In the Tahrir Square demonstrations that brought down President Mubarak in 2011, protesters sang two of Negm’s most famous verses. One was from ‘The brave men are brave’:
The brave men are brave
The cowards are cowardly
Come with the brave
Together to the Square
The second emphasized the disparity between the powerful and the disenfranchised:
Who are they and who are we?
They are the princes and the sultans
They are the ones with wealth and power
And we are the impoverished and deprived
Negm had the admirable gift of seeing through the nonsense put out by government officials that encouraged the common man to be acquiescent with his fate in Egypt. When a government doctor appeared on television telling people to be glad they could not afford to buy meat as it was unhealthy for them and that they should stick to the basic diet of beans, Negm responded in verse cutting through the patronizing rhetoric of the doctor:
What do you think, Dr Mohsen?
You less than reliable source
Let us eat meat and die
We’ll let you eat beans and live
Nasser was mocked as one who loved his countrymen so greatly that he could not help but take away their freedoms, and of Mubarak Negm quipped,
The President is a compassionate man
Constantly, busily working for his people
Busy gathering their money
Outside in Switzerland, saving it for us…
Poor guy, looking out for our future
Can’t you see his kindly heart?
His belief that poetry can act as an expression of resistance and opposition is succinctly illustrated in ‘The Strike’:
How sweet are the poems?
In times of bitter hardship…and the songs
How sweet are the spoken words of love?
In times of privation
You will not find a definitive works of Ahmed Fouad Negm in local bookshops or a standard bibliography online. His poetry was banned in Egypt and often existed only as cassette recordings smuggled out of prison. Nevertheless, whilst those who imprisoned him are long dead, the words and views of Negm live on.

Ahmed Fouad Negm: The Revolutionary Poet of the People

Cookies Policy