Although it's nothing compared to what happened a month ago, a new civil war of sorts is raging underground in Egypt. This time, the underground is quite literally under the ground, in Egypt’s subway terminals. As The New York Times reported last week, subway riders at the Mubarak Station beneath Ramses Square are playing a bitter back and forth game with the subway workers. For weeks now, they’ve scratched Mubarak's name off the signs in the subway cars and written alternative names — often commemorating the martyrs of the Jan. 25 revolution — in their place. In retaliation, the subway workers have dutifully removed the new signs and restored Mubarak’s name. While graffiti is nothing new to subway stations, this is graffiti of a new sort: a graffiti of erasure.

The subway battles illustrate the tensions still present between those, many of them government workers, who still venerate their ousted leader and the growing demographic who wants Mubarak’s name erased from Egypt entirely. On Mar. 1, attorney Samir Sabry sued the government to make them erase Mubarak’s name from every public institution in Egypt, The New York Times piece reported. This “deMubarakization” is no small feat: the former president’s name is plastered everywhere, from libraries to hospitals to airports, not to mention hundreds of schools. 

“Corrupt people should not be honored. I do not want to delete 30 years of Egyptian history, but I want to remove that name,” Sabry told the New York Times.

But where do we draw the line? Does a subway sign or a school building today become a history book tomorrow?

These questions — as well as the practice they concern — have much historical and literary precedent. In an attempt to completely obliterate traitorous individuals from the historical record, Roman emperors or senators would erase the names and seize the property of traitorous individuals under the practice of damnatio memoriae. Following the deposition of Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina in 1955, it was forbidden to speak his name. Photographs and representations of Peron were also forbidden, and public buildings bearing his name were renamed. Most infamously, the Soviet Union eliminated traces of Joseph Stalin’s opponents during the Great Purge, even doctoring photographs to alter the historical record. Furthermore, new imaging technologies have made the authenticity of any historical document subject to more doubt than ever before.

These trends have been the subject of much literary inquiry, especially in Czech author Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The opening chapter is set in 1971 Czechoslovakia, at the height of the Soviet crackdown following the reformist and liberalist Prague Spring initiated under Alexander Dubcek. The chapter opens with a lengthy description of a doctored photograph and follows the one-time Soviet supporter Mirek as he attempts to recover letters written to a former lover, herself a Soviet supporter. Mirek, who has completely refashioned his life since his one-time Soviet allegiance and one-time love affair with a Soviet sympathizer, wants to destroy the letters to obliterate any ties to his past life. Throughout this attempt, Soviet police follow Mirek at a close distance. When he returns home, they are waiting to arrest Mirek, his son, and his friends on the basis of anti-Soviet letters and documents lying around Mirek’s home. 

The chapter ends on an ironic note as Mirek, in an attempt to re-write his own personal history, neglects to hide the anti-Soviet documents lying around his home and falls right into the trap of the great historical revisionists themselves. As Mirek concedes at the chapter’s opening, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivions.” His arrest is therefore fitting on an allegorical level. He has not fought on the side of man but on the side of power. After fighting on the side of the oblivions, he does not personally deserve freedom because he has allowed the country itself to become less free.

As Sabry pointed out, Egyptians should not celebrate or honor corrupt leaders. However, it’s a slippery slope from erasing Mubarak’s name off a subway sign to historical revisionism, from erasing something personally repulsive to fighting on the side of the oblivions. If, as Kundera claims, the struggle against power — the struggle for freedom and democracy itself — is always a struggle against erasures, where is the delicate balance between rightly removing Mubarak’s name from places of honor without re-writing thirty years of Egyptian history? Although many Egyptians undoubtedly view these events as slight concerns when faced with the challenge of building a democracy, I believe these questions — on a philosophical, ideological level — are just as important for a budding democracy to answer: How does a nation move towards a progressive future without compromising the integrity of a past they would rather forget?