthesia of beautiful songs, the lyrics to which, all things considered, we had no reason to believe -- then we will find our way out of the prison of 1967. Such is the answer to the complex, and every other complex likely to block our way.
