A new essay, “Before the Inevitable Ending: Time, Nâzım Hikmet, and the Sweet Potato Boy of Tahrir Square,” by alumna Andy Young (poetry, ’11), appears online in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
SINCE 2011, one of the mainstays of Tahrir Square, and the advent of its on-and-off occupation, is the presence of sweet potato sellers. Among the flags and protest banners, the throngs of citizens, and the hawkers of gas masks and cotton candy, the black metal potato stoves puff like small train engines. Twelve-year-old Omar Salah had been selling sweet potatoes for two years when he died in early February this year. He was shot twice by an Egyptian army conscript, “accidentally,” outside the gates of the US Embassy.
In Egypt, over the last two and a half years, thousands of people been killed by some type of authority attempting to contain protests — the police, the Central Security Forces, the Ministry of Interior, or, in Omar’s case, the army.
Regardless of who does the killing or holds the power, each death represents a stopped narrative, a ripple of grief, a person. As the deaths and their implications accumulate, as the blame is (or, in most cases, is not) assigned, the names blur and are replaced with numbers. Living in Egypt, I am constantly aware of, constantly overwhelmed by, the number or protests, the number of arrests, and especially the mounting number of the dead. Still, there was something about Omar’s death that stopped me, that made me want to know who he was. To remember his name.
