On 12 February 2011, one day after the hundreds of thousands of people who had occupied Tahrir square for eighteen days had withdrawn, I witnessed a scene on the midan that left a durable impression on me. President Hosni Mubarak had just stepped down, and I expected to find in Tahrir some sense of the joy and excitement I had experienced the night before. Instead, the midan was pulsing with tension; heated discussions were taking place between youth who refused to fold up their tents and those who vehemently pushed them to do so. Among the many disturbing scenes I witnessed that day, I saw tens of youth frantically cleaning up the square– although it had never been dirty throughout those eighteen days. They were gathering the pavement stones demonstrators had patiently taken off one by one to be used in the battles against the baltagiyyas (thugs), and washing slogans off the dark green metallic fences with sponges and dish soap (Heshmat 2012: 100–1).

In the following days, not only slogans were wiped off from the walls and fences, but a more general, all-encompassing operation of erasure began, and the 25 January revolution was actively re-written in an elitist manner. The complexity of the extra-ordinary moment we had gone through was simplified through a focus on the sit-in, detaching it from its context and from the still unfolding revolutionary momentum.