When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Egypt

Egypt: Metaphysical Walls After State Abduction Of Our Friend

Alaa was taken away by the Egyptian state. Mohamed al-Baqer, a human rights lawyer, was also detained when he showed up to attend Alaa’s interrogation.

You may not make it up. You may never come down.
You may not make it up. You may never come down.
Sarah Rifky and Lina Attalah

CAIRO — On Sunday morning, our friend, the ghost of spring past, was abducted. For the past six months, Alaa has emerged every morning at 6:01 am outside of the Dokki police station, where he spends 12 hours every night. These are the terms of his 60-month probation. Today, he would have successfully completed 10 percent of it. Alaa, a techie, activist, father and writer, has been in prison for five years. In another four, Alaa will have spent the entirety of his thirties locked up, serving his sentences, full and part-time. By 2024, it will have been 10 years since he was convicted of breaking the protest law.

Alaa was taken to State Security Prosecution. Mohamed al-Baqer, a human rights lawyer, was also detained when he showed up to attend Alaa's interrogation. They were both assigned to Case 1356/2019. After hours of waiting, a rushed session concluded with a list of four charges, none of which have been formally confirmed. Despite attempts to report on the case quickly and accurately, what we know is what we are told, and we retell. Through relays of words from lawyers and family, we believe the charges are ones commonly fabricated by the authorities: "joining an illegal organization" and "receiving foreign funding" through said organization, "spreading false news' and doing so by "misusing social media." Both Alaa and Mohamed are being held for 15 days in remand detention. Following the interrogation by prosecutors, they were relocated. Their whereabouts remain unknown today. Families of both men are out looking for them.

A few days ago, together with his son on the playground, Alaa was telling us about climbing a tree. Khaled would run toward a tree, climb up its trunk, feel its bark, get stuck, and not be able to climb down. "Who does he take after?" Alaa asked. The question, largely rhetorical, has to do with the capacity for imagination. Some of it is hereditary, perhaps. We run toward causes, incite revolutions, fall in love. Let's just say they are all adventures in nature, in our nature.

What happens when one climbs up a tree and can't get down?

More so, what happens when one climbs up a tree and can't get down? More and more, it feels like everyone is stuck in trees. The descent from treetops is an enduring task, both physically and mentally — except for superheroes, perhaps.

Alaa is a comics fan. (We don't share that interest.) However, in moments like arbitrary detentions, especially when repeated, it inspires something of the fantastical as a means to political imagination. In a simple sense, when someone you love gets arrested or detained in the conditions we are in, in which action is impossible, one can feel their own body split and phantasms emerge. Superhero feelings. Wings grow and hands multiply into mechanical extensions that do many things at once — we become cyborgs, with the quantum sentience of being in many places at once. Teleportation is real; we are in at least two places in an instant. In time, it is unheard of that anyone gets stuck in a tree. For years, we have been drafting plans for cities in treetops, a type of commune: We all live in our own tree houses, together.

A tree that grows in Egypt ... — Photo: Adamina

Wittgenstein once asked, "What if something really unheard-of happened?" A metaphysical question, which is intended to examine what we would say — or write — or how we would react. (When the unheard of has happened.) A logician and philosopher of mathematics, he imagined how houses would turn into steam, or cows would graze upside down, laugh and speak unintelligibly. In his book, On Certainty (published posthumously in 1969), he also wondered what would happen if trees changed into men, and men into trees. (In mythology it is often women who turn into trees). In a city of people-turned-trees, perhaps in climbing and being stuck, our plight is that of an acrobatic human pyramid, rather than simply a matter of someone being stuck in a tree-tree. We are stuck together, trying to be trees, in some bizarre tower of sorts, scattered.

It is not normal to accept the current state of things.

What are trees, and how many are in Cairo, still? Are we them? And are we stuck trying to climb down, trees and each others' bodies, petrified? This is a different type of arboreality.

This is not normal. It is not normal to accept the current state of things.

An uneasy version of the really unheard-of is really happening for real. Alaa, already serving a post-prison probation sentence, is imprisoned again. A recursive nightmare, which also entails the illogical abduction of the law itself: Mohamed, a human rights lawyer and director of the Adalah Center for Rights and Freedoms, founded in 2014 — the same year Alaa was first imprisoned — while representing Alaa during his detention.

There is no doubt that this moment is one that has left everyone, ourselves included, in a petrified state, whether we might think of ourselves as entangled masses of people-trees, or, perhaps more simply, as those who have climbed up trees and gotten stuck, amid dense branches, frozen in fear. While the more likely imagination in this scenario is to cry and reach out for a hand to help us climb down or someone to catch us falling, there's also another solution: Let's just build treehouses and stay up there. Let's embrace the arboreal.

We are drafting a tender call for proposals from gifted children with treehouse-building experience, and bird watchers who are hobby engineers.

For now.

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

Keep reading...Show less

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

The latest