Songs, speeches, parades, debates, fireworks: Amira Howeidy sets out to capture the mood at the golden jubilee of the July Revolution Click to view caption Picture, picture, picture! We all want a picture! A picture of the happy nation Under the victorious flag Take a picture of us, time Time, take a picture of us If Salah Jahin, the poet who provided the lyrics for many of the songs -- including the one quoted above, sung by Abdel-Halim Hafez -- that have resonated through the post-revolution era was still alive, what picture would he paint of the "happy nation" today? Almost certainly it would have been a more complex image than the one presented in official celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the revolution. For the media, who began their marking of the event early, and with predictable fervour, the theme of the celebrations was clear-cut: the republic's four presidents would be celebrated and not just the iconic figure of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, as had been the case in the past. But how should one really commemorate this particular golden jubilee? Well, for tens of thousands who crowded the banks and bridges of the Nile in central Cairo on Tuesday, the parade of ships in the water and the carefully choreographed, if brief, fireworks display seemed appropriate enough. The warm voice of Abdel-Halim Hafez floated across the water, extolling the glory of the revolution, only to be interrupted abruptly by Hisham Abbas, Mohamed Mounir and Tamer and Sherin as the Ministry of Information provided the Nile-side celebration's necessary dose of pop music. There have been heated debates in the newspapers, in homes and work places on whether the revolution was good or bad for us. Other debates pondered the motives behind the supposedly grandiose nature of this year's celebrations when very little appears to remain of the revolution itself. State-run TV's eight channels, armed with a rich stock of revolution-era content -- songs, movies, vintage news footage and documentaries -- set the mood, as always, for the annual celebrations. But this time it was different, not least in the intensity with which the past was resurrected. Its symbols and events, assessed and scrutinised, were presented as if they offered yet another new reading of the revolution, of its makers and impact. Media and official celebrations have been neatly schematised: the past 50 years can be summed up by four faces of four presidents: Mohamed Naguib (1952-54), Gamal Abdel-Nasser (1954- 70), Anwar El-Sadat (1970-81) and Hosni Mubarak. Thus can five decades be broken into phases that run seamlessly, one into the other. Nasser is the leader of the revolution and was committed to its constants; Sadat, who won the 1973 October War, paved the way for "peace". Contemporary Egyptian politics, it has been stressed, are the natural extension of this historic background. The mood on the streets, though, might not be wholly in harmony with this careful reading. "We're really happy because of 23 July," Youssef Abdel- Wareth, a secondary school teacher who was walking along the Corniche with his family on Tuesday night, told Al- Ahram Weekly. "It's quite festive. We've never seen this before. But I don't know who or what they're celebrating. It's so different today. We're at peace with Israel although its slaughtering Palestinians and threatening us and there's no social justice. Isn't this what the revolution aimed to fight? But still, the weather is very nice today and walking by the Nile isn't costing me much. " On the pavement in front of the Nile Hilton an entire family was nibbling libb (seeds). "It's lovely!" exclaimed Mohamed Qadri, a 20-year-old computer science student. And then, almost as an afterthought, added: "We didn't see much and I'm disappointed really but then we didn't really expect something impressive like the parades we see on the national day of Western countries. We're not like them." His mother, Zizi, was humming Abdel-Halim's Al-Sadd Al-Ali (The High Dam). "How could he feel anything?" she told the Weekly. "I lived through these days and it feels so good to remember Nasser and feel so patriotic." "To me, the revolution is Nasser and Abdel-Halim I guess. I also like to watch the movies marking the occasion every year, and I know them by heart," she confided with a smile. Many have found, much to their surprise, that the films, broadcast daily over the past week and produced in the '50s specifically to propagate the revolution's principles, seem to have a contemporary relevance. Ali, played by Shukri Sarhan, the leading character in the movie Rudda Qalbi (Give Me Back My Heart), for example, and an obvious stand-in for the Free Officers, talks endlessly about fighting corruption, the British occupation and the revenge that must be exacted for the 1948 Palestine war. Today corruption cases involving officials continue to shock public opinion as more and more are referred to state security trials. The Palestine war continues to be lost, albeit in different ways. Continuity has its flip side. "It broke my heart after a joyful day celebrating 23 July to watch footage of Israel's massacre of innocent Palestinians in Gaza," Sherine Hassanein a 21-year-old student who was walking with her sister by the Nile told the Weekly. And at midnight on Tuesday, as Cairo's traffic entered gridlock and the remains of the fireworks light the night, one at least had an inkling of what the picture could be.
