January's children: Men and women in purgatory

Al Manassa did well to present a special file titled “Gen Z & the Revolution| Speak, and be seen,” a collection of essays and reflections on the meaning, consequences and lessons of the January Revolution for those who lived through it as children—as shadows and onlookers—and who are now men and women in their 20s with generally democratic and progressive leanings. In my view, this is a more precise description than labels such as “Gen Z” or the “zero-one generation.”

The file’s title alone reveals something of our present condition: more than 20 writers rendered invisible, children of a time in which people rarely disclose what stirs in their minds. Expression becomes less a disciplined debate and more a cry rising from beneath the rubble.

When I shared the file with a friend, he responded with unease—even irritation—arguing that several essays were written from a narrow vantage point. What they lacked, he said, was “agency”: the capacity to dream in a way that sustains belief in one’s ability to act, influence, and decide—and thus to imagine launching a new experiment under the harsh conditions of the present. Were they to recover that capacity, he added, they would deserve another name altogether—neither “Gen Z” nor, certainly, “January’s children.”

I told him that however methodologically sound the idea may be, it cannot vault over a reality that weighs heavily on these young women and men at the threshold of their lives. Such an approach builds no bridge and reaches no harbor. People remain suspended in January’s memory not out of romantic indulgence, but because of the material conditions produced by the revolution’s defeat—conditions followed by a systematic effort to uproot every political, economic, and social factor that might reopen that door.

The January Revolution was seismic. It shattered symbolic structures and dismantled inherited meanings. It altered the consciousness and psychology of rulers and ruled alike, reshaping the terms of their former social contract. Those who came after, found themselves living in a liminal world governed by fear and apprehension—and, for some, by the need to rediscover the wheel, perhaps even fire.

In 2016, in an article titled “January’s ghosts await self-critique and reckoning,” I likened the revolution to a stone hurled from above that crushed a village of mud-brick houses, exposing their fragility—only to fragment itself soon after, leaving behind a desolate void demanding rare resolve and deliberate reconstruction.

January destroyed an old world, especially at the ideological and symbolic levels. It has yet to build a new one—unless the reader considers themselves alive within a “republic” to begin with, let alone a new one.

From within this liminal terrain, with all its contours, the 20 contributors wrote their essays. That explains—and in many ways justifies—why January remains a central event even for those who experienced it as children.

A revolution that died and fertilized the mud

At the personal level, revolutions are human experiences in which time thickens. It grows denser the more deeply one is entangled in it.

Revolutionary time is exhausting and painful for all who inhabit it, regardless of position. The pendulum of emotion and perception swings freely, often violently. Conflict, and its lessons, consumes the individual’s psychological and physical energy, whether they emerge victorious or defeated.

Gasser El-Dabea touched on this in his essay on the January generation, which he described as traumatized after performing a miracle. The same may apply to all who took part, across positions and allegiances—not only to revolutionaries. Trauma is not the twin of defeat; violent victories also leave their mark.

Collectively, revolutions mark the boundary between eras. They consign what preceded them to a bygone time and forcibly shape what follows.

Victorious revolutions inaugurate a new world that initially feels harsh and unfamiliar, then gradually settles into authority and routine. Defeated revolutions, by contrast, yield devastation that can stretch across decades. During that span, society begs for the minimum required to sustain life, beneath ever-lowering ceilings, suspended between reluctant acceptance, despair and numbness. We need little help identifying where we stand.

January 2011 is not an aberration in modern Egyptian history. The country has witnessed other concentrated moments of spectacular popular uprising. Each left scars on the decades that followed—lessons some absorbed, others ignored.

The Cairo Fire, which erupted for a single day on Jan. 26, 1952, directly hastened the Free Officers’ decision to seize power through a military coup, which they framed as rescuing the state and public order. 

The blaze itself—a moment of sweeping destruction in the capital’s wealthiest districts—became a lasting obsession. Its status as collective trauma is evident in the competing and contradictory official and popular accounts of its causes to this day. Nearly everyone accuses everyone else, except the event’s principal actors: the poor residents of Cairo’s working-class neighborhoods bordering Khedivial Cairo.

Twenty-five years later, Egypt faced another social uprising in 1977 that lasted just two days: Jan. 18 and 19, known as the Bread Intifada. Those two days were sufficient to instill in the state a deep fear of violent public backlash should it implement radical subsidy cuts recommended by the International Monetary Fund.

That delicate caution endured until 2014, when the government introduced austerity measures that included raising fuel prices and reducing subsidies.

What, then, of a political and social experience that remained alive—even epic—for years rather than days? Millions participated, intersecting from divergent positions. For some, it was 18 days culminating in the fall of the head of state by popular will—a first in modern Egyptian history. For others, it was a political and social trajectory extending three or four years beyond the revolution’s peak.

How do we begin to imagine the impact of January as the longest, most intense and most comprehensive popular uprising in this country’s history? How do we grasp its imprint on the consciousness of rulers and ruled alike?

It remains too early to judge. Measuring such impact is nearly impossible amid more than a decade of sustained repression that constricts freedom and expression—let alone careful study.

