resistance lessons

"The first thing you have to understand is how power works."

We are sitting on a sidewalk in Cairo outside the US embassy--seven women, surrounded by a tight ring of riot cops and closely watched by the ever-present mukhabarat, the Egyptian secret police. (Someone called them "refrigerators in suits," because that's how they're built, and that's how I'll think of them forevermore.)

We're in the middle of a week in which we 1,300 internationals, most of whom come from western "democracies," got a very mild taste of what it's like to organize in a police state--a real, permanent, and very well-developed one, not the collapsible police state that the US government like to trot out during big demonstrations.

We are sitting down because a few minutes ago, the refrigerators in suits started violently shoving us toward the entrance to the embassy grounds, where another group of about 30 people are also penned in by riot police. We decided we weren't going, so we linked arms and sat down, blocking the entrance. It was a brilliant use of nonviolent civil disobedience tactics, de-escalating the situation immediately, and now we are sitting in a circle, getting an impromptu lesson on resistance from Lisa Fithian, who's been at this game longer than I've been alive.

"The people who have power over us get to keep it because we let them--because we're afraid of what they'll do to us if we don't cooperate," Lisa says. "We start to get power back when we refuse to cooperate with them."

Three hours later, I know she is right. The sit-in has dispersed with no arrests and no serious injuries. And what's more, I feel great. Fantastic, actually. Best I've felt since landing in Egypt. The bitter disappointment at not getting into Gaza and the worry about what the Egyptian government might do to us are gone as if they never existed. And I'm not alone. Shae and Dara, my two travel companions, feel it too. Even Lisa is grinning. Everyone realizes now: this is what we have come here to do. We challenged the police, we refused to be intimidated, and we won.

What's more, we gained valuable intelligence about how these particular police behave. They're physically intimidating, and there are a lot of them, but they are not ready--yet--to beat us or arrest us. That means we have space to keep pushing and escalating our tactics.

From that moment on, I am fearless. Walking through downtown later that day, I realize I have learned how to cross the street. It may seem silly, but crossing the street is the biggest challenge many tourists face in Cairo. There are no traffic rules, and where there are crosswalks and signs cars generally ignore them. You have to learn to just step out into the street without fear, trusting that that cars will stop. And I am doing it like a native.

The sit-in has transformed everyone who participated in it, and our confidence is contagious. At the nonviolence training the next day, our affinity group, which contains three people who were in the sit-in and two people who were not, is one of the few that decides we are willing to risk arrest in the model scenario we are working with. When asked to arrange ourselves in the room based on the level of risk we are willing to assume at the protest the next day, we are right in the front. We're not trying to show off. We're just not afraid.

When Lisa asks for female volunteers to be at the front of the demonstration on the 31st, Shae, Dara and I all volunteer without hesitation. I'm ready to be on the front lines. I decide fearlessness is the most valuable thing I have to offer at the moment, especially since some people are clearly freaked out by Mick's pre-protest speech when he tells people in his thick Scottish accent that they should be prepared to be beaten and arrested. I personally don't think we're going to be arrested, although I'm willing to be if it comes to that, and I decide I'm not afraid of a little police brutality.

I've already written about the spectacular beginning of the demonstration here, so I won't repeat myself. But when we sit down in the street in Tahrir Square, I can tell there's going to be violence. I can feel it coming. The uniformed riot cops are reluctant to touch us, but the secret police, they've had it. They're used to being feared. They are not used to people defying them, and it annoys the hell out of them. They've decided now is the time to reassert their power-over, and they're going to make sure we get the message.

Soon there is grabbing, dragging, kicking, punching, hair-pulling, and it gets pretty hectic. I do my best to stay in the street as long as possible. Finally four guys pick me up and carry me out of the street. For some reason I find this kind of funny. It's just absurd, the fact that four refrigerators in suits are exerting themselves over a 5' 1" woman. I almost start laughing.

Turns out one of them grabbed me hard enough to leave a bruise on my arm a week later. What's that about? They could have gotten me out of the street without the bruise. But they want to remind you of their capacity for violence.

One of the goals of nonviolence training, Starhawk tells us, is to help people realize that they have power, and the ability to exert some control over a situation, even when all the force is on the other side. If people realize that they are in control of their actions, they can avoid panic and remain empowered even in situations where violence is being used against them. (Personally, I believe this is true even in situations of extreme violence, like torture, although it is certainly much harder to remember this when the violence is that intense.)

I'd love to say I was scared and faced off with the cops anyway, but I can't claim any such bravery. In truth I wasn't scared at all, because I felt in control of my actions the whole time, and I never felt the consequences got beyond what I had prepared myself to accept. Behold, nonviolence training works!

Without fear in the mix, something interesting happens. You kind of see through the game. The whole thing becomes transparent and almost comical, because the cops are so aggressive, and they clearly think they're intimidating you. And the fact that you're not scared of them becomes kind of like a private joke or a secret weapon--aha, I know you're trying to frighten me by using violence, but it's not working, which means I win. I WIN. Joke's on you, asshole. You may have the monopoly of force, but it turns out it ain't worth shit.

The point of relating all this is not to make myself look badass. It's to make a point about resistance.

Toward the end of last semester, working on the rewrite of Gaza Sunrise, I started getting really frustrated, because I couldn't seem to effectively communicate why people would engage in resistance when the price of doing so was very high. Now I understand the piece of information I was missing. It's not just that there isn't any other way to win, because power concedes nothing without a demand, etc., etc. It's that sometimes resistance is the only way to claim any power in an oppressive situation.

It should be stated that the situation we were in in Cairo was a very, VERY low-stakes environment compared to what Palestinians face and what Egyptian citizens face from their own government when they protest. At the end of the day, it can be a fun war story and not a genuinely terrifying experience for us because, as internationals, the consequences for us are still relatively mild. There is a scale of political repression, and--let's be honest--we are still operating at the low end here. None of us were going to be imprisoned, tortured or killed for our actions. Obviously, as you go up the scale of increasing consequences, it becomes a lot harder to get to that state of fearlessness. At some level it may become impossible, and that's when real courage--of the scared-shitless-but-doing-it-anyway variety--is required. But I think the same fundamental dynamics of power and resistance apply.

There is something amazing, deeply subversive and delightful about realizing you have power in a situation where the other side would like you to believe you have none. I'm starting to understand that that is true even in the most extreme conditions of repression. As Lisa said while we sat on the sidewalk outside the US embassy: "If you know what the consequences are and you're willing to accept them, there is nothing anyone can do to stop you."