I am used to visiting my village of Al-Zarabi in the hills to the west of Assiut in Upper Egypt at the beginning of every academic year, as well as on feasts and family occasions. However, after the 25 January Revolution I was preoccupied and so was late. The trip began in the Al-Dagayshah district, where the car passed through narrow streets and near the old houses of loved ones. I was overwhelmed by waves of memories that I was unable to resist. The words of the poet Amal Donqol echoed in my ears: “all beloved ones pass on, and gradually the familiarity of the homeland also fades away.” I had become acquainted with the generations of writers and others who had formed a different panorama of life in my village. After the building of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, the streets, houses and shops were lit by electricity. There were more schools, and girls shared their chairs in class with boys. The line separating the north of the village from the south also disappeared. The north had always used to be more progressive, and it housed the market, police station, the only school and the house of the village mayor. The south of the village housed families who clung to the old ways of life and had few services or influence. The faces of the African-looking villagers who had worked for the big families also vanished. I was accompanied on my trip by Iman Mahran, a professor of popular heritage at the Academy of Arts in Cairo. She had participated in the parliamentary elections, and as we passed the old buildings on the roads we drove along on our way to Al-Dagayshah I was immersed in memories of the inhabitants of the district, one that had witnessed the early years of my childhood. My aunt and cousins used to live there, and we had shared much human warmth, had had lots of fun, and had frequently had our pockets filled with sweets. We had heard distressing tales of revenge that had horrified us in their frequency during our childhood, but these later declined to a great extent. What remained were some sensitivity and a few events that were quickly forgotten. I observed what remained of the old buildings and those had been newly built. Things had not changed much, except for the emergence of some modern buildings, the absence of loved ones, and the appearance of new generations who behaved differently from those who had departed. But we encountered the same human warmth and the same love that we had been used to in our childhood. There were women who were still locked up in their homes. Most of them continued to play the same roles in spite of education and educational certificates. They made no contribution to speak of outside their homes. We spoke to them about the elections, but they said they did not vote. But they did follow political events on the radio, the Internet and in the national press. They wanted to see a new president chosen from among young people close to the ideology of former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser. They rejected so-called “riotous elements” because they had inherited love and a pleasant neighbourhood from the people of the village, among whom were many Christians. I stopped to look at one of the old houses, one that had once belonged to aunt Hanoma but whose ancient gate and wooden balconies had now collapsed. None of her descendants remained except one grandson who himself now had 10 children. I remembered a visit by my uncle who was a pilot and who had inherited the interest of my grandfather in architecture and who used to visit the village frequently. He asked me in front of a gathering of relatives about my life at school, and when I answered that I had not yet gone to school because I was only six years old he was dissatisfied with my answer. He predicted that I would end up like my aunt Hanoma, meaning that I would imprisoned by illiteracy and the traditional roles of women, including housework, raising children and taking care of my husband. But destiny chose a different fate for me. Home life and village traditions still play an important role in the lives of the village inhabitants, particularly women who live inside suffocating houses. Some heritage is positive and enlightening, yet much of it is submission to a destiny and a value system that is imprisoned in tradition. My companion wondered about the role of education and what education had given the women of Upper Egypt since tradition still cruelly governed their fate. I told her that any discussion of this issue would take a lot of time and that we would have to go to a male-dominated meeting in the home of villager Abdou Abdel-Aal in order to find out more about local views and the impact of the Revolution. We reached a modern building surrounded by a large garden looking like a cross between a castle and a villa. It was located in front of the first mixed secondary school in the village, to which I had contributed after my participation in the 1984 parliamentary elections. The school was part of my elections campaign. Close to it is the police station that the former British high commissioner in Egypt Lord Cromer recommended building together with a primary school during his visit to Upper Egypt at the beginning of the last century. In the reception area of the house there was a long table with a computer on it on which the owner of the house followed developments in Egypt together with news of the situation in Palestine and events in other parts of the nation. The visitors were a mixture of young people and retirees. Some worked in agriculture and others used to work in schools, the village bank and commerce. They represented the oldest families in the village. The conversation started gradually, but soon voices came together and hands were raised and features changed when we discussed the revolution. Those present agreed that they had predicted the revolt but not the form it had taken. They did not believe that the children of yesterday who had grown up all of a sudden would be capable of leading it. One of the participants, who seemed to be pleased with himself, said that the visit by ousted former president Hosni Mubarak's son Gamal to the village had emphasised that change was coming, but not through him. The headmaster of the preparatory school, Abdel-Rahman Aref, interjected, saying that untruth in the country had reached such a stage that some had been saying that our village was among the poorest 100 in the country even though it had schools covering all educational phases and the oldest school for girls in the region, established in 1911. It also had the oldest police station in the western area of Upper Egypt, he said, and hundreds of the village's sons and daughters had become doctors, architects, lawyers, teachers, university professors and military men. Some of its best young men had been martyrs in the wars with Israel after 1948. He said that the previous governor had tried to obtain a loan from the World Bank on the false assumption that our village was among the poorest in Upper Egypt. Was this just, he asked. The participants in the meeting expressed their happiness with the revolution. They said it was necessary to take serious measures against anti-revolutionary elements, adding that the police under the previous regime had been oppressive and that after the revolution security would prevail. Among the issues they raised was water drainage in the village. The issue was preoccupying the participants because of the damage it might cause. They also talked about poor administration. One of the young men from the Dagag Shah family spoke of the problems of agriculture and of the crops that had decreased, such as wheat and cotton. He called for resolving the problem of debt, cancelling interest, freezing balance scheduling, eliminating funds that supported crops for export, and giving more support to farmers. An expert on archaeology referred to a story of corruption among leading figures in the previous regime, including Gamal Mubarak and his associates who had controlled 4,000 square metres of land nearby containing Pharaonic and Roman graves. A cement factory was to be built there, but the real reason was to dig up the graves and steal anything they contained. The speaker called on those responsible to rescue the ancient relics, and others also expressed their concern, raising the possibility that the village be considered a heritage site like Luxor and emphasising the need to explore further in search of possible artefacts. They called on the Ministry of Antiquities and those working in the field to show more interest in the issue. At the end of a long day we met the new governor, selected by the post-revolutionary government to administer Assiut province. The governor had been deputy to the interior minister in parts of Upper Egypt and was familiar with the situation in the area. We discussed security problems in Egypt after the revolution, and his speech was frank and unreserved. We did not argue with him on disputable issues, such as the role of the police in killing young people. We turned to Assiut. He had some ideas intended to alleviate the problem of youth unemployment and the problems of industrial cities that had failed to meet the needs of development and were producing consumer commodities. The new governor emphasised that the security situation in Assiut was stable. And he expressed his wish that the people of the village would cooperate in solving any social problems that might emerge in Assiut. The writer is a veteran professor of journalism.
