Graphic Nonfiction by Magdy El Shafee

Translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies

Throughout the February 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Magdy El Shafee and his friends created and passed out graphic pamphlets like this one.

See the text-only version.

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Definitions

Mubarak: Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt from 1981 to 2011. He stepped down after 18 days of protests in February 2011.
Ahmed Ezz: In early 2011, Ezz was a senior member of Egypt's ruling party and the owner of Ezz Steel, a company accused of monopolizing Egypt's steel industry. He was arrested shortly after Mubarak stepped down.

First published in Words Without Borders' February 2011 issue: International Graphic Novels, Volume V.

for Two Million People in the Square
https://wwb-campus.org/literature/two-million-people-in-the-square

Magdy El Shafee

Magdy El Shafee was born in Libya in 1961. He started a comic series for children in Alaa Eddin in 2003 and started publishing strips in El Dostoor in 2005. That year he also launched the first comics website in Arabic, www.magdycomics.com. He has published many underground and independent works in Egypt, and in 2006 was recognized by UNESCO. His book Metro, the first adult Arabic graphic novel in Egypt, was published in 2012.

Humphrey Davies (translator)

Humphrey Davies was an award-winning translator of some twenty works of modern Arabic literature, among them Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, four novels by Elias Khoury, including Gate of the Sun, and Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq’s Leg over Leg. He also made a critical edition, translation, and lexicon of the Ottoman-period Hazz al-quhuf bi-sharh qasid Abi Shaduf (Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded) by Yusuf al-Shirbini and compiled with a colleague an anthology entitled Al-‘ammiyyah al-misriyyah al-maktubah: mukhtarat min 1400 ila 2009 (Egyptian Colloquial Writing: selections from 1400 to 2009). He read Arabic at the University of Cambridge, received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, and, previous to undertaking his first translation in 2003, worked for social development and research organizations in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Sudan. His awards included the inaugural Banipal Prize for Arabic literary translation for Gate of the Sun.

image:

Sketch by Magdy El Shafee.

Links available online only

Meet Magdy El Shafee

Find out why the creator of this pamphlet, Magdy El Shafee, is also known as the "Godfather of Egyptian graphic novelists," in this article from Newsweek.

Then, read about El Shaffee's arrests over issues of free speech, both before and after the Revolution, in a series of posts from Words Without Borders.

Meet Translator Humphrey Davies

Humphrey Davies, sketched by Magdy El Shafee inside the cover of Dushma (Foxhole) magazine, January 2011.

Read the WWB Campus profile, "Euphoria is a Kind of Drug: A Conversation with Translator Humphrey Davies."

Hear the Names

Listen to pronunciations of the Egyptian Arabic terms in this story, read aloud by Noor Naga.

Words Without Borders · Two Million People In The Square

(Listen on SoundCloud.)

The Egyptian Revolution

Listen to an on-air report from the protests: "Millions Against Mubarak," from Sharif Abdel Kouddou and Democracy Now! (12 minutes.)

Organizers of the 2011 demonstrations used social media to rally supporters—for a powerful example, watch this video blog from Asmaa Mahfouz, which went viral after she posted it to Facebook.

Finally, for more on the "thugs" mentioned in this pamphlet, read the BBC News article "How 'Thugs' Became Part of the Arab Spring Lexicon."

Revolutionary Art & Culture

Watch the teaser and first scene of Microphone, a 2010 film about the underground art scene in Alexandria just before the Revolution.

Then, learn more about the graffiti art that began appearing in Egypt during the revolution in "Egypt's Murals Are More Than Just Art, They Are a Form of Revolution," by Waleed Rasheed, one of the leaders of the 2011 protests. Below is a TED talk from Bahia Shehab, who grafitti-ed the Arabic word “no” all over the walls of Cairo during the Revolution.

And look photos of graffiti by Egyptian women during and after the Revolution.

Finally, hear the music that began appearing during and after the revolution in the NPR story "Authentic Egyptian Music Is From The Streets." (You'll find full songs in the sidebar.)

Background on Egypt

Mural, Egypt 2013, photographed by stttijn. License: CC by 2.0.

To learn more about Egypt's history, read the BBC's timeline of key events from 7000 BCE to 2018.

To find out about current events, visit the newspaper The Egypt Independent.

Links available online only

More from Magdy El Shafee

Watch a video of the making of Magdy El Shafee's comix magazine, TokTok, and see some of the magazine's issues (in Arabic).

