Reframing the ‘Arab Winter’: the importance of sleep and a quiet atmosphere after ‘defeated’ revolutions

ABSTRACT

This article offers an alternative approach to the study of atmosphere by examining the relative absence of Egyptian independent music following the military’s return to power in 2014. It argues that periods of quiet, what the Western media has labelled the ‘Arab Winter’, are not reducible to defeat, inactivity, or repression. Instead, they comprise the exploration of third spaces, alternative imaginations, to pre-existing frameworks. Treating the creative work of two Egyptian artists as political theory, it defines a quiet atmosphere as a period composed of nearly-inaudible activity, the relative absence of particular sounds and the illegibility of certain ways of acting, thinking, and speaking in relation to dominant frameworks. The ‘quietness’ of the independent music scene, then, is an indication not that the music has stopped but that it is enacting meaning in ways it had not previously during the revolutionary period (roughly 2011–2014). Treating sonic absence as meaningful and productive, this article broadly suggests an ethnomusicology of the inaudible, which decentres sound in order to be better attuned to the affects of (sonic) absence.

KEYWORDS:

• Silence
• political exhaustion
• Arab Spring
• resistance
• atmosphere

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I follow the International Journal of Middle East Studies guide to transliteration. When quoting spoken dialogue, I use the spelling that most closely resembles pronunciation in Egyptian Arabic; Independent music (al-mūsīqa al-mustaqilla) is a genre loosely conceived through its marginalisation from Egyptian state patronage and the multinational music industry. It comprises a variety of styles from rock and hip-hop to local and regional genres as well as musical ‘fusions’.

2 In her study of musicians in authoritarian Guinea, for instance, ethnomusicologist Nomi Dave demonstrates that musicians viewed silence as a positive cultural value, ‘an indicator of moral strength’, and through ‘performative play’ their political silence allowed multiple interpretations for listeners (Dave 2014: 18–19); for more on silence as productive (see Abe 2016; Gill 2018).

3 As political scientists have argued, any account of the Arab revolutions and counter-revolutions must consider the ways local and global militarised-capitalism are deeply intertwined (Abou-El-Fadl 2012, 2015; Hanieh 2015).

4 Street concerts continue to happen in the poor peripheries, however, where the state does not maintain much power (Bayat 2013 [2010]).

5 In April 2019, the well-known independent band Massar Egbari was forced to release a pro-Sisi song.

6 See also Weeden (1999) for an account of a similar phenomenon in Syria.

7 As Naomi Klein demonstrates, neoliberalism is characterised by a ‘powerful ruling alliance between a few very large corporations and a class of mostly wealthy politicians’ and requires authoritarian conditions for its full implementation (2007: 11, 15). Egyptian authoritarianism, as a merger between military governance and Big Business, is not an exception, but the rule (see Elyachar 2015); among the central issues for protestors were the effects of economic liberalization and Zionist/Western imperial expansion (Abou-El-Fadl 2012: 11).

8 See Abu-Lughod (1990, 2013), Mahmoud (2005), Ortner (1995, 2016), Taylor (1997).

9 See for instance Chang (2015) and Ramy Essam’s 2017 US tour, https://www.facebook.com/RamyEssamOfficial/photos/a.1548230055220974/1548230445220935/?type=3&theater.

10 By contrast, instances of state regulation and control in the West are rarely framed in terms of ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘repression’ (Nooshin 2017: 174, 179)

11 Other recent works include sound/visual artist Khaled Kaddal’s Essence of Disappearance (2018), visual artist Hoda Lutfi’s 2019 exhibition When Dreams Call for Silence, the 2011 collection The Middle Ear co-edited by Haytham El-Wardany and Maha Maamoun, and El-Wardany’s 2017 book How to Disappear. Such contemporary creative work focusing on sleep and disappearance has broader resonances with other works across the region and previous time periods similarly marked by senses of suspension or half-living, most notably following the 1970s student movement in Egypt (especially the work of Arwa Saleh) and Arabic zombie literature of the early 2000s. Due to space constraints, I must leave explorations of these broader resonances to a different essay.

12 The full album is available for streaming at https://soundcloud.com/dina-elwedidi/sets/slumber.

13 Unlike Western conceptions of the imagination as interior, Mittermaier’s interlocutors in Egypt understood dreams to originate outside the subject, often as Divine inspiration. Notions of what the imagination is and does in Western philosophy have gone through various shifts, from dangerous irrationality to later a source of individual creative capacity and ‘genius’; in all instances, however, the imagination is understood to emerge from within the individual subject. Mittermaier’s approach questions the presumption that dreams are inherently linked to the psyche (Mittermaier 2010: 14–16).

14 Translation by the author.

15 Ṭarab is synonymous with an ecstatic state and a musical genre, see Racy (2003). Traditionally, Sufi music typically features voice with duff (frame drum) and nāi (reed flute).

16 Al-Sisi’s regime has built 19 new prisons since taking power in 2014, and decrees have already been passed for building 16 more. More than 60,000 people were imprisoned between 2014 and 2017 (The Arab Network for Human Rights Information).

17 There are significant ways class and generation are working here, particularly in the way the more abstract works I examine are received (or not) by previous generations and more working-class audiences in Egypt. I leave these important considerations to a later work.

18 This movement is characterised by shorter works, experimentation in language and theme, avoidance of larger socio-political concerns and nationalist narratives (al-qaḍāya al-kubra) in favour of the self and the minutia of daily life and subversion of the opposition between public and private spheres.

19 El-Wardany discusses Sufi thinkers directly. Sufism, neither a monolithic nor static phenomenon, is often defined as a spiritual form of Islam that centres around love and remembrance (dhikr) of God (see Mittermaier 2010).

20 Such a move resonates with what anthropologists such as Saba Mahmood and Lila Abu-Lughod have identified in their respective work: people do not always desire liberation in the (neo)liberal sense (Mahmoud 2005; Abu-Lughod 1990).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Darci Sprengel

Darci Sprengel is an ethnomusicologist and Junior Research Fellow in Music at the University of Oxford. Her research examines contemporary music in Egypt at the intersections of technology, capitalism, and politics. She has published in Popular Music, Culture, International Journal of Middle East Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Sound Studies. She has taught at the University of Oxford, Beloit College, The American University in Cairo, and UCLA.