January has ended, yet it persists in its death—ghost-laden and relentless. From this vantage point, Seif El-Din Ahmed’s call appears both logical and necessary: those who lived the experience consciously must break the silence and prevent the memory of those who were children from being surrendered to distortion or emptiness.

January, paternalism and political inheritance

We must confront a persistent issue whose roots trace back to the revolution itself. One of January’s foundational misfortunes was its deliberate confinement to the label of a “youth revolution”—a framing echoed today in the fixation on “Gen Z,” and one that reproduces paternalistic relations in Egyptian politics.

To “generationalize” the revolution and brand it as youthful was one entry point to undermining and uprooting it. Youth, by definition, is presumed innocent and inexperienced. The voice narrating this story is that of a father urging a rebellious child to calm down and wait.

In the lexicon of that moment, youth was not merely innocent but apolitical—as though politics were contamination and innocence a form of purity. Celebrating innocence and non-politics became a hollow ritual.

What was once hailed, at the height of ascent, as pure and untainted by ideology could later, in moments of retreat, be recast as naïve, reckless and inexperienced. The same youth could be portrayed as deceived and manipulated, eventually reduced to the status of a fifth column. 

This was the residue of the paternalism embedded in half the July Republic at the revolution’s onset—a paternalism January’s sons and daughters themselves accepted when they embraced the role of “children” in the script, whether out of opportunism, ease or misplaced cleverness.

We now inhabit an even bleaker stage, in which the world’s most “democratic” societies assign generations their defining traits before they are born. Those now in their 20s were labeled “Gen Z” in the late 1990s—before they existed. Children under 10 are already designated “Gen Alpha.” The principal, perhaps sole, criterion for these classifications is each cohort’s relationship to technology.

This unfolds in countries that long accused their ideological adversaries of totalitarianism and social engineering. If defining a generation’s contours before its birth is not a form of social engineering—even authoritarianism—what is?

Those in their 20s are not “Gen Z,” because they are not yet a generation. A generation is, by definition, the product of historicization—the summoning of memory once experience has run its course.

On Jan. 27, 2011, those who would descend into the streets the following day were not known as the “Jan. 28 generation.” People are the children of their experiences, even when those experiences remain unfinished. When they do reach completion, they carve out a name and inscribe it into history.

No one remains a child forever. But one may spend a lifetime imprisoned in the cell of adolescence.

Pleas from purgatory

Most contributors to the file revisit childhood memory and January as a radiant moment embodied in their parents—towering figures in their formative worlds. For many, January resembles a collective father: they yearn for his return even as they seek to shatter his idol.

Marwan Mehrez articulated this liminal awareness with particular clarity. January’s most enduring impact on his contemporaries—despite its immense moral centrality—was the formation of a cautious political consciousness, alert to risk, attuned to power’s complexities and burdened with far more questions than answers.

Nihal Salama’s essay reflected a sharper awareness of the need to move beyond this limbo and to attempt answers to Mehrez’s questions through concrete entry points. She rejects confinement within a generational label and insists that politics must translate into tools, organization and structure.

She harbors no illusions about the sufficiency of formal legal rights while economic sovereignty remains compromised.

Nihal also gently challenged the January generation’s romantic excesses. She warned against dissipating emotion into wasted energy and offered a quiet critique of the “performance of fragility” that followed the revolution’s defeat.

Murad Abdelmaqsoud approaches similar ground in firmer, more declarative language. He relegates the question of toppling regimes to the margins beside what he calls “liberating the Egyptian person.” He argues for building a political organization capable of planting ideas before public squares overflow.

Among the youngest contributors, Murad maintains that political radicalism does not automatically yield social progressivism. He privileges organized will over the material conditions that generate forces of change.

Connection, rupture and accumulation

As the file’s title urges speech, many contributors call on veterans of the revolution intself to speak as well. That is a necessary beginning.

Modern Egyptian history, as I read it, unfolds in political, social and intellectual tides that rise for a few years—flowers bloom, the most sincere calls are heard, the deepest ideas mature—before receding under repression and frustration, leaving the worst and most mediocre entrenched. The outcome is a recurring civilizational rupture.

This pattern followed the 1919 Revolution, the student and labor surge between 1946 and 1954 and the second student wave between 1968 and 1977.

January, in its ebb and flow, was the most embodied of these peaks. For all its extraordinary achievements, the backlash it provoked was the most violent in our history, to the point that the educated and the cultured became targets by default.

The task of this file—and of all of us—is to reconnect what has been severed through steady accumulation and patient work during periods of ebb. One marker of our societies’ stagnation is the squandering of what has already been built, forcing successive generations to rediscover what their predecessors uncovered a century ago, only to debate it again from zero.

It is no coincidence that in Egypt we remain captive to questions first posed by the national movement in the early 20th century: equality in citizenship, women’s rights, minority rights, bureaucracy and the condescension directed at the peasantry as both existence and culture.

In times of limbo, preserving accumulation and restoring continuity is itself an achievement.

More crucial still are serious revisions. Such revision demands theoretical and philosophical grounding through which one can understand lived experience. It requires reading, systematic knowledge, diligence, focus and collective labor.

Above all, it requires humility—so that revision does not devolve into spectacle, a display of fragility masquerading as refinement. Or, as Nihal Salama wrote, the dissolution of politics into tears—or into an impotent anger.