Then, read excerpts from Metro, also by Magdy El Shafee. It was the first Arabic adult graphic novel in Egypt, and it was first published in Words Without Borders. (It was translated by Chip Rossetti, who also wrote the introduction to the Egypt unit on Campus.)

Arabic speakers can take a look at khallina.org's series on Arabic comix and graphic novels, which begins with a viewing of the Tok Tok video above.

Who Influenced Magdy El Shafee?

Magdy El Shafee says that his novel Metro came out of a 2002 workshop led by another comics artist, Golo. Look at Golo's Proud Beggars, also available on WWB Campus.

More from Translator Humphrey Davies

Read Humphrey Davies' recent translations of several Egyptian novels: Leg Over Leg, Private Pleasures, and Midaq Alley.

Life After the Revolution

Listen to stories of post-revolutionary Egypt from This American Life:

"Thug Me? No, Thug You" (July 2011; 17 minutes)
Interviews with two men "whose ideologies are completely opposite, except one thing unites them: their anger at the United States." (December 2012; 6 minutes)
"They Love a Man in Uniform," from Egyptian-British blogger Sarah Karr (January 2014; 10 minutes)

Then, watch a Vice video on Egypt under el-Sisi from the protests of March 2014. (20 minutes, click “Show More” beneath the video on YouTube for more background information.)

Finally, get the latest news from the New York Times' Egypt coverage.

Comics After the Revolution

What happened to comics, and their creators, after the Revolution?

Hear from Magdy El Shafee and others in "CairoComix: Excavating the Political," by Jonathan Guyer, published on the independent Egyptian website Mada Masr. Then, read the Guyer's 2017 article on "Egypt past, present, and future," which also describes what's happened to sites like Mada Masr over the past few years.

For more recent satire, follow cartoonist Andeel on Facebook, or watch his web series "Big Brother," in which his character suggests some...interesting ways to solve Egypt's problems. Below, you'll find the 2018 episode, "Agonies of the Rich." (With a few implied four-letter words.)

Finally, find out what happened to the Twitter accounts of such Egyptian cartoonists as Ganzeer (also featured on this site) during a series of 2019 protests.

Selling the Revolution

Listen to the NPR story "Graffiti Reclaims Egypt's Revolution From Marketers" to find out about "revo-branding"—the use of revolutionary images in ads.

Then, watch an example of revo-branding: a cell phone ad set to the patriotic song "Egypt is My Mother."

The translated lyrics (from NPR) are:

Egypt is my mother, its Nile is my blood
Its sun is in my tanning, its semblance is in my features
Even my color is wheaten, the color of your goodness
Egypt, Egypt.

More Revolutionary (and Post-Revolutionary) Culture

See more Egyptian street art in the blog suzeeinthecity, from journalist Soraya Morayef. Then, read about the groundbreaking cultural historian, artist, and feminist Huda Lutfi, and look through her work.

Finally, listen to a story about Bassem Youssef, the "Jon Stewart of Egypt," and the success (and consequences) of his satirical show about the Egyptian revolution.

Taking On Thugs

Some women who were taking part in the revolution experienced brutal harassment, mostly from the 'thugs' the pamphlet describes. Watch a video about a self-defense program to teach women to respond to street harassment.

Revolutionary Love

For a story of love before, during, and after the Revolution, read Lena Merhej's comic Manal and Alaa.

Censorship in post-Revolutionary Egypt . . .

Watch the documentary “Authorized to be Shown,” about censorship of the arts in Egypt.

Then, read a 2019 article in which Egyptian novelist Mansoura Ez-Eldin says that it is the “silence or self-censorship of creative people that actually threatens Arab creativity.”

Mansoura Ez-Eldin, 2012. By Lesekreis, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

. . . And Beyond

Watch an American Library Association video featuring the "Top Ten" most challenged books in the US.

Next, listen to a panel on National Public Radio discuss "What people miss in the conversation about banned books." The panelists point out that comics are often among the most frequently banned books in U.S. schools. (We suggest starting around 12:55.)

Finally, read "An Iranian Metamorphosis," a graphic memoir from an artist imprisoned for a single word.

More Graphic Nonfiction With a Message

Read Slaves of Moscow, graphic reportage about a shocking modern-day instance of slavery.

Then, read a comic about the power of storytelling, and browse through the archive of Symbolia, an online magazine for illustrative journalism.

Reading Grade Level(s): 7, 8, 9 and up

1. Visual Style
2. The Meaning of "Thug"
Additional Resource

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Two Million People in the Square

Graphic Nonfiction by Magdy El Shafee

Translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies

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