عيش / Bread
A research-based media project tracing the word عيش (Eish) through protest, media, translation, and (my) contemporary memory.
April 2026 · Self-initiated project
Methods/Tools: Archival research, Media Analysis, Data Visualization, Web Design Every day, the X account @Jan25Count posts the same message. Only the number changes.
مرّت ١٥ سنةً وشهرين و٤ أيام. It has been 15 years and 3 months and 4 days.
No comment. No explanation. Just the count.
Every day, another account, @Jan25Text, posts an image from the revolution with a short caption.
Together, these accounts turn remembrance into a daily practice. They do not explain the revolution. They repeat it. They make it return, one post a day.
I was ten years old when the Egyptian Revolution began on the 25th of January 2011. We lived two kilometers from Tahrir Square, the place where it all happened. I remember the sound of military helicopters above our heads. I remember people chanting and screaming in the streets. I remember my parents, scared, but hopeful. And I remember the television, on day and night, broadcasting everything that was happening just two kilometers away.
I remember images of young men and women protesting. Images of them being killed. White body bags on the ground.
Back then, I couldn’t fully understand what was happening around me. I adapted the emotions of my parents. When they were scared, I was scared too. When they were hopeful, I was too.
Now, fifteen years and three months later, I am no longer sure what I actually remember. I don’t know which images I saw with my own eyes, which ones I saw on television, and which ones were added later through stories, videos, songs, posts, and retellings. This uncertainty became the starting point of the project.
In a seminar on media and cultural memory at the FU, I understood that this uncertainty is not a personal failure. I came across the work of Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, who argue that there is no memory that exists prior to mediation. There is no pure, unfiltered experience before the images, stories, screens, and retellings through which we make sense of the world. Memory is not simply stored and retrieved. It is continuously produced and reshaped through media. What we remember is always already a remediation. A version of a version of something that happened.
Reading this, I thought immediately of the television in our living room. I was two kilometers from Tahrir Square, but I experienced the revolution through a screen, an already mediated version. And in the fifteen years since, that memory has been remediated again and again, through news archives, social media, political narratives, and the slow rewriting of what the revolution meant and what it failed to achieve.
I don’t know what I remember, but I remember the chant: عيش، حرية، عدالة اجتماعية (Eish, Hurriya, Adala Igtimaiya, Bread, Freedom, Social Justice). The word عيش (Eish) is the center of this project. In Egyptian Arabic, it means bread. But it also means life. The two meanings exist in the same word. This makes the chant so powerful, but also difficult to translate. In English, عيش usually becomes bread. But something else is carried in the Arabic word, something about living, surviving, dignity, and the right to a life that is more than mere existence. This project follows عيش (Eish) as it moves through different forms of memory, layers and media: from the bodies and voices of protesters, to tweets from 2011, to English translation, to songs, and finally to later reflections on what the revolution became. Bread was not separate from freedom. Life was not separate from social justice.
At the same time, عيش (Eish) is not a stable symbol. It changes depending on where it appears and who uses it. In protest footage, it is a collective chant. In tweets from 2011, it appears as slogan, literal bread, crisis, memory, joke, and political disappointment. In translation, it often becomes simply bread. In songs, it is explained and emotionally stabilized. In later reflections, it becomes part of the memory of a revolution whose promises remain unresolved. This project traces these transformations.
Rather than reconstructing the Egyptian Revolution as a historical event, it studies how one revolutionary symbol moves across different layers of collective memory: embodied protest, digital circulation, translation, cultural remembrance, and retrospective political interpretation. This follows Vlad Glăveanu’s understanding of collective memory as something that operates across different levels, from individual memory to shared stories, group narratives, and broader social representations. Memory is never fully stable. It changes through communication, repetition, and the circulation of symbols.
What happens to عيش (Eish) when it moves from chant, to tweet, to translation, to song, to memory?
Layer 1 — The Embodied Word
Here, عيش (Eish) is not yet a translation. It is a body, a voice, a demand. Bread and life simultaneously. Inseparable, untranslatable, alive. The word exists collectively, carried through voices, gestures, and physical presence. Meaning is not explained. It is experienced by the people on the streets and their demands.
Of course, this moment is still encountered through video, so it is already mediated: framed recorded, archived. But within the structure of this project, the video is the closest we can get to the embodied word.
