Dear Santa Cruz and Berkeley Occupiers,

We are students and faculty from Cairo writing to you from within the folds and dust of an ongoing revolution. Many of our own universities are now occupied by the military, and we now find ourselves fighting against a regime that grows worse than the one that our revolution had initially rose up against only 3 years ago. When we first heard that you had occupied your universities, we were inspired by and felt close to your revolt that we see as resonating with our own.

We think it is important to say that our struggles arise from distinct histories, but we also know that the problems we all face can only ever be challenged by a cascade of a thousand revolts, revolts like yours that involve both a struggle for your own lives but equally for the lives of others. Our revolts are ultimately attempts to become something together, to become a part of a collectivity that is as much emancipatory as it is diverse. In your occupations against the tuition increases in your universities, we hope you find yourselves fighting alongside new and unanticipated friends and allies, people found in your revolt that have joined you in inhabiting spaces that you have made your own. We hope that you consider us among these new friends as well.

We don’t find it so urgent to distinguish between whether the attacks on our lives come in the name of austerity, security, or civility, but instead recognize that each of these attacks and each of our revolts against them are connected by shared logics: the logic of what you’ve called in your communique the “capitalist economy of accumulation” and the opposing logic of what we’ll call in this letter “creativity and solidarity”. In this spirit, we write in solidarity with all of those who look forward and see a hopeless future, and in return demand a different present and occupy it. We write in solidarity with you who have been ignored by society’s institutions, and in return have seized them. We write in solidarity with you who the global powers hope will suffer injustice alone, and instead have found one another on the barricades of revolt. We write in solidarity with you who were born into a world of fear, and yet have learned to light fires that cast fear away.

With fires against fear,

-Students and Faculty from Cairo’s Universities