The city and its martyrs: Cairo as the site of an alternative historiography in Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins

Abstract

Omar Robert Hamilton’s semi-autobiographical debut novel The City Always Wins (2017), presents the most recent fictional depiction of the Egyptian capital. The novel is based on the writer’s personal first-hand experience of the city, which predominantly staged the 2011 Egyptian version of the “Arab Spring”. In this context, it witnessed the people’s euphoric revolutionary spirit, as well as their subsequent sense of disillusionment. In the wake of the Revolution, Hamilton delineates the city as a palimpsestic site upon which the revolutionists attempt to commemorate their martyrs as well as to secure their imprint on its urban locale. The paper envisions Cairo as a city with a double entity, which manifests the contention between the official overpowering voice of an indifferent city, and the repressed “other” voice of the martyrs of the Revolution. The paper, thus, depicts the central character as a historiographer, whose mnemonic rhetoric portrays the martyrs as spectres returning from the dead. Hamilton’s novel, therefore, lends itself to a critique in the light of the concepts of mnemohistory and hauntology, against a challenging urban backdrop, so as to engage with an alternative historiography of the 2011 revolutionary outbreak and its aftermath.