Inter-generational defeat

“Someone after me will plant an ax in my skull.”

This cry echoes from the character of Said, a journalist and poet, in Salah Abdel Sabour’s 1971 play “Leila and the Madman.” It appears in a strikingly titled poem within the play “Diaries of a Defeated Prophet Holding a Pen, Awaiting a Prophet Holding a Sword.”

The play concludes with the Cairo Fire of January 26, 1952 at the headquarters of a revolutionary magazine. The nightmarish atmosphere of the play arguably alludes to the Nasserite era, especially in the wake of the 1967 defeat.

Against the backdrop of these two historical moments, the narrative unfolds through six journalists—Said, Leila, Ziyad, Hanan, Hassan, and Salma—and their editor, known simply as “the professor,” who tries to unite the fragmented group of young reporters who lack experience of life and love. To bring them together, he invites them to rehearse Ahmed Shawqi’s version of “Leila and Majnun”, the classic tragic love story, casting Said as the lover Qays and Leila as her namesake, and dividing the remaining roles among the group.

Bygone generations

In the poem’s title I sense a conflict between two generations, old and new, one of speech and one of action.

Abdel Sabour offers a harsh portrayal of this inter-generational relationship. The tool of symbolic vengeance—or redemption—between generations is not a knife, which implies a crime, nor poison, which implies conspiracy and betrayal, but an ax: an object of brutal finality, echoing a more ancient time when axes were the chosen means of execution.

Why then does Said, a symbol of the old generation, speak in the register of martyrdom, despair, and inferiority? And which defeat is meant? Since defeat, whatever it may be, is not exclusive to a specific generation. Is it the sin committed by the old generation for which it offers itself as a sacrifice for the new generation?

Why does Said fully entitle the younger generation to take its revenge, even though both generations possess the symbolic power of prophecy as reflected in the title of his poem.

Perhaps the generation that is defeated, or senses defeat, ages quickly without the passage of years. It is consumed in flames where it is, and immediately assumes the position of the old generation, even if it is still young, like Said and his colleagues. Defeat, then, eradicates the future—and the imagination inherent within it—for one generation, and bestows it upon another that is coming. And perhaps the most important symptom of the absence of a future is absolute despair.

Perhaps the right to vengeance that Said grants the younger generation is a form of compensation for the suffering they are yet to endure. In this light, the right to absolute condemnation of the past generation becomes an inheritance.

I recall a personal moment at a gathering with my father and his friends in the late 1970s, just as I was beginning university, I blurted out a damning critique of the pre-revolutionary generation, calling it the bygone generation that lived through the monarchy’s corruption and wallowed in its filth.

My father erupted in anger. It was one of the few times I witnessed his indignation stem from something greater than his own pride. I felt deep embarrassment, until one of his friends, whose family’s cotton business had been nationalized, intervened. He told my father I wasn’t at fault, but rather a victim of Nasserist propaganda that had vilified the pre-revolutionary era as regressive.

It reminded me of Naguib Mahfouz’s novel “Autumn Quail", in which Issa al-Dabbagh, already in his thirties, finds himself consumed by the revolution and prematurely inducted into the bygone generation.

A moment of catharsis

Returning to the problem of generations, there is always inevitable psychological and physical overlap between them. This overlap allows the younger generation to inherit what it resents in its elders: the martyr’s pose, the pathologies of defeat. There is always something larger than vengeance in the quest for justice—something the rigid-minded character Said fails to see. Perhaps even Abdel Sabour himself, and his generation born of the 1967 defeat, missed it too.

There can be no transcendent leap from one generation and era to another, except as fleeting performance. This moment consumes the anger driving change, yet paradoxically, it is also a pivotal moment of purification, intensely complex and interconnected. However, it quickly vanishes and dissolves amidst other concepts that come to dominate the culture and contexts of change, resulting in everything returning to its place afterwards.

It is this very moment of purification that drives Said, the symbol of the older generation, to make a corporeal offering. His life becomes the price he pays to redeem this defeat and prove the purity and innocence of his generation, despite its failure.

Defeat here is not total, for there remains a faint possibility of redemption. But the play does not explore that postponed future. It stops at the declaration of loss—a loss that, perhaps until today, still dominates.

The redeemer

Said’s state of defeat is pre-exisiting. He calls himself “the defeated prophet,” not only because of the collective failure but also because of personal scars, what he calls his black box of memories: images of his father’s death during his childhood, his mother’s remarriage to a man who treated them with cruelty in exchange for financial support.

Alongside this personal pain lies a shared wound: the collective defeat of Egyptian society in 1967. The play never names it outright, but its suffocating atmosphere looms large. Its shadow shapes the generation of both Abdel Sabour and his protagonist. From this soil, the diaries of the “defeated prophet” begin—diaries of those who were crucified by defeat.

Perhaps the hidden presence of the 1967 defeat in the play explains why the theme of sacrifice emerges so starkly in Egyptian culture. Perhaps defeat/victory grants each generation its coherence, its bonds, and even its right to survival or extinction.

