Slide 1 (Photo credit: Karima Khalil)
When I walked into the some 800,000 strong crowd that was in Tahrir Square on the morning of Saturday January 29th, one of the first things I saw was a man standing quietly, holding a sign with a simple message in Arabic: “I used to be afraid, I became Egyptian.” I looked around me and saw hundreds of signs bravely held by people of all ages and backgrounds, made from whatever they could find: paper, cardboard, wood, fabric, balloons, and even shoes. This man’s simple yet profound message neatly sums up the decades of repression Egyptians endured under Hosni Mubarak’s autocratic rule and the newly-found pride we felt at expressing our outrage at last.
Over the next fourteen days I saw messages written on people’s foreheads, others spelled out on the ground with rocks, cups, candles and even date pits. Largely homemade, these handwritten messages expressed yearnings that we Egyptians had been prevented from voicing for decades: messages in Arabic addressing Mubarak and his hated regime directly, but also in English, aimed at the world: “Here we are and this is what we want”. The signs, with their eloquence and passion, articulated a unique moment in our history that I felt had to be preserved; they were simply too heartfelt to be lost. I decided to put together a book, using images taken by me and many other photographers, largely protesters themselves. From some 7,000 photographs, I selected 150 images for what became Messages from Tahrir. The book includes images by thirty-five different photographers as well as my own, focusing on signs from the square from January 25, when the uprising started, to February 11, the day Mubarak stepped down.
Slide 2 (Photo credit: Islam el Azzazi)
Unarmed protesters face security forces on Kasr el Nil Bridge amid dense clouds of tear gas on February 28th, eventually reaching Tahrir Square after fierce street battles. Some 800 protesters died that day.
Slide 3 (Photo credit Ghazala Irshad)
This protester’s sign clearly voices the determination shared by the hundreds of thousands of protesters who decided to stay in the square for the 18 days between January 25th and February 11th, when President Mubarak stepped down.
Slide 4 (Photo credit Rania Helmy)
“No talking before he leaves” was the response of these four brothers to the regime’s offer to negotiate; they wrote this on tape covering their mouths after their two other brothers were killed in the protests.
Karima Khalil will speaking about Messages from Tahrir at the Notting Hill Tabernacle on November 21st and Leighton House on November 22nd. This is the first of three blog posts on the book and its photographs.
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