This paper deals with a play about the 1919 revolution performed in the wake of the Naksa. In al-Masamir (The Nails, 1967), Sa‘d al-Din Wahba revisits the history of 1919 in a mode that has little to share with previous canonical literary and cinematic narratives about the revolution. Unlike ‘Awdat al-Ruh by Tawfiq al-Hakim or Bayn al-Qasrayn by Naguib Mahfuz, the story is not that of a victorious nationalist struggle narrated from the perspective of the urban middle classes. Rather, the events are set in a small Delta village and narrated through the perspective of its deprived peasants, who end up defeated despite their courageous resistance. Al-Masamir’s rewriting of the past is at once a mirror of the disillusion of the present, and a tool to counter it: Wahba uses the 1919 revolution, I argue, to comment on the contemporary context in an agit-prop mode, appropriating the voices of the past to encourage people not to lose hope, and urge them to resist.