Tag: versopolis

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Food: Pleasure Becoming Guilt

Yasmeen cried because she could not breastfeed our daughter, Sina, on her first day in this world. Sina cried as well. As I was held captive with both of them in the hospital room, I had no idea what should be done. I called for the nurses’ help. A nurse came and offered to help Yasmeen breastfeed. It was in vain. The milk did not come, and the crying persisted. The nurse suggested using formula, made especially for new-borns. That made Yasmeen cry even more, feeling the failure.

In her first day as a mother, Yasmeen detected the essence of it: An everlasting feeling of guilt.

 

fish by Seif wanly

The nurse asked me to sign some legal and executive papers to confirm our consent to give formula to our hungry baby daughter. For the hospital to get involved in the bond between a mother and an infant, they need the mother’s informed consent or else this interference would be considered a crime. By all powers of biology and modern law, only the mother is responsible for feeding the infant.

A few days later, Yasmeen’s breasts supplied milk. Each time she breastfed the new-born, despite all the physical pain, her face lit up with a smile. She tried to explain how she felt, but words failed her. She spoke of energy, of something that runs through the inside of her, along with milk, to the inside of Sina. It is believed that this is the maternal bond.

We come into life incapable of consuming solid foods. We can only suck our mother’s milk. The first sign of a human infant’s growth is their ability to keep their heads upright, so that they can swallow. Only then some sustenance can be offered. The second sign of growth is weaning. When babies are not breastfed anymore, they shift from being infants to becoming toddlers.

The older we get, the more distant we are from her. We are weaned off the mother’s milk only to eat what her hands offer us. Our palate is shaped by our mother’s food, and we spend years believing that the best food is that cooked by mom.

Regardless of how bad a mother’s cooking might be, children do not realise it. On the contrary, they genuinely believe this is how normal, even excellent, food tastes!

This is known as Mother Culture. It extends not only to include the taste of the mother’s cooking, but also the customs of cuisine taught to us by our mothers. Some mothers raise their children with a must finish your plate rule; others are raised encouraged by mothers to leave a bite or two on their plate. In Egypt, this is known as “the Cat’s Share,”the idea being to help out cats and dogs that live off of garbage.

The mother instructs us as to what we should and should not eat. As such, ever since I was a little boy my mother declared all types of sausages (Egyptian-style street food sausages/ frankfurters/ hotdogs) FORBIDDEN at home. Throughout my childhood we were warned not to eat them outside behind her back.

We listened to Mother because she, definitely, knew our stomachs better than we did. Over time, we grew, left the house more often, we rebelled against Mother’s culture and we began to explore the world…and the hotdog.

I fell in love with all types and shapes of sausages at first bite, when I was nineteen. I went back to my mother asking her, ‘Why did you forbid us from eating hotdogs’? She answered that, as a kid, she stopped once in front of a shop that sells sausage sandwiches and, for some reason, the smell of sausages on the grill upset her so much that she passed out. Ever since that day, she’d hated sausages and everything related to them. So, the ban in this case was never for health reasons. It was merely our mother’s own palate.

Our bodies are a record book signed by time. On the surface it’s all flesh, blood and bones which are the result of what we eat. Our bodies, and what we eat, reflect all that shapes our identity.

We take control of our own selves and reshape our identity when we rebel against the cuisine of Mother Culture. I come from a world where pork is defiled, Haram. I had to travel at the age of twenty-three to know what pork tastes like. I loved the juicy taste of the pink meat. However, when I go back to Cairo, it’s hard for me to find restaurants or shops that serve pork. This made the joy of eating this pink flesh feel like forbidden fruit. I had to wait until I travelled to keep eating it in all its possibilities.

We rebel against Mother Culture.We drift away from Mom’s cuisine only to explore the facts of life.

Some cannot take the taste of truth. They refuse to eat food which they cannot recognise and hold onto the palate shaped by the mother’s cuisine. Others take in everything with mouths wide open, realising that Mom’s food is not necessarily the best there is. However, the taste of nostalgia in Mom’s cooking cannot be found any place else.

