Remembering Hani Shukrallah (1950–2019): the Egyptian journalist, leftist thinker, and poet of the impossible.
Hani Shukrallah would often repeat Salah Jahin’s famous line: “I, who am seduced by the impossible.” This was not merely a verse he admired; it was an expression of his life and an embodiment of his constant infatuation with the impossible.
Such was the life of Hani Shukrallah (1950–2019): an endless wager on adventure and defiance. Though he left us eight years ago on this day, the wound of his absence has not aged among those who loved him and his friends, nor even among those who only met him in passing.
Do we remember Hani as a son, with his tales of grandmother’s stories in the Abbasiya house, frying falafel with raisins, and the rituals of Easter Eve?
Or do we remember the young militant cutting sugarcane in Cuba, who spent not a few periods in strange apartments fleeing security persecution? The leader in the Egyptian Workers’ Party who later became one of the most important thinkers of the Egyptian left? The journalist who influenced everyone he worked with, and was a founder of Al-Ahram Weekly, Al-Shorouk, Ahram Online, Belahmar (In Red), Welad El-Balad (Sons of the Country), and the Heikal Foundation for Arab Journalism?
Hani, exceptionally intelligent, fiercely independent, and revolutionarily honest through all difficult circumstances, always leaning towards professionalism, freedom of opinion in journalism, and pluralism and integrity in politics. The loving father and family man who fought illness with a love of life and stubbornness, and fought the dwindling of revolutionary possibilities by insisting that all that is humanly possible is possible, not impossible.
Truly, we cannot and will not cover the many rich sides that distinguished Hani. But because loss can be healed through love and remembrance, through sharing accounts of his friends, collaborators and students and through them we try to cast some light on Hani’s ideas, haunted as they were by struggle, art, freedom, poetry, and the impossible.
