Dissident poet is allowed to speak, but Egypt's leaders aren't listening
Iman Bakry has risen to national prominence with her politically barbed verse about repression, corruption and poverty, appealing to the intellectual as well as the illiterate.
Reporting from Cairo — Iman Bakry has a fortuneteller's voice, husky and cracked. It coaxes you into her colloquial poems, which once were about romance, but have since shifted to a cutting critique of President Hosni Mubarak's government and an Egypt plagued by self-doubt, repression, corruption and a dangerous divide between rich and poor.
"I see a storm coming," begins a stanza in one of her poems.
Bakry is a media-savvy wordsmith who has risen to national prominence through television appearances and public readings. Her politically barbed verse articulates the frustrations and false dreams that have embittered a cynical public and laced the air with hints of rebellion. Opposition forces are often silenced and intimidated by the authoritarian government, but Bakry senses the anger welling.
"The explosion is already happening," she said in an interview in her Cairo apartment. "There's demonstrations, political activism, labor strikes, protests over clean water and bread shortages. All this signals the collapse of the whole society. We are walking to hell, toward a very dark future."
A former Arabic language teacher, Bakry has a curious relationship with the government she pillories. Until recently she headed the publishing department of the Egyptian Cultural Ministry. She resigned after complaining that her superiors resisted new writers and new ideas. She also sensed that some within the ruling National Democratic Party were fed up with her criticism of Mubarak's 27-year rule.
But Bakry has not been censored. She publishes and speaks when she wishes; she gets invited onto state-owned TV. And that, she said, illustrates the irritating, beguiling power of a police state that creates the veneer of democracy by tolerating a degree of freedom of expression.
Some dissident bloggers and political opponents are jailed. However, there is no reliable pattern of whom the government targets. The state allows certain artists such as Bakry, regarded by officials as passionate but harmless to national security, to write about whatever they choose, even if it causes a few politicians to wince. She skewers the state but does not directly call for unrest or overthrowing the government.
"Yes we can say it. The only problem is the regime doesn't listen to what we say," said Bakry. "The people listen to me instead of telling political jokes. My poetry allows them to vent, but as far as the government is concerned, neither I nor any other poet has much of an impact."