One’s palate is similar to one’s identity. It is not a frozen image, but one that changes as a result of what time does to our physical forms. Until the age of twenty-eight, I could not stand eating salad or fruit. I still have a memory of many full years having past in my life without me eating a piece of fruit. All of a sudden, with the age of thirty approaching, my palate changed as a result of my body’s needs and abilities having changed. Today, I seek out salads, in fact some of my meals are all salad and vegetables.

It had started as a call from a secret place in my body. Eating meats and carbohydrates gives me a heavy body and a lazy, slow capability of moving and thinking. After the age of thirty, health problems in my digestive system just blew up in my face.

I went to see a doctor, complaining from difficulty in urination and rectal pain. He asked me to sleep on the bed with my knees held tight against my chest, then he inserted two fingers into my rectum.

‘Anal fracture’, announced the doctor, as he was prescribing some analgesic ointment and telling me that the best remedy for me is to change my diet: Stay away from pastries, pizza, pasta… etc. and to eat more vegetables and fruits.

It was only then that I realised that a new phase of maturing and growing old has started, one where you choose your food not based on your Mother Culture, or your personal palate, but based on medical recommendations and the needs of your digestive system that is starting to go downhill.

I moved, a few months ago, to live in the States, carrying on a digestive system that cannot take in pink meat and other indulgences of American cuisine on a daily basis. Only a small amount of these are now allowed to me.

I feel guilty every time I cheat on my diet. I eat pizza, enjoying the taste, but simultaneously thinking of the pain I go through as I defecate. If, by any means, I managed to silence my conscience, the way food is shown and marketed here in America is basically designed to make you feel guilty.

When you go to any restaurant, whether fast food one or fine dining, you will find the name of the plate, a brief description of the ingredients, pri ce and the number of calories. So, while you are choosing your food, you will not only be thinking of the aroma of the main dish, or the taste of the food, but rather about the number of calories entering your body and coming out of it. If the food was good and you could not resist eating more, you will keep eating as the calorie counter in your head keeps adding.

You finish your meal trying to get over your feeling of guilt and enjoy the warmth of a full stomach, only to find yourself surrounded by articles of nutritional education and posts of friends who promote different diets to target weight loss and health.

Food is now tasteless. It is more of a medicine that has to be taken to stay alive in a fatless, sugarless, flavourless, and odourless existence.

Two or three days a week, I let go my food cravings. I eat pastries, pizza and/or pasta. I enjoy marinating beef myself and eat it medium rare, delighting in the red colour of the meat. The sound of boiling oil frying potatoes and chicken breaded with flour and that secret recipe is music to my ears. For the rest of the week, I eat leaves and vegetables, just like rabbits. I watch my weight and examine my urine, trying to keep a minimum level of fitness and maintenance of my digestive system, not because I want to be slim or to live a long healthy life, but because I want to still be able to enjoy all types of delicious unhealthy food, forever.

Braque
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Getting over a Breakup Medication from Ibn Hazm to Antidepressants

In his work, Tawq al-Hamam (The Dove’s Collar), the Andalusian writer, Ibn Hazm, tells the tale of a man he describes as wise, reasonable and sensible—until the day he travelled to Baghdad and stayed in one of its inns. ‘There, he saw the innkeeper’s daughter, fell in love with her, and married her. When they were alone together, she saw him undressed and, being a virgin, was alarmed by the size of his penis. She fled to her mother and would not see him. Those around her advised her to go to him, but she refused, and came close to death, and so he left her. Regretting his decision, he attempted to win her back but could not, even with the help of al-Abhari and others, for none could find any solution to his predicament. His mind became disordered and he went to stay in the maristan [infirmary], where he suffered for a long time until he had almost recuperated and found consolation, and yet still whenever he recalled her, he would sigh deeply’.

