Activist blogger Al Sharkawy about TH

Your imitation of the Abdel Karim post is very good, beside a few sounds that are anyway difficult to pronounce for non-native speakers. I think that it can have a positive effect for the freedom of expression, because very often the repetition of the same message in a different form will increase its strength and potential. In any case everyone should recognise that your imitations require a hard work from your side because you don’t speak Arabic and this aspect should contribute to draw attention to what is being transmitted.

The activist bloggers consider their blogs as an extension of the street and also the street as an extension of the virtual space of the internet. We use the blogs to organise the demonstrations, invite people to join in and then go and demonstrate, get arrested and report about that on the blogs. The popularity of my blog do have an effect on my own daily live. Sometimes people recognize me on the street and congratulate me for doing this. Most of the activists are bloggers and also friends. Our faces are well known by the state security, that’s why we cannot just meet and demonstrate peacefully. Our goal is to wake up the street to claim for a real freedom of expression. We believe that generally people feel solidary even if they are afraid to join us. The foreigners who come to witness what happens here are useful to us, because they report about these events and give us more visibility outside of Egypt.

Mozaar's comment about the TH

You know, it’s very funny because when I listen to your Talking Head imitations, it gives me the impression to hear the sound that you are receiving from the Arabic language. When I concentrate on the words I can more or less reconstruct the meaning, but when I listen to it as sound, then I see what you are actually hearing!
It makes me think about a piece of music that I brought with me from Zanzibar. (he plays it). They are singing in Swahili, an African language that has a lot of Arabic influences. To me it’s like if it where a song in Arabic. It sounds like Arabic without being it, like your work. What we are hearing is a tune from a CD I bought from a taxi driver, one of most beautiful music I ever heard. Zanzibar was a place where I felt very much in peace. The architecture, the streets, an island, a small piece of Africa which has fallen down in the sea, a Muslim population, speaking an African language, such a mix, a lot of Indians, Persians, British people… After their revolution in the 40’s, some socialist stuff, the mix of the culture was even obligatory…

Ash about CTH & freedom of speech

I’m quite sure that Teeth & Tongue won’t have any problem by repeating activists’ statements. But to build the conditions through which one could spread out insults against religion, religious people or against the government may be dangerous. If they want to be asking for trouble with you, they will do. Generally the amount of reasons to sue you is so wide and at the same time so intransparent that you never know. Moreover the Egyptian society is not used to surf on the web but for searching for pornography, chats or contacts with girls. The few web users interested in political issues are the activists. Regarding the blogosphere the government wanted to make a case of Kareem, because in its perspective an increasing number of activists were going too far on the web. Well-educated, bourgeois are leading this growing but still little scene that could be able with the help of the capital to change the political order. The point with Kareem is that he has been assuming his words at the court. It would have been very easy to avoid the condemnation, because one hardly establish the responsibility of a web-based statement. If Teeth & Tongue now ask me if with their audioblog they add a web-based tool in favour of freedom of speech, I would say no. It’s a kind of joke. They make abstraction out of serious things, perhaps in order to show the beauty of the language, but this trick remains an ironical one. Of course it’s a way to say things indirectly and people love it. It reminds me of a show we have here with this guy who can perfectly imitate Sadat’s voice while saying bad things about Israel. People laugh about it but however it still transmits a clear political message. One may consider it as a hint to the work of the bloggers, if not as a contribution. But now if they want me to read a Kareem’s text in order to repeat it afterwards, I’ll accept. No problem. I hope I would then become a refugee in their country.

Ash's comment about our imitation of his poem & the Talking Heads in general

(see previous post with our performance of his poem HERE)

Teeth caught the rhythm but not really the letters or the phonemes. He only touched the words through rhythm. He plays the real game, because the whole Arabic poetry has been written in this rhythm that is a meter, a timeline that is not related to the syntax. Although the modern poets use western rhythms now, only a few like me still write in the old one. So, one can say that he caught the rhythm in my voice, considering it as music, as a row of musical units or pieces. Altogether my poetry becomes abstract, so that I only understand 50 percents of the word-centred meaning.
Tongue concentrated more on the letters. They are more precise. His pronunciation is better. He caught the units of the words, the contours of which become here sharper, as if he knew them. Tongue really imitated my voice. I understand more than 70 percents, except regarding some letters that are particularly difficult to pronounce and that he should work on, if he wanted to learn the language. The combinations of letters reach very deeply into the language, they are also hard to be seized. But sometimes Tongue did touch them and in that case his voice relied on the very background of this text that is the Koran and its particular combinations and formulas. They are rare, beautiful and I was keen on imitating it, especially in that sentence which says, “when the monster sweeps the suns from the café of my blood” [tahshufushumuseh].

First to my surprise I found it clever, but now I see how sensitive this idea can be, because the emotion I’ve put into this poetry has moved into the voice of someone who ignores my mother tongue. It’s amazing how the spoken language keeps the feeling, even transferred through their blind performance. Although they can’t speak Arabic some word stay understandable and moreover the emotion. I don’t know how they managed to transmit my expression, not only my words but also my voice with both my particular way to pronounce phonemes and my rhythm. Of course something remains lost, which is a certain singular belonging to a culture, as a native speaker. So it’s neither the same profound sadness nor the same shallow I spoke out, but what I can hear here is my own expression that has been abstracted.

Explaining your silence: first comment by Ash, who we met in Cairo

I will tell you my opinion. The arabic is not clear. The one who is reading this arabic didn’t know arabic. He read latin letters but the text is arabic, so he writed in latin and he read it. That means the word itself is not clear and his prononciation of the letters is not good and he didn’t know what is the difference between this word and the other word, he didn’t stop with the ending of the word. Sometimes I understand 3-4 words, one word, and the rest I can’t understand it and sometimes I think that he is speaking in french or english. I understand 30 % of the words. He try to telling poetry, this I understand but the rest of the poetry is not clear.
The idea is to produce abstract group voices but sometimes I recognise that a voice is coming front and the rest is away. It remind me of Beethoven. Beethoven he is very complicated composer because he has this idea… you know how to walk, if you would like to walk you have to stand once and then a step further and you have to stand and the other…this back and forward work remind me of the human being brain, you can’t think many things in one time. He knows that so you have focus in one idea and the rest is backround. Beethoven he has four melodies in one time, one time he has one melody in front and the rest is in background but it all work together and then it moves to the second bar and third bar and fourth bar and than again and again. It’s allways Beethoven work in this way. This work is remind me of that because sometimes I have a voice coming and the other is a bit lower and then it’s back and then another one is coming, another one is coming, but group of voices you can’t recognise the mistakes and you didn’t recognise one text but I recognise that this text is really have the common idea of any tourist about Egypt and about Arab people that they like the blong girls and they speak about the fighting and violence and old history… first I’m asking myself when I hear something like that, something like, sorry to say it, like kind of racism like we put in a shelf that Arabs they like blond girls, violence and they are voices, very hard voices for fighting and violence. This three things is like kind of stereotypes. You going to prove to the europeans that they have right to judge and to put these people in that shelf that they have sex hunger and violence. What you would like to do with that ? It’s confusing you know. Especially when you speak about Saladin. Saladin is symbol for the Europeans that he is really violence and killed a lot of christian because of the crusades war. When you have this symbol it’s not a name it’s have history. This is what I thought that you’d like to bring me with this text.