Video source: www.858.ma
Layer 2 — The Digital Word
Social media played a central role in the Egyptian Revolution, not just as a tool for organisation, but as a space where the revolution was witnessed, shared, and kept alive in real time. As the chant leaves the street and circulates on Twitter, it is remediated: voice becomes text, collective rhythm becomes post, and the protest becomes part of a searchable digital archive. The word عيش (Eish) is not used in a single, stable way. It occurs as part of political slogans, in references to food and everyday practices, in discussions of economic conditions, and in retrospective accounts of the revolution.
Rather than separating into distinct meanings, these uses overlap. The word continues to carry multiple associations simultaneously, even when only one of them is made explicit in a given post. In this sense, Twitter does not stabilize the meaning of عيش (Eish). It distributes it across contexts. The platform preserves the word, but it also changes its form: what was shouted by bodies in the street becomes timestamped, searchable, quoted, reposted, and archived.
Home
Layer 3 — The Translated Word
After circulating as chant and tweet, عيش (Eish) appears again in Ramy Essam’s song Bread, Freedom, Social Justice. The song is itself a remediation of the revolutionary chant: it repeats the chant, gives it a musical form, and turns it into a cultural object of memory. What was carried collectively through voice and rhythm now becomes lyrical and repeatable In the song, Essam makes the double meaning of عيش (Eish) explicit:
WHAT IS SAID
عيش بالمصرى يعنى حياة
“In Egyptian Arabic, Eish means life.”
WHAT THE SUBTITLE DOES
“Bread in Egypt means life.”
The subtitle shifts the meaning from language to place. Essam is not saying that bread in Egypt means life, but that the word عيش (Eish), in Egyptian Arabic, carries both meanings: bread and life. The line is meant to explain the word, but the explanation itself fails in translation. This shows how difficult عيش (Eish) is to carry across languages: even when the song tries to make the meaning explicit, translation narrows it again.
عيش → bread
life
I found a translation commentary online that attempts to work through this difficulty. Rather than simply replacing عيش (Eish) with bread, the translator tries to preserve the wider field of meaning around the word. In this sense, the translation commentary becomes another remediation: it returns to the word and tries to make visible what the subtitle made less visible.
[...] So this is the official version of the video. And there are captions/subtitles if you turn them on, but they’re such a mess that I just cried. I don’t know if someone just threw it into an auto-translator or what, but it’s almost completely garbled. [...]Bread in egypt means lifeEgyptian lived it before for a whole civilizationAnd if he gets thirsty one day ,egyptians will fill his thirst[...]There’s another version, via MemriTV.In the Egyptian dialect, “bread” means “life”Egyptians have lived their civilization for yearsIf the Nile shall run dry, the Egyptians will water it with their sweat[...]This one is much better, but not without its problems and I still felt like I was missing something when I read it. [...]What I came up with is kind of overwrought, but I can’t see any way around it:The word “Bread” in Egyptian means “life”Egyptian civilization has been earning its daily bread for eonsAnd if the Nile should run dry, Egyptians will fill it with their sweat[...]So the first line even gives me grief. The literal translation is: “Bread in Egyptian [dialect] means life.” Ramy is alluding to the fact that the noun bread in the Egyptian Arabic dialect is ‘aish, which is derived from the same root as the verb ‘ash, to live. But life as a noun in the first line is rendered as haiyaa, whose root is different (hayawa). The difference between the root ‘ashasha and hayawa is that the former refers to the physical act of living, where the latter speaks to the abstract idea of Life. So when Ramy says “Bread means life”, he’s invoking both senses of the word “life.” Bread allows you to physically live, but the act of earning your bread allows you to live your Life. I felt that by rendering the first line as “The word ‘bread’…” it draws attention to his wordplay without going into didactic [...] explanations.[...]Because Ramy made the connection between “life” and “bread” in the previous line, I wanted to drive that home [...] The English plays on the bread/life connection. [...] So even though I’ve added like a billion words to the line, I feel like it more fully encompasses the subtleties of the lyrics [...]This remediation does not only happen in media. It also happened in my own memory. After moving to Germany, and as my thinking became increasingly shaped by German and English, I began to remember عيش (Eish) mostly as bread. Only when I returned to the word more carefully did I realize what had become less visible to me: that عيش (Eish) also means life.
Layer 4 — The Remembered Word
Fifteen years and three months later, I am no longer sure what I remember. But I remember the word. عيش (Eish) is no longer only a chant. It is part of the memory of a revolution whose promises remain unresolved. The word still carries bread and life, but now also distance, disappointment, and the question of what remains when a revolutionary demand survives longer than the revolutionary moment itself.