alwasti

A few years ago, my mind also became disordered, like that of the wise man, but since these days we don’t go straight to hospital for that sort of thing, I decided, for the first time in my life, to visit a psychiatrist. I complained to him for a whole hour: I frequently burst into floods of tears, I slept for hours and couldn’t get out of bed, I was suffering liver problems that the doctors seemed unable to find a reason for, my hair and beard were thinning, I’d resigned from my job several months previously, I saw no reason to live and was overwhelmed by despair, I consumed a vast quantity and variety of drugs which brought me neither pleasure or relief. He listened, then pronounced that my complaints were the side effects of my recent breakup; the psychosomatic symptoms, too, were simply the pains that accompanied the end of an intimate relationship. In another context, I’d have been angry, refusing to see my emotional experience—my epic of shattered love—compared with or ranked alongside the love affairs of others. We all believe that our romantic journeys are unique. But I was drained and in pain, and willing to accept any diagnosis of what was happening to me. I was ready to try whatever the doctor prescribed, without hesitation or objection.

The doctor gave me a strip of antidepressants. They relieved the pain and brought some equilibrium to my disturbed body, but it took time to find ‘consolation’, as Ibn Hazm called the convalescence of the wise man in his story.

Although I fell in love like the wise man, my beloved left me, not because of the size of my penis, but because of its fondness for adventure, along with other reasons too numerous to mention. When I was in the darkest depths of pain after our separation, friends pressured me to get over it as fast as possible, so I decided to get away, and left the city to escape their nagging. On my journey, while I wallowed in my pain and sabotaged any potential chances for future relationships, I discovered a whole breakup industry—an economy of strategies for getting over love.

Ibn Hazm devotes a chapter entitled ‘al-Dana’—a word which describes a sort of gruelling and all-consuming grief—to the pain of love lost and the trials of breakups. It is followed by a chapter entitled ‘al-Suluww’, (‘consolation’), in which he writes: ‘Consolation after a long separation is like the disappointment which enters the soul when it achieves what it has long sought; the intensity of its striving abates and its desire fades away’. Then, through the story of his experience with a courtesan with whom he fell in love as an adolescent, and who accompanied his family on their peregrinations to and from Cordoba before finally leaving him, Ibn Hazm arrives at the first cure for the trials of love and separation, the ‘consolation’ of the chapter’s title: A healing process which he divides into the stages of forgetting, indifference and replacement.

But Ibn Hazm seems to contradict himself, often repeating that any love from which one can be ‘consoled’, and any relationship that can be forgotten, is not to be counted on. For Ibn Hazm, it is not true love. Notice that, unlike in today’s psychoanalytical and romantic writings, in Ibn Hazm’s time, passion and love represented a link to the metaphysical world. Every soul was split in two, and each half sent to this life to search for the half, which would complete it; it was the meeting of a half with its lost counterpart which represented true love, as opposed to the kind of passion which cannot be counted on. Ibn Hazm wrote his Dove’s Collar to help lovers distinguish true love from ephemeral lust, and to guide them past critics and naysayers along its thorny path. All this, of course, sounds very different from today’s discourse, in which the ideal of virtuous love has been replaced by notions of healthy and toxic relationships, balance between the two parties, the importance of equality, respect, and non-exploitation, and other concepts which have filtered through from the realm of political correctness to replace terms for love such as gharam and hawa.

The wise man in Ibn Hazm’s story ended up in the maristan because he was suffering and in pain. At the time, the function of the maristan—an infirmary for the mentally ill—was to relieve pain and suffering, rather than to subdue the patient and ready them for a return to the treadmill of production. There, Ibn Hazm’s wise man did not forget his beloved, but sighed whenever her name was mentioned. He learned, with time, to silence his longing, to control his reactions and to maintain his equanimity. Forgetting one’s beloved was only for false and contemptible lovers.

Today’s breakup advice tends to place forgetting at the centre of its recovery plan. On self-help websites, the foremost piece of advice to heartbroken lovers is usually to forget: Stay away from your ex, keep communication to a minimum, get rid of anything that reminds you of them. After that, the advice gets confusing: Don’t sit in your room moping, go out and meet new people, life is full of pleasures and adventures—but don’t rush into new relationships, because you might get hurt. Put your sadness aside and get out of yourself. Cry and express your emotions, they say—but if your sadness lasts too long, they accuse you of weakness, of giving in to pain, of wallowing, or worst of all, of a pathetic attempt to win back the attention of the person who used to care about you.