Said writes himself into a scene of crucifixion:

I am hung by my wrists from two ropes

These ropes are my cross and the resurrection of my soul

Freedom and love

Freedom is a flash of lightning that may only burst forth on gloomy days

A flash that my eyes and the eyes of my exhausted generation might glimpse

But love hovers close to me

Perhaps, the unspoken defeat of 1967 lies behind the ritual of sacrifice that has emerged in Egyptian culture, whether as the crucifixion or death without resurrection for that culture in the mind of the author. Therefore, Abdel Sabour reaches for a religious image: Christ on the cross, at the critical moment that demands a redeemer in the theological sense.

Perhaps this is also why Abdel Sabour sets the play before the 1952 revolution. It is as if he is anticipating the revolution and the arrival of that redeemer in the form of Gamal Abdel Nasser. It is also possible to read the play’s atmosphere as an indictment of the Nasserist era itself, where the 1967 defeat became one of the defining markers of its generation. This reading feels more compelling.

The time to come

The poetic journal that runs through the play opens with the line “One who comes after me,” a phrase repeated so often that it gradually erases the present. What remains is a suspended state, the wait for salvation, resolution, and justice. The future becomes everything. It is the era that revolutionary poets like Amal Dunqul wrote of, as in his collection Al-Ahd al-’Ati/The Coming Testament.

The poet not only sees who will come after, but he also witnesses the ruin of his own moment. And so he warns the people of his city:

Rise up or die

A greater terror is on the way

All await the messianic figure, the symbol of a new generation, who will restore justice, and wield the sword, or ax, of action, instead of the blunted sword of language. To this expected redeemer, Said, the poet of the past, offers himself completely, giving up his skull to the ax.

A perplexed time

Said responds to Ziyad, his colleague at the magazine and in the play, when the latter accuses their generation of being “filled with the defeated, already dead before their death”:

That’s true, Ziyad.

I feel we are a generation that died before it was born.

We can’t accomplish anything—not even love.

Here, we confront a double time that combines both birth and death simultaneously. Said and Ziyad’s generation is dead while still alive, before actual death comes. Life becomes an extended death, where the force of ending overtakes the power of beginning. It is a time when nothing new can appear.

In his “Prison Notebooks" Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci described something similar during the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in his country: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Though abstract, Gramsci’s formulation feels hauntingly apt for moments like these—political or personal. When both the old and the new are in states of weakness, what flourishes instead is confusion or desperate, obscure, and distorted forms of thought.

The inter-generational struggle remains unresolved. Words remain unsaid that could have conveyed the innocence of uncompleted births. The old that is perishing wraps itself around the new, smothering it, delaying its emergence. We are still waiting.

In the 1980s and 1990s, during a similar period of birth pangs, our generation had no chance, either in life or in literature, to openly wield the ax and strike down the generation before us. Instead, we inherited the burden of their defeat. Everyone, it seemed, was simultaneously sinner and redeemer.

Still, we had Freud. In our imagination, we embraced his symbolic patricide, the slaying of the generational father. No real blood was spilled, only metaphor. There were tears, though, exchanged across generations, like the tears of Mohsen Mohieddin playing Yehia in the 1971 film “Alexandria… Why?” when he parts from his father on the quayside in Alexandria as he departs for America.

Sacrificial blood and tears were scattered among the tribes, while guilt remained free, circulating across generations, distributing accusations and violations in equal measure.

A scene from the January revolution

During the early, joyful days of the January 2011 revolution, once the threat had receded and the celebrations of victory began, the features of a new generation rapidly took shape. In that moment, I earned the title of “Hagg,” (literally, one who has performed the Hajj, but used colloquially to address one’s elders) with all the age distinctions it implies.

I could see the sharpened ax in the eyes of some young, non-politicized people who had been taken aback by what had happened. They responded with swift, intuitive defiance—and turned a condescending gaze towards the older generations now that authority had withdrawn from the streets.

This was in contrast to the first days of the revolution, when age itself seemed to dissolve. The revolution became a fluid age in which all ages melted into a shared average, distributed evenly across the crowd. In that brief utopia, everyone regardless of age was part of an ageless collective.

The paternal archive

A new episode of generational tension is now playing out on social media. It has taken the form of a battle over the archive. Old truths are being rediscovered and re-argued, many of them tied to the 1967 defeat, the truce with Israel, and Abdel Nasser’s position on it. Familiar questions return, questions the older generation has already answered through various readings of history by historians and amateurs as well.

The return of these questions is not an irony of history. Nor is it a free choice made by the younger generation. The real culprit is forgetting or the gap between generations and the different tools each uses to seek knowledge and understand their context. Many overlapping generations remain stuck between the death of one world and the birth of another. Perhaps this is why the necessary intellectual disciplines have struggled to emerge.

In this sense, the archive becomes the savior, the new generation’s spiritual father. Or it becomes the son, the new generation wielding the ax against the mind and group conscience of the old.

The core argument is being dragged into a new class arena. Naturally, a class gaze will favor those who own more—more information, more archive. And so the archive, once a tool for uncovering truth, becomes a source of dominance and exploitation, because it will not be distributed fairly.