Brash

In this audacious autobiography, Egypt’s most dangerous resistance artist proves he’s as much a storyteller as poet

Brash is the memoir of Egypt’s most notorious resistance poet, Ahmed Fouad Negm. Writing in a vernacular jazz that is smooth and clear, rough and rude, Negm spins a subaltern tale told nowhere else in Middle Eastern literature. From the amazing events of his childhood in a dirt village run by cruel feudal overlords, to his desperate days as a factotum in the British military bases of the Suez Canal, to his sad stint as a petty criminal and then prison inmate, Negm charts the experiences that propelled him into becoming the most important poet of his generation, and one of the most formidable activists of the modern Arab world. Negm was a sui generis poet who managed to translate the problems of everyday life into unforgettable works of beauty and barbed wit. Since 1967, his poems have formed the core soundtrack for Egyptian protest. Indeed, when Egyptians rose up against Hosni Mubarak in January 2011, they were often chanting poetry that Negm had composed forty years earlier. Even after his death in 2013, his impact on Arab poetry and popular politics remains as strong as it ever was.