It’s no wonder the advice is contradictory. There is no clear route map for avoiding or overcoming pain, or for the confusing task of getting over both the pain of a breakup and the memory of love.

One friend of mine who went through a painful divorce decided to go to a psychoanalyst, rather than a psychiatrist. Instead of being prescribed medication like me, my friend has spent hours with her therapist, and is still doing so, a year and a half down the line. Looking like she’s got it together and is proud of it, she spends more than ten hours a day at work, sometimes works six days instead of five, cares for her dog, and steers clear of any potential relationships, on the grounds that she isn’t ready yet, according to her therapist. She wants to maintain the stability she has now because, in her words, ‘I need a bit of time to work on myself’.

Analysing her last relationship, my friend found that she had always been attracted to men who would lie to her and exploit her emotionally. My response to that was to ask: ‘Are there men who don’t’? She shook her head. ‘You don’t understand. The problem isn’t them, it’s me—for being attracted to men like that’.

She pays around $25 for each session with her psychoanalyst, but she no longer has suicidal thoughts now, or borrows our phones to stalk her ex on Facebook, and she’s convinced that she’s forgotten her last relationship—she just needs to focus on her own issues.

Unlike her, I’ve never tried to forget. I remember the mistakes and happy moments of every passing fling. What would be left, if we forgot our emotional connections, the most profound and affecting of the experiences which make us who we are? And anyway, you never really forget. You just put the relationship and all of its associations in a black box, and since there’s nowhere to put the box, you end up carrying it on your back forever, thinking no-one’s noticed. Every time you try to open a door to let love in, the black box eyes you from the corner of the room, shattering your focus and distracting you from the person beside you, who’s waiting eagerly for the moans of the climax which will offer proof that the two of you have truly connected.

Every ‘getting over it’ rests on an illusion of forgetting, on a flight into the future, yet no matter how hard you strain to break away, the memory will cling to you, or lurk in the corner of the room along with the broken pieces of your heart and soul. Maybe the solution is not to forget but to leave the wounds open, to wear them with pride and share them with others—whether you want to entice them to bed, or just to the cinema. Don’t hide your experiences from your new partner, because no matter how hard you try to forget, the monster will still be there, in the box, waiting for the right moment. Perhaps your new partner can help you tame the monster instead, help you transform your anger at yourself and your ex into the energy you need in order to change and build a new life and a new relationship. One day, the monster could be your pet.

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A Writer on the Swing of Fear

I was a young lad watching TV with my grandfather, who appeared full of sorrow when he followed a news segment that showed a frail, old man lying in a hospital bed with tubes attached to his body. My grandfather quipped that the old man was a good man and did nothing but write, not understanding why they had tried to kill him.

I found out from my grandfather that he was named Naguib Mahfouz. A few years later I would find out that the brief clips I saw were of Naguib Mahfouz becoming conscious after he survived an assassination attempt in 1994. It was a young man who hadn’t read any of Mahfouz’s works who stabbed him in the neck repeatedly, based on a fatwa where a few sheikhs deemed him an apostate because his novel spread blasphemous ideas.

I saw Naguib Mahfouz’s novels for the first time in my high school library, years later. I would escape from over-packed classes, the putrid stench enveloping the schoolyard, and would go the library replete with different kinds of books.

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I grabbed a Naguib Mahfouz novel and went to the library manager to take it out. She sighed heavily, started to bismalah (invoking God’s name), and chased the devil away, then she said she wouldn’t let me borrow this novel or any other Naguib Mahfouz novel.

The teacher, doubling as the library director, explained to me that some ‘less than moral’ scenes in Naguib Mafhouz’s novels were not suitable for a teenager like me and that the novels also contained atheistic and blasphemous ideas. To settle it, she pointed to a shelf of Shakespeare’s plays translated into Arabic and she said you can take any book by him because he’s entertaining.

