On the complexity of Cairo, young love, and the Arab Spring: In conversation with playwright Ahlam

You Bury Me Trailer © Nick Virk and Marcus Ebanks, Courtesy of Paines Plough, 2023.

Words by Shams Hanieh.

“I hope the play honours those that fought in the Arab Spring, particularly a young generation that dared to dream and were punished for it”, says Ahlam, the playwright of You Bury Me. The play, showing at the Orange Tree in London later this month, is a coming-of-age story about a group of young Egyptians in post-Arab Spring Cairo. It functions as a love letter to the city, where Cairo is a complex and raucous backdrop to the group’s journey through adolescence, as well as a direct character within it. The play follows the six friends as they grapple with love, queerness, and the fall-out of the revolution, all while living under a police state.

As I interview Ahlam over Zoom, I see the white letters of her name on the black screen, next to my own face reflected back at me. She has chosen to remain anonymous, concealing her identity, and using Ahlam as a pseudonym. “There is a little bit of freedom in that I’m not the face of the play, or people can’t find me”, she expresses, “but the labels are still there. I am still fully seen as an Arab woman, or North African, or whatever. I don’t mind these labels or frameworks, as it is who I am, but it’s narrow. I’m a lot of different things, this lens of seeing me as an Arab woman primarily is quite a Western way of looking at my identity”.

“This distilling of identity that happens in the UK or Europe, where people have to fit into one neat box to be authentic, is not how I see the world,” Ahlam elaborates, “I don’t authentically belong anywhere, the way I speak all my different languages is messy, the way I belong to a place isn’t a clear-cut easy relationship. As much as we would like to simplify and flatten identity, the reality is much more layered”.

It feels that this fraught experience of belonging, or complicated relationship to home, comes out of living in Cairo. The characters of You Bury Me do not have an easily-defined relationship to their city; Osman, a young blogger and activist in the play, says “The thing about Cairo is, she’s all layers”. These layers are tangible throughout the play; its characters feel a moral duty to be politically outspoken, while also feeling shaken and disillusioned at the state’s imprisonment and “disappearing” of dissidents.

Ahlam represents this dissonance in both a comedic and sombre tone, reflecting the true affective experience of growing up in Cairo. “My friends who were on the front lines of the revolution all have stories about that time they almost died, but it’s always told as an epic hilarious story. ” Ahlam says, “It’s an absurd experience, being light-hearted while the stakes are so high, but for us, that’s the norm”.

The duality of lightness under heavy circumstances is felt not only in stories of the revolution but also in the experiences of young love. The play’s characters sneakily make out in staircases and parked cars, losing themselves in the joys of first crushes and early sexual encounters. But they are always on edge, waiting for a policeman to find them, or for their families to find out. “Growing up under this fear and experiencing your first love, it heightens the feeling sometimes,” Ahlam comments, “The desire is big, the yearning is big, you’re trying to resist your body and you’re not able to, it’s very exciting”. However, Ahlam doesn’t feel this complex nature of growing up in Cairo is too different from adolescence elsewhere, “Our coming-of-age story has the universality of all coming-of-age stories, but there's these nuances to it. I can't express it in words, but I can express it in scenarios”, she says.

I wonder aloud to Ahlam why these scenarios, or theatre as a medium, are a good vessel for representing such complicated universalities. “Theatre is a communal experience”, she tells me, “it brings people from different walks of life to experience an emotional journey together, and that’s incredibly exciting and powerful. I tried to make it as open as possible, so it speaks to Egyptians in exile, or wider diasporas, or people that know nothing about Egypt. I tried to make it so that everyone can experience this together”.

Other than aiming for a sense of togetherness, Ahlam’s play also serves as an act of mourning and remembrance. “I feel like with the Arab Spring, we haven’t been allowed to mourn. The fight for the narrative has been so brutal, and people literally have been banned from mourning, or from speaking about it openly. Those that do are living with the threat of exile or threat of arrest”.

This is the context that the play sits in. Ahlam hopes it allows for space to mourn, and to honour. “I hope it honours my peers, and honours a whole generation in a sense,” she states. The playwright aims to honour not only her peers, but the togetherness experienced by her generation during the Arab Spring; “I think of little acts of solidarity and how people survived, there’s something beautiful about that which I want to celebrate”.

This sense of solidarity and togetherness reminded me of a piece by the imprisoned Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah. In 2011, from Tora Prison, he addressed people’s fear that the unity experienced in Midan al-Tahrir during the revolution is ephemeral, and would not persist after the revolution toppled the state. He argues that “Nothing is exceptional in the Midan except our togetherness[...] If the state falls, it is not just the Midan that will remain; what will remain is the love of strangers and everything that impelled us towards the Midan, and everything that we learned in the Midan”.

This immortality of love for others, this persistence of the revolution, is palpable throughout the play. The characters of You Bury Me continuously assert that the revolution is not over, and that they always hold it within them. “The revolution is not dead, as hard as they tried to kill it, quite literally”, Ahlam affirms, “The point is that it happened, we were there, and we remember. This is part of the honouring and remembrance; saying not only did it happen, but it’s still happening, and it’ll happen again”.

You Bury Me mourns those lost in the revolution and its aftermath, it honours the beauty of first loves, and it looks towards the future for Egypt and the Arab Spring generation. “The play is very hopeful, but I think it's because I'm very hopeful”, Ahlam says earnestly, “I think the revolution happened, it's in our bodies, our memories, our ghosts, our plays, it’s in everything. And it's in the way we live life”. Ahlam, and You Bury Me, serve as a testament to the persistence of the Midan, in all its optimism and togetherness.

Find out more about You Bury Me here.