Revolution Is My Name: An Egyptian Woman’s Diary from Eighteen Days in Tahrir

4166693Mona Prince 
Translated by Samia Mehrez 
English edition   Sep  2014
200 pp. Paperback 
$16.95 /LE90 
ISBN 978 977 416 669 3 

 
“For thinking about how the collective memory of revolution is being created right now, even as the revolution regains its steam, there is no better place to start than with Mona Prince’s remarkable memoir of the 25 January Uprising. . . . Revolution is My Name tells the story of revolution as it unfolds over eighteen days. It is a literary memoir in the best sense of the word. By this, I mean that it expresses and reflects on, rather than documents a set of lived experiences. Moreover, it is not merely a story about the unfolding of a revolution as told by a participant who was there. Arguably, the more important story is about the character of the narrator developing as an evolving, complicated revolutionary.”—Jadaliyya

What it was like and how it felt to be an Egyptian woman revolutionary during the eighteen days that changed Egypt forever 

Mona Prince’s humorous and insightful memoir tells of one woman’s journey as a hesitant revolutionary through the eighteen days of the Egyptian uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Alongside the brutal violence of the security forces, the daily battles of resistance, and the author’s own abduction and beating at the hands of the police, this is a story of exceptional solidarity, perseverance, and humanity. Juggling humor and horror, hope and fear, certitude and anxiety, Prince immerses us in the details of each unpredictable and fateful day. She mixes the political and the personal, the public and the private to expose and confront divisions within her family, as well as her own social prejudices, which she discovers through encounters with diverse sectors of society, from police conscripts to street children. Revolution Is My Name is a testimony not only of women’s participation in the Egyptian uprising and their courage in confronting constrictive gender divides at home and on the street, but equally of their important contribution as chroniclers of the momentous events of January and February 2011.
Mona Prince was born in Cairo in 1970. She is associate professor of English Literature at Suez Canal University in Egypt. She has published novels (including So You May See, AUC Press, 2011) and short stories in Arabic, and has translated both poetry and short stories. In 2012, she nominated herself for the Egyptian presidency in the run-up to the country’s first ever democratic presidential elections. Samia Mehrez is professor of Arabic literature in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilization and director of the Center for Translation Studies at the American University in Cairo. She is the author of The Literary Atlas of Cairo (AUC Press, 2010) and The Literary Life of Cairo (AUC Press, 2011), and editor of Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (AUC Press, 2012).
http://www.aucpress.com/p-4896-politics-economics-and-social-issues.aspx