But I didn’t want entertainment, I wanted ‘fun’ instead. I hid a copy of Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs under my shirt and walked out of the library, without her suspecting. I devoured it in one night and returned it the next day without her noticing. From this moment on, I realised the governing rules of literature in the country that I was living in. You needn’t be a dictator or a dissident politician to be assassinated. You can be a peaceable person with fifty novels under your belt, win a Nobel Prize for Literature, be ninety years old preparing for a serene retirement and still face an assassination attempt for a novel you wrote forty years earlier.

Even if you were a writer who does not oppose the government, like Naguib Mahfouz, and even if those in power celebrated your stellar achievements by putting your books in school libraries, that doesn’t make you immune from having a teacher prevent students from reading your writing. In her eyes, you are spreading kufr (blasphemy) and Shakespeare’s books are piously dripping with Islam.

Literature, then, is a secret activity. It must be practised away from prying eyes and with extreme caution.

Fear is a constant companion of the Arab writer. Fear is a compendium of varying degrees, one on top of the other. If you look closely to the writer or the book, there is fear of political authorities. Then there’s fear of religious authorities. And the most troubling of all, fear of the reader’s reaction, if they didn’t grasp what you’ve written or feel that you’ve unsettled national, religious, social or any other mores.

Therefore, early on, when I started writing, I decided to befriend this fear. For I would lose a war with it.

I am, ultimately, a son of this time and place and what happened in the past inevitably affects the present.

During the 60s, all forms of cultural media and production in Egypt were under the purview and control of the state, similar to other countries that followed the Soviet model of cultural management. In this period, the state enforced a set of literary rules and criteria that, if you wanted to bypass, meant not getting your work published.

The Ministry of Culture refused to publish a young Sonallah HYPERLINK “https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/sonallah-ibrahim-egypts-oracular-novelist” Ibrahim’s seminal That Smell and Notes from Prison. Sonallah recounts that the culture minister asked to see him for a sit-down. In a long interrogation about one of the scenes, where the recently-released hero has sex with a prostitute and is unable to sustain an erection, the minister mockingly turns to Sonallah and asks him, ‘so are you like your hero, you can’t get it up’?

Sonallah’s novel was never fully published in its entirety until years later in Egypt.

However, Egypt was able to escape the Soviet shroud early on, specifically in the late 70s. The state’s grip loosened over cultural and artistic productions and censorship was limited. It still remained, though, in the hands of large, state-affiliated publishing houses and book distributors. This made private publishing unfairly doomed from the start.

Instead of state censorship, this was outsourced to religious institutions: Which were at once competitors and conspirators in the battle for political power from the 70s until Sisi’s ascent to the presidency.

This claustrophobic climate shaped the identity of contemporary Egyptian literature. We evil writers learnt to maintain the secrecy of our craft. We lived in secret societies on the margins of official public culture. Since the 70s, the best works were published at the expense of the author and the state curbed its public distribution until the book market opened up at the turn of the noughties.

The Internet appeared and suddenly publishing became easier and writers were able to write using pseudonyms. Gulf states pumped thousands of dollars into the book and publishing industry. More bookshops popped up, as well as publishing houses. Stylistically, new genres of writing blossomed – crime, horror and others that were stellar in their commercial success, but duly short-lived.

A florid style of writing took over the literary sphere, while the writers themselves were marching towards a stark reality. They were writing novels tracking class and social changes and, when the winds of the Arab Spring hit in early 2011, some writers who topped ‘best-seller’ lists became opinion-makers. For a moment, I felt that the spectre of fear had lifted its shadow from Arab literature. New identities were formed and with it a new vernacular sprang up that people used on the internet. Then suddenly everyone asked, where’s the revolutionary literature?

And before any revolutionary literature could rear its head, the revolution was crushed, as with all other revolutions, and the breathing space for Egyptian and Arab literature dwindled.

The authorities regained their control of the arms of artistic and cultural productions and currently the state holds 90% of all television channels, newspapers, magazines and news sites. The remaining sites are mostly blocked.

