In these first lines of Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said insists on the porosity between past and present, on their irremediable connectedness,

Throughout this book, I have been arguing that representations of the past are ultimately a function of our present. In my introduction, I insisted on Walter Benjamin's argument that the images of the past that survive are those that the present could recognise as ones ‘of its own concerns’ (Benjamin 1969: 255). Following Benjamin, I have tried to show in the preceding chapters that what remains, and what is lost, of those ‘flashes’ of memory, is ultimately a function of the present, of the power struggles of each historical period, between the ‘victor’ and the ‘oppressed.’ In this chapter, I show that this porosity between past and present is nowhere as striking as in the connection between 1919 and 2011. Although those two revolutionary moments obviously have many dissimilarities, there are striking resemblances in the energies and emotions unleashed by both revolutions. The successive anger, joy, fear and disillusion experienced in 2011 enabled writers and artists to connect in new modes with century-old emotions. The defeat, with its deep bitterness, brought to life ‘flashes’ of memory hitherto lost in successive presents where they could not be recognised as meaningful.

In this chapter, I focus on two narratives about 1919 written and produced in 2014: a play by Laila Soliman (1981), Hawa al-Hurriyya, translated as Whims of Freedom, and a novel by Ahmed Mourad (1978), titled 1919. Both narratives attempt to ‘rewrite history’, by offering alternative representations of 1919 to those hitherto dominant about that key moment in the anti-colonial struggle.