Leila Zaki Chakravarti writing in Open Democracy:
The Egyptian Government’s anti-terrorism measures are causing subtle but significant shifts in Cairo’s vibrant informal service sector- illustrated through the experiences of one middle-class resident and her long-serving part-time cleaner.
“The revolution is a nakba.”More hereIn Egyptian colloquial Arabic the word nakba carries a special charge and force. It is reserved for calamities, catastrophes, disasters of the worst imaginable depth and scale such as Egypt’s defeat in the Six Day War. The speaker on this occasion is vehemently in support of the military takeover and subsequent election as President of former Field Marshal Abd El Fatah el-Sisi. She is a skilled working class woman who regularly moonlights from her job as a seamstress in a government-funded orphanage, working as a visiting cleaning lady for a roster of private clients in the city’s more affluent areas. One of these is Kawsar, a distant relative of mine, and it is at her flat that I get talking to Fadila (as I will call her), as she gets on with the dusting.
