John Skoyles Prize for Poetry

Ploughshares is pleased to present Mostafa Ibrahim and Abdelrahman ElGendy with the inaugural John Skoyles Prize for Poetry for Ibrahim’s poem “So-and-So,” translated from the Arabic by ElGendy.

John Skoyles served as Poetry Editor of Ploughshares from 2007 until February 2025, when he took over as Interim Editor-in-Chief before retiring later that year. During his tenure at the journal, Skoyles championed the work of emerging poets, celebrating enigmatic poetry that possessed, as he put it in his Editor’s Note for the Winter 2024-25 issue, “clarity and surprise.” Skoyles edited with great care and empathy, and continues his prolific career as a poet and writer. To celebrate his important legacy at the journal, Ploughshares will award this prize to one poet published in the journal each year.

“So-and-So” appeared in the staff-edited Winter 2025-26 issue. The $1,000 prize, selected by former Poetry Editor John Skoyles, honors a poem published in the journal from the previous year.

Of Ibrahim’s poem, Skoyles writes:

“So-and-So” is a political poem that focuses on the heroism of those who engaged in protests during the Arab Spring. The anonymity of “So-and-so” is made powerfully personal through actions depicted in each stanza. The humanity and courage, the risk and suffering of these so-and-so’s is reinforced by their facelessness. This is a poem in which a universal movement is brought to life through significant individual gestures drawn with compassion and from experience.

Abdelrahman ElGendy is the author of the memoir Huna (Hogarth Books, 2026). A winner of the Samir Kassir Award for Freedom of the Press, ElGendy holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. His work appears in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, the Nation, Guernica, and elsewhere. His poetry and prose translations from Arabic appear in Poetry Northwest, Literary Hub, and Words Without Borders, among others.

Mostafa Ibrahim is one of Egypt’s most prominent contemporary poets. Hailed by the late Ahmed Fouad Negm as his “heir to the throne of poetry,” Ibrahim is renowned for his groundbreaking colloquial Arabic poetry collections: Western Union: Haram Branch (2011), Manifesto (2013), and Al-Zaman (2019). The winner of the Ahmed Fouad Negm Colloquial Poetry Award, Ibrahim’s poems appear in Ploughshares, Literary Hub, and ArabLit.

John Skoyles wrote the following questions for Ibrahim and ElGendy, which ElGendy translated into English.

John Skoyles: Briefly describe the poem’s historical background. For instance, please identify for our readers the “he” in the fifth and eighth stanzas, the one who triggers the poem’s action.

Mostafa Ibrahim: The person referred to here is Mubarak. At the time, he had already been in power for thirty years. His party controlled every corner of the state, and any organized opposition had all but disappeared. The parties that did exist were, in one way or another, under the regime’s wing. There was also growing talk that he intended to hand power to his son.

Around then, videos documenting torture had begun to surface. Labor strikes were spreading, the Kefaya movement had emerged, and other small currents of dissent were beginning to take shape. There had been the faint beginnings of a political awakening five or six years earlier, though it remained tentative, because no one genuinely believed Mubarak could be removed.

When January 25 began, the demand was not to overthrow the regime. At most, people wanted Interior Minister Habib al-Adly replaced, or for the Ministry to change its ways. Police abuses had reached an unbearable level, and the idea was to take to the streets on Police Day and spoil the celebration.

Then everything escalated. Suddenly it was no longer about replacing the interior minister or reforming the police. It became about removing Mubarak himself, along with his entire regime, the interior minister, and the whole political order.

It was a moment in which people discovered their own power simply by seeing one another in the streets. No one had imagined something like that could ever happen. No one had dared dream of anything beyond going out to ruin Police Day and calling it a day. But once people saw one another, saw the crowds, and saw, from the very first day, the sacrifices others were willing to make, events gathered momentum with astonishing speed. The violence of the police only accelerated that momentum.

So, I wouldn’t call it an accident. But neither was it something anyone could have calculated or anticipated. In a way, it felt like divine providence.

JS: How did you arrive at the poem’s structure? When you began writing it, did you expect it would become a litany, a powerful example of the use of anaphora?

MI: The structure of the poem wasn’t something I planned in advance. It emerged in the process of writing. But the central idea of the poem, this Folan El-Folany (“So-and-so”), this anonymous figure who becomes the poem’s protagonist, had been on my mind since the revolution. I wrote the poem three or four months afterward, once I’d had some time to absorb what was truly extraordinary about what people had done.

