Last week artists and writers rallied at Talaat Harb Square voicing their political demands. Rania Khallaf talks to Adel El-Siwi, spokesperson for Writers and Artists for Change, about this new cultural initiative It was through an emphatically peaceful demonstration at 7pm on Talaat Harb Square that Writers and Artists for Change (WAC) announced their genesis last Tuesday. While riot police blocked the way to the square, hundreds of writers, artists and journalists -- as well as activists from other groups, such as Kifaya ("Enough," a popular political movement primarily demanding the ending of Mubarak's rule and opposing the possible succession of his son Gamal), Youth for Change, the Popular Campaign for Change -- gathered there. Bearing not only banners calling for reform but blown up portraits of such seminal cultural icons as Umm Kulthoum, Salah Jahin, Naguib El-Rehani, Fouad Haddad and Taha Hussein, demonstrators began by chanting the vernacular verses of poet Ahmed Fouad Negm, who was present at the rally, in a scene that drew in greater and greater numbers. Only half an hour later, however, this largely festive occasion acquired an oppositional, almost militant tone as some crowds began to chant anti-Mubarak slogans: "over our dead bodies will political power be by inheritance," and "ask Mubarak what he did with our country's wealth" were some of the refrains. Tightly encircled by riot police, the demonstration nonetheless went on for two hours without interference. This may have had something to do with the presence of relatively high-profile figures like novelists Ahdaf Soueif, Sonallah Ibrahim and Mohamed El-Bisatie, critic-scholars Abla El-Rowaini, Sayyed El-Bahrawi and Amina Rashid, as well as actor Abdel-Aziz Makhyoun, who delivered the opening speech. Yet artist Adel El-Siwi's reading of the event suggests otherwise: intellectuals are in the same boat as political activists. "Intellectuals have long been attempting to wage a battle against the official cultural authority, but they have consistently failed to achieve real gains," El-Siwi explains in setting the new initiative in its context. Since the Ministry of Culture banned the local edition of Syrian novelist Haydar Haydar's A Banquette for Sea Weeds -- in response to an Islamist campaign against it in the mid-1990s - writers have been involved in few conflicts with the establishment, he elaborates. "The cultural movement has always been sporadic, it never has a set strategy. However, saying no to the attempt to normalise cultural relations with Israel is one battle we can count on winning. But WAC is no impetuous formulation. There have been real political movements in Egyptian society in the last two years: I'd say it was the emergence of Kifaya that revived political life. The oppositional scene had been monopolised by religious currents, especially the Muslim Brothers, for too long. But Kifaya has finally carved out a different space for dissidence, and in so doing it has paved the way for other alternatives, not all of which are necessarily overtly political -- for example, Doctors for Change, and Youth for Change." As for "our own initiative, this has capitalised on this change -- the time is ripe for dialogue to a far greater extent than has been the case before." Is there, then, a different contribution that WAC is seeking to make? "It will be different from other groups in various ways," says El-Siwi, "for one thing we stand for change, not reform." Reform, he goes on, implies partial change to policy. "We are rather about dramatic change. We have our political demands, but we are not a political movement. We are not in alliance with Kifaya or any other movement precisely because we are not a political entity. Yet, we do not want to isolate ourselves from the call for change now prevalent in Egypt -- we share the views of these other groups. Kifaya is the founding father of the entire current, but we still insist on our independence." Ranking high on the list of demands of WAC are freedom of expression and complete elimination of censorship. "The space for imagination, the creative drive, has been terribly limited," El-Siwi says, "so has the opportunity for genuinely critical research. It's unbearable: research papers on suicide rates among the young in Egypt, or on poverty levels, say, are not approved by universities. Another problem is book banning, which occurs annually at the Cairo Book Fair -- it's a phenomenon intellectuals have yet to tackle." WAC holds a weekly meeting on Saturday, at 9pm, at the offices of Miret publishing house. "We welcome every cultural and political orientation," says El-Siwi, "even those in support of the cultural establishment. And the purpose of the discussion is always to address our differences, not to eliminate them but to prevent them from hampering the work of the initiative as a whole. And we need to develop a long-term strategy away from the pressure of the upcoming presidential elections; this is but one event, and we don't want it to have a disproportionate influence on our visions." Such a vision will be further articulated in the context of a large-scale conference the initiative is in the process of planning. Scheduled to take place in the first week of September, a few days before the elections, it provides for extensive representation of writers and artists from the provinces. "We do not want to impose a single vision on the cultural sphere as a whole." Yet El-Siwi insists that it has nothing to do with the elections as such, except insofar as it defies their being the month's principal event: "We won't subscribe to official schedules. As I have said, we want to draft our agenda regardless. I happen to think the movement's contribution will only start once the dust has settled. The form it will ultimately take will be decided at the conference, anyway. It is up to intellectuals to decide whether they want a society, an association, a union or a movement, the latter being what we already have now." But on the practical plane, the movement has yet to prove its mettle. "We are becoming more flexible, more experimental by the day," El-Siwi responds. "I'd say that one of the priorities, currently, is liberating the imagination from self-censorship." Over the last 25 years, after all, it was intellectuals who suffered the most. "Many fell into the trap of the establishment, others were excluded from festivals and state awards and official posts." Will it be a kind of shadow ministry of culture? "This is exactly what we're trying to achieve. Sadly, where democratic processes have yet to be the norm, the intellectual must maintain relations with the cultural establishment. But it is changing the nature of such relations in a way that preserves the integrity of the intellectual, and by extension the dignity of society as a whole, that we are hoping to achieve. The government wants intellectuals to endorse its policy; this is more or less understood. We have our own vision for culture, and we believe funds allocated to cultural activity should be dispensed according to specific criteria, standards that take our views into account. People are not aware of how much of their own money is being wasted." By way of example, El-Siwi adds that "the mechanisms controlling the performance of the Supreme Council of Culture must be revised. I never understood why the Minister of Culture should be made president of the SCC when any intellectual could do a better job. Independent executive authority is the first step on the way to change. It would eliminate the tendency to bow to the will of political decision makers. In Egypt we have a unique cultural phenomenon, the Cultural Palaces, which, I believe, do not exist in any other country. The Cultural Palaces Organization, this huge cultural authority, which has branches in every Egyptian governorate, has long been regarded as an 'employment center', where offices are crammed full of thousands of idle employees. Revising the laws according to which such an official body is run is the responsibility of intellectuals." WAC will start publishing a newsletter with a view to encouraging interaction and dialogue, and, perhaps more importantly, endorsing this notion of responsibility. Nothing guarantees the initiative's success - or longevity. "But," El-Siwi insists, "it is the support of mainstream intellectuals throughout Egypt that will ultimately determine its future."