Currently, Egyptian and Arab writers are either imprisoned, exiled or prevented from writing and publishing their works. Saudi author and Arab Booker Prize winner Raja HYPERLINK “https://arablit.org/2018/04/25/why-raja-alem-is-publishing-sarab-in-translation-before-she-publishes-in-arabic/”Alem HYPERLINK “https://arablit.org/2018/04/25/why-raja-alem-is-publishing-sarab-in-translation-before-she-publishes-in-arabic/” announced recently that a translation of her novel, Sarab, would be published in German and English before the Arabic version. There is not even a date of when her novel in the original Arabic is set to be published.

The novel’s events take, as their starting point, the 1979 Kaaba (Grand Mosque) siege in Mecca, when a group of extremists surrounded the holy site. The siege ended in a series of mysterious, unruly bloody events that saw guns and tanks blot the holiest site for Muslims.

It’s only natural that Raja, a daughter of Mecca, writes about this incident that undoubtedly shaped her childhood. But this historical incident has become shrouded in mystery in the Kingdom. A red line encircling it, where no one discusses or even comes near it. This has forced Raja to delay publishing her novel in Arabic.

Egyptian author Alaa HYPERLINK “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaa_Al_Aswany” Al HYPERLINK “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaa_Al_Aswany”Aswany, who publishing houses were always racing to print, has also been unable to publish his latest work, The As If Republic. The reason is that the novel examines the January 25 revolution through a series of characters, including a military general. Egyptian publishers were scared to catch the ire of the authorities. His novel has been published in Beirut. Even though it is Egyptian through and through, the novel is banned in Egypt.

The latest victim of the games of censorship and stifling dissent is Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, the successful author whose novels have been turned into dramas on Egyptian television, including Abou Amro El Masry, which is on TV screens now. His name was taken off the credits and events were changed, in order to appease the political vision of the current regime.

There are new forms of censorship and narrowing of the public space daily. Censorship has become a looming spectre. Red lines dissolve and no one knows what is allowed or what is forbidden anymore.

The writer moves on the swing of fear, sometimes forcing him to hide what he thinks or alluding to it discreetly, instead of discussing it valiantly and truthfully. And sometimes fear drives him to the white noise of the internet and social media, turning him into a political megaphone critiquing and denouncing. And in the middle, artistic questions disappear. Talking points turn towards literature itself and its utilitarian aesthetics.

There is a mighty dark ghost, a spectre, haunting this country, and I am looking for a way to hide from its panoptic vision or running away from its grip.

Translated by Farid Farid

 
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The World Cup, Chaos and Corruption

published first time at: versopolis.com

Fifa’s most tedious make-believes are the notion of ‘fair play’ and the idea that the World Cup brings nations together in a celebration of football, peace, sport, and the future of childhood. Everyone knows they’re a pack of lies, but we need them: To keep the smiles going, to justify all the exhilaration and zeal, all the disappointment and anguish, all the overflowing, conflicting emotions that are the reason we care so much about the World Cup.

The World Cup is generally held to be an encounter between peoples and nations, but in truth it’s an excuse for competition and conflict and an opportunity to show off differences and inequalities. Parading their collective identities on the pitch, nations learn to recognize their respective peculiarities, while we as humans come to see that conflict and competition are forms of co-operation, and that conflict is the engine of progress.

It was with these thoughts in mind that I read Klaus Zeyringer and Ilija Trojanow’s Manifesto against the Dictatorship of Sport. The text begins with the question of conflict, referencing what it describes as Fifa’s ‘mafia-like’ behaviour (a moot point since no prison sentences have ever been handed out), dealings which in some countries would be considered corruption, but in others, such as Switzerland, are not. The manifesto moves swiftly on to the question of social justice, accusing international football’s corrupt institutions of bleeding state resources and taxpayers’ money, which pays for the infrastructure which makes the sport possible. At this point one gets a little lost: Is the manifesto directed at Fifa, players’ wages, or liberal policies? Or at everything, like the anger of the Ultras on an adrenaline high?

The text ends by urging the reader to take an unusual decision: To refuse to watch the World Cup, and to refuse to be ‘sheep’ or ‘consumers’. Then, in stark contrast with what they have said so far, the authors affirm they are ‘true football fans’.