The genius of it was that there was no leadership. There was no organized movement directing everything. It unfolded almost chaotically, or perhaps in what you’d call organized chaos, a kind of creative disorder. What captivated me most was that no one wanted to claim credit. No one seemed interested in recognition. People were willing to risk their lives without even caring whether anyone knew their names.

There was a famous video at the time of a young man standing in front of a water cannon. To this day, no one knows who he is. He never came forward to say, “That was me. I’m the one in that video.” And there were countless stories like that.

More than anything, what filled me with awe about the revolution was this collective spirit of selflessness. No one wanted anything for themselves except to see the country become a better place for all of us. And for that shared goal, people were willing to sacrifice everything: their lives, their money, their time, whatever it took.

That is where the idea for the poem came from. As for its structure, that developed as I wrote. I couldn’t tell you exactly how it happened. I simply tried to gather the moments that had given me this feeling, the moments that awakened in me this profound appreciation for anonymous people. The scenes I witnessed in Tahrir, the moments I saw during the revolution, the stories others told me, all seemed to belong together. I wanted to bring them into one place as a kind of memorial to that unknown person, the one no one would probably ever speak about again.

JS: The genius of the poem is, for me, that the main figure is called “So-and-so,” a label used colloquially to designate a person who is so inconsequential as to be nameless. Then, this unnamed one is depicted through specific dramatic actions (and some not particularly heroic, as in being “too tired to stay.”) This provides a convincing human quality to the efforts of the protesters. How hard was it for you to keep this balance and not romanticize the revolution?

MI: The idea of Folan El-Folany itself, this ordinary person, not just an anonymous one but an ordinary one in every sense, in both his abilities and his actions, was also part of what inspired such profound admiration in me. They’re like ants. Each one, on their own, seems so small, almost insignificant. But together, through countless tiny acts, they become capable of accomplishing something immense.

As for romanticizing the revolution, I’ve never been comfortable with that. I’m opposed to the idea of finding pleasure in suffering. It feels like a kind of emotional begging that I’ve never liked. I think we’re stronger, and more dignified, than that.

What moved me in those days was something else entirely. It was the immense generosity people revealed during those eighteen days in Tahrir. Everyone simply did whatever they could. Someone would make ten sandwiches and hand them out to protesters. Someone else would carry an injured person to safety before bird shot hit them. Every person contributed whatever they were capable of, no matter how small the act. And somehow all those small acts came together in this extraordinary, spontaneous harmony. That was what amazed me.

It amazed me because it was also the first time many of us had witnessed genuine collective action by Egyptians, after years of telling ourselves that we’d been broken, that we’d been corrupted beyond repair. Then, all at once, people astonished us through things that were utterly ordinary, through gestures that were almost impossibly small. None of them, individually, was some legendary or superhuman hero. They weren’t doing heroic things in the conventional sense. But together, they created something heroic.

That’s why I kept the focus of the poem there. The heroism lies not in any individual, but in the sum of their actions.

JS: Am I reading too much into the end of the poem—the last stanza—to think that the “son of So-and-so” is the generation born from the heroism of those anonymous masses who risked and, in some cases, lost their lives?

MI: The ending isn’t about the younger generation or anything like that. Here, ibn al-Folany (“son of al-Folany”) functions as a stand-in for an insult, the way someone might say “son of a … ” followed by any number of expletives. It’s directed at those who stood against the revolution, or rather, at everything they represented.

So, it’s not just about Mubarak himself. It’s about the entire system he embodied, and all that came with it. That’s what the ending is pointing toward.

Earlier in the poem, Folan El-Folany is the anonymous, ordinary figure who is celebrated. In the final line, ibn al-Folany reworks that same expression into the structure of an implied insult. The wordplay shifts from praise to condemnation.

Abdelrahman ElGendy: This was indeed one of the trickiest parts of translating the last line. In Arabic, Folan El-Folany, which I translated as “So-and-so,” refers to an anonymous or unspecified person whose identity is either unknown or unimportant to the context. I chose “So-and-so” because it is the closest idiomatic equivalent in English that also preserves something of the sound and musical repetition of Folan El-Folany through the repeated so.

The complication is that Folan El-Folany also evokes in Arabic the structure of a first and last name. (My own name, Abdelrahman ElGendy, follows that format.) A more literal rendering would be something like “So son of So.” In Arabic, that construction can simply signal anonymity, but because “son of … ” is also a common frame for insults, it can take on an additional meaning in the right context. Here in the last line, Mostafa drops the first Folan and leaves only “son of El-Folany.” In doing so, El-Folany stops being a placeholder surname and instead occupies the position where an expletive would normally appear, as in, say, “son of a bitch.” This shift is one that Egyptian readers are likely to recognize immediately.

