The old prediction made by a medieval prophet that iron will one day mix with blood and flesh, is an accurate description of our times.  Probably no other time in history had witnessed a so blatant violation of the human body by machines before now.  Yet in the last century, war took its heavy machinery out of battlefields to the streets for a very good reason: the enemy has now become the street protester, and not solely renegades plotting overthrows in remote mountain caves, secretly dealing in weapon exchanges with invisible tribes across borders.

For the first time in the Arab world, mass culture is turning into an important agent of change. Culture?  Yes, culture.  Symbols replete with insinuations, word plays, puns, pictures, fashion, anything and everything could fit into this cauldron.  Mass culture is now transforming history and may be on its way to change the map of the world very soon; politicians, who had for so long allied themselves with the cosy arrangements of western democracies to ‘keep the damage within limits’, failed to see the early signs of an inevitable change coming, and the result is that they are now being trodden down in the march of history. 

source:  http://imgs.fatcap.org/8994/opct_550d51aa27ac9a924a2293b508a2a21f.jpg

Born in the street, this new form of art shamelessly declares its affiliation with the street, and constantly reaffirms this affiliation, for the street is both inspiration and safety.  ‘We’ll keep Going,’ a recent poem by Egyptian poet Hishal El Gakh drew my attention to the subtle forces at play in the simple picture of a protester fighting a cop in the street, a picture which we have grown to take for granted recently.  Because ‘doors scare us’ as El Gakh says, street art protest affirms and re-affirms its affinity with the only place where it can be, the only place that has witnessed the death of hungry vagrants and angry mobs, and where police patrols routinely stop and search suspected law breakers who are none but the future poets and artists of the street. But where police states prevail, youth have gained immunity against oppressive systems, and a fresh creativity was born out of deep frustration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TmnX0X0R28

But for how long shall this resistance persist?   

When thousands of young people in the United States took to the streets in the sixties to protest the injustice of the system, they transformed their angry gripes into creative art that favoured peaceful yet poignant manifestations of radically different opinions.  When it became evident that force cannot stifle these movements, the machine of capitalist greed succeeded in the least imaginable way, by transforming the acts of protest into a ‘lifestyle’ which was displayed on shop windows.  It is no surprise that the protests of young Arab youth attracted the attention of the west before that of the Arab rulers who have been thinking in terms of the classic patterns of power, based mainly on torture and violent physical oppression, encouraged by the support and the blessings of western democracies. 

Following the toppling of the first dictator in Tunisia, a deluge of books and academic articles flooded libraries and websites; it was so quick that one could not help wondering: when did those academics and writers find the time to write them?  And most of all, where was their visionary talent before that, and why were youths always excluded in their early forecasts?

Western democracies failed to see that history could repeat itself and that frustration may result in the same patterns across the globe, but they seem to be now fast adjusting to this new reality.  To Arabs, the experience is novel and scary, both to political authorities and to protesters.  A door has just been opened, and no one knows yet whether it is Pandora’s Box or a box of treasures.  We are now looking at the persecuted protesters of past regimes turn into political leaders in the last few months, but whether they will bring the creative spirit of street protest into the political world, or whether politics will impose on them its old patterns, is yet to be decided.  But despite the vagaries of political and ideological tides that threaten post-revolutionary times, a truth has unfolded and is becoming unflinchingly certain:  protest is a continuous process, and the street will remain the site over which protesters will always be able to inscribe these words: ‘we’ll keep going’.