Perhaps to the white European intellectual this manifesto might sound like a courageous voice of reason, but to the brown intellectual, it comes across as counter-intuitive. If you’re a football fan, but you resent the dictatorship of Fifa, then why boycott, why withdraw from the battle? As I see it, the text reflects Western anxiety over the white man’s loss of control over Fifa, and international football more generally, in recent decades. Other, non-democratic states are no longer satisfied with giving up talented expatriate players to European clubs and national teams; many of these states are now wealthy and powerful enough to join the fray that surrounds Fifa, hosting tournaments and gaining access to the material, social and political power which international football bestows.

The white intellectual is perturbed by Russian, Qatari and Saudi influence within Fifa. He sees what is happening as a corrupt dictatorial takeover of what is ostensibly a democratic game. Their intervention prescribes turning one’s back on the world and on the conflict.

A brown intellectual like myself, on the other hand, would never have paid the equivalent of €200 to the Qatari company Bein, and instead chooses to stream the World Cup on pirate websites or watch free broadcasts on British or European television channels. That’s how I enjoy my World Cup—not to mention the exasperation of the commentators and presenters, as they rail against piracy and accuse me of stealing from Qatari billionaires.

Zeyringer and Trojanow’s manifesto addresses the democratic world, which has been shrinking ever faster over recent years, to the point it scarcely has a continent to its name. The writers believe that football derives its power and presence not only from corrupt institutions, but from the continued interest of its fans and followers, and hence believe that with their call to football lovers not to watch any matches, they can shake the structure of the institution, or perhaps reform it. Once again, this is a white man’s fantasy.

In the brown part of the world where I live, the state of Qatar has invested tens of billions in the media and sports sectors over the last ten years, won their bid to host the next World Cup, and established the Aljazeera news network, as well as the Bein sports network which monopolises World Cup broadcasts in the Middle East. Qatar has pressed all this into service of its political agenda, which consists in supporting regressive and Islamist currents across the Arab region. This agenda has brought Qatar into conflict with ruling regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, resulting in a movement to boycott Qatar led by the three states.

Watching football matches on the Qatari channel is an irritating experience thanks to the style of Arab commentators. [Arab] commentators don’t just get excited about goals—they remain in a permanent state of excitement throughout the match, reeling off metaphors and nicknames, and wittering about their sporting reminiscences, or becoming engrossed in thinly-veiled invective directed at Saudi Arabia and other states participating in the blockade.

If you get bored of the Qatari commentary, you can switch to a Saudi pirate channel. Saudi Arabia refused Bein permission to operate or sell satellite receivers within the kingdom and instead established its own sports network which pirates its broadcasts from the Qatari channel. In breaks you’ll find Saudi commercials urging you to visit Salwa, at the base of the Qatar peninsula, where you can see the cows—a mocking reference to the dairy shortages caused by the Saudi-led blockade—up close. Fifa, from whom both channels claim they bought the rights, have given vague and contradicting statements on the matter.

All these manoeuvrings are highly undemocratic, and a result of the regional crises and conflicts of recent times. Fifa and the World Cup merely reflect the contemporary moment. There is no use attempting to reform Fifa by democratic means, since Fifa cannot be reformed as long as these regional conflicts continue. It is naive to think that democracy is capable of solving any of these problems, because it was democracy that got us where we are today. Giving up our right to watch football, meanwhile, will do nothing but make our lives as individual football fans more miserable, and more isolated from the world and its conflicts.

That said, I couldn’t bear to stream the whole World Cup on sites pirating the Qatari and Saudi broadcasts, because the constant political chatter and nationalist swagger of the commentators got on my nerves so much. Searching for alternatives, I discovered a whole world of commentary. I found a website showing the BBC broadcasts, whose commentators were so calm you hardly noticed when anyone scored a goal, and confined themselves to narrating the action in a neutral tone, with asides I can only presume are considered humorous in the white world—one described the Egypt v. Saudi Arabia match, for example, as the ‘desert derby’, while another attributed the African teams’ poor showing to the migration of African players to Europe. In the end I decided to watch the World Cup with the sound switched off, without commentators, sitting with my friends and listening to our own commentaries.

Translated by Katharine Halls

 
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