The difficulty is that the same move does not work idiomatically in English. I therefore had a choice. I could preserve the poem’s sonic qualities and the recurring Folan motif through “So-and-so,” or I could depart from that framework to make the implied insult more explicit, at the cost of losing both the musicality and some of the poem’s cultural opacity. I ultimately chose the first option because it felt truer to the poem’s overall integrity.

JS: I’d like to learn about how the process of translation works for both of you—Mostafa and Abdelrahman. The refrain, the name “So-and-so,” is a perfect appellation for a “nobody” in English. How did you arrive at that term for what is the central focus of the poem? Another moment I found very touching occurs in stanza two, when the speaker talks of not knowing the name of a fellow protester: “ … so I called him / cousin, and that was / enough.” “Cousin” seems the perfect choice: it is a relative, but not too close. “Brother” would have been too intimate and maybe even too predictable. Would you both elaborate on how these choices, and others, were made?

MI: That was Abdelrahman’s brilliance. I really can’t take any credit for it. He handled the translation from beginning to end, making all the lexical choices himself. He has a deep command of Egyptian culture, colloquial Arabic, and its nuances, so he was able to make that connection and capture the poet’s intention rather than simply produce a literal translation.

Now, the other part of your question, the difference between ibn ‘ammi (“my cousin,” literally “my paternal uncle’s son”) and “my brother.”

I can’t honestly say I was 100 percent conscious of that choice when I wrote it. Part of it may simply have been musical. Ibn ‘ammi sounded better than “my brother.” But reading it now, I also feel it fits the poem better. He’s not close enough to be “my brother,” but neither is he so distant as to be a stranger. Ibn ‘ammi occupies that middle ground.

It’s also a very common expression in Egyptian colloquial speech. People are always saying ya ibn ‘ammi, ya ibn khalti (“my maternal cousin”), and so on. It belongs to the language of ordinary people. It’s a more vernacular expression.

I also think it captures the temporary bond that emerged during those eighteen days of the revolution. Ibn ‘ammi feels right for that. There’s a saying in our folk culture: “My brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the stranger.” During the revolution, we had reached that second part. It was my cousin and me against the stranger.

Maybe these are the kinds of unconscious calculations my mind was making as I wrote. But I think the phrase suits the context because of that meaning. This man isn’t close enough to be my brother, but in that particular moment, we have each other’s backs. We would give our lives for each other. We would do whatever it took to achieve our shared goal and stand together against the stranger.

AE: It’s been such a joy to translate Mostafa’s poetry, which has become one of the defining literary classics of the revolution. His work captures the spirit of Egypt’s 2011 Tahrir generation, especially “So-and-So,” which has been adapted into songs and has become one of the revolution’s most enduring literary texts.

At the same time, I have deeply personal stakes in this work. The collection in which this poem appears, Manifesto (2013), was the book that sustained me in prison. For more than six years, between 2013 and 2020, I was a political prisoner in Egypt, and smuggled poetry was one of my main refuges. My smuggled copy of Mostafa’s Manifesto, in particular, became something like a sacred literary scripture. Its pages are loose and creased from the countless times I pored over them. I still have that copy.

So, when I carry this grief and wonder into English, I do so with the surplus care of kin, not mere practicality. I think carefully about every choice Mostafa makes in the Arabic, about the musicality and emotional resonance of the poem, and about the particular literary tools he uses to achieve those effects. Because many of those tools do not exist in contemporary American poetry in quite the same way, I often ask myself: if Mostafa had written this poem in English, within this literary tradition, what tools would he have drawn on to evoke the same response in the reader? But also: how can I protect the specificity of the Arabic and the Egyptian essence of the poem and retain their opacity?

I explained, for example, how I arrived at “So-and-so” in my last answer. Another aspect I paid close attention to was line breaks. Line breaks do not function in Arabic poetry the way they do in English, so they became one of the tools available to me for creating tension and layering meaning in the translation, in ways that rhyme and meter do in the Arabic.

Of course, whenever in doubt, I consulted Mostafa about his intentions and had him review these choices, so that I wasn’t overstepping with my own interpretations.

There are many ways in which English will always fail to hold us, yes, yet I continue to strive toward approximation. I think there is a beauty in that inevitable failure; it almost becomes its own poem.