In Egypt under Sisi, the memory of the 25th of January has not only been politically suppressed. It has been actively rewritten. As the German Institute of Development and Sustainability writes in their 2026 analysis of Egypt's revolution: "The principles for which they stood are treated as threats or treason. Their sacrifice is stripped of its political content and redeployed to legitimise the very order they opposed."The man once presented as the one who would bring stability, prosperity, and bread back to Egypt after the revolution, is now part of the order that suppresses the memory of the demand.
Silvana Mandolessi extends this into the digital: algorithms have become gatekeepers of cultural memory, determining what remains visible and what gradually disappears. In Egypt, the state is the gatekeeper. A 2018 law explicitly authorizes surveillance of social media accounts with more than 5,000 followers. Mada Masr, one of Egypt's most important independent news websites, has been blocked inside Egypt since 2017. What can be remembered is what can be accessed. What can be accessed is what the state permits.
عيش (Eish) was never only a metaphor. It pointed to the conditions that make life possible: food, wages, work, dignity, care, and the right to live beyond mere survival.
In 2024, Egypt raised the price of subsidized baladi bread for the first time in over thirty years: from 0.05 EGP to 0.20 EGP per loaf. The increase was small in absolute numbers, but politically and socially significant. Bread is not just another commodity in Egypt. It is a daily staple, a state promise, and a measure of whether life is still affordable.
This brings عيش (Eish) back to its most literal meaning: bread. But after everything the word has carried, bread will never only be bread. It carries the unresolved promise of the revolution: a life that can be lived with dignity. Something Egyptians are still hoping for to this day. The tragedy is that عيش still has to be demanded.
What I remember is not only what happened in 2011. It is also what did not happen after, what failed to be achieved.
Methodology and Process
This project was very personal to me as it is connected to my own background, my family, and my memory of Egypt. I was born in Egypt and lived there during the revolution, but my family and I left the country two years after the revolution. Because of that, I did not experience the full aftermath of the revolution from within Egypt. A lot of what I remember comes from fragments: sounds, images, television, stories, emotions, and later media. Working on this project became a way of returning to those fragments and trying to understand how they were shaped. The starting point was a text I read in a seminar on media and cultural memory. From there, I began researching the Egyptian Revolution again. I watched archival videos, looked through old tweets, read articles and academic texts, searched for translations, and followed traces of the word عيش (Eish) across different media. I also spoke with my parents and my grandmother about how they remember the revolution and how they think about it today. Looking at the videos, tweets, songs, and images was emotional, but also important. It allowed me to engage with a part of my own history that feels both close and far away. Because I no longer live in Egypt, this process was also about understanding what it means to remember a place through media, family stories, and political distance.
I decided not to reconstruct the revolution as a whole. Instead, I followed one word: عيش (Eish). However, the Egyptian Revolution is too complex to be captured through one word alone. There are many histories, movements, political actors, and social struggles that the project couldn’t capture. Sometimes I felt that I could have gone deeper into the different layers of the revolution and its aftermath. Still, I decided to keep the project focused. It is not meant to be a complete history of the Egyptian Revolution, but a personal and research-based entry point into it. By following عيش (Eish), the project opens a path into questions of memory, translation, media, and unresolved political hope. It also showed me that I want to continue working on projects like this, using research and design as a way to understand where I come from. The Twitter/X feeds were built with JS, HTML and CSS.
The project is also critical of the current situation in Egypt. Looking at عيش (Eish) today means looking at bread prices, inflation, repression, and the way the memory of the revolution has been suppressed or rewritten. This part was important to me because the revolution is not only past. Its promises are still unresolved, and people are still struggling today.
References
Rigney, Ann, and Astrid Erll. "Introduction: Cultural memory and its dynamics." Mediation, remediation, and the dynamics of cultural memory. de Gruyter, 2009. 1-11.
Glăveanu, Vlad Petre. "Collective memory between stability and change." Culture & psychology 23.2 (2017): 255-262.
Mandolessi, Silvana. "The digital turn in memory studies." Memory Studies 16.6 (2023): 1513-1528
El-Haddad, Amirah. "In Memory of Egypt's Failed Revolution." The Current Column, IDOS, 2 Feb. 2026.
Mittermaier, Amira. "Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: The Egyptian Uprising and a Sufi Khidma." Cultural Anthropology29.1 (2014): 54–79.
Olick, Jeffrey K., and Joyce Robbins. "Social Memory Studies: From 'Collective Memory' to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices." Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–140.