For the first time during my travels abroad, I decided to keep a journal, expecting that I would want to record and process the extraordinary experiences I knew I was going to have. Since I am a careful observer of foreign cultures and always try to get to know local artists, this journal, quite unintentionally, became schizophrenic: half a Western tourist’s Orientalist musings and half the attempts of a student of culture to understand Egypt’s political and cultural economies. Reading it again in light of the uprising in Tahrir Square, I realized that my schizophrenic prose had unwittingly captured a “state of emergency,” a moment of coming-into-being, which, Walter Benjamin notes, “is not the exception but the rule,” and of which we become sensible only by hearkening to the “tradition of the oppressed.” These entries thus document a state of emergency which, like all such states, becomes recognizable only in retrospect. To my own journal, I append the first two emails I received from Egyptian friends after the revolution began.
It’s so easy to get it wrong. Soon after arriving in Beirut, I end up at a kefta stand; a small, garage-like shack that no tourist would voluntarily set foot in. Yet the kefta and the chicken skewers taste fantastic. While eating, I look around. Straight across, there is a bus terminal. Especially in the darkness, it is at first difficult … 
My flat is located in the Armenian neighbourhood of Geitawi. It is beautiful and spacious. Directly across, a man shouts every ten minutes. He used to teach Arabic, then he got fired. Now he teaches the street swearwords and curses, of which the Arabic language knows many. The light goes on and his voice thunders … 
