- Before the revolution, political expression in Egypt was stifled…
- …but the anger broke through after the example of the Tunisian revolution of January.
- The fist symbol of the April 6th opposition movement, founded in the wake of the violent crackdown on striking textile workers in 2008.
- Rage of the oppressed, painted on a wall near the Fine Arts faculty of Cairo University
- Notice the S.M.S. message in his hand—the tools of social networking, especially Facebook and Twitter, were useful for massing people and outwitting the police during the revolution.
- The police were defeated on the Day of Rage, January 28th, when protesters fought tear gas and rubber bullets to take Tahrir Square.
- Nearly a thousand people are estimated to have died during the eighteen days of demonstrations that brought down Mubarak, and many stencils commemorate the martyrs. This portrait, by Ganzeer, is of Islam Rafat, who was run over by a car during protests on January 28th. At one point authorities painted over the image; an outcry went up on Twitter and Ganzeer repainted it. Ganzeer is hoping eventually to make portraits all of the martyrs.
- The White House equivocation during the first days of protests in January, and its long-term support of Mubarak, caused a lot of dismay on the street. This image comes from a larger picture, in which a pipe connects Obama’s head to a shower that drips blood.
- Notice that the king has been toppled in this game of chess.
- There are plenty of fists of defiance; this one is inscribed with a crescent and cross, the symbol of religious unity that was one of the features of Tahrir Square, when Coptic priests and Muslim Imams held hands and demonstrated together.
- Fist and victory sign painted on a school wall.
- The stylized hand, used most often as a symbol to ward off the evil eye, flips the bird. Underneath is written: Take that!
- All over Cairo and Egypt, ordinary people have painted stripes of the Egyptian flag across walls, fences, and tree trunks in revolutionary and patriotic celebration.
- Mubarak shows up in a number of guises on Cairene walls. Here he is eyeless, behind bars.
- Here Mubarak is shown in a noose.
- This is an image from a famous classic movie. The man is a drug dealer and he’s rolling a joint. His celebrated quote is written underneath: “I am the people!”
- Recently the street-art stencils have moved toward satire and subversion in the manner of Banksy.
- Here the Statue of Liberty wears a full veil. Underneath is written, “You’re not free!”—a quote taken from a Salafi song, advising women that they must remain submissive.
- Che Guevara is depicted with a prayer cap and long beard.
- And Snow White becomes a gun-toting revolutionary.
- The recent retaking of Tahrir Square by protesters has prompted a new rash of graffiti. More and more, they explicitly denounce the rule of SCAF, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Here, its leader, Field Marshal Tantawi, has been put behind bars.
- Tantawi’s underpants?
- The red beret of the military police sits atop a pair of handcuffs. It is estimated that ten thousand civilians have been put through military tribunals over the past six months.
- In recent clashes between police and youth on the square, a few Molotov cocktails were thrown amid a hail of stones. I watched one kid drop his and set fire to the hem of his trousers.
- As activists have now settled into Tahrir for a long-term sit-in, they decry the “couch party” of people who prefer to sit at home and complain about the ongoing disruption.
Amid the cacophony of protest and debate since the revolution—which I wrote about for the magazine this week—there has been one method of expression that has regularly stopped me in the middle of Cairo traffic so that I can get out my iPhone camera: graffiti. (See the slide show above.) It’s suddenly all over Cairo, on schools, on telephone exchange boxes, on empty walls and corrugated fencing around building sites. Daubs of slogans, finely rendered panoramas of Tahrir Square, and, increasingly, the kind of biting satire and subversion that Banksy made famous.
One afternoon I went to see Ganzeer, one of the better known street artists. (There’s also Keiser, whose images include a lightbulb going off and a parade of ants, and Sad Panda, who, as the name suggests, paints dejected panda bears all over the place.) Ganzeer means “bicycle chain,” but his images go well beyond that. I found him at home, underneath a bushy Egyptian fro and wearing a pair of paint-spattered Adidas sneakers. He lives in a clean, white-washed apartment, and we sat on a sofa opposite his a work bench holding the tools of his trade: a stencil of Mubarak, a MacBook, and a pencil sharpener. Ganzeer is a graphic designer by day. “I don’t consider myself a street artist; it’s just that certain things say they should be on the street,” he told me.
We talked about the rise of street art in Cairo. Ridicule is an important part of breaking down the fear barrier in a revolution, he said, which no doubt accounts in part for the flourishing of the form. Another purpose of the graffiti is commemoration. Although many of the images reflect the current debate, they also offer a way to revisit what happened in Tahrir in February.
Ganzeer trades in both. He is particularly famous for his series of portraits of martyrs of the revolution, painted big and graphic in red and yellow, but he has gotten attention recently for a cartoon about the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, which shows a figure gagged and blindfolded with the caption “Mask of Freedom: A Gift from SCAF to our beloved sons of our homeland… Currently in stock for an unlimited period!” At every Friday protest on the square, I seem to see someone wearing a big bright yellow T-shirt with the image.
A few weeks ago Ganzeer was arrested for putting up “Mask of Freedom” stickers downtown. The police officers didn’t quite know what to do with him, and ended up driving him around for several hours and having a long political discussion. Ganzeer told me it had been fun to challenge the police face to face. Eventually, he managed to convince them that he hadn’t been disrupting the peace—that, as he described it to me, “we were not evil people, that we have the country’s interests at heart, but at the same time they have different opinions.” He sighed, reflecting on the times and the culture gap between hip youth and government employees. “So you get into a discussion and nothing is really resolved. We’re just from completely opposite ends of the spectrum.”
By the time the police had deposited Ganzeer at the military prosecution center, the Twitterati had gone crazy over his arrest. He was released without charge. I asked him what the Army officers had made of his “Mask of Freedom.” He told me they were more amused than anything. He had five left on him at the time, which were confiscated. Three were placed very carefully in an evidence envelope and sealed with wax; the other two, he told me, laughing, the investigating